NOVANEWS
Morning Star
17/08/10
See also at http://www.troopsoutmovement.com/latestnews.htm
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On July 8 1981, on the Falls Road in Belfast, Nora McCabe stepped out of her house in her bedroom slippers to go to the shop. Almost immediately, she was shot dead by a plastic bullet, fired from a passing police jeep.
At her inquest, one after another, the five police involved repeated the same story that there had been a riot taking place and they had acted in self-defence. It looked like the inquest was going their way until suddenly the McCabe family’s lawyer, a young Pat Finucane, introduced a new witness – a Canadian cameraman who happened to be in the area at the time. The film was shown to the court, and revealed that the Falls Road that morning was deserted. It shows the jeep coming down the road, turning into Linden Street where Nora lived and it shows the puff of smoke from the gun that fired the lethal shot. There had been no riot, and Nora had been killed in cold blood.
If the rule of law had prevailed in Belfast at the time, one might have expected a prosecution of the killers to have emerged. Instead, the inquest was stopped, never to be reopened. The young solicitor’s assassination was arranged by a British agent and the man in charge of the police Landrover Jimmy Crutchley was given a medal and a promotion.
“This is what happens,” explains Robert McClenaghan, “to the bad apples.” Cases such as these are the tip of the iceberg. McClenaghan estimates that around 1,100 people have been killed by loyalists in collusion with the agencies of the British state.
“In our opinion we could put what the British state has been doing for 20 or 30 years on a par with what happened in Chile or what happened in Argentina. It may not have been on the same numerical scale, but the policies were the same.”
Eight years ago, hundreds of relatives of those murdered joined forces to create An Fhirinne, a united campaign to discover the truth about how and why their loved ones were killed – to discover, as they put it, “not just who pulled the trigger, but who pulled the strings.”
An Fhirinne, which is Gaelic for “the truth,” now represents over 250 families. Its struggle has not been easy. At the start we were dismissed as republican propaganda. The attitude was ‘how dare you try to assert that the British government could be involved in murdering its own citizens? But bits and pieces of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, began to come out and it got to the point where the British couldn’t hold it back any more.”
The result was the Stevens inquiry. After 11 years of investigations, former head of the Metropolitan Police Sir John Stevens concluded that collusion had indeed taken place. “From about a million pages of evidence,” says McClenaghan, “he was only allowed to publish 20. But those 20 were damning.”
Stevens concluded that he had amassed enough evidence to mount 25 prosecutions – including against senior RUC, Special Branch and British military intelligence personnel. He handed this evidence to the director of public prosecutions (DPP). Years passed until finally, in 2007 – four years after being handed the files – the DPP announced that there would be no prosecutions.
As McClenaghan puts it, “this was the British state covering up the mass murder of its own citizens.”
State cover-up of murder is something of which McClenaghan has personal experience. On December 4 1971, McGurk’s Bar was blown up by an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) bomb.
His grandfather was among the 15 killed. At the time, he says, “we hadn’t a clue about media, about press statements or anything else. We just knew our grandfather was dead. He was blown up, at 75 years of age, and within hours he was being called a bomber in the media.
“It’s hard enough to deal with a death, especially a brutal death like murder. But then on top of that to be told lies by the police…”
Six years later, while being interrogated over an unrelated murder, a UVF member named Robert Campbell admitted to being the getaway driver for the bombing that day.
“Now if you were in Special Branch, and you had a list of five and one of them confesses, you would think at the very least, you should arrest the other four. You don’t have to watch CSI to work this out.”
Even then, the official line continued, and although Campbell was sent to prison, none of the others was arrested.
Last month the police ombudsman published a report exonerating the police involved in the McGurk’s case.
“That was a brutal report. A loyalist bomb and for 40 years they blamed the IRA, and they said that was a proper investigation. It’s another whitewash in our opinion. They didn’t even get the names right on the list of people killed.”
What Stevens’s inquiries had unearthed, however, was that by the mid-’80s collusion had shifted from this type of informal – albeit widespread – collaboration among forces on the ground to a crucial plank of British state policy. Loyalist death squads were effectively integrated into the British chain of command.
Finding the fingerprints of Brian Nelson, a leading member of loyalist militia the UDA, on British army documents, Stevens’s team had Nelson arrested. During his time in prison, Nelson admitted he was a British agent, and that far from being placed in the UDA to disrupt its operations, he was in fact there to facilitate them. Nelson, it emerged, had been given access to army intelligence files to improve the UDA’s targeting and assassinations, and had been aided by MI5 in facilitating the import of a huge arms shipment in from apartheid South Africa in 1987.
Nelson’s handler was a man named Gordon Kerr. His subsequent career demolishes the “bad apple” theory.
“He actually left the north under the cloud of being a mass murderer, but then went on to become British military attache in China! He was later moved to Basra in Iraq. So this is not only Belfast or the six counties that we’re talking about, this is transporting terror around the world and this is where they perfected their techniques.”
That collusion was taking place, however, has never been doubted by republican communities, as it was manifestly obvious in their daily lives.
McClenaghan says: “It was common knowledge at the time. This was probably one of the highest militarised parts of the world, covered with checkpoints and helicopters. And yet they would suddenly disappear and the area would be deadly silent. And every one of us used to say: ‘Someone’s going to get killed tonight’ because you knew once the checkpoints had disappeared, this was the death squads getting the green light to come in.
“We want some sort of independent international inquiry that’s independent of the British and Irish governments but will have the authority to subpoena witnesses.
“The British government try to portray this image to the world that they were peacekeepers trying to keep two warring factions apart, to stop the Catholics killing the Protestants and the Protestants killing the Catholics, instead of saying: ‘This was our colony and we were actively involved as combatants on one side, namely the pro-British loyalist side.’
“And what that meant in reality is that they armed the loyalists, they gave them information and then they let them loose on our community and killed upwards of 1,000 people. So they can’t then be the people that sit in judgement. We don’t want British judges coming over and bringing republicans and loyalists in and saying: ‘Tut tut. That shouldn’t have happened,’ and then the British state gets off scot-free.”
WHAT CAN WE DO TO SUPPORT THE FAMILIES WHO’S RELATIVES WERE THE VICTIMS OF COLLUSION BETWEEN THE BRITISH STATE AND LOYALIST PARAMILITARIES?
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Distribute this information as widely as possible – in Trade Unions, Political Parties, Community Groups, friends & colleagues. The Troops Out Movement has a DVD in which relatives are interviewed. We can also provide a speaker to show the video and lead a discussion about what needs doing. Detailed leaflets about collusion are available from the address below.
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Write to David Cameron, Owen Paterson and your own MP to demand a full Independent, International, Investigation into the Ballymurphy killings – and encourage others to do so.
Contact details
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David Cameron, 10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA email:[email protected] or on Form at https://email.number10.gov.uk/Contact.aspx
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Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, NIO 11 Millbank, London SW1P 4PN Email: [email protected] or fill in form at http://www.nio.gov.uk/index/contact-us/enquiry-form.htm
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Your own MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA www.writetothem.com
