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Truth-telling's challenges

Thursday, January 29, 2009

IT'S BEEN AN EXTRA-ORDINARY week for facing the truth. But first, the background. Countries with a history of conflict have recently formulated ways, once peace prevails again, of dealing with the horrors and hatreds of the past.

Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission, under a local jurist and a human rights expert, plus an international lawyer from overseas, provided its template in the 1990s - and then came South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a broadly-based team of lawyers and community leaders.

 

Both instances are now seen – in the main – as relatively successful efforts to lay fresh ground for a damaged nation to move forward in some spirit, at least, of forgiveness and greater unity. With varying degrees of success and public acceptance, other countries from Peru to Liberia to Fiji and more have followed suit, often altering the investigative formula and the recommended outcomes to suit their local circumstances.

 

Now this week it’s Northern Ireland’s turn - 40 years since British troops were first ordered in, ostensibly to keep the peace, but in the end fighting a long war against the nationalist Irish Republican Army, while sectarian killings went on between (Catholic) nationalists and (Protestant) “Loyalists”.

 

After a torrent of press leaks ahead of time, it was no surprise that yesterday’s press conference to launch the report by Northern Ireland’s Consultative Group on the Past should be disrupted by protestors (as pictured above left) – who mainly objected to the Group’s recommendation of a flat-rate financial recompense totaling UK£12,000 (about US$17,000) for the family of every dead individual, regardless of that individual’s status as “innocent civilian” or “paramilitary volunteer”.

 

It does seem crass to put a cash value, especially an evidently paltry sum like this, on a lost life, and even more insensitive to apparently equate crime victims with criminal perpetrators. But – and here I veer to the Group’s side – it’s important in such a divided society not to create some “hierarchy of victims”, to use phrase from the co-chair, the Catholic ex-priest Denis Bradley (whose own history includes being an intermediary in the 1990s between the IRA and British Intelligence while a ceasefire was negotiated; his fellow co-chair is the retired Protestant Archbishop Robin Eames).

 

Such official grading of deaths, amid all the harms done and the deep, long-justified resentments, would - Bradley has been arguing - inevitably be divisive. It would produce the very opposite of reconciliation.

  

   

 

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YESTERDAY WAS ALSO WHEN THAT OUTSIDER veteran of the Irish peace process, ex-Senator George Mitchell (above right) began work in his latest troubled territory, the Middle East.

 

He arrived armed with the strongest of mandates - and credentials. President Barack Obama had, very tellingly, chosen an Arab TV station for his first sit-down interview after taking office. All too obviously this big international “get” went not to Al Jazeera (still most noted among Americans for being Al Qaeda’s preferred station for making announcements) but to the Dubai-based Al Arabiya, and in the interview Obama firmly identified Mitchell’s role in this Mid-East mission as an extension to the Chief Executive himself.

 

The President said: “He’s going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me”. That stamp of direct personal authority, by the way, was something of a corrective to Hillary Clinton, and her State Department spokesman who had been at pains during a press briefing to say Mitchell would be reporting to the Secretary of State (and only through her to the President).

 

Of all Mitchell’s demanding assignments - which have included, beside Northern Ireland and an earlier Middle East exploration of possible common ground on the causes of violence, a truth-digging exercise (about drugs) in the resistant dirt of American professional sports - this current quest for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian settlement must surely count as his most daunting.

 

This month’s devastating Israeli assault on Gaza, justified by its proponents as an attempt to stop Islamist Hamas militants from firing rockets into Israeli, has certainly flummoxed a venerable seeker-after-truth, the British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s a cause for despair among its many friends (myself included) that the Corporation compounded some recent egregiously stupid editorial and managerial mis-steps, by bovinely refusing this week to carry a non-partisan appeal for charitable funds to aid the suffering citizens of Gaza.

 

Such two- to three-minute public appeals are a weekly commonplace in British broadcasting (indeed I was a commercial TV representative for a while on the joint committee that vetted them regularly) and it’s a fact of TV life that British charities know perfectly well just how to be politically non-partisan – they have to. But the BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson kept saying, quite insupportably, that the Corporation had to block the TV spot in order to avoid “compromising public confidence in the BBC's impartiality”.

 

Incomprehensibly, the executive higher reaches of the “Beeb”, have lost sight of the clear distinction (plain to all of us) between being partial toward one side in a conflict, and helping its victims, whoever they are.

   

   

 

MAYBE SOME INTRACTABLE POLITICAL SITUATIONS AND the human capacity for unendingly bitter memories - as in Arab-Israeli relations - will defy both truth-seeking and reconciliation. There certainly can be limits.

 

That same co-chair of Northern Ireland’s band of hopeful conciliators, the former Father Bradley, has a powerful personal base from which to work on this difficult issue. He happens to write a newspaper column these days, but 37 years ago this very week he was, at the age of 26, giving the last rites to a 17 year-old. The boy was Michael Kelly, who’d been shot by a British soldier and lay dying on a City of Derry street - while I, as it happened, lay cowering from the firing about fifty yards away.

 

Bradley gave evidence, as I did, to the current British government’s public inquiry into the “Bloody Sunday” killings of fourteen civilian Catholic victims, including young Michael Kelly. We both coincidentally were called to testify back in 2001. All of the nearly 1,000 thousand witnesses like us, plus the hundreds of national and international reporters who covered the inquiry, not to speak of the entire 1.75 million population of Northern Ireland - which of course includes the endlessly long-suffering families of the 14 dead themselves - are still waiting for the official report on this single, horrific event.

 

The broader review by Bradley’s and Eames' Consultative Group recommends strongly that there should be no amnesties for perpetrators of crime during the so-called “Troubles”. It also says the peace process should continue with the creation of a "Legacy Commission" led by some prominent international figure. This body would continue investigations into past murders in the hope of securing prosecutions.

 

But, according to briefings by the Group’s staff, “unlike South Africa’s Truth Commission there will be no public hearings” – an idea that Bradley has privately stressed as well. It’s certainly arguable, though the thought sits uneasily with my journalist’s devotion to complete transparency, that this could be the wisest course.

 

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