Max Hastings
They went through traumas we can scarcely imagine, so why are we hounding them?
More than 40 years ago, I watched young officers and men of the British Army perform a duty they had never in their wildest dreams expected to have to face: they fought for their lives against enemies of the Queen on streets and in fields of the United Kingdom.
Bewilderment was etched on their faces as they deployed for the first time amid flaming buildings and shrieking fanatics on Belfast’s Falls road in August 1969.
‘Are these people savages, then?’ demanded a young squaddie, gazing upon the rival sectarian mobs banging dustbin lids and baying hatred at their foes.
And indeed there was plenty of savagery in the Ulster Troubles which persisted through four decades, at bitter cost in lives and treasure — not Irish treasure, but our own cash. The British Army was called upon to hold the ring between Catholics and Protestants, then to battle against terrorists of the Provisional IrA bent on murdering soldiers and policemen.
Some men and women of the security forces died in street firefights, others at the hands of snipers who vanished after firing a single shot, others again in rural ambushes and after detonating hidden booby traps.
For all the attention lavished on tragic military lapses and blunders such as Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, for the most part the British Army did its thankless job with exemplary courage, devotion and good humour. Thank God it is all over now.
or is it? This week, it has been revealed that the newly created Legacy Investigations Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland could reopen some or all of the 302 cases of deaths caused by the UK Armed Forces. Former soldiers who served in Ulster and are now long retired, men in their 60s and 70s, could have to answer questions and even face charges over episodes in which they were involved in the Seventies and eighties.
SUCh an adventure in archaeology, funded by the taxes of you and me, represents a monstrous injustice for many reasons. First, it is wrong that men, and maybe a few women, who did their duty under the Union Flag all those years ago should be subjected to anxiety and perhaps calumny by a battery of lawyers interested only in enriching themselves and advancing the political interests of the republican faction in Ireland.
It is bad enough that such terrorists as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have waxed fat for so long at our expense, since their retirement from the killing game.
But it becomes intolerable when past crimes of the IrA and Protestant paramilitaries remain largely unpunished, while the actions of the security forces in uniform are subjected to yet another dreary and costly official inquiry process.
We are told that terrorist murders will also be investigated. But the cost will be enormous and it is wildly unlikely that any convictions will result, partly because successive British governments have conceded pardons for a wide range of terrorist crimes — though not for the actions of the security forces.
Beyond this, I am sceptical about all legal proceedings concerning events that took place decades ago. I was in Derry on Bloody Sunday but refused to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry 30 years later because I could remember so little about what I saw. Threatened with a subpoena to appear, I told inquiry officials I would be delighted to have a day in court against them — and heard no more.
But lawyers seeking clients to represent in cases about the Mau Mau in Kenya in the Fifties, former eoKA terrorists in Cyprus and Irish republicans have become disease-carriers, plaguing our society. The more money one lot extracts on behalf of one group of alleged victims, the more loudly others bay over long-filled graves.
We are becoming an increasingly childish society, accepting personal responsibility for less and less while seeking to heap blame on others for more and more. A grown-up people would recognise that after a certain lapse of time, the only wise course is to move on.
Those who carry arms in the name of the Queen must, of course, be held accountable for their actions.
If soldiers abuse their power, they must pay the price before a court martial. They fight in the name of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. When they break the law, as a few do, they compromise the cause they represent.
But lawyers today are completely out of hand on the battlefield, chiefly because of the pernicious consequences of human rights law.
Some senior officers are gravely alarmed at the damage being done to military effectiveness and morale by an obsessive preoccupation with possible legal sanctions, at the expense of operations.
Lawyers were attached to every unit operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sometimes called upon to arbitrate on the ‘proportionality’ of air or artillery strikes in the middle of firefights.
officers in today’s Army are not frightened by the prospect of a bloody battle but by the risk of having their careers destroyed, or going to prison, for some breach of the enemy’s human rights.
Britain’s judges, including the highest, have shown a dismaying remoteness from reality in some of their recent decisions in this area, notably by concluding that human rights law can apply when Britain is conducting military operations abroad.
We Are an ever more civilianised society, most of us lacking personal experience of war’s horrors, demands and dilemmas. Lawyers, including a shocking number of judges and coroners, act as if firefights can be subjected to forensic investigations similar to those that follow passenger aircraft crashes.
They cannot and should not be. In the words of Lord Tedder, the great airman who was Deputy Supreme Commander for the 194445 liberation of europe, ‘war is organised confusion’.
It is wrong that civilian coroners are allowed to pass ignorant and often foolish judgments on deaths in the heat of military action, laying blame on named officers and soldiers. It is even more mistaken for police in Northern Ireland to consider reopening inquiries into past killings by British soldiers, most of them entirely proper in the circumstances of the moment.
how can we propose to inflict new traumas on veterans, some of whom went through experiences we can scarcely imagine?
A British government spokesman yesterday expressed concern that almost all investigations of historic killings address the doings of soldiers or policemen. When they killed innocents, they did so by accident. Gerry Adams’s friends, by contrast, did this as a matter of policy, yet most have been granted a free pass for their ghastly crimes.
The vast majority of violent deaths in Northern Ireland between 1968 and the 21st century — more than 3,000 in all — were the work of republican or Loyalist terrorists.
The latest commitment to new investigations suggests an equivalence between killings by terrorists and those by the security forces. This is entirely spurious.
It is one thing to uphold the rule of law by punishing government servants guilty of wrongdoing, quite another to display the sort of masochism to which we seem prey today, by hounding men and women for their roles in the service of the Crown one, two or even three generations ago.
We should stop abusing the word ‘hero’ to describe anybody who served in uniform anywhere in a war zone. Soldiers are like the rest of us — a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.
But most do a dangerous and difficult job pretty well, so the rest of us may sleep easier in our beds. This they did in Ulster, in the latter years of the last century.
If the Legacy Branch of the Northern Ireland police wishes to play a futile history game, let yesterday’s terrorists become its losers, not the brave soldiers who strove for peace.