Murder is murder... except when Johnson says it isn’t
MARGARET THATCHER, in 1980, justified her government’s steadfast refusal to grant political status to prisoners convicted of terrorist offences in the North with characteristic certitude. She insisted: ‘Murder is murder is murder.’
It now appears, however, that one of her great admirers, Boris Johnson, is not as unequivocal as his predecessor in No.10 was when it comes to the most terrible crime in the book.
Johnson still denounces murder, but not quite so robustly when it involves former members of the British army. To the great delight of Tory elites and pandering to British establishment jingoism he brands prosecutions of former British soldiers for crimes including murder, committed while serving in Northern Ireland, as a witch hunt.
So, he’s decided to end such prosecutions – and in doing so has, uniquely, united all political parties in the North and the Irish Government in opposition to him.
We’ve grown so used to low standards in high politics that we’ve developed some kind of immunity, no matter what the level of outrage.
THAT’S why the proposal by the British government to set aside the requirements of justice, to trample on the legitimate demands of victims’ families and friends, to kill off the very concept of accountability by due process of law for even the most depraved acts of barbarity has had a muted response from the general public.
Tragically, the disgusting behaviour of a handful of English thugs at the Euro finals in Wembley on Sunday is of more compelling interest to many.
Northern Ireland’s 30-year calamitous descent into a living hell of mutual destruction and brutality revealed all of the ugliest elements of humanity.
It differed in one respect only from the excesses of Hitler’s Third Reich, from Pol Pot’s carnage in Cambodia, Stalin’s crushing embrace of mass murder in the former USSR, Mao’s exterminations in China and the Hutu tribal slaughter in Rwanda – scale.
The hate that produced all those millions upon millions of deaths was the very same.
Hate made it possible for a depraved gang of IRA assassins to remove 11 Protestant men from a bus in South Armagh in 1976, line them up on the road and shoot them in what became known as the Kingsmill Massacre. Only one man survived, though shot 18 times.
There is no reason at all to believe that if there had been 15, 20 or even 30 Protestants on that bus that day that one of those IRA murderers would have said, ‘let’s not kill that many’.
THE Kingsmill atrocity followed many others, including murders of Catholics by the socalled ‘Glenanne Gang’, a bunch of loyalist cutthroats in cahoots with members of the British forces, the Ulster Defence Regiment and the RUC. So intimate was the violence in the North then that one of the first RUC officers to arrive on the scene of the Kingsmill Massacre was Billy McCaughey who had been involved in the killing of three Catholics the previous day.
The Kingsmill slaughter is just a brief snapshot of the kind of lawlessness that Johnson now wants to, in effect, forgive. And forget.
Johnson has the numbers in the House of Commons to force this murder amnesty into law. But he’ll be confronted by opposition from all sides in the North and from the Irish Government.
New leader of the DUP Jeffrey Donaldson was eloquent in the Commons in his denunciation of the proposed amnesty, referring to
two of his UDR colleagues who had been killed by the IRA in July 1984. His criticism, however, would have been much more persuasive if his examples of murders still requiring accountability had reached across the sectarian divide.
Donaldson, like Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, said victims of crimes carried out during the Troubles must be at the very centre of British government policy.
And while Johnson might not pay much attention to victims in Northern Ireland, he is less likely to ignore those on mainland Britain.
They include Julie Hambleton whose sister was among 21 people killed in the IRA Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. She bluntly asked Johnson, ‘Tell me prime minister, if one of your loved ones was blown up beyond recognition, would you be so quick to agree to such obscene legislation?
‘You would do everything in your power to find the murderers and bring them to justice.’
In reality, Ms Hambleton has a greater chance of putting a stop to Johnson’s amnesty solo run than all the arguments coming from Ireland, North and South, Unionist or Nationalist.