Transitional Justice and Legacies of State Violence

Lisa White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415826242
• eBook ISBN: 9781135981242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

As politicians, public bodies and non-Governmental organisations continue to profess an interest in making peace with the past, this highly original study explores the motivation, significance and legacy of 'making public' experiences of state violence in Northern Ireland.

Based on a synthesis of documentary material with the findings from a series of contemporary interviews, this timely book uncovers the reasoning behind many Republican former detainees' accounts of state violence and torture. It examines the aims of those who 'went public' during the conflict and discusses the meaning they attached to their stories and the various responses to them. It also identifies some of the risks involved in criticising the violence of the British State and illuminates the ways in which 'truths' are often contested in Northern Ireland - both during the conflict and in the years which have followed. A unique piece of interdisciplinary work, the study disentangles and evaluates the discourses presented by former detainees and makes an innovative and interesting contribution to knowledge about transitional justice and legacies of state violence.

The book is suitable for social science scholars interested in human rights, state violence, criminology and transitional justice, as well as those seeking to understand more about experiences of imprisonment and the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict.

1 Introduction

Based on research with Republican former detainees,¹ this book explores the motivation, significance and legacy of bringing private memories of state violence into the contested public history of the Northern Ireland conflict.² To do this, the text first examines how former detainees define the state violence they experienced whilst in detention. Second, it analyses the popular discourses around ‘healing’ and the extent to which these motivated former detainees ‘go public’ with their experiences. Third, it explores former detainees’ perceptions of gendered concepts of hegemonic masculinity and the impact such perceptions may or may not have had on their decision to narrate their experiences of violence. Fourth, the book discusses the extent to which former detainees perceived their narratives to be significant as political propaganda for the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. The consequences of official discourse are then explored from the perspective of those whose accounts challenged the imagery of an impartial and liberal state. Finally, the book presents an overview of previous attempts to hold the British State to account for its violence in Northern Ireland. In sum, the book argues that the presentation of experiences of conflict is a complex act which emerges out of a synthesis of personal and collective motivations, takes on a significance for former detainees that can in itself become challenging, and often leads to consequences that are far from homogeneous in terms of form and scale. Through its original synthesis of literature, documentary analysis and qualitative interview data, the book disentangles and evaluates the discourses presented by former detainees about state violence. It investigates the production of these contested narratives of victimisation and analyses just what those who ‘go public’ may desire from those who ‘hear’ their stories. The research contributes to an enhanced knowledge about the production, significance, ownership and effects of narratives of state violence at the individual and societal level.

Within the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the existence of a wide range of public accounts, testimonies, narratives and memoirs describing personal experiences of violence appear to suggest that ‘going public’ with accounts may be a valuable and possibly even a necessary exercise for those who have experienced harm. The meaning of ‘going/making public’ remains dynamic and flexible, in order to reflect the diversity and range of opportunities which have been utilised by survivors and their families to bring their experiences into the public domain. It may refer to newspaper articles featuring survivors’ accounts, to television interviews or to the publication of memoirs and everything in between. It may also refer to localised storytelling projects. In the absence of any overarching truth-sharing mechanism in Northern Ireland, a number of storytelling projects have developed to try to enable survivors of state violence to ‘make public’ their stories and record the history of the conflict as they have experienced it. These projects are listed in Kelly (2005, 2007) but a few illustrative examples are discussed here. In 1999, a community-based truth-sharing initiative was established by Falls Community Council to record the experiences of the conflict as felt by those living in nationalist West Belfast (Kelly 2005: 54). The project coordinators of ‘Dúchas: Living History’ felt that state violence against the local community had been framed as legitimate and that the narratives of those most affected had been replaced by the official discourse, which further facilitated a lack of trust in the British State and its institutions. Similarly, in South Fermanagh, Fírinne (Truth) began a storytelling project aimed at recording people’s experiences of state violence in the region, which lies on the border with the Republic of Ireland. The organisation felt that it was important to document experiences of state violence, ‘for posterity and have them acknowledged, not just within their community, but the wider community, particularly to highlight the sanctioned policy by the state’ (Kelly 2005: 68).

These projects are an attempt to respond to the legacy of state violence by recording the stories of those affected by this facet of the conflict. Possibly the most well known is the Ardoyne Commemoration Project (ACP) which ‘was established in 1998 to document the stories of Ardoyne residents in North Belfast who lost their lives as a result of the conflict between 1969 and 1998’ (Kelly 2005: 32). The resulting book Ardoyne: The Untold Truth was designed to enable the community in Ardoyne to tell their story of the conflict in their own way (Kelly 2005; Lundy and McGovern 2006). People wanted ‘an opportunity to “set the record straight”, to “tell their story” [and] challenge the hierarchy of victims’ (ACP 2002: 3). The participation of the Ardoyne community was of vital importance to the project, partly in order to ensure that people’s narratives of suffering were not misrepresented and that survivors retained a sense of ownership over their narratives which, as Kelly (2005) recognises, had not always been the case in the past. Narratives were recorded, then returned to participants to ensure all details were correct and approved, before consent was sought for publication (ACP 2002; Kelly 2005; Lundy and McGovern 2005, 2006). The ACP is an example of a community-based initiative and a ‘bottom up’ approach which took place amidst a ‘lack of interest amongst dominant political actors in developing formal mechanisms’ (Lundy and McGovern 2008: 285). Such community-based initiatives are undoubtedly of value. They provide space for the ‘airing’ of subjugated narratives and can help to foster a sense of shared experience which enables social movements to develop and/or strengthen. They also can be an opportunity for intra-group discussion and reflection, particularly around the difficult ‘taboo’ questions – such as the treatment of suspected informers in Ardoyne (Lundy and McGovern 2008). Community-based initiatives might also form early building blocks to help people develop confidence in the benefits of wider truth sharing (Aiken 2010). When referring to victims and survivors of state violence, community-based approaches also function so as to illustrate the ‘view from below’. For Gormally and McEvoy (2009: 12), this denotes ‘a “resistant” or “mobilising” character to the actions of community, civil society and other non-state actors in their opposition to powerful political, social or economic forces’.

That said, any discussion of storytelling must avoid over-romanticising community-based approaches to the legacy of state violence. If only one community (or section of the community) takes part, it risks reducing those communities to symbols of suffering. Individual stories can become lost in the overarching narrative of community experience and a falsely homogeneous portrayal of the legacy of state violence might be produced. These approaches might also be limited in their ability to gain and impart information (and possibly achieve a sense of acknowledgement) from other communities, including from the ‘security community’³ whose role in the conflict is often downplayed or diminished within the official discourse (Lundy and McGovern 2001). If projects become overly insular and inward looking, they risk only ‘preaching to the converted’ (Gormally and McEvoy 2009). Furthermore, as Lundy and McGovern (2008) recognise, even the most conscientious of community-based approaches sometimes reflect the structural inequalities of wider society, with men’s experiences of the conflict tending to dominate. Care must be taken so that the experiences of women and the conflict’s impact upon people with disabilities (McEvoy 2013) do not drop out of community-based approaches or the wider discourse of transitional justice itself (Ní Aoláin 2009; Bell 2009). The relative absence of women’s narratives of state violence during the conflict is particularly pronounced in regards to female detainees and their stories of life in Armagh during the conflict, although there are some exceptions (see e.g. Aretxaga 1997; Corcoran 2006a, 2006b).

In addition, the very meaning of ‘community-based’ approach is difficult to define. It might refer to the way in which a project emerges and operates and/or to projects which receive a level of state funding but still retain a sense of being in and of ‘the community’. As Gormally and McEvoy (2009) suggest, groups may also ‘start out’ as being ‘single identity’ and linked to only one community, but move later to work with others. Others begin with an understanding of truth sharing across communities being built into their raison d’être. This can be clearly seen in the work of groups such as ‘Towards Understanding and Healing’, an organisation whose members include ‘ex-members of non-state armed groups, Republican and Loyalist, ex-members of the state security forces – RUC, UDR/RIR, regular British Army regiments – and those who have suffered from violence from any of these sources from the two main communities here and in Britain and the Republic’ (Gormally and McEvoy 2009: 29). The sharing of experiences is an important part of their work. Alongside the work of organisations like the multiple-community ‘Healing Through Remembering’, these groups offer one potential way of responding to the legacy of state violence through truth sharing.

Storytelling about state violence in detention

Storytelling has become a popular way of responding to the legacy of the conflict, but what is sometimes marginalised within the transitional justice discourses emerging from Northern Ireland is the existence of truth sharing during conflict itself. The existence of these primary materials shows that there has been a constant dissemination of narratives throughout what might have appeared at times to be an intractable, violent conflict, rather than simply after its apparent cessation. As shown in Chapter 2 state violence in Northern Ireland took a range of forms. It included the use of violence against detainees by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC),⁴ the British Army and the Prison Service of Northern Ireland. Many former detainees first gave their accounts to local lawyers, who were permitted to distribute their narratives to the Association for Legal Justice⁵ and related civil society organisations who would publish and distribute them. Some of those interviewed for this book had given their narratives of state violence to other political activists, for example, those working for An Phoblacht, which merged with Republican News in 1979. This magazine has been the official paper of armed Republicanism and has remained broadly sympathetic to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA hereafter ‘IRA’). Others gave their accounts to journalists from local newspapers, such as The Tyrone Democrat. Some former detainees’ accounts also featured in publications with far wider circulations, including The Irish Times, and British newspapers, such as The Sunday Times. Similar accounts featured in the publications of international human rights-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Amnesty International. Finally, many personal accounts of state violence appear in the collected memoirs of former prisoners released towards the apparent end of the armed conflict, including biographical-type memoirs like texts such as Nor Meekly Serve Thy Time (Campbell et al. 1994, 2006), Out of Time (McKeown 2001) and Blanketmen (O’Rawe 2005). These texts contain detailed narratives about experiences of imprisonment, often as edited by groups of former prisoners themselves. Other accounts by former detainees can be found in histories of the conflict written by journalists (Taylor 1980, 1998, 2002) or by academic researchers (e.g. Feldman 1991; English 2003).

These accounts underpin this entire book and examples feature in Chapter 2, which explores the extent of state violence in Northern Ireland. Their existence created the spark from which this research emerged. Why did male former detainees choose (or experience sufficient pressure) to ‘go public’ with their stories? What did they gain by doing so? What did they lose? How did they experience ‘going public’ and its consequences? What do they feel has been the personal legacy of their narrative? These questions are rarely discussed in former detainees’ narratives of state violence themselves. Although based within criminology in its study of state violence and victimhood, the book also touches upon a range of disciplines, including law, social psychology and the political sciences. As such, it shares some foundations with Stanley’s (2002, 2005, 2009) work on survivor identity, Hayner’s (2002) discussions of truth and Cohen’s (2001) study of denial.

Methodology

In order to carry out the research, a list of existing literature featuring former detainees’ narratives of state violence experienced during detention was located during an extensive review of historical literature about the conflict. This review utilised the vast newspaper archives, civil society pamphlets, television and media sources contained in the Linenhall Library in Belfast and the Special Collections at Queen’s University. Other documentary material could be found in the published memoirs of former detainees (e.g. McKeown 2001). From this collected material, a list containing named detainees who had previously ‘gone public’ (and done so under their own name) was drawn up. Personal contacts were asked to help locate those on the list who might wish to participate in the research project, thus enabling prospective snowball sampling. Access to the sample was dependent on trust and good practice, and the complex workings of a series of inter-relationships both professional and personal, which slowly led to a ‘snowball effect’ (Silverman 2005). In addition to these networks, former prisoner groups including Coiste n-Iarchimí⁶ were also used to locate former detainees from the list of those who had previously made public accounts of state violence. These groups acted as gatekeepers to the research project, sometimes controlling access and sometimes initiating the first contact with former detainees.

There are, however, problems with involving ‘gatekeeper’ organisations. They might close down access to those who are critical of the organisation, or whose views the organisation finds problematic. They may also misrepresent the research project or its aims. Possible participants may understand the project as the gatekeeper’s own and may make decisions to/not to participate based upon this understanding. Although not the case in the research for this book, ‘gatekeeper’ organisations may also bring pressure to influence the findings of any resulting report, or otherwise bargain with the researcher for access to participants (Hughes 2000). In this instance, organisations such as Coiste helped locate possible participants from my list of former detainees who had made public their experiences and did not ask for anything in return.

Ten former detainees agreed to participate. Others on the list were found to have since died or were difficult to access. One possible interviewee did not wish to participate in the study and hinted that due to his current circumstances he could find the process difficult – even with mechanisms in place to minimise harm. Another former detainee felt that his own experiences were not ‘worth’ any discussion, but was keen to help find other possible participants. The language of ‘truth s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The history of state violence in Northern Ireland
• 3 Defining experiences of state violence in detention
• 4 Revealing as healing?
• 5 The masculinity of ‘making public’
• 6 Former detainees’ narratives as ‘propaganda’
• 7 Discourse, denial and dehumanisation
• 8 Seeking accountability for state violence
• 9 The problems and possibilities of talking about violence
• Index