Missing in Action (22 page)

However, the politician shortly to be famed as ‘The Cruiser’ was never shy of courting controversy and in 1962 he caused outrage when he accused Great Britain of playing a hidden agenda in the Congo, supporting the UN Security Council position in relation to the Congo on the one hand, while doing everything possible to frustrate the implementation of UN policy on the ground in Katanga. It was a claim that provoked a storm of controversy not just in Britain and Westminster, but also in Rhodesia, where it was felt Dr O’Brien had effectively accused them of offering tacit support to Katanga, which, if true, could have had serious diplomatic and security consequences for this neighbouring state.

Britain has a long memory and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s accusations were never forgotten. Thirteen years after the Congo crisis, when ‘The Cruiser’ was part of Liam Cosgrave’s Fine Gael-Labour coalition government, a British diplomat threw Katanga back in his face. Dr Garret Fitzgerald, writing in his autobiography
All in a Life
, recalled that in the mid 1970s Katanga was used to try to discredit the coalition government’s support for the Council of Ireland. ‘Dublin political correspondents were invited to Belfast to meet the Secretary of State [Willie Whitelaw]. A very senior British civil servant referred to Conor Cruise O’Brien and myself in Whitelaw’s presence as “third rate academics”, one of whom had been in charge of a “second class” colonial area – a reference to Conor’s role some thirteen years earlier as UN Administrator in Katanga. Whitelaw had looked at the journalist to whom these remarks were addressed, showing no inclination to demur at them,’ he wrote.

The truth was that in the 1950s and 1960s Anglo-African politics were about as clear as mud. The British government was deeply concerned about the aftermath of independence in a host of its former colonies from Kenya to Uganda and from Rhodesia to Nyasaland, and their biggest fear was that chaos in Katanga could destabilise adjoining countries – most of which were former British colonies – in their race to independence.

The Congo mission drew to a close in 1964 when the UN, having effectively disarmed Katanga, handed the country over to a government that promised to be inclusive of all provincial and tribal groups. Moise Tshombe – having returned to the Congo after fleeing at the start of Operation Morthor – was even given a ministerial role. Yet, within twelve months of UN troops leaving, the deal fell apart and Joseph Mobutu copper-fastened his iron grip on power by abolishing parliament. Mobutu – privately assured of US support for his promised pro-western policies and anti-Communist stance – had transformed the Force Publique into his personal army. He was now unassailable.

Tshombe fled for his life for the final time, and Mobutu imposed direct rule. The US was happy with the new status quo and saw no reason to take a stand for democracy in the Congo once Mobutu maintained his pro-western policies. The powerful mining interests were immediately promised stability and non-interference in their affairs by the new government and were equally quiescent. Once the mines paid a stipend to Mobutu and his cronies, all would be well – or so at least they hoped.

Between 20 July 1960 and 15 May 1964, more than 6,000 Irish soldiers served in the Congo. The involvement formally ended when Ireland’s 2nd Infantry Group under General Redmond O’Sullivan formally stood down and returned home. In a fitting link, the armoured car unit of the 2nd Group was under the command of Captain Art Magennis. He formed a connection between the last Irish armoured unit in the Congo and the armoured unit that suffered the heaviest casualties in the African country two years earlier. The 1963 unit was again reliant on the Ford AFVs, but the decision had been taken that they simply weren’t worth the trouble of bringing back to Ireland. The three vehicles that weren’t
hors de combat
were formally handed over to the Congolese National Army at a special ceremony in Kolwezi. The cars were handed over by Lt Ken Kelly, and Captain Magennis took a special photograph of the ceremony. Showing how little things had changed, an African officer casually smoked a cigarette as he inspected the armoured cars – while a Belgian officer commanding the Katangan-born soldiers watched.

The UN formally ended Ireland’s mission in the Congo in May 1964, although as the Irish troops departed Kolwezi on the first leg of their marathon journey home, an ironic sight greeted them. One of the Ford AFVs was left abandoned, effectively impaled on a steep roundabout where a Congolese crew had crashed it a few hours earlier. It was the last thing the Irish unit saw as they left Kolwezi.

The next month the UN formally ended its mission, although fighting would continue in the Congo through rebellions and coups for the next forty years. Irish troops had acquitted themselves with honour in the Congo. Furthermore, they had shown an empathy with the indigenous people who had suffered under colonialism that could only be offered by a nation that had endured similar suffering. That reputation earned Irish soldiers a unique kind of respect and made them extremely useful to the UN in the world’s hotspots.

Perhaps the greatest proof of Ireland’s new-found peacekeeping skill and respect comes from the case of the Baluba tribe itself. The Balubas had attacked and butchered Irish troops at Niemba and yet, within a matter of eighteen months it was Irish troops who were protecting the Balubas from persecution. Irish troops defended Baluba refugee camps in and around Elisabethville during the fighting of 1961 and 1962. At one point more than 35,000 refugees were in the care of Irish and Swedish troops in Elisabethville. Far from seeking revenge for Niemba, Irish troops had followed a noble course and left the Congo with a reputation for fairness and decency that would only be enhanced through deployments in Cyprus and Lebanon.

As it turned out, the Defence Forces didn’t have long to wait for their next UN assignment – in fact Irish soldiers were dispatched on UN duties to Cyprus before all units had been withdrawn from the Congo. The Cypriot involvement – while always a smaller logistical deployment than Katanga – continued for years. Tortuous negotiations over the fate of the Turkish-speaking northern section of the island continue to this day.

But the major application of the hard-won experience in the Congo came in Lebanon, when Ireland was asked to deploy peacekeepers following the eruption of a ferocious civil war. The UN had mounted a small deployment in Beirut in 1958 and had helped successfully stave off civil war, but by 1978 tensions within Lebanon could no longer be contained. After an influx of hard-line Palestinian factions from Jordan over previous years, fighting erupted. The UN deployed troops under the UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) mission. The situation in 1978 was complex and violent as the various Lebanese factions allied themselves to outside influences including Israel, Syria and Iran, and at times Lebanon served as a proxy battleground for these countries.

Irish troops would ultimately remain in Lebanon for twenty-three years, until 2001, when a painstaking peace deal was finally agreed. Lebanon remains Ireland’s biggest and longest-running UN mission – and ultimately cost twenty-seven lives.

The speed with which Ireland switched from peacekeeping duties in the Congo to those in Cyprus meant the Irish military had new priorities. The army suddenly had a major logistics operation on its hands; therefore, there was less time to focus on the lessons and tasks still remaining from the Congo. Amongst these was the fact that when the 2nd Infantry Group took down their tents, packed up their gear and stowed their rifles for the long flight back to Ireland in 1964, one Irish soldier was still unaccounted for in the Congo.

The search for Trooper Pat Mullins was about to dip below the radar for almost thirty years.

The rains transformed the Congo in a matter of hours, with everything covered in a lush blanket of greenery. Captain Art Magennis (centre) is pictured at a temporary camp in the bush. Note the FN rifle propped against a tree. (Photo: Art Magennis)

It is hard
to explain precisely why the case of Pat Mullins faded so quickly from the national consciousness. The Defence Forces maintain that his case file was always kept open and inquiries were repeatedly made about his fate. But it is curious to note that rather than being officially deemed ‘Missing in Action’, which is factually what happened to Pat Mullins, the young trooper was accorded a different official status. Instead of being recorded as ‘MIA’, he was regarded as being: ‘Dead, presumed to have been killed’. The decision to omit the word ‘missing’ from his status has never been fully explained.

There was certainly no apparent political decision made to ignore the matter. Rather it seems that Ireland’s first MIA fell victim to a combination of the traditional acceptance of the age, the geographic realities of where he died and the fact that Ireland was accelerating out of the de Valera era of economic deprivation into the heady world of 1960s expansion and growth overseen by Seán Lemass. For some strange reason, the Congo deployment was quickly associated with an old, fast disappearing Ireland, while Cyprus and Lebanon was part of the proud, new modernised nation.

Undoubtedly, another key factor is that within a decade of Pat Mullins’ death and disappearance Ireland found itself dealing with ‘The Troubles’ and the increasingly vicious border battles between the resurgent IRA, Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British army. Faced with the threat of Northern Ireland tearing itself apart, the Defence Forces had more immediate priorities than the events of an African mission of a previous decade.

Twenty years after Tpr Mullins vanished in the Congo, Ireland added a second name to its list of MIAs. The second incident centred on Ireland’s UN peacekeeping involvement in Lebanon. At the time, in the late 1970s, many wondered if the bloodshed in Lebanon would be as bad as it had been in the Congo. Lebanon, over the course of twenty-three years, proved to be far deadlier, with twenty-seven Irish soldiers killed in the country whose capital Beirut was once hailed as ‘the Paris of the Mediterranean’. Yet many army veterans believe that, but for the experience hard-won in the Congo, Ireland’s death toll in Lebanon could ultimately have been far higher.

On 27 April 1981, Private Kevin Joyce (20) was on guard duty at a UN observation post in south Lebanon when he was kidnapped. He was never seen again and is now officially regarded by the Defence Forces as: ‘Missing in Action, Presumed Dead’. Despite hopes that the blossoming peace process in Lebanon might lead to information about where his remains are buried, no trace of the Inisheer-born soldier has been found to date.

Ireland’s last UNIFIL battalion in Lebanon had made it one of their primary missions to obtain information about Pte Joyce’s burial site before Ireland, like other UNIFIL countries, withdrew their troops in 2001. In May of that year, Henry McDonald, writing in
The Observer
, revealed that the battalion was working with the Christian Maronite Bishop of Tyre as well as the Lebanese Minister for Missing and Displaced Persons, Senator Mirwan Hamadi.

Crucially, for the first time Palestinians from refugee camps in south Lebanon agreed to discuss the possible location of Pte Joyce’s burial site – the first time anyone had ever admitted any knowledge about the missing soldier or the precise events of that fateful April day. In perhaps the ultimate irony, Pte Joyce’s kidnapper, Abu Amin Dayk, was himself condemned and executed by the Shia militia,
Amal, for crimes against the Lebanese people. Dayk was hanged in May 1984.

Back in 1981, Dayk had emerged as the leader of a hard-line Palestinian faction in the south Tyre area. He was Lebanese by birth but was determined to ‘earn his spurs’ with his Palestinian allies. Amid the chaos in Lebanon between 1978 and 1990, factions fought the Israelis, the Lebanese army and very often each other. They fought over politics, religion, territory, access to weapons and, in one notable case, over running water supplies.

On 27 April 1981, Dayk and his militia decided to raid a UN position at Dyar Ntar, possibly in the hope of securing some heavy weaponry. But the raid quickly went wrong and one of Dayk’s men shot one of the two Irish UN peacekeepers on duty at the post. Pte Hugh Doherty was just twenty years old and was shot three times in the back, dying instantly. Pte Joyce was disarmed and was dragged away by the gang before UN reinforcements could arrive.

Intelligence reports later revealed that he was taken to Tyre, ostensibly to facilitate negotiations over the price of his release. He was kept under armed guard in a house in a Palestinian refugee camp. Tragically for the Irish soldier, it was a time of escalating conflict between the various Lebanese-Palestinian factions and UN forces. A few weeks later a Palestinian militia ended up in a major gun battle with a unit of Fijian UN troops. The firefight erupted at Deir Amis and, as the Fijians bravely refused to withdraw from their positions, several Palestinian fighters were killed in a heavy exchange of rounds. Furious at having had men killed, the Palestinians demanded retaliation and Dayk’s gang was ordered to execute the Irish soldier captured a few weeks earlier in a tit-for-tat punishment. Pte Joyce was shot and his remains buried at a secret location.

Initial Irish efforts to locate Pte Joyce were hampered by the chaos caused by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon a few months later in 1982. The UN – again caught like the meat in a sandwich – wouldn’t be able to re-open useful local lines of intelligence until 1983/84.

Bizarrely, shortly before he was arrested by Amal, Dayk had a meeting with UN officials. The meeting was staged at Dayk’s specific request and UN officers suspected that he was trying to cut a deal whereby he would be granted safe passage out of Lebanon in return for information. One Irish UN officer shrewdly suspected that Dayk’s reign as a minor warlord was coming to an end and that his rivals and enemies were tightening the noose around him. Dayk clearly felt himself to be under threat. The Irish officer gave the following description of Dayk: ‘Dayk was in his mid-thirties. He was of slight build. He had black hair and spoke in a very deep monosyllabic tone. I remember during that meeting he appeared to be very nervous. You could tell that he was aware that his enemies were closing in. It was quite weird being in the same room as the man we suspected had been behind the Dyar Ntar attack. He was very uneasy during the meeting and he kept looking out the window. When people like Dayk sought a meeting with UNIFIL you could be sure their power was waning,’ the officer explained.

The UN was eventually able to determine that, contrary to black propaganda and local rumours, Pte Joyce had indeed been executed in the Palestinian refugee camp. One bizarre rumour had previously claimed that he had changed sides and agreed to fight for a Palestinian faction. Another rumour had it that he was accidentally killed during a massive Israeli air strike on Palestinian positions near a refugee camp and his body was buried under a collapsed building.

The Times’
then-Beirut correspondent, Robert Fisk, correctly assessed that the attack on the Irish UN post was as much about getting weapons as embarrassing Yasser Arafat, who had been desperately trying to maintain good relations with the UN. Fisk, in his superlative history of modern Lebanon,
Pity the Nation,
tracked down details of the young Irish private’s last lonely weeks before his death: ‘The soldier had been imprisoned in an underground cell beneath the Ein Halweh Palestinian refugee camp at Sidon but had (it was then claimed) been killed there when an Israeli air raid destroyed the bunker. Later, the Irish army would be told that he was taken not to Sidon but to Beirut where, after months of lonely imprisonment underground, he was coldly executed just prior to the 1982 Israeli invasion,’ Fisk wrote.

In May 2001, the Joyce family travelled to Lebanon to try and offer first-hand assistance in the campaign to locate Kevin’s remains before the formal withdrawal of Irish troops as part of the UNIFIL mission. They were accompanied by the then-president of PDFORRA (Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Representative Organisation), John Laffery. PDFORRA had taken a high-profile role in campaigning for every effort to be made to repatriate Pte Joyce’s remains and escorting the family was a gesture of their support.

‘This is a festering sore for the Defence Forces. Every soldier that has served in Lebanon over the past twenty-one years owes to Kevin Joyce that we do everything to find him. Talks are underway and we hope his remains can be found. All the Joyce family want is to take Kevin’s remains back to Ireland so he can be given a Christian burial on Inisheer,’ John Laffery told reporters in Lebanon. Tragically, as of 2010, Pte Joyce’s remains are still unaccounted for.

It is interesting to note that between 1981 and 2000 the Irish media repeatedly focused on the case of Pte Joyce while inexplicably ignoring the fact that another Irish soldier had been ‘Missing in Action’ for almost two decades longer. A simple Internet search will underline the difference, with 4,670 hits for ‘Trooper Pat Mullins Congo’ in contrast to 27,800 hits for ‘Kevin Joyce Lebanon’. What is also noteworthy is that the overwhelming majority of posts in relation to Tpr Mullins have all occurred post-2005 when a determined campaign to highlight his case began to gain some interest within the Irish media.

It is perhaps understandable that so much focus should have been on the kidnapping of Kevin Joyce given that it occurred in Lebanon, which, for innumerable reasons, was never out of the news headlines in Ireland. Lebanon also represents Ireland’s biggest and longest-running peacekeeping mission, which has contributed to making Joyce’s case so high profile. Another factor was that, thanks to intelligence work and investigative reporting, so much eventually emerged about the circumstances of Pte Joyce’s kidnapping and death. In Tpr Mullins’ case, after he was shot and killed on Avenue Drogmans/Boulevard Elisabeth, the trail goes cold.

The contrast in the Irish media’s handling of the two cases over the past twenty years has also been marked. There were news reports updating the search for Kevin Joyce’s remains and an inquiry into precisely what had happened to him. RTÉ carried repeated reports in their main television news bulletin over a period of years. Sunday newspapers carried detailed analysis pieces on the factional fighting in Lebanon and who may have been responsible for the kidnapping. The decision to wind down the UNIFIL operation in Lebanon and the eventual withdrawal of Irish troops also spawned a series of articles on Ireland’s missing soldier and efforts to locate his final resting place.

Yet, unwittingly, the reports ignored the plight of Ireland’s other MIA, Tpr Mullins. Pat Mullins had by then fallen so far under the radar that one British newspaper,
The Observer
, even reported that Pte Joyce was the only Irish UN peacekeeper to remain MIA. Almost like the Congo, Pat Mullins seemed to have been forgotten by all except his family, close friends and former comrades.

For almost thirty years, the search for Pat Mullins remained in this strange kind of limbo – the army file was open but, from the family’s perspective, there appeared to be little or nothing happening. Worse still, the family were confused over the precise details of Pat’s final hours. At first they understood that he had been killed in the initial ambush, but then word began to filter to them from some Congo veterans that Pat’s fate was not quite that simple. The family felt that, at the very least, they deserved more detailed answers about Pat’s death, but most of all they wanted his memory and his sacrifice better honoured.

Pat’s father, Ned, died on 30 November 1960 – just eight months before Pat flew out to the Congo with the 35th Battalion. The family was grateful that he wasn’t alive to endure the nightmare of not knowing Pat’s fate and the whereabouts of his youngest son’s body. But it was a nightmare that Pat’s mother, Catherine, poignantly had to live with for the last thirty-seven years of her life.

Catherine died on 10 December 1998. She was eighty-eight years old and had prayed for Pat every day of her life since September 1961. Catherine was a strong woman but her children suspected that she had never really gotten over the disappearance and death of Pat. His brothers and sisters knew the pain she felt over her missing youngest child – and, above all else, they didn’t want to do anything that might add to her suffering. Part of the reason the family didn’t launch a high-profile campaign in Pat’s name in the 1970s and 1980s was concern over the hurt and pain it might cause their mother. As Catherine got older, Pat’s siblings worried about the impact such a campaign might have on her. Pat’s disappearance remained an unhealed wound with Catherine until she died. Her main instruction to her family before her death was that she wanted her youngest son commemorated on her gravestone in the cemetery located directly behind St Joseph’s church in Kilbehenny.

One month before her death, Catherine got the greatest signal yet that Ireland had not totally forgotten the heroic sacrifice of her eighteen-year-old son. On 8 November 1998 a special ceremony was organised in Collins Barracks in Dublin to honour Ireland’s UN dead. (A few years later the barracks itself fell victim to Ireland’s military cost cutting and was transformed into an annex of the National Museum.) But, that November day, Defence Minister Michael Smith formally presented a total of thirty-six Military Star medals to the relatives of Defence Force personnel killed overseas on UN duties, including the Mullins family. The Military Star – one of the highest awards that can be bestowed by the Defence Forces – aims to recognise personnel killed overseas in the course of their duty. The award ribbon is made up of the Irish Tricolour framed by black-edged purple bands – the traditional colours of requiem. The central depiction on the eight-pointed bronze medal is that of Cú Chulainn, the fabled warrior of Ulster and core figure in Ireland’s classic poem,
The Táin
. The depiction is that of Cú Chulainn bravely standing his ground against his enemies despite being mortally wounded. The bar on the ribbon carries a single word – ‘Remembrance’. The reverse of the medal carries Pat Mullins’ army number, his name, the date he fell in action and the UN mission he was supporting.