Growing Terror and Limited Rights in Northern Ireland

With the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, terrorism, as human tragedy, media sensation, and political catch-all, is back with a vengeance. In fact the vengeance is sometimes so thick that it's all too easy to lose sight of the human tragedy. The air is filled with threats and counterthreats, and the TV networks' "terrorism experts" warn of tough choices ahead in the war on terror.

In the eyes of the experts, those tough policy choices usually boil down to two options. One is a policy of broad-brush, scorched-earth retaliation against terrorists, or against cities where some terrorists are presumed to reside. The other is the slow erosion of civil liberties necessitated by the infiltration and surveillance of terrorist, or "suspected" terrorist, organizations and the inevitably messy attempts to bring them to a crude sort of justice.

For an example of civil liberties sacrificed on the altar of counter-terrorism, we need only look to Great Britain, the land of the Magna Carta. There a draconian campaign against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has led to serious infringements of rights - such as due process and trial by jury for those suspected of crimes, and freedom of the press - that are fundamental to any free society.

The history of British domination in Ireland is, of course, centuries old. The size of our own Irish-American population, largely descendants of refugees, is testimony to the economic deprivation and cultural-political persecution visited upon England's oldest colony in times past.

In 1921 the greater part of Ireland, now the Republic of Ireland, finally won its independence. But as part of the independence agreement Britain retained a piece of the North within a line drawn expressly to create a Unionist-Protestant province. That is the province of the United Kingdom known as Northern Ireland. Today it still has a Protestant-Unionist majority that identifies itself with Britain and violently resists any talk of a united Ireland.

Throughout most of the years since 1921, the Catholic-Nationalist minority in the North was small, weak, and relatively docile. Today they are not nearly so small, comprising as much as 40 percent of the population. And for the last 20 years they have been anything but docile. In 1968 a civil rights movement emerged, based mostly in the Catholic community and modeled in large part upon the successful campaigns waged by America's oppressed African-American minority. Irish Catholics marched, demanding fair housing and equal employment opportunities and singing "We Shall Overcome." Catholic marches were met by Protestant counter-demonstrations and increasing violence. In August 1969, when violence broke out widely in Derry, British troops were sent in. But as it became clear that the troops were there to support the Protestant-dominated status quo, the Provisional IRA emerged to take up arms against British rule.

IN THE YEARS SINCE, the IRA's senseless and brutal attacks on the civilian population have done much to shame the Irish nationalist cause and have created great and unnecessary suffering on both sides of the North's political divide. It is possible that if Britain had responded differently, the IRA would have withered from lack of popular support. But the repressive abuses of the British occupying army, courts, and prisons have kept the IRA popular enough to survive. In the last local elections, Sinn Fein, the legal political party allied with the IRA, gained 11.4 percent of the vote. And IRA support is even higher in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast and Derry, where the majority is unemployed and options are sorely limited.

The first great wave of British repression came in 1971, when hundreds of Catholic Nationalists were "interned" without charges or trial for months at a time. With internment came the institution of court procedures in which those suspected of security violations could be tried, without benefit of jury, before a single judge and under considerably loosened rules regarding evidence and procedure. IRA suspects could be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of a single alleged accomplice, or solely on the basis of a confession extracted under torture.

According to Amnesty International's 1988 report, most of these human rights abuses still go on, though Amnesty notes a lessening of the "mistreatment" of prisoners. However, in recent months other measures have emerged that make such "mistreatment" unnecessary. In October 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced a new rule under which a defendant's refusal to answer questions could itself be taken by a judge as evidence of guilt.

Even the technicalities of arrest and trial have been circumvented in dozens of cases in which IRA suspects are simply shot on sight. In June 1988, Amnesty International detailed 36 such cases. At least three more have occurred since that report. Many of the dead actually were IRA members, though they were unarmed at the time of their death. Some were simply young men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Another of Thatcher's anti-terrorist innovations hit closer to home for her British subjects. British television and radio stations were forbidden to broadcast interviews with, or statements by, members of organizations the government declares "terrorist," or members of the IRA's legal wing, Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein has 57 elected members of local councils in the North, and one duly elected, though boycotting, Member of Parliament.

Such censorship cuts at the very bone and marrow of a free society. It also lends a perverse and morbid credibility to the view of Sinn Fein leader Danny Morrison, who commented, "Now the British public won't get our point of view. That's why the IRA carries out bombings. The British public listens to bombings."

Danny Duncan Collum was a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.