Victims group SEFF tells MPs its 'unique' approach already achieves reconcoliation for Catholics and Protestants
A "unique" victims group made up of Protestants and Catholics has told an investigation by MPs into reconciliation that its members are already living it out.
That was the submission from victims group SEFF to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (NIAC) call for evidence on reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
By contrast, the group said that genuine reconciliation could never see its members unify with people who "gaslight" them by continuing to justify, defend and glamorise the violence they committed during the Troubles.
SEFF Director Kenny Donaldson was giving evidence to the committee of MPs on Wednesday.
He says SEFF’s focus on relationships based on the repudiation of terrorism is "unique" in the victims’ sector and matches the ethos of the Belfast Agreement.
The organisation’s submission paper said: "We believe that reconciliation is not about white-washing the violence of the past, nor is it about foisting innocent victims to accept the language and self-exculpations of terrorists. Reconciliation must proceed from the acknowledgement that there ‘was no justification for terrorism and/or other criminal violence irrespective of who carried it out’.
It emphasised that SEFF is not a single-identity group but has members from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds.
"We are an organisation which supports the full community and that eschews single-identity advocacy; we have consistently argued that neither the glorification of violence nor the assertion of an equivalence between innocent victims (and the vast majority of the people throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland who rejected terrorism) and proscribed terrorist organisations is morally and historically wrong."
SEFF urged MPs to consider SEFF’s model of reconciliation, which is "based on the shared values of repudiation of terror that allows our members affected by both republican and loyalist (and, where it occurred, state) violence to build authentic and lasting friendships".
And it criticised the 2013 Haass/O’Sullivan paper, which, unlike the 2009 Consultative Group on the Past, adopted a "relativistic" approach with no moral absolutes.
According to one of SEFF’s members, this type of thinking is an invitation to perpetrators to "play the victim".
The paper added: "The tendency of terrorists to explain away their crimes is tantamount to gaslighting – it exonerates bombers and assassins as it suggests they were passive actors in some kind of three-decade long Greek tragedy.
"This type of historical revisionism is located in the glorification of terrorists on murals and statues across Northern Ireland; it is also found in the idea that ‘war came’ to the terrorists who were only reacting as anyone would."
The paper said SEFF does not divide people along Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist lines - but does divide them "on the basis of our values"; those excluded are "those who used, justify, excuse or glamorize violence".
It concluded that Northern Ireland is not actually at peace but rather at "a stand-off" and added that "we are some distance away from reaching a place where minorities (from whatever background) become valued neighbours, as opposed to being tolerated guests”.
The unfinished business of ‘The Past’, the paper argued, is still “the present” for many victims and the "missing chapter of Accountability" must be faced - "not begrudgingly - but with charity and grace".