The Saville Report: A Moment of Truth?

 He may be new but  British Prime Minister  David Cameron will  soon  be dealing with an old  problem…the conflict in Ireland.  The coalition  of the Conservative and Liberal Democrats will be the first change in government since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998.   What will this change mean for the  N. I. peace process, a topic barely mentioned in the campaign?   The Prime Minister is due to release the Saville Report reviewing the events of January 30, 1972 in Derry, otherwise known as Bloody Sunday.  The  Report, 16 years in the making and at a cost of 200 million pounds, was  made necessary by Lord Widgery’s  farcical 1972 account  of the killing of 14 unarmed civil rights protestors by the British Army.   Saville will  spin the deaths as isolated, accidental, the result of poor training and communication and a  cover-up of all that was misguided.  It will   not be the last word on  one of the conflict’s most grisly episodes.    A key  provision  of the 1998  peace pact  requires an  independent inquiry into the   1974   Dublin-Monaghan bombings and that is where it gets dicey for Mr. Cameron.    Together these two acts of slaughter transformed the civil rights struggle for jobs, housing and voting equality into a violent conflict to end  British garrison rule.    Will the  Cameron government  give us the truth of these monstrous events or offer  more delay, cover-up and absolution of wrongdoers?  Lord Saville’s report is just the beginning of the  struggle for the  facts and truth of the conflict.

What is at stake for  the British is the credibility,  particularly in America, of   Britain’s widely promoted  ‘honest broker’  image in the conflict and the credibility of  England’s image  as a  effective  promoter of  democracy, justice and the rule of law around the globe.    Will  the Cameron-Clegg coalition continue this legacy of deception or embrace a more candid and accountable chapter in British history.

Brazilian author Amaury de Souza writes that “Remembering… is a struggle over who gets to write history.”  England successfully linked the word ‘famine’ into Irish history even though ships loaded with foodstuffs sailed to England daily from Irish ports.  That was then—and this is now.  Now that the fog of war has lifted with the Good Friday agreement can Her Majesty’s government continue to claim it was fighting crime in Ireland’s six counties and if so wasn’t the government criminally culpable?    Saville’s work will minimize blame and admit a few errors,  all well intentioned by those in and out of uniform.  But the new British government must confront the Dublin-Monaghan bombings which could very well mean  re-writing the history  of  the entire conflict.  History will be unkind to British leaders.

In the 1970’s  two events  transformed  the  Catholic civil rights campaign.   The first, Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, was witnessed world-wide and the release of the  exculpatory Widgery Report  prompted these words from the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella’s  in The Butcher’s Dozen:

“Does it need recourse to law
To tell 10,000 what they saw?
Law that lets them, caught red-handed,
Halt the games and leave it stranded,
Summon up a sworn inquiry
And dump their conscience in the diary.”

In response to demands of the families of the 13 victims former Prime Minister Tony Blair asked Lord Saville for a second-look at the obvious failures of the   Widgery inquiry.   His report took longer to complete than the combined  investigations by U. S. authorities into the  My Lai massacre(Peers), the JFK assassination (Warren) and the Kent State killings (Scranton)!   The second event, the no-warning bombing of Dublin and Monaghan towns on May 17th, 1974 killed 33 and injured or maimed 200 more.  Again the fingerprints of the British Army were everywhere from priming the sophisticated devices to their delivery to loyalists for placement in the shopping centers.  Irish police identified 6  key suspects within a week but  successive British governments  refused to produce them  for questioning.  Gordon Brown  steadfastly refused to  respond to an All-Party Resolution of the Irish Dail or Parliament in 2008 and failed to fully respond to the inquiry  of the late Justice Baron into the bombings.  These failures to tell the truth about their hand in this  early escalation of violence and the resulting response of the IRA created a platform and blueprint  for Britain’s  subsequent 30 year  corruption of law, justice and democracy.  Internment, arrest without charge,  juryless courts, political prosecution and sentencing, sectarian policing,  censorship and anti-Catholic discrimination in housing, jobs and voting all were employed to crush the threat to their rule.

Irish Nationalists insisted in the  1998 pact that the armed campaign  would cease if independent investigations are initiated into the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the murder of attorney’s Patrick Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, and into the killings of over 1000 unsolved murders,  mostly Catholics.  The British government since then has stalled all of these inquiries.  In fact, a summary of the Stevens Report concluded in 2003, five years AFTER the agreement  “..that  the police [RUC] were fabricating and destroying evidence to pervert the course of justice.”  The British have good reason to fear the truth.    Their security forces (SAS) assassinated five elected officials, made the Dublin Monaghan bombs that caused the largest atrocity of the entire conflict and  are implicated in the murders of  a great number of the unsolved murders  of  Crown subjects.   Not exactly in the “How to Handbook for Promoting Democracy, the Rule of Law and Justice!      Not  surprisingly    Rt Rev Bishop Robin Eames, Chairperson of the  British appointed Consultative Group on the Past in submitting his report in 2009 concluded they could not function because, “how can you agree on how to remember the past when the government is not talking.”  Will David Cameron bring change?

The Czech author Milan Kundera noted “that the struggle of a people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Historians will view  the voluminous but self-serving  Saville Report as the best source document on that fateful day.  It is simply the British version of the truth.  Other  factual reports the British refuse to publish like  that of Stevens and  Stalker  will not be available to historians to muddle their version of truth.  The Saville diary will join a long list of English reports on Ireland to insure England will win this battle for memory!

However, the truth is becoming politically fashionable and Prime Minister Cameron may take  comfort in these recent examples of other leaders confronting the past.

·       In 1992 Boris Yeltsin released documents on the  Katyn Forest  massacre of Polish military and political leaders.   Prime Minister Putin  has embraced the remarks of the late Polish President Lech Kaczyinski  who, speaking of Katyn,  stated:  “you can not adopt a principle that only those defeated must speak of their darker episodes and the victors do not.  There is only one truth.”  Will this  British Prime Minister  be the first to order the Ministry of Defense to release  all its records to an independent review of  the Army’s role in the D/M bombings?

·       Boris Tadic, President of the Republic of Serbia when speaking of  his  Parliament’s  declaration on Srebenica  accepted responsibility for the massacre of Muslims and stated “..that reconciliation is seen as a moral imperative to tell the truth..the unadorned, factual and horrible truth of the bloodshed that must never return to our lands.”   Is Mr. Cameron ready to
address  the murders by  British security services and fully cooperate,  as has          President Tadic , with  independent bodies investigating such crimes?

·       Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet in dedicating the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago earlier this year stated with respect to the Pinochet  ‘disappeared’ era that “..only injuries thoroughly cleaned can heal.”  Is the new  British coalition government prepared to heal the wounds of the  Irish conflict by accepting responsibility for the murders of  civil rights advocates Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson?

Will an apology from Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg do?   British comedian  John Cleese in the BBC comedy Fawlty Towers responded  dismissively to  a request for an apology stating  “Sorry…is saying sorry what made Britain great??”  Such an act of contrition by Prime Minister  Heath after Bloody Sunday or  Wilson, his successor,  after the D/M bombings would have without question had an impact on the violence.  Today it would be seen as a cover-up, the obstruction of truth.

Perhaps President Obama can, as did a predecessor, assist  the peace process at this critical juncture.  President  Clinton’s issuance of a visa to Gerry Adams transformed the stalemate there and forced John Major from his intransigence.  An appeal by President Obama to Prime Minister Cameron,  invoking  that “special relationship’ so often cited by the British,  to close this chapter of Anglo-Irish relations with the truth could  be a defining moment for both.  In Forbes magazine the British author and historian Paul Johnson notes the qualities for leaders aspiring to greatness are two:  a gift for listening and the imperative for telling the truth.    Kinsella pens the dilemma for Cameron in the closing stanza of The Butcher’s Dozen:

Theirs is the hardest lot to bear,
Yet not impossible, I swear,
If England would but clear the air
And brood at home on her disgrace
-Everything in its own place.

A recent Boston Globe editorial affirmed that “ truth is inseparable from reconciliation.” This Prime Minister M unencumbered by decades of strife and bitterness in Ireland has a unique opportunity to perform this final act of reconciliation with the truth of their  malevolence in Ireland. Does he have the courage to do so?