British commitments made and broken

Objective assessment of what the British government has not done with regards to justice, equality, human rights, demilitarization, and policing shows it is not living up to its responsibilities, leaving the nationalist community’s end of the bargain unfulfilled.

The Irish government, while committed to the GFA, has done little to effectively ensure British compliance. The US, while interested, has not yet made Ireland a priority. As a result, Unionists are encouraged to treat equality, human and civil rights, and sharing power as concessions to Nationalists rather than a democratic birthright.

Regardless of the sources of the political pathology that has caused the British government to shut the GFA down four times to coddle Unionist politicians, even British M.P. Tony Blair admits his government has NOT fully implemented most aspects of the GFA that it committed to.

The British government has a commitment to implement the below. It has yet to do so.

1. Devolved Power Sharing & Participatory Democracy

While the NI Assembly, executive and cross-border bodies have been established, an implicit unionist veto and British lack of political vision constantly destroys the new institutions. The British government’s promises of a nationalist share of governmental power safe from the whim of the British government and Unionism have been broken four times.

The threat of Unionist walkout is always a cloud over the peace process. Since the establishment of the power sharing institutions, the UUP alone has given nine separate ultimatums for rollbacks to the GFA or threats to destroy it. The DUP refuses to share power outright. Often they simply use and abuse the rules to destroy or confound these institutions, as the UUP did by illegally blocking SF from participating in the work of the Cross Boarder bodies.

In the six and one-half years since the signing of the GFA, the power-sharing Assembly has been in operation for only 20 months.

Today, the British government is still in direct rule of the Six Counties and has been so since they illegally and undemocratically suspended the Assembly in December of 2002 and canceled scheduled Assembly elections twice in 2003. When the elections finally were allowed because of international pressure, the GFA was in such a downward spiral that the Assembly has still not been re-established.

The British government’s failure to implement the democratic aspect of the GFA revolves upon its constant interference with the evolution of Irish democracy, which it has done for centuries.

The Securocrats

Unionism/Loyalism is supported by a security industry in the north of Ireland and in the UK who thrive on the need to be militarily engaged and on alert to ensure their jobs and interests. This is the reason why it suits the securocrat industry, including it’s military police force, British army intelligence and command structure, to make the most of the IRA s potential or imagined threat to the peace process, a process they themselves do not support.

This persists despite the fact the IRA have upheld a unbroken, 8 year ceasefire, are the only armed force that has cooperated with General deChastelain's International Independent Committee on Decommissioning (IICD), and have made concession after concession to keep it alive.

These securocrats within the establishment effectively gum up the works with timed arrests, unsupported leaks, and bizarre propaganda leading to outlandish smears and allegations in the media. When these false arrests, leaks and media hype prove baseless, the damage has already been done.

PSNI Chief Hugh Orde in a major January 2003 speech in New York City declared there were elements within his own force actively working against political progress.

Unionist politicians use this culture of state militarism to make unrealistic demands on Irish Republicans and receive placating concessions in return.

The failure of the peace process suits Unionism and British securocrats needs. But who put these people in charge of the peace process?

The Unionist Veto

Why is the British government behaving like this even though it probably doesn’t want to? What dementia in the political mind causes them to allow Unionism to control the process instead of themselves? Nationalists refer to this British mindset as the Unionist Veto.

It implies that Unionism has the traditional, fundamental and inalienable right to pull down agreements it signs or block human/civil rights progress any time it wants to, or thinks it needs to, to stay in political power.

It is the antithesis of democracy

Every time Unionism has political difficulty since the forced establishment of the 6-county statelet 80 years ago, the British government has bailed them out politically and/or militarily.

While the source of the Unionist Veto may be socio-historical, it endures to this day to everyone s detriment. It has never delivered peace or justice or prosperity for the people of the north of Ireland. It doesn’t work for British people or Irish people. It doesn’t even help Unionist people.

Because the British government s sole strategy seems preserving weak Unionist politicians in power that it thinks it can deal with -- David Trimble has, for example, made an art of weakness -- and because they see a coalition of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the middle of the road, nationalist SDLP as indispensable to their short sighted, undemocratic vision, they have caused political stagnation.

It is not the British government’s job to determine whom Irish people should vote for or lead them.

The Result

The result of the continuance of the Unionist Veto is Unionist leadership that has not learned how to lead but to bluster, has not learned consensus building and compromise, but trouble making and childishness; and instead of tolerance and the ability to change with changing times, they are prejudiced and intractable.

The Patten Commission was empowered by the GFA to recommend reforms of the sectarian police force in the n north - The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The British government implemented only part of the Patten Commission's recommendations.

Key recommendations not implemented include: redistributing control from Britain and the Chief Constable to local officials; adequate local powers to investigate and oversee police performance; reigning in the largely independent Special Branch as a secret force within a force; and police oaths to respect human rights.

Members of the RUC responsible for serious crimes against citizens and murder have shifted wholesale into positions of authority in the PSNI without a vetting process. This is unacceptable.

The newly named Police Service Northern Ireland has also been the center of complaints by the Nationalist community since its inception.

3. Demilitarization and Military Security

Britain's reductions in troop levels (always only a shuttle fight away in any case) and military installations have been showy but minimal. Nationalist areas such as South Armagh remain honeycombed with British Army forts and electronic surveillance posts.

The British proclaimed that decisions on demilitarization would not be made under the requirements of the GFA or the stability of the IRA cessation but rather based on advice from the police and the British army itself.

4. Justice

Emergency Laws

Instead of bringing criminal law and procedures into line with accepted human rights norms, Britain enacted even more repressive laws, made some of the military emergency laws permanent, and applied some to Britain as a whole.

The "Terrorism Act of 2000" continued Britain's power to "derogate" from selected rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, shifting the presumption of guilt to defendants in certain cases, and extended police power to arrest and hold people incommunicado.

Criminal Justice Review

The CJR report (issued over a year late) was largely seen as going in the right direction. But even the positive steps may never happen because they are linked to a functioning Northern Ireland Executive, which the British government (at the behest of the Ulster Unionist Party) has collapsed four times already.

Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission

The Commission has little legal power; it cannot even issue subpoenas to conduct independent investigations. Its primary power is to advise the British government on human rights, but it is seldom followed.

Over the past months (2004), four of the thirteen commissioners have resigned in frustration.

Bill of Rights

The NIHRC s ability to deliver a meaningful Bill of Rights is in serious jeopardy.

First, the British government severely under funded it.

Second, the Bill of Rights is supposed to be comprehensive, not just the minimum rights contained in the European Convention of Human Rights. But Britain's derogation from the Convention makes it impossible for the NIHRC to deliver even the minimal rights set forth in the Convention.

Third, the British track re Accord is to ignore the advice of the Human Rights Commission.

5. British Violations of the European Human Rights Convention Right to Life: State Collusion to murder citizens, Shoot-to-Kill or Summary Execution, Failure to Prosecute and Cover Up

In a wide range of specific cases, the British government has not delivered justice, or even truth. As evidence of British Army and RUC collusion with loyalist death squads and its shoot-to-kill policy slowly comes into public view, British government involvement in the murders of hundreds of nationalists remains concealed by the British.

A recent BBC produced documentary -- A License To Kill -- tied the murder of civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane directly to British intelligence, army and RUC.

Over the past months, an extraordinary number of reports B, inquiries and inquests have delved into allegations that the British government, military, and police directly, and indirectly by collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, killed innocent members of the public.

They include:

The Saville Inquiry into British army killing of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators on Bloody Sunday;

A Community Inquiry (The New Lodge Six ) into the killing of 6 unarmed men by the British army in north Belfast;

The Barron Report exploring allegations of British military/police collusion in the Dublin/Monaghan Bombings that killed 33 Irish citizens;

The Stevens 3 Inquiry Report into the British policy of collusion with loyalist death squads;

The Cory Report (UK) into British State collusion in the killings of Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, Robert Hamill, Mand Billy Wright;

The Tyrone Inquest into British army/police shoot-to-kill and collusion in the killing of 10 Irish people in the early 1990s have been stalled and stonewalled;

The Euro Court of Human Rights ruling that the British government violated the Right To Life in Ireland; and

The Police Ombudsman s Report: The Investigation by Police of the Murder of Mr. Sean Brown on 12 May 1997 into police failure to investigate (and perhaps to have colluded in) the murder of an esteemed, innocent member of the public, Sean Brown.

Many of these investigations have been the result of decades of campaigning and pressuring the British government by human rights groups and the families of those killed.

Revelations

The course of these investigations point in the same direction:

1) The British government directed, 7 oversaw, failed to prosecute, helped or committed the murder of hundreds of its own citizens in Ireland;

2) The vast majority of these citizens, innocent members of the public killed directly through covert operations by British forces, or in collusion with their Loyalist agents, were special -- they were Irish Catholics or Nationalists; and

3) In each investigation, many under their own auspices, the British government and its agencies refused to cooperate fully or at all, engaged in cover-ups and stonewalls, or refused to hand over files or other evidence in its possession, and otherwise interfered with the pursuit of truth and justice.

Justice for nationalists remains an unfulfilled promise.

6. Equality

The main problems of religious discrimination, which gave rise to the conflict, are not being dealt with. The equality agenda has been allowed by the British government to be politicized by unionist politicians and made virtually a dead end.

In 1999, it was revealed by a British government agency that Catholic males are now three times as likely to be unemployed as Protestant males and the proportion of Catholics in the long-term unemployment category has risen to 70%.

7. Sectarian Harassment

The Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and other loyalist paramilitaries continue to pipe and fire bomb Catholic homes and terrorize Nationalist communities. Catholics have been forced from their homes in significant numbers in Counties Antrim and Down and in North and East Belfast. No area in the north is free from sectarian attack and terror.

Loyalism is in disarray, stuck between their own parochial interests and the interests of the British state, which they sometimes attack and sometimes defend. They are volatile and violent. Their internal feuding and murder spree over turf and drugs is just one aspect.

The British government and the Police Service Northern Ireland tolerate them and in many cases encourage them. Murdering Catholics and each other, putting nationalist areas under siege, even terrorizing Catholic school girls is no bother to the British government, PSNI or Unionist political leaders.

It puts the spotlight on the tribal feuding scenario and takes the spotlight off them. In 2001 alone, there were hundreds of pipe bomb attacks against Catholics. Convictions? Less than 2%.

Of the 100 paramilitary murders over the past three years, the vast majority by Unionist/Loyalist murder squads, there

has been but ONE conviction, and that of a Republican dissident.