Truth, Denial and Transition

Northern Ireland and the Contested Past

Cheryl Lawther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317755500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Conflict of Laws
• Index: Law

Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and the Contested Past makes a unique and timely contribution to the transitional justice field. In contrast to the focus on truth and those societies where truth recovery has been central to dealing with the aftermath of human rights violations, comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to those jurisdictions whose transition from violent conflict has been marked by the absence or rejection of a formal truth process. This book draws upon the case study of Northern Ireland, where, despite a lengthy debate, the question of establishing a formal truth recovery process remains hotly contested. The strongest and most vocal opposition has been from unionist political elites, loyalist ex-combatants and members of the security forces. Based on empirical research, their opposition is unpicked and interrogated at length throughout this book. Critically exploring notions of national imagination and blamelessness, the politics of victimhood and the tension between traditions of sacrifice and the fear of betrayal, this book is the first substantive effort to concentrate on the opponents of truth recovery rather than its advocates.

This book will interest those studying truth processes and transitional justice in the fields of Law, Politics, and Criminology.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

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The twenty-first century has been characterised by an ‘urge’ or ‘rush’ to truth in the aftermath of violent conflict. Declarations of ‘Nunca Mas’ and truth commissions in Latin America, the opening of Stasi police files in Eastern Europe and the establishment of the SATRC, among others, have all been influential. For advocates of truth recovery, the purported benefits of recovering truth about past human rights violations have been well rehearsed. They include reaffirming the rule of law; responding to victims’ needs; fostering reconciliation; making known the range of forensic, personal and social ‘truths’ about past conflict; promoting accountability and broadening social and political ownership of the structural causes of violence and conflict transformation (Tutu 2000; Boraine 2000; Smyth 2007; Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010). The extensive literature on the transitional justice ‘success stories’ – those societies that have successfully, at least, attempted to engage in a macro level process of dealing with past human rights violations and the speed at which discussions on the merits of truth commissions have developed in response to regime changes associated with the Arab Spring, for example, indicates how truth recovery is now considered an axiomatic element of post-conflict reconstruction (see, for example: International Centre for Transitional Justice [ICTJ] 2011; Michael 2011). That notions of ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness’ permeate contemporary debates concerning, for example, the involvement of Ireland’s Catholic Church in institutional child abuse and the forced assimilation and abuse of indigenous children at Canadian Indian Residential Schools – two ‘settled’ democracies – provides further evidence of the intellectual and practical mainstreaming of this discourse (McEvoy 2007; McAlinden 2013; James 2012).

This book seeks to broaden the transitional justice gaze. In contrast to the dominant focus on truth and those societies where truth recovery has been central to the transition, comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to those jurisdictions whose transition from violent conflict has been marked by the rejection or absence of a formal truth process. In all transitional contexts, the dialectic between truth and denial – defined by Cohen (2001: 25) as ‘the need to be innocent of a troubling recognition’ – is a key contest. This book engages with this debate to critically interrogate how post-conflict truth recovery is challenged and contested. It draws upon the case study of Northern Ireland, where, despite a protracted debate and significant energy around the question of establishing a formal truth process, at the time of writing, there has been little progress and the topic remains hotly contested. The strongest and most vocal opposition has been from unionist political elites, loyalist ex-combatants and members of the security forces. Based on empirical research, their opposition is unpicked and interrogated at length throughout this book. Critically exploring notions of national imagination and blamelessness, the politics of victimhood and the tension between traditions of sacrifice and the fear of betrayal among others, this book is the first substantive effort to concentrate on the opponents of truth recovery rather than its advocates.

Denial, silence and challenging the past: The international context

There are a number of jurisdictions, such as Spain, Mozambique and France, whose transition from a period of political violence and human rights abuses has been characterised by the absence of a formal truth process. In these sites and others, several powerful critiques of the perceived ‘need’ to recover truth about the past have been made (see also: Daly 2008). Couched within the euphemisms of ‘getting peace’ or promoting ‘reconciliation’, for example, some of the most slippery and strongly stated oppositional discourses to truth have been framed within a context of denial and silence (Payne 2008; Misztal 2003; Cohen 2001; Ben-Ze’ev et al. 2010). As Cohen (2001: 3) argues, ‘Statements of denial are assertions that something did not happen, does not exist, is not true or is not known about’ and are a common response to information that is too threatening or disturbing to be publicly acknowledged. Denial, then, includes cognition (not acknowledging the facts); emotion (not feeling); morality (not recognising wrongdoing or responsibility); and action (not taking active steps in response to knowledge) (Cohen 2001). Silence, the ‘socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken’ is also an active and deliberate response to past trauma (Ben-Ze’ev et al. 2010: 4). In contrast to denial, whereby the uncomfortable aspects of the past may be reframed or deflected, silence constitutes that which is ‘generally known but cannot be spoken’ (Zerubavel 2010: 32). Before exploring the Northern Ireland case in detail and broadening out the sociological, political and ideological objections to truth there, the five major models of opposition to truth recovery found in the international literature and borne out in practice are outlined below. As can be seen, these perspectives are often overlapping and the themes of denial and silence are often present.

Truth and pragmatic peacemaking

From a practical peacemaking perspective, it is often asserted that the demand for political stability and nascent democratisation is not well served by ‘raking over’ the past (Kovras 2013). Major arguments include that examining the past could derail or prevent fragile peace initiatives and/or provide an opportunity for the past to be re-interpreted and manipulated as a weapon for further conflict (see for example: Forsberg and Teivainen 2004; Aguilar 2001; Graybill and Lanegran 2004). The example of Spain is, ostensibly at least, a textbook illustration of a transition from violence in which the demands of peacemaking appeared to have taken precedence over the need to address the abuses of the past.¹ Approximately 500,000 citizens were killed either during the Spanish civil war of 1936–39 or under the dictatorial rule of General Francisco Franco until his death in 1975 (Preston 2012). For Spanish political elites, fears of a right-wing coup or return to civil war dominated the transitional period and led to the prioritisation of peace, order and democratic consolidation over an examination of the past (Aguilar 2001). The ‘Pacto del Olvido’ – the pact of forgetting was therefore founded on a pragmatic need for silence and was supported by the amnesty law of 1977 (Davies 2005; Blakely 2005; Ferran 2007). The amnesty law presents the civil war as a period of ‘collective madness’ where both sides committed heinous crimes and does not attribute responsibility to any party (Kovras 2013). According to Davies (2005), the law was intended to ‘close’ and ‘forget’ the past, heralding the beginning of a new democratic era in Spanish political life.

Truth, silence and ‘moving on’

Work from the field of memory studies has shown that a common feature of post-conflict societies is the conscious decision to forget certain aspects of the past (Brewer 2010; Connerton 2008). In such contexts, silence may be a pragmatic choice in the quest to embed social stability and protect against retraumatisation (Winter 2010). Hayner (2011: 207) cautions that ‘Remembrance must be balanced with forgetting so that … memories of the past don’t overwhelm the present and the future’. In the Spanish case, the political dimension of the Pacto del Olvido was matched by a social consensus on the need for silence (Encarnacion 2001). For those communities most affected by violence and disappearances, ‘the traumatic memory of a fratricidal conflict’ and a fear of a return to totalitarianism offset many victims’ demands for truth and the return of the bodies of the disappeared (Aguilar 2001: 97; Davies 2005; Farran and Amago 2010). Similar themes can be identified in the Republic of Ireland following the Civil War (June 1922–May 1923), which was fought between two opposing groups of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and followed the War of Independence (January 1919–July 1921). Neither were accompanied by any efforts to address the violence of the previous years. The intimacy of the Civil War, described as a ‘war of the brothers’, a desire to ensure that its bitterness was not transmitted to younger generations and a sense of shame about what had happened acted as codes for silence (Coogan 1998; Dolan 2003; Pine 2011). Not examining the past may therefore be linked to a particular understanding of reconciliation that suggests a need to silence the past in the name of the future. Raul Domingos, a former senior leader of the Mozambican guerrilla force Renamo, explicitly made this case in respect to the determination not to revisit the past in Mozambique following 16 years of war – ‘The word “reconciliation” is a word used to mean forget the past and be tolerant. We killed each other, but we forget this because we are sons, brothers and we have to live together’ (cited in Hayner 2011: 201; Cobban 2006).

Truth and trials as dominant scripts

In other cases, a formal overarching truth recovery process has been eschewed in favour of local, national, international or hybrid tribunals, designed to foster accountability, recover truth and provide restitution for victims. As Garland (1990) points out, criminal trials contribute to the construction of ‘imagined communities’ and generate meanings not only about crime and punishment, but are also about power, legitimacy and memory (Anderson 2006; Osiel 2000). For still powerful political actors, criminal tribunals can be a tool for perpetuating denial and silence and creating favourable narratives on the past (Wilson 2011; Scott 1992). The Extraordinary Chamber of the Criminal Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid court of international and local jurists, established in 2003 to try high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge regime illustrates this case. Described as working to a ‘politically pre-arranged script’, the Chamber only has jurisdiction over five senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and has not inspired confidence among the Cambodian people (Muddell 2003: np; Glaspy 2008). Trials have also been used in France to gloss over the extent and depth of the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazi regime and, latterly, the use of torture by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) (Rousso 1991; Branche and House 2010; MacMaster 2002). As Loytomaki (2013) points out, the virtues of democracy, equality and human rights have been central to the traditional republican national identity. Not only has Vichy been presented as an authoritarian interlude in republican legality, but the French state has used criminal trials to claim that torture and other human rights abuses committed during the Algerian war were the acts of isolated individuals, helping to bolster a narrative that is supportive of French colonial history (Loytomaki 2013).

Truth, power and politics

Often related to the strategic use of criminal trials or a ‘pragmatic’ decision not to re-examine the past are the interests of political elites who remain in positions of power (Cohen 2001; Hayner 2011; Huyse 2013). A refusal to undertake a comprehensive truth recovery process has arguably been politically self-serving in a number of the jurisdictions already discussed. In Spain, for example, MacDonald and Bernardo (2006) have argued that silence has spared the main political parties – the Partido Popular and the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol – discomfort and embarrassment. Likewise, Marks (1994) and Klosterman (1998) suggest that in Cambodia, one of the main reasons for the reluctance to fully examine the past is that few members of the Cambodian government have clean hands. Alternatively, in Turkey, successive governments have consistently engaged in a policy of ‘literal denial’ regarding responsibility for the 1915–17 Armenian genocide, during which approximately 1.25 million Armenians were massacred by the Turkish army or died during forced deportations (Cohen 2001; Dixon 2010; Hovannisian 1999). Power and political interest, particularly where the transition from political violence does not involve a complete break from members of the previous regime, may therefore contribute to a policy of denial and silence on the past (Huyse 2013). Kovras (2013) argues that in such contexts, as time passes, selective silence can become a well-entrenched and hegemonic feature of the political discourse and democratic institutions, narrowing the variety of alternative policies and sidelining dissenting voices.

Truth and cultural relativism

Finally, a preference for indigenous methods of conflict transformation, designed to symbolically deal with the past, has been expressed in societies such as Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Uganda (Shaw 2005; Honwana 1998, 1999; Baines 2007). In Mozambique, for example, ritual purification ceremonies are used to ‘cleanse’ and ‘restore’ victims and ex-combatants of their past experiences and are designed to symbolically ‘lock’ the past away (Nordstrom 2005). There, it is believed that to recall the past would open the space for malevolent forces to intervene and violence to return (Green and Honwana 1999). In Uganda, the most commonly known Acholi justice process – mato oput – has been used to deal with the legacy of the civil war between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. Following a period of diplomacy and discussion aimed at reaching consensus on what happened and the amount of compensation to be paid, the mato oput ceremony is a means of promoting reconciliation between the clans of the victim and the perpetrator (Baines 2007). The height of the ceremony is the act of drinking the oput root, symbolising that both clans are willing and able to swallow any bitterness between them (Baines 2007). Many Acholi believe that the mato oput process can bring true healing in a way that the formal justice system cannot and scope has been provided for such community reconciliation processes in the Amnesty Act of 2000 (Jeffrey 2011).

Truth, transition and commissioning the past: Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland conflict began in 1969 and lasted over 30 years. During this period, approximately 3,739 individuals died and over 40,000 were injured (McKittrick and McVea 2012). Following the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland has been an active site of transitional justice, with the reform of the criminal justice system and security forces, the release and reintegration of political prisoners, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the development of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) all forming part of the peace process (Northern Ireland Office [NIO] 1998; McEvoy 2001; Campbell and Ni Aolain 2003; Independent Commission on Policing [ICP] 1999; NIHRC 2003). The Belfast Agreement did not however make reference to the need to establish a formal truth recovery process and the absence of such a mechanism remains one of the outstanding factors of the peace process (NIO 1998). In this vacuum, an array of truth-finding efforts have emerged and a fierce contest over whether a formal truth recovery mechanism should be established has ensued. This book is structured against this backdrop. By way of introduction, the following discussion offers some preliminary comments on the development of the truth recovery debate in Northern Ireland. It draws attention to existing practices of truth recovery, outlines the arguments in support of a forma...