State Violence (14 page)
Authors: Raymond Murray
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #General, #History, #Political Science, #Human Rights, #Political Freedom & Security, #british intelligence, #Political prisoners, #Civil Rights, #Politics and government, #collusion, #IRA, #State Violence, #Great Britain, #paramilitaries, #Northern Ireland, #British Security forces, #loyalist, #Political persecution, #1969-1994
Then a black soldier came in. The military policewoman said, âI want her strip searched'. He just walked out. The young soldier came in again and the military policewoman said, âShe's gong to be strip searched and you have to leave'. He said something about âhis luck'. He then left and the black soldier came in again. I was standing facing the wall. The military policewoman came over to me and said, âRight, you're going to be strip searched'. With that the black soldier left again. The military policewoman said, âGet your clothes off'. I said, âNo'. She said, âTake them off or I'll get three or four women to take them off for you'. I said, âGo and get them'. She went out for about one minute and came in again with the black soldier. He said, âYou'd be better to make it easy for yourself'. I said, âFor what reason should I take off my clothes?' The military policewoman said, âBecause you are a suspicious bitch'. I said, âI've been searched twice before'. She came towards me and grabbed my coat and tried to pull it off me. I resisted and she pushed me and I banged my head off the wall. She lifted her fist and I thought she was going to hit me. I slapped her face and she then hit me on the ear. With this the black soldier came in. She told him that I had hit her and that I wouldn't take off my clothes.
She left and came back with two other women soldiers. One was a sergeant major. She said to me about âmaking it easier for myself'. I said again that I would not take off my clothes. She asked me again. This time I said I would, if some of them left. I took off my clothes, every stitch. I put my shirt and anorak on very quickly but the military policewoman said, âWho gave you permission to get dressed yet?' With that she grabbed my anorak and a struggle developed. The black soldier must have heard it and came in again. I struggled and kicked like mad but eventually they managed to get me onto the table. They put plastic-like handcuffs on my wrists and on my ankles.
The black soldier was holding my arms and he asked one of the women to hold them so he could search me. He said he could not get at me, so he took the handcuffs off my ankles and he put his finger inside me. I was crying with the pain. They turned me over and he did it again. During this time they were shouting and yelling at me.
When I was getting dressed, this military policewoman kept hitting me on the back with her fist. They questioned me again and said they were going to charge me with assault. I thought I was going to be released then, but instead they took me to Castlereagh where I was kept for twenty-four hours. I was released on Thursday 31 August 1977 at about 8pm.
H Blocks: Ill-tratment of Prisoners and Human Rights, 1978
In 1973 Amnesty International reported 70 countries using torture and inhuman and degrading treatment against prisoners and political opponents. In 1977 they named 116, an alarming increase. In December 1975, a resolution sponsored by Amnesty International was passed by the United Nations condemning torture and inhuman and degrading treatment of persons. All the countries affiliated to the United Nations signed it. The conclusion is that either many of these governments are hypocrites or they are unwilling to classify their own treatment of prisoners and political opponents as brutal and inhuman.
The Irish government showed an interest in torture by the agents of the British government in Northern Ireland. They brought them to Strasbourg and won the case. But they did not show the least enthusiasm investigating the serious allegations made against the Irish government by the Barra à Briain Report and implement the worthwhile recommendations, namely access of family solicitors and the use of a custodial guardian for prisoners under interrogation. Only after a hearing in the Supreme Court and a Presidential crisis was Seven-Day Detention in the Republic reluctantly suspended.
The British government was very interested in the allegations of brutality against the gardaà sÃochána and their newspapers and other media gave a very inflated picture of these allegations and of the Amnesty Report of June 1977 (on the Irish Republic). Their crusading liberal spirit, however, disappeared when they themselves were confronted with the finding of the European Commission for Human Rights, January 1976, and the verdict of the European Court, January 1977, and the clinching of the subject by the Amnesty Report, June 1978. They showed no desire to rectify the serious damage and injustice. They were no different from the Russians who have come to Northern Ireland often looking for details of the British torture of the Irish people, but who deeply resent the public searchlight on their labour camps, mental hospitals and treatment of dissidents. So it is with governments. They are all interested in the torture of other governments but not in their own.
It is difficult to get governments to put an end to ill-treatment within their own countries. It is equally difficult to gain the interest of the opposition because they hope to win the next election and they will not risk losing votes by attacking the sacred institutions of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, the civil service. There is need for real Christian witnesses at the present time, people with professional training, doctors, lawyers, journalists, priests, teachers to answer the demands of the Christian conscience and to stand up for the human rights of the oppressed and dispossessed every day and every week of every year. It is a lonely and unpopular witness that will meet with sneers and smears and misrepresentation from the leaders of state and society. But it is a genuine charity for the end of the century to fight the problem of the individual against the state with its control of power, publicity and patronage. From those who fight this battle will come the prophets, heroes, and saints of our age.
The H Block problem is a classic example of how the state can intimidate genuine Christian people into waffling about basic moral principles. H Block is an obscenity no matter what the prisoners may have been convicted of, justly or unjustly, no matter what protest action they have taken, no matter for what motive or purpose they may have taken it. The state has no right to do wrong. It has no right to ill-treat prisoners. It has no right to break its own laws. It has no right to break the international covenants on human rights. It has no right to break the moral law.
Leave the questions of political status aside. The factual position is this. The prisoners refused to wear prison clothes and work. These are trivial matters. In the Republic of Ireland prisoners wear their own clothes and prison work is voluntary. The British government removed all remission from the prisoners on protest. Wasn't that punishment severe enough? Is not the punishment of prison deprivation of liberty? But the British government also in the month of September 1976 imposed an inhuman degree of punishment on the men for this refusal â 24 hour lock-up, no physical exercise, no mental stimulation, harassment by internal body searches, casual beatings. All these taken together over a period of time constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The British government has inflicted all this for thirty months.
It is completely untrue to say that these punishments are self-inflicted. They are inflicted by the British government on persons who have broken trivial regulations, not wearing prison clothes and not working. The fact that in April 1978 the prisoners escalated their protest with a no-wash, no slop-out campaign is not really relevant to the real issue. The prisoners were merely using one of the few forms of protest left to them against an administration which had deprived them of many of the ordinary necessities of life.
I salute courage and sacrifice wherever I find it. Whatever the past deeds of the men in H-Block may or may not have been and whatever the justice or injustice of the sentences, one has to admire their courage, fortitude and endurance against impossible odds. The Athenian prisoners in the stone quarries of Syracuse could not endure their deprivations for two months. The American and British prisoners collapsed in Korea. The men in H Block, the majority of them 17â21 years, have already created a place for themselves in the records of human endurance. The words of Terence MacSwiney ring true â it is not they who inflict the most but those who endure the most who have the victory.
Extract from a lecture given in St Patrick's College, Maynooth, under the auspices of Cumann na Sagart, 6 December 1978. Published in H Blocks: British Jail for Irish Prisoners, 1979.
When men tried on a few occasions to carry Jesus off and make him king, he ran away and hid himself. He didn't want power. His kingdom was not of this world. He was a king, he said himself, in the sense that he bore witness to the truth. We admire in others, perhaps subconsciously, the good qualities we have ourselves. The picture Jesus gives of John the Baptist when he praises him may be a picture of Jesus himself, âWhen you went out to John in the desert, what did you expect to see? A blade of grass bending in the wind? What did you go out to see? A man dressed up in fancy clothes? People who dress like that live in palaces! ... From the time John preached his message until this very day the kingdom of heaven has suffered violent attacks and violent men try to seize it' (Matthew 2:7â8, 12).
Jesus did not wear fine clothes. He did not live in a palace. He did not try to charm the world or show off. He was a friend of the oppressed and chose to live more in obscurity than in the limelight. He rebuked those who called for fire and brimstone. He took a safer line; he called for a change of heart. No crown, no seal of office, no signet ring, no purple band, no red cloak. These would come later in the castle-yard of Pilate. No presentations except the perfume in the house of Simon the Leper. Jesus appreciated Nathaniel because there was nothing false in him. There was nothing false in Jesus, friend, brother, reconciler. There was room for Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector among the twelve apostles. He healed the government official's son and the Roman officer's servant. He touched lepers and ate with sinners. He taught that God âmakes the sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do right and those who do wrong'. This message is clear â kindness to all, not only to respectable people but to the outlaws and outcasts as well. The goodness of Jesus was closely connected with his obscurity. For thirty years he was the carpenter's son from Nazareth who shocked his village people in the three-year period of his public life. And always his interest is in redeeming and mercy. Not lording it over people. The greatest is the one who serves! No hatred, no hostility. He recognised the dignity of Bartimaeus and the Phoenician woman. He had room for all in his heart from the children to the thief on the cross. For our sake he opened his arms on the cross. His embrace is for all.
This attitude of Jesus is a scandal to humankind. The guests at the dinner party recoiled when the street woman touched him and kissed his feet. âDoes he not know what kind of a woman is touching him?' âThis day you will be with me in paradise' was his dying promise to his fellow prisoner.
Life is short. It has pain, sickness, tragedy, quarrels. War and killing seem pathetic. The unborn are killed. For some there is no happiness in life at all. Who understand more than the compassionate Christ who never condemns? âHas no one condemned you?', he said to the woman taken in adultery. âNo one, Lord'. âNeither will I.'
Nameless, obscure, hidden. Christ the teaching beggar. Even his death was as ordinary as the thousands of others who were crucified in his time. Only the film producers make it grandiose. Jesus in pain cried out in a loud voice; he was parched with thirst; he felt the abandonment of his friends.
Prisoners are not dressed in fancy clothes. In H Block, Long Kesh, in the north of Ireland nearly 400 are naked. They live obscure lives. Their names are replaced by numbers. They are dossiers. âShow me his file!' They are outlawed. They are oppressed. They are vulnerable. The world goes about its business. Important men who travel long distances to discuss finance are not worried about them. Cars scud along the M1 motorway alongside the massive prison camp of Long Kesh. The occupants hardly turn their heads. Courting couples saunter in the Mall in Armagh. They don't even know that 34 girls on protest in the prison opposite them are locked in for most of the day. The world is too busy, too occupied. It is in a hurry. âI was in jail and you did not come to visit me'.
Where are the Good Samaritans? Jesus told us the story of the Good Samaritan, not to make us think, not to weigh up reasons for doing this or that, not to calculate ambition or popularity â not even to be charitable for the love of God. All that Jesus said in the story is that the Samaritan looked and he saw a man, a human being. He did not even think. He saw, he looked, he stopped. The good Samaritan never heard the story of the Good Samaritan! All Jesus is saying is that our very human existence should move us to compassion. Jesus was compassionate, not because he was God, because he was human.
In the H Blocks, Long Kesh, 370 prisoners are denied the basic status of life for going on a minor strike as a protest for political status. For refusing to wear prison clothes and work, excessive punishments have been imposed which, taken together and over a period of several months, amount to inhuman treatment. The punishments are: complete removal of remission; twenty-four hour lock-up; deprivation of mental stimulation of any sort, reading material, newspapers, books, television, radio, games, hobbies or writing materials. These are combined with intimate body-searching. Here is an extract from a letter written on toilet paper and smuggled out of H Blocks:
âSeeing it is a special occasion I have decided to write. The last time I wrote you on this date I was one year “on the blanket”. I wrote then, I thought it was an achievement. But I don't know about this for it is hard to gauge even now how much longer I will be on it. What would I say after four or five years lying naked in a cell and times change so much? One would think being in our position we have lost out in experience in life, that is normal life. I can assure you that these last two years have changed my outlook in many things and have helped me to learn and realise many other things. Everyone of us has his regrets that he didn't do this or that, and we all have our desires and yearnings for this or that, which change every week. None of you outside could gauge fully the amount a visit or letter would mean to us or some small thing that indicates we are not forgotten. It is being deprived of the small luxuries of life that has helped us to face up to the harsher realities plus all the suffering and anxiety. We don't say any more that it is a hard station, as most of us believed long ago our station had reached its limits, only to learn this isn't the case. Well, I suppose there are those who say, “They made their beds so they can lie on them”. I used to accept this, especially in regard to myself, but now I realise that this is another person's opinion. My own now is that our beds were well made long before we lay in them.