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BLOODY IRELAND
by Jo Thomas
from The Columbia Journalism Review
May/June 1988
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It was one of those small Irish houses in County Armagh in
which the only warmth comes from the hearth, and some ofthe men
get up to leave, quickly and without comment, when a stranger
enters the room. I was looking for information about the deaths
of three young, unarmed members of the Irish Republican Army shot
by undercover police. The initial police account of the
circumstances in which they died had proved to be a tissue of
lies, according to subsequent court testimony. But what really
happened the night the three men died in a firestorm of bullets
was still a mystery. None of the victims survived.
I was, at the time, a correspondent for the New York Times,
a junior member of the London bureau, a journalist for eighteen
years. Originally, the Times had hired me because I liked doing
investigations. As a reporter and later as an editor, I had seen
a lot of them through. "I won't stop", I assured the family of
one of the victims, "until I get to the bottom of this." I don't
think they believed me. Another person had visited them recently,
they said, an amazing policeman from England. In Northern Ireland
one is more likely to see an elephant on roller skates than a
policeman making a polite call at the home of an I.R.A. man, dead
or otherwise. But this policeman, they say, had explained that he
had orders to re-investigate the Armagh shootings, and he
intended to be thorough. He was Detective Chief Superintendent
John Thorburn, of the Greater Manchester Police, second in
command to Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker, as expert and
impartial investigator looking into six controversial shootings
in Northern Ireland. The family of the dead man wished them well
but didn't think their chances were much better than mine.
As it turned out, the family was right. As he has since told
the story, Deputy Chief Constable Stalker was stonewalled by top
police officials in Northern Ireland for month after month. He
was urged to apply for better jobs in England and Scotland. When
it became clear that he would not leave, quit, or consent to a
whitewash, he was pulled off the case, his integrity questioned
and an investigation into his personal life was instituted.
Although no wrongdoing was found, he was still off the case in
Northern Ireland. His mistake, he has revealed, was to ask
questions about the involvement of MI 5 (British domestic
intelligence) and senior police officials in the killing of a
teenaged boy and the severe wounding of his companion. Early this
year (1988) the British attorney general declared the whole
matter closed, in spite of evidence that justice, in his words,
had been perverted. He gave "national security" as the
justification. Stalker, who had resigned from the police, has
told his side of the story in a book titled 'Stalker', published
in England in February. Viking Press will publish it here this
month under the titles 'The Stalker Affair'. His revelations,
also serialized in the London 'Daily Express', caused such a
sensation in Britain that people even began talking about movie
rights.
What happened to me was quieter. A senior editor, who kept a
home in London as well as New YOrk and who had been enthusiastic
about my initial dispatches from Belfast, began telling me to
stay out of Northern Ireland. A high-ranking British official,
who in the past has had close ties to the intelligence community
in Northern Ireland, took me to lunch and suggested I drop my
investigation in exchange for a lot of access to the secretary of
state for Northern Ireland, the British official who administers
the place, as well as an exclusive first look at the Anglo-Irish
pact then being negotiated between London and Dublin. I refused.
Several American colleagues in London suggested I leave the
difficult investigations to the local press; if there really were
a story, British and Irish reporters would be on top of it. In
fact they were not--but some of them began treating me as if I
were a member of the I.R.A. Then, too, the mail at my house in
London started to arrive opened. In Northern Ireland, I was
refused all official records, even transcripts of inquests that
had been open to the public. "We are not obliged to open our
investigative files to you," a police official replied when asked
to explain why the police had misled a newspaper photographer who
was permitted to take after an army shootings--one of the rare
instances in which this was allowed. (The bullet riddled car
shown in the photo, which the police said belonged to an innocent
man caught in I.R.A.-army crossfire, actually belonged to the
army; in fact, according to witnesses and his family, the victim
had been elsewhere. According to evidence released by the deputy
state pathologist, two and a half years after the shooting, he
had been killed by a shot in the back with a handgun.)
At the outset, in December 1984, I had wanted to learn how
many times police and army undercover units had been involved in
questionable shootings, and how these shootings had occurred. I
picked 1982, the year of the Armagh killings, as a starting
point. This is not when the shootings began--there had been some
particularly infamous cases in earlier years--but I felt that to
years was the longest time I might be able to depend on the
accuracy of anyone's memory. And any new information about these
cases would have to come from new witnesses and new evidence.
**
I had some success. I found some eyewitnesses and learned of
physical evidence the police had overlooked. The first story
appeared in The NY Times on April 12, 1985. From then on I had to
bootleg the investigation during whatever time I had in Northern
Ireland, which was relatively little. Then, in February 1986, I
was abruptly ordered home. (In light of constant complaints that
I had been paying too much attention to Northern Ireland, I
suspected this was the cause, and one senior editor
confirmed that this was so. The foreign editor and other senior
Times editors, however, said that while my work was good it was
not distinguished and they wanted to replace me with one of the
finest writers on the paper.)
Before I left, I was able to finish a second story (March
17, 1986) about the shootings, this one about two army undercover
killings, one of an unarmed Catholic youth with no ties to the
I.R.A., the other of a Protestant businessman. After that, the
shootings continued--indeed, the shooting of three unarmed I.R.A.
guerrillas in British Gibraltar in March led to a virtual
bloodbath afterward in Belfast--but no reporter has investigated
them.
I've left the Times to teach journalism and to have more
time to spend with my children, who are very young, but the
silence about what is going on in Northern Ireland troubles me,
and it should worry people who care about journalism as much as
it troubles those who care about justice--or the lack of it--in
that place.
"If a police force of the United Kingdom could, in cold
blood, kill a seventeen-year-old youth with no terrorist or
criminal convictions, and then plot to hide the evidence from a
senior policeman deputed to investigate it, then the shame
belonged to us all," Stalker writes. "This is the act of a
Central American assassination squad--truly of a police force out
of control."
Stalker looked into six cases. But, by my count, between
1982 and 1987 there were at least forty-seven suspicious
shootings by police or army undercover units. At least twenty-
one of the victims, according to police statements or court
records, were unarmed. On the basis of the available evidence,
it's doubtful that those who were carrying weapons were given any
opportunity to surrender before they were killed or--in the cases
of three who lived--seriously wounded. How, in a place where the
security forces are as tightly controlled as they are in Northern
Ireland, did this happen? And why isn't this news? I can't answer
either question, but I can tell you a little about the way
American reporters cover the place, which for a lot of reasons,
is not very well.
***
It is the misfortune of Northern Ireland to be covered from
London, that most beguiling of cities. Like many Americans, I was
an enthusiastic anglophile when I went there, and I loved the
place. Publisher A. O. Sulzberger invited me to lunch at the
Savoy the day I arrived. It was easy to feel important. It was so
easy to feel well-informed. American journalists get a weekly
confidential briefing at No. 10 Downing Street and another at the
Foreign Office. They are also invited to dinner at the best
places and, especially the bureau chiefs, to the best parties.
There are hierarchies of parties, the A lists and the B lists. No
one understands hierarchies better than the British, and they are
careful to make close friendships with members of important
American news organizations. It makes us reluctant to offend,
especially to bring up the touchy subject of the war, which they
refuse to call a war, in Northern Ireland.
Because of the way assignments in London are generally
structured, with large territories to cover--sometimes all of
Europe and the Middle East--American journalists cover Northern
Ireland infrequently, in short trips sandwiched between other
assignments, if they go there at all. Many stories are simply
written from London, with no on-the-ground reporting, even though
Belfast is just a hour away by air shuttle. When reporters do go,
they rarely leave Belfast, except for a predictable swing through
what is thrillingly, if inaccurately referred to as "bandit
country", along the border with the Irish Republic.
Sometimes the press officers in the Northern Ireland Office,
the administrative outpost of the British government, will do
something as blatant as arranging a visiting correspondent's
entire itinerary--I saw this when I was there--but most of the
time they do something more subtle and even more effective: they
set the terms in which the situation is discussed, which is
usually one of law and order, terrorism and counterterrorism, or
religious sectarian battles in which both sides are inaccurately
portrayed as equally bigoted, equally powerful and equally
unreasonable. Until recently the British government had tried to
portray itself as the principle peacemaker, the sensible
intermediary between the "hard men" on both sides. Now, with the
signing in November 1985 of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Dublin
government has been given a symbolic role as the advocate for
Catholics in Northern Ireland, although the Irish government has
no legal or actual power that and wants nothing to do with the
large minority of those Catholics who support Sinn Fein, the
political arm of the I.R.A.
If you see Northern Ireland in these terms, as a cauldron of
violence, religious bigotry, and terrorism--and many American
journalists seem to--then it makes sense to rely on the
"guidance" of British and Irish officials in trying to grasp the
situation. The British and Irish know the place, they are
"reasonable"; the people who live in Northern Ireland--and their
elected representatives, from this point of view--are "bigots" or
"terrorists", to be interviewed but not listened to. If you see
Northern Ireland as a place of "mindless violence", as I've seen
and heard it described, it's also very tempting to seek out and
write about "peacemakers", an American correspondents so often
do, even if these well-meaning souls have no constituency and no
prospect of righting terrible wrongs which exist, and have
existed for many years. To see Northern Ireland this way,
dismissing the lives, feelings and suffering of many of its
people, is not to understand it at all. Almost everyone in
Northern Ireland wants "peace"; the question is what price
they're willing to pay to get it. Many Catholics feel that the
status quo, in a state set up to maintain the Protestant
ascendancy, obliges them, as they put it, "to live your lives on
your knees." They would rather fight. Protestants, on the other
hand, fear that any change in the status quo would strip them of
their culture, their heritage, their very soul. They would rather
fight. The conflict is terrible, but it is not "mindless". It is,
on both sides, deeply considered.
In trying to describe a foreign political landscape,
language is everything. Just as our command of language sets the
boundaries of our ability to think, the way we name things in a
volatile pace like Northern Ireland profoundly influences the way
we--and our readers--feel about them. We can take sides or accept
a certain set of assumptions without even realizing it.
Take, as a revealing example, the nearly universal use in
the American press of the word "Ulster" as a synonym for
"Northern Ireland". Both terms are controversial. Ulster is used
interchangeably with Northern Ireland *only* by the British and
by the Protestant unionists, who want to maintain their union
with the Crown at any cost. Nationalists, who think the British
should get out if Ireland and who are largely Catholics, would
prefer the use of "the six counties" or "the north of Ireland".
For them, it is anathema to equate Ulster with Northern Ireland.
Historically, as they point out, Ulster was one of the four
provinces of Ireland and included nine counties. The British
carved Northern Ireland out of six of them. When nationalists use
"Ulster", they mean the historic province still shown on maps of
Ireland and still claimed by the Irish Republic as part of its
national territory. I'm not suggesting that reporters should
start calling the place a "statelet" as the I.R.A. does--that
term always makes me think of something to eat--but to call the
place "Ulster" is to chose sides. To do so unconsciously is to be
profoundly unaware of the culture and the feelings of the
Catholic minority, some 610,000 people who are a "minority" only
because their country was partitioned in 1920 to ensure a
perpetual upper hand for the Protestants, who now number roughly
950,000 in the North and would be a permanent minority in an
Irish nation of almost 4 million Catholics. (I use the term
"Northern Ireland" because that is the official name of this six-
county political entity.)
**
The major antagonist of the British government, which runs
Northern Ireland, is the I.R.A. The government defines the I.R.A.
as a 'terrorist' rather than a guerrilla organization, even
though it is one of the oldest insurgencies in the world and, at
the beginning of this century, in an earlier incarnation but
using many of the same methods, fought the British and won
independence for the Republic of Ireland. It is now a crime,
punishable by imprisonment, to be a member of the I.R.A., so
journalists are accurate in referring to it, as they so often do,
as "the outlawed I.R.A." This makes it sound like a bunch of
criminals, but I wonder why we don't also feel constrained to
refer to "the outlawed contras" in Nicaragua or the "outlawed New
People's Army" in the Philippines. I see it as an example of the
British genius for public relations.
The terms in which the conflict is described are of supreme
importance to the British government. It has declared the problem
to be a 'criminal', and not a 'political' one. That was the
significance of the hunger strikes in 1981, in which ten
prisoners, including Bobby Sands, died in an effort to retain the
special status which had been accorded--and subsequently denied
to--political prisoners. If the problem is a criminal one, it can
be solved by the criminal justice system, such as it is--by the
police, by courts without juries, by allowing the uncorroborated
evidence of paid informers, by long and, in some cases,
indeterminate prison sentences--and also by a massive public
relations campaign, such as a recent one o television, to strip
the I.R.A. of the popular support it has to have in order to
survive. Language is an essential ingredient of the government's
'criminalization' policy.
If the I.R.A., whose members are Catholic,, kills a
policeman who happens to be Protestant--and most of them are,
because, under the government's policy of 'Ulsterization',
English troops have been replaced, where possible, with local
hires--the shooting will be described not as an act of guerrilla
warfare but as a 'murder.', usually as a 'sectarian murder', as
if it were no different in character from the random killings
committed in Catholic neighborhoods by Protestant paramilitaries.
Nowhere is the obfuscation of the true nature of the
conflict in Northern Ireland more evident than in stories filed
from places where much of the fighting is going on--rural areas
near the border with the Irish Republic. Typical is a story
frequently filed by American reporters, in one version or
another, that the I.R.A. is involved in a campaign of 'genocide'
against Protestant farmers, especially men who are the only sons
in their families, in an effort to drive them off their land. One
problem with these stories is that they rarely mention how many
of the victims were members, or thought to be members, of the
security forces in Northern Ireland. The police and army include
many part-time members who also farm. At this writing, the I.R.A.
has killed more than 800 police and soldiers, including
Catholics, since 1969. The I.R.A. contends that its members are
fighting a war; the British say they are simply murderers. If
they are also engaged in a massive private land-grab, some
results--some change of land ownership--would eventually show up.
I have yet to see any documentation of this. And since many, if
not most, Protestant farmers would never sell their land to a
Catholic, let alone a known supporter of the I.R.A., I have my
doubts that the motive behind the killings is related to an
attempt to take over border-area farms. Meanwhile, purveyors of
the 'genocide' theory don't bother to mention that nationalists
who live near the border have been killed or burned out by
Protestant paramilitaries, simply for being Catholic. There are
some lovely country roads along th border in County Tyrone on
which Catholics I know are afraid to drive day or night.
I am not saying that journalists should never use the word
'murder', but I think they should be aware of its political
implications. 'Genocide', I think, is simply a distortion.
In the battle for hearts and minds, the I.R.A., which has no
press operation, and Sinn Fein, which has a clumsy one, are often
portrayed by government officials as waiting for or gloating over
a 'propaganda victory' when the government is caught in a
wrongdoing, such as a police or army shooting of a civilian. So
great is the concern over this 'propaganda', this possible assist
to terrorism, that the wrongdoing itself--how and why it happened
and who will have to answer for it--tends to get lost in the
shuffle. The British government, which has an adroit press
operation with many resources, is never portrayed as caring about
propaganda at all.
**
I didn't know any of this when I first went to Belfast, and
I confess that, if I could have avoided going there at all, I
would have. Like many Americans who are not of Irish ancestry, I
knew only what I had read about Northern Ireland in newspapers or
had seen on TV. At a distance, it seemed to be a tiresome and
confusing place, and old battleground that was not a good
candidate for page one. But, as the number two person in the
bureau, I had it as part of my beat. I managed to delay going
there, for one good reason or another, for more than two months
after I arrived in London. When I was finally ordered to go, a
police shooting was the cause.
Martin Galvin, a leader of Irish Northern Aid, an American
group that sides with the I.R.A., had, in defiance of a British
government ban, appeared to speak at a rally in Belfast. Police
moved in to arrest him, firing plastic bullets into a crowd of
men, women and children who had complied with an earlier
speaker's request to sit down on the ground. The supposedly
nonlethal bullets killed a man in full view of the TV cameras. I
was sent to Belfast the next day.
A march to protest the shooting was announced, declared
illegal, and held anyway. It was peaceful, but, in the rush to
get back to file, I was forgotten by the television crew with
whom I, not knowing West Belfast, had been advised to hitch a
ride. There was nothing to do but walk back. The cameras had
gone, the march crowd had evaporated, and things started to get
rough. I found my way blocked by a flaming street barricade.
Feeling ridiculous in my suit and high heels, I realized I was
caught between a throng of children throwing rocks and a fleet of
armored police vehicles rapidly bearing down on the children. A
man came from behind a building and pulled my out of the way--
the children knew how and when to scatter--and the conversations
I had afterwards with the people in the street left me angry and
depressed.
The violence in Northern Ireland baffled me. My unease was
reinforced by what I then took to be a fair comment by British
and Irish officials: that ill-informed Americans with romantic,
anachronistic ideas about Northern Ireland and caused untold
death and damage there, principally by drumming up support for
terrorism, by which they meant only the I.R.A. (Nobody ever
mentioned the Protestant paramilitaries, who, at that point,
killed more ordinary people than had the I.R.A.) Reporters, these
officials said, could share the blame. "A bad newspaper story can
do more damage than a bomb," they warned.
They didn't have to worry about me. My first story, which
made the front page, led with the fact that the police who did
the shooting at the rally were trying to arrest "an AMerican
supporter of the outlawed Irish Republican Army." I dutifully
repeated the warning of a Roman Catholic bishop that Irish-
AMericans should not be 'seduced' by television coverage of the
rally, and of the killing that occurred there, into giving the
I.R.A. money for guns. And i included all the warnings about the
'propaganda victory' for the I.R.A. I filed four stories in all,
and two of the headlines used the word 'Ulster.' The praise for
my work was effusive. But I went back to London troubled, hoping
that the place would quiet down and that I wouldn't have to go
back too often.
Two months later, the I.R.A. tried to assassinate Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Tory Party Conference at
Brighton. Clearly, something was going on in Northern Ireland
that shouldn't be ignored--and if what I am saying her is,
inadvertently, an argument for terrorism as a device to catch our
attention, it will have to stand. I still had no idea why people
were so willing to kill--or to die.
A few weeks before, I had to interview Gerry Adams, the
president of Sinn Fein. He had suggested that I might want to
spend some time living with a Sinn Fein family, to see what life
was like in est Belfast. Now I decided to take him up on his
offer. I also arranged to live with the family of a leading
member of the Ulster Defense Association, the legal guise of the
largest Protestant paramilitary organization, which operated its
illegal activities under other names. The men in both families
had served time in prison: one for possessing explosives, the
other on a weapons charge. The visit, reported in a cover story
for 'The New York Times Magazine' (March 10, 1985), opened my
eyes. In doing the reporting I began to realize that religious
fanaticism was not the issue. Power was: Who had it? Who
benefited--and who lost out?
Shortly after my stay in West Belfast, on December 6, 1984,
two I.R.A. members were shot dead at the Gransha psychiatric
hospital in the city nationalists call Derry, its ancient Irish
name; the British, who renamed in 1613, call it Londonderry.
The I.R.A. men, carrying loaded handguns, were purportedly
planning to kill a part-time member of the security forces who
worked at the hospital. An army undercover unit cut them down
with a fusillade of bullets as they rode a motorcycle onto the
grounds. Few official details were available--they rarely are-
=but what intrigued me about the case were reports, later
confirmed, that the suspects had been shot dozens of times.
Apparently they had been given no opportunity to surrender.
John Hume, the local member of Parliament and leader of what
the press likes to describe as the 'moderate' nationalist party-
-the one does not support the I.R.A.--was moved to ask whether
the authorities had abandoned th rule of law. Church leaders,
other British and Irish politicians, and human rights groups had
been asking the same question: Do the British, who do not have
the death penalty, have a 'shoot-to-kill' policy in Northern
Ireland? Were the police and army undercover units, following
orders that violated British law, going out to ambush their
fellow citizens and killing them on the spot? Did the ends
justify the means? And was the rule of law subservient to the
imposition of order?
Government officials have always said no. I felt it was
important to find out whether they were telling the truth. This
much I did learn: they lied about the circumstances of at least
some of the shootings. But by the time I had to leave I wasn't
even close to finding out whether 'shoot-to-kill' was actually a
policy. John Stalker, who had access to the police, came closer,
but he was denied vital evidence and was ble to conclude only
that "the circumstances of these shootings pointed to a police
inclination, if not a policy, to shoot suspects dead without
warning rather than arrest them." He also had left. What keeps on
are the shootings. And the press coverage is just more of the
same.
**
On February 21 of this year, a young man I knew was walking
to a Gaelic football game in a field on the northern side of the
border at Aughnacloy. He had returned earlier in the day from his
uncle's funeral in County Monaghan, one of the counties of
historic Ulster that is in the Irish Republic. He had parked his
car in an Aughnacloy housing project and had walked back through
the army checkpoint toward the field. In broad daylight, without
warning, a soldier shot him to death. The army said the shooting
was accidental and expressed deep regrets. The Irish government
expressed its doubts and said it would conduct its own
investigation. The American press covered this from London.
The '{New York} Times' wrapped the shooting into a front
page story about the political rift between Britain and Ireland
over the Stalker affair. The story was written by a correspondent
with a fine ear for language, a writer who has never hesitated to
listen to the voices of people who suffer. But he was just back
from Gaza, and he was miles away from that spot in Aughnacloy
where my friend fell dying. The story never mentioned Aidan
McAnespie by name, never said that he was young, that he was not
a member of the I.R.A., that his sister had run for office as a
candidate for Sinn Fein, that he had been frequently interrogated
and occasionally beaten by soldiers when he crossed the border
each day to go to work, that he came from a family that for
generations had been Irish nationalists.
In the story, Aidan was simply "an unarmed nationalist" who
was "shot and killed as he walked past a British Army checkpoint
in Northern Ireland"--the headline called it "Ulster". The story
went on to warn that "the incident will be used to foster the
contention of the outlawed Irish Republican Army that the
British-Irish agreement is proving worthless in its goal of
better protecting the rights of Northern Ireland's Roman Catholic
minority." Another shooting disappeared under the haze of a
potential propaganda victory. And still there was no reporting on
the ground. What really happened there? And why? And--the I.R.A.
aside--what did it mean?
"I could not in all conscience turn my back on what I
thought was murder by policemen," Stalker said in a radio
interview. "I have been a hard-nosed copper all my life, but I
draw the line at murder."
At least Stalker tried to dig out the facts. How much more
blood will have to be shed, one wonders, before AMerican
reporters do the same? Where do we, as journalists, draw the
line?
*****************************
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