Eamonn McCann: Britain deliberately refuses to ‘deal with the past’ in the North

Asked a few years ago to nominate the best parliamentary speech he had ever heard, the former British Labour minister, Denis Healey, nominated Conservative (later Ulster Unionist) MP Enoch Powell's plea in 1959 for the truth to be told about the torture and murder by British forces of 11 suspected "terrorists" detained without trial in Kenya.

Powell was no softie when it came to empire. He had already formed the racist attitudes to be expressed nine years later in his “rivers of blood” speech, demonising immigrants as near enough sub-human.

But the same mindset, not illogically, generated a belief in the moral superiority of all things British: it was this which conferred upon Britain its “right” to rule.

“It has been said – and it is a fact – that these 11 men were the lowest of the low . . . But that cannot be relevant to the acceptance of responsibility for their deaths . . . In general, I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human being and to say, ‘Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.’”

Powell’s words then will resonate now with the families of many killed by security forces in the course of the Northern Troubles.

The families can, and do, point to the cases of Ndiku Mutua, Wambugu Nyinhi, James Muthoni Mara, Paulo Nzili and Susan Ciong'ombe Ngondi, all in their late 80s or 90s now, who in 2009 brought a claim against the British government for torture during the Kenyan events which Powell had referred to.

Mau Mau

A series of

High Court

judgments against the British government in 2011 and 2012 found that the present government remained liable for the soldiers’ actions.

It was not suggested that truth and justice for the five Kenyans must await truth and justice for the (relatively few) victims of the Land and Freedom Army – the "Mau Mau".

The scale and intensity of the suffering inflicted on Kenyans was of a different order to the abuses by British forces in the North. A report at the time by an Anglican missionary society detailed: “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums with lit cigarettes, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight . . . In one instance, two men died under castration.” Rape was commonplace.

The degree is obviously different, but the issues of principle arising in the North are the same.

The war in Kenya ended in 1960. Independence followed in 1963. Ever since, if in an episodic way, the Kenyans have been campaigning for acknowledgment of what had been done to them and for recompense. They were stymied at every stage by the manoeuvres and lies of the British authorities.

Avenue of avoidance

To an extent, Mr Justice McCombe has closed off that avenue of avoidance. Compensation of just over €3,000 each has been paid to 5,228 torture victims.

Thus, there is nothing new about the dodging and delaying tactics of the British authorities in the North in relation to “dealing with the past”. One obstacle to telling the truth is – so it is pleaded – that there’s no indication paramilitary groups would follow suit. The relevance of this – other than as a child’s game of “You go first, No you go first” – is far from clear.

An apt example of the British approach lies in the claim that, try as they might, they have been able to identify only one member of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment involved in killing 11 unarmed people in Ballymurphy in August 1971.

Again: at the opening in Belfast on Monday of a review of a logjam of inquests into 95 killings, barrister Barry McDonald referred to the strange inability of the PSNI to locate documents relating to allegations of shoot-to-kill against the RUC. “They are fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the RUC, which they have done successfully to date.”

The PSNI’s explanation is that it lacks the resources for a thorough-going search. Many are quite prepared to disbelieve this.

These are two of scores of similar cases.

The most fundamental dimension of the matter has to do with democracy. When people uniformed to represent the state kill citizens without legal justification, the state must be held to account.

But in the North, far from accounting for actions undertaken in its name and in many cases with its prior and subsequent approval, the British state adamantly refuses to make itself amenable to courts, inquests or the people.

This is the most formidable impediment to "dealing with the past" and will remain so until David Cameron, Theresa Villiers, et al, manage to scale the moral heights achieved by Enoch Powell more than half a century ago.