When is it right to draw a line under the past? That is the question that the British government is mulling as it proposes an amnesty for crimes committed in Northern Ireland during the 30 years of ambuscades, shootings, and bomb attacks known, with terse understatement, as “The Troubles.”
What began as a protest by the Catholic minority against rigged electoral boundaries and one-sided policing erupted into violence in 1969. British troops were sent to Northern Ireland to restore order and were initially welcomed by Catholics as a relief from the Protestant-dominated local security forces. But the soldiers soon became targets for IRA terrorists, beginning a cycle of killings.
Over the next three decades, dreadful atrocities were committed. The Irish Republican Army did not shoot only at soldiers or off-duty policemen. It planted bombs in public places. It kidnapped and murdered many Catholics, including a young mother who had cradled the head of a dying British serviceman. It imposed a reign of terror on the housing estates it controlled.
Republican paramilitarism summoned into existence an answering loyalist paramilitarism. Protestant terrorist cells, supposedly defending their communities, began to attack IRA leaders and sympathizers. They, too, quickly fell to picking softer targets, murdering Catholic civilians on sectarian grounds.
Most of the murderers have already received an effective amnesty. Under the terms of the 1998 peace deal, republican and loyalist criminals were released from prison, and special arrangements were put in place for those still on the run. The chief effect of a statute of limitation would therefore be to indemnify the one group that has not benefited from an earlier amnesty — namely the British Armed Forces.
Naturally, there are many in Britain who support the proposal for precisely that reason. The soldiers, they argue, were there to uphold the law. Their self-restraint, relative to the two sets of paramilitaries, can be inferred from the numbers. Of the 3,500 victims, some 60% were killed by republican terrorists, 30% by loyalist terrorists, and 10% by state security forces. Precisely because the security forces were acting within the law, and subject to rules designed to minimize casualties, they suffered many more fatalities than they inflicted. The army killed 247 but lost 709; the police killed 50 but lost 303.
Why, many ask, should young men doing their duty be harassed by the criminal justice system decades after the event, when unapologetic terrorists were set free? Why should the British state abet its enemies and persecute its servants?
I understand that objection. I understand, too, the argument that there comes a time when everyone has to let go. Some countries tackled past conflicts in a burst of spontaneous and semi-legal revenge — notably those that turned on World War II collaborators following liberation. Others simply agreed not to talk about the past. When Francisco Franco died in 1975, leftist and rightist politicians hammered out a “Pacto del Olvido,” an agreement to forget. Most famously, South Africa established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which allowed those who had done wrong during the apartheid years to indemnify themselves by coming clean.
I appreciate that many people in Northern Ireland want to move on. Their province is now peaceful and prosperous, a growing financial services center. Why stir up old ghosts?
The answer, surely, is that an amnesty for the armed forces will put them on the same plane as the terrorist murderers. It will reduce the conflict to a kind of giant tribal war. It will retrospectively undermine the basis on which the troops were there, namely as representatives of the legitimate government, sent to uphold the law, and subject to its strictures.
Inevitably, during three decades of deployment, some individual soldiers acted badly. The most notorious case was Bloody Sunday, when 14 civilian protesters were shot dead by members of the Parachute Regiment. After an initial whitewash, the British government ordered a new investigation, which concluded that some of the soldiers had knowingly shot unarmed men, prompting an apology and opening the door to prosecutions.
To argue that those soldiers should be let off because terrorists were is to draw a moral equivalence between them. That is, paradoxically, precisely what the IRA did throughout the conflict, claiming that it should be treated as an army rather than a criminal gang and demanding prisoner of war status for its jailed bombers.
But there is no such equivalence. Soldiers operate according to rules. When those rules are broken, there are consequences. It is that principle that distinguishes a law-based state from a criminal insurgency. Lose it, and we lose the very thing the soldiers were meant to be defending.
