ALEX KANE: Learning to live with troubled past
LISTENING to Al Hutchinson’s suggestion of a possible amnesty for some murderers I was reminded of a quote from the detective writer L. C. Tyler: “I am completely with Agatha Christie on the issue of whether you could murder somebody on a Nile paddle steamer. You can murder somebody anywhere. It’s getting away with it that is always the tricky bit.”
And as far as I am concerned an amnesty – whether for an individual or for a group – amounts to “getting away with it”.
An amnesty means more, much more, than a pardon. It is a legislative or executive act by which the state itself can restore those who may have been guilty of an offence to the positions of innocent people, because it obliterates all legal remembrance of the offence.
Once you are the subject of an amnesty you can never be charged with the offence, even if overwhelming evidence of your guilt emerges a day later or 20 years later. Mr Hutchinson describes his position as “the pragmatic approach; it simply would be impossible probably to investigate to a criminal standard all murders”.
He may be right, yet that doesn’t mean that alleged murderers or attempted murderers should thereupon be granted an amnesty, conditional or otherwise.
For as Nigel Dodds said: “Justice is one of those things you don’t just give up on.” Quite right: criminals should never be free from the threat of prosecution if evidence of their guilt becomes available.
I don’t care if they are old, sick or even terminally ill by the time new evidence emerges.
The very fact that they can never rest easy, never be certain that their past won’t catch up on them, never be sure that someone isn’t going to walk into a police station with a document or confession, is sometimes the only form of punishment which they may ever be subjected to, anyway.
And what sort of message does it send to a new generation of terrorists? If Nazis can still be tracked down almost 60 years after their crimes why should we be any less thorough in tracking down murderers and torturers in our own country? Actually, I’m not entirely sure how Mr Hutchinson defines the conditions under which an amnesty would be an option, for he seemed to be suggesting that if charges were not feasible in a particular case, then victims or surviving relatives could approve or veto an amnesty for the alleged perpetrator.
But if an amnesty is to be available to someone – albeit dependent on what the victims or relatives think –then surely there must be an alleged murderer to whom the amnesty can be granted?
And if that person is willing to accept an amnesty does it not follow that he is, almost certainly, guilty of the offence?
In other words, Mr Hutchinson appears to be arguing in favour of a permanent “getting away with it” status for probable murderers.
Two other questions arise. As Mike Nesbitt has noted, “families do not operate as a unit, all neatly agreeing on the best way forward”.
So what happens in the event that the families do not agree on an amnesty, or don’t even agree that the offence should be looked upon as a “cold case”?
How do you even define who counts as a relative 10 or 20 years after the event, when parents, spouses, children, brothers and sisters may have died?
Also, what happens in the event that the family unanimously reject the possibility of an amnesty?
Does the inquiry against the alleged murderer continue even though, according to Mr Hutchinson, bringing charges may not be feasible?
To be frank, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr Hutchinson’s suggestion amounts to nothing more than giving up and moving on and hoping that the families concerned give you the “cover” for your decision.
Remember too, that granting an amnesty to one person will simply add to the pressure for some sort of ‘let’s-close-down-the-past-and-move-on-with-the-future’ general amnesty for everyone who hasn’t been, or presently can’t be charged.
I can’t see the IRA, let alone any other terrorist organisation, buying into the idea of an amnesty.
None of them regard what they did as criminal. They would have precisely the same attitude to amnesty as they do to a truth and reconciliation process: hoping to exploit it all for their own self-serving, self-justifying propaganda purposes.
The only truth the IRA wants is something they can point to as a justification of their terrorism.
The only truth loyalist terrorists want is something they can point to to justify their obscene delusion that they were defenders rather than ruthless brutes.
Speaking last week, the day after the Historical Enquiries Team’s very unsatisfactory report into the slaughter at the La Mon Hotel in February 1978, Michael Copeland said: “Without being seen as detractors, without being seen as living ghosts from the past, we need to know that the history of what went on for the last 30 years or 40 years, when it is recorded, will be recorded in a fair and balanced way.”
Michael is talking about the “truth” underlying our past. Not a version of events that suits terrorists or terrorist supporters. Not a version of events that allows the victims to be forgotten or sidelined.
Not a version of events that tries to push us towards a forgive and forget solution in which we all assume some element of guilt for past deeds and then take part in some sort of absurd group hug masquerading as a shared future.
Mr Hutchinson’s suggestion of an amnesty (and you can bet your bottom dollar that he was probably flying a kite for some agency or other) fits in with an unsettling notion that the truth, as truth, is probably best avoided.
It’s almost as if there are some agencies who believe that Northern Ireland is not ready for the truth and will, consequently, do everything they can to push us towards a Pollyanna solution. But if we are not ready for the truth then I suspect that we are not ready to move on from the past.
If our political institutions and so-called peace processes are not robust enough to withstand the unvarnished truth about what happened in Northern Ireland then they will never be robust enough to meet the challenge of making the changes required to create a genuinely new era Northern Ireland. You cannot build trust on lies and unanswered questions: and that’s the real truth!
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