We all did things we shouldn’t: but it was the circumstances and conditions of Northern Ireland that drove us. We are all victims and our job is to ensure that we never return to those days.” – Alex Kane writing in the News Letter
Alex Kane continues – That mantra, or something like it, trips off the tongues of too many terrorists and terrorist supporters. Describing everyone as a victim is simply a way of covering their tracks and excusing their actions.
But the inconvenient truth for them is that the vast majority of people didn’t do things they shouldn’t have done. They didn’t lift a gun or get trained in bomb making. They didn’t learn to resist interrogation. They didn’t huddle together in safe houses and decide who to kill. They didn’t gather information on their targets and work out the logistics of an assassination. They didn’t organise alibis, getaway cars, escape routes and the disposal of murder weapons and evidence. They didn’t walk up to people and shoot them dead, or put a bomb under a family car.
That’s why the people who joined terrorist organisations are different. The very fact that they could kill and justify that killing is what makes them different: and we must never allow them to persuade historians that what they did was either ‘normal or acceptable in the circumstances’. If it were normal and acceptable then most of us would have been doing it. It was abnormal and unacceptable.
David Trimble had a valid point when he said that ‘just because you have a past doesn’t mean you can’t have a future’; but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t suggesting that you be allowed to pretend that your past no longer existed, or that we created an environment in which terrorism is retrospectively justified.
Allowing terrorists to present or define themselves as ‘victims’ is wrong. Plain, morally, politically wrong. And once you go down the path of accepting that the terrorists might be victims then all you do is build a surreal, topsy-turvy world in which there is no difference between the person who squeezed the trigger and the person through whom the bullet exploded. Or worse, we end up overlooking the massive difference between the gunman and his target, namely, that only one is still alive.
What strikes me most about the reaction of so many republicans to Ann Travers is just how much she angers and irritates them. It’s almost as if they think she should just shut up and keep her ongoing pain and grief to herself. Mind you, I can understand why she irritates them (in precisely the same way I can understand why Sinn Fein wanted to kill off Jim Allister’s SPAD bill with a petition of concern), because she reminds them – and the rest of the world – that terrorism is never normal and never excusable.
A peace process and a shared future require truth. A key element of the truth in Northern Ireland is that the IRA face up to the fact that it waged a murderous campaign for goals which could have been pursued by other, non-violent means. The SDLP believes in Irish unity, but never supported terror. The SDLP sits in the same Executive as Sinn Fein but didn’t use violence to get there. The IRA didn’t bring down the Stormont Parliament and it certainly wasn’t responsible for changes in electoral law, or housing allocation, or fair employment, or an equality agenda, or a whole raft of other changes to everyday life and politics in Northern Ireland. The IRA did nothing, not one single thing, which made Northern Ireland a safer, better place.
What it did do, however, was deploy terror for its own ends alone. It could have abandoned the armed struggle at almost any point because it knew that Irish unity was never happening without the clear support of a majority vote in Northern Ireland and it also knew that unionists would never again provide the sole basis for government here.
Yet the IRA ploughed on (with Sinn Fein nodding approval and providing the propaganda) and in ploughing on it created victim after victim. Not the sort of ‘we-are-all-victims’ type of victim, who exist merely in rhetoric and news reports, but cold, dead victims; paralysed, maimed victims; widows, orphans and grieving family circles. The very victims, in fact, that they want us to forget all about, or simply remember as part of the wider collateral damage of the conflict.
A central plank of Sinn Fein’s rewriting of history involves what Marie Braniff and Cillian McGrattan (lecturers in the University of Ulster and Swansea University) have described as ‘the idea everyone was in someway responsible and, therefore, no-one is culpable. Furthermore, slippery suggestions of amnesties and decoupling truth from reconciliation simply embed a culture of impunity, rather than accountability.’
Accepting the we-are-all-victims line blurs (as it is meant to do, of course) the distinction between victim and perpetrator. It allows Sinn Fein, in particular, to argue that all victims are the same and should be treated as such. Yet it doesn’t seem to require Sinn Fein or the IRA to answer questions about what they did, why they did it and whether it was justifiable.
No, the Sinn Fein/IRA approach to history, legacy, truth and reconciliation starts and finishes with the position ‘we did what we had to do because of you. You started it. It’s your fault. And thanks to us we now have a peace process which others seek to destroy’.
Each of us is ultimately responsible for our own actions, irrespective of how much we try and justify them because of what others did to us.
Sinn Fein (and others) would do well to remember that most of us didn’t resort to terror.
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/allowing-terrorists-to-call-themselves-victims-is-wrong-1-5149484