Time to leave victimhood behind
By Mary Nelis
There were eighteen people in the small room, in the silent house, on
that January day seven years ago. The sense of pain and grief was
visible, though not a tear was shed nor a word spoken.
It was written on the faces of the men and women, deeply etched
lines, eyes darkened with a suffering that was born out of
generations of being defined as non people in their own country.
Many were the survivors of loyalist death squads, whose murder
campaign against Catholics has its origins in the sectarian unionist
political establishment. Some others had experienced the sorrow and
the pride that their sons and daughters had engaged in armed struggle
to defend the rights of the Irish people in the north when peaceful
change was shot off the streets on Bloody Sunday by the British army
protecting the rights of unionism. Whatever the circumstances, all
those gathered in the home of the McKearney's in Moy, Co Tyrone, were
there to share the grief of parents, whose son had just been murdered
as he carried out his work in his father's butchers shop. All had
been through that door, all had lost someone they loved.
In today's terminology, on foot of reports by academics, social
workers, and British civil servants, those gathered in the
McKearney's home are described as victims, and even the word victim
is qualified by some as ``innocent'' victims.
Those who talk of innocent victims usually mean those people, mainly
involved in the security forces, who were killed by nationalist
insurgents. These same people constantly assert that the Six Counties
is a democracy, that the killing of Catholics is justified, that the
state can only be maintained by keeping them in their holes and that
Unionists collectively are all innocent victims of republican
violence.
So when the British government resort to summary execution as they
did at Loughgall, Gibraltar etc, these people would argue that those
killed got what they deserved and their relatives have no right to be
included in the victims category, as outlined in the Bloomfield
report.
This was the picture presented by the media when the Loughgall
relatives met Adam Ingram, who as security minister surely owes those
who met him at least an explanation.
The relatives were met by the Families of Innocent Relatives group
(FAIR) led by the equally ``innocent'' members of the DUP.
The issue for the relatives of those massacred at Loughgall, like all
the other nationalists killed in this long war, is simple justice.
They want to know the truth.
They want to know why their loved ones were shot down by undercover
professionally trained assassins, when they could have been captured.
They want to know how loyalist death squads were given safe passage
into nationalist areas to carry out their murder missions, they want
to know the role of British Intelligence and the collusion between
loyalist paramilitaries and the UDR, Ulster Resistance, and all the
pseudo gangs involved in the many unexplained deaths of both
Protestant and Catholics over the past 33 years.
Most of all, they want to know why Sir Kenneth Bloomfield has
produced a report which categorises victims on the basis of whose
finger pulled the trigger.
No matter how they square the circle, those victims involved in FAIR
and their mouthpieces in the DUP were not standing outside Stormont
out of any sense of justice, or empathy with those Loughgall
relatives who, like them, stood over the graves of those they loved.
The woman whose photograph of her son, a member of the UDR killed by
the IRA, is as deserving of all our sympathy as the Kellys are for
their brother killed by the SAS.
But her son chose to join a highly trained, highly paid unit of the
British Army, whose role when it was set up by the British government
to replace the disbanded B Specials was to protect key installations.
In essence, it never stepped out of its ``special'' shoes, and for
nationalists coming into contact with it, meant a terror-ridden trip
ending in murder, assualt, theft, collusion, and sectarian
harrassment of people solely on the basis that they were Catholics.
Over four hundred of its members, those actually caught, have been
convicted of criminal offences, and their notoriety included being
part of the ``Shankill Butcher'' gang, the death squad responsible for
the Miami Showband.
Certainly those members of the UDR and all the security forces do not
deserve the label innocent. Nor are they victims. Those left to mourn
them in death may be innocent victims, not of the IRA, but of
Britain's dirty war in Ireland, which has claimed the lives of so
many of our best and brightest, from both political and religious
dividers.
We all, through accident of birth, have been put into positions of
taking sides, for whatever reason.
In this respect, all deaths have demeaned us and we all have been
deprived of the basic human dignity of consoling each other in our
time of greatest need, when we suffer the loss of a loved one. If we
continue to accept that some are more guilty than others, if we
refuse to admit that there were wrongs on all sides, if we think as
if we are in ghettoes, then we are victims and our torture is self
inflicted.
It is time to leave victimhood behind and begin an honest appraisal
of how we can share this island in agreement. It is time to become
survivers of the conflict.
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