Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland

Chapter 5. No Justice, No Peace

CHAPTER 5 No Justice, No Peace Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends. . . . One notices this in the case of people one disagrees with, such as Fascists or pacifists, but in fact everyone is the same, at least everyone who has definite opinions. —George Orwell, “Second War-Time Diary,” April 27, 1942 “At least I wasn’t a traitor!” bellowed a Democratic Unionist Party councillor in the September 1997 Belfast City Council meeting. He was enraged that Progressive Unionist Party councillors David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson did not vote to commemorate the Bloody Friday bombings of 1972. As if they had rehearsed, the Sinn Féin delegates sarcastically hooted in unison, spectators to an entertaining intraunionist spat. At that meeting, I received my first lesson in Northern Ireland’s politics of the past. “Lisa,” a research participant and city councillor, had invited me to the meeting. In those days, despite the ceasefires, security was strict at public meetings. When I arrived at City Hall, I was screened and guided by an escort to the upper gallery. I sat alone in the lofty area created for citizens to observe their democracy at work. After direct rule was imposed in 1972, local government had a restricted set of responsibilities—sanitation, community, cemetery, leisure services, and 134 Chapter 5 limited building regulation.1 Within these parameters, council work veered between stultifying discussions about planning permission and arguments about commemoration and the peace process. That night, councillors vigorously debated a service to memorialize those killed and injured in the Bloody Friday bombings and a plaque in City Hall to their memory. Bloody Friday was an especially shocking atrocity during the early years of the conflict. On Friday, July 21, 1972, the IRA detonated twenty-two bombs across Belfast in little more than an hour. Nine people were killed and 130 injured. McKittrick et al. (1999) report one policeman’s account: “One victim had his arms and legs blown off and some of his body had been blown through the railings. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to a wall” (229). Although the IRA placed warning calls to press and public protection groups shortly before the bombs, they were interspersed with hoax calls. In that brief span of time, it was difficult for police to discern which calls were legitimate and to evacuate multiple locations. Later, rumors swirled as to why the operation took place: retaliation for Bloody Sunday six months earlier, a show of PIRA strength, or protest at the collapse of talks with the British government. Whatever the reasons, the atrocity damaged the republican movement’s image across the world and led to internal recriminations. The PUP’s David Ervine often declared that Bloody Friday led him to join the Ulster Volunteer Force. Those bombings convinced him that the security forces could not protect the public from the PIRA, which was not subject to rule of law or rules of engagement. Loyalists, he explained, needed a force unfettered by legality or procedure to counter republican paramilitarism. Both he and Hutchinson had served sentences for paramilitary offenses. To other unionists, Ervine and Hutchinson’s paramilitary pasts and their abstention from the commemoration vote aligned them with Sinn Féin. To at least one fellow councillor, therefore, they were “traitors.” The motion was not passed. As the meeting neared its end, councillors proposed several symbolic statements regarding peace talks—for example, that the council recommend release of political prisoners. These proposals were swiftly voted down, and the council’s work, such as it was, ended for the day. At the mayor’s reception after the meeting, I innocently asked Lisa, “Why is it controversial to commemorate Bloody Friday?” She patiently explained that parties with paramilitary links, loyalist and republican, did not view the motion as a sincere commemoration of lost lives. Instead, she said, it was a point-scoring tactic to beat their opponents over the heads about the past. Lisa joined the point-scoring fray by adding that the commemoration was No Justice, No Peace 135 one-sided, with no acknowledgment of police and security force violence. She pointed out that both Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party shared this...