Category: Political Analysis

BERNADETTE McALLISKEY SPEAKING AT TRINITY COLLEGE

On By rebelbreezeIn Capitalism, Civil Rights, Education, Gender Equality, History, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, National Liberation, Palestine, Peace Process, Political Analysis, Racism, Socialist RevolutionLeave a comment

Diarmuid Breatnach

The auditorium in Trinity College on Friday 20th June was nearly empty at the advertised starting time for the lecture on “The Legacy of Power, Conflict and Resistance”. The start was delayed and more people came in but, by the time the speaker and the theme was introduced, the hall was still not full. That was surprising, because the speaker was Bernadette Mc Alliskey (nee Devlin), who had been at 18 years of age one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the Six Counties (“Northern Ireland”), at 21 years of age elected MP for Mid-Ulster in 1969 and still, 45 years later, holding the record for the youngest woman ever elected to the British Parliament.

Bernadette Devlin circa 1968 or 1969. She was elected MP on a People's Democracy ticket in 1969 but later classified herself as an "independent socialist".
Bernadette Devlin early 1969. She was elected MP on a People’s Democracy ticket in 1969 but later classified herself as an “independent socialist”.

The same year as her election, Bernadette went to the USA to gather support for the Civil Rights movement in a trip being used by others, rumouredly, to gather funds for arms. She shocked the conservative part of Irish USA, Ancient Order of Hibernians and Democratic Party political allies, by some of her statements and actions regarding blacks and chicanos and in visiting a Black Panthers project. Bernadette returned home to serve a short prison sentence after conviction for “incitement to riot” arising from her role in the defence of Derry against police (RUC and B-Specials) and Loyalist attack.

In 1972, during her five-year tenure as a Member of Parliament, enraged by his comments about the murder a few days previously of 13 unarmed protesters (a 14th died later of his wounds) by the Parachute Regiment in Derry, she stormed up to the then British Home Secretary and, in front of a full House of Commons, slapped him in the face. Bernadette had been there in Derry that terrible day – she was to have addressed the anti-internment march upon which the Paras opened fire.

 

The Tyrone woman was also a founder-member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party in 1974, which she left after failing to bring the armed organisation, the Irish National Liberation Army, under party control.  She continued to be a Left-Republican political activist, in particular campaigning against the treatment of Republicans on arrest and subsequently as prisoners in jail, in the H-Blocks Campaign.  She learned to speak Irish.  In January 1981, she and her husband Michael McAlliskey were the victims of an assassination attempt by a squad of the “Ulster Freedom Fighters” (a cover name for the Ulster Defence Association, which was not banned until 1992).  They both survived, though Bernadette had been shot seven times.

 

In 1996, while four months pregnant, Bernadette’s daughter was arrested on a German extradition warrant, charging her with being part of a Provisional IRA mortar attack on a British Army base in Osnabruck, Germany. Although taken to England, where a judge agreed to her extradition to Germany, a long and vigorous campaign fought by Roisín’s mother and her supporters eventually defeated the extradition and Roisín gave birth to a healthy daughter.

Recent portrait of Bernadette (Devlin) McAlliskey by Francis McKee
Recent portrait of Bernadette (Devlin) McAlliskey by Francis McKee
Bernadette's daughter was arrested twice on the same charge but vigorous campaigning impeded her extradition. Photo shows banner resisting the earlier attempt.
Bernadette’s daughter was arrested twice on the same charge but vigorous campaigning impeded her extradition. Photo shows banner resisting the earlier attempt.


In 1998 and for some years after, Bernadette was an outspoken critic of Sinn Féin and of their direction in the “Peace Process”, which she saw as the party coming to accept British colonialism and Irish capitalism. In 2003 she was banned by the USA and deported, widely interpreted as being due to her speaking against the Good Friday Agreement, but continued her campaigning. However in 2007, another extradition warrant was issued for her daughter Roisín on the same charges as before and the young woman became emotionally ill. The whole trauma was seen by many as a warning to Bernadette to cease criticising the “new dispensation” and subsequently she was seen to fade from the ranks of public critics of the GFA, Sinn Féin and of the treatment of Republican prisoners.

Bernadette remained active through working with migrants in a not-for-profit organisation in Dungannon. In recent years she has returned, on occasion, to the issues upon which she was so outspoken previously, for example standing surety for Marian Price’s bail to attend her sister Dolores’ funeral and speaking at the ceremony herself. Bernadette also spoke at the Bloody Sunday Commemoration/ March for Justice in January this year in Derry.

With a c.v. of that sort, one would reasonably expect a packed auditorium.

Bernadette Mc Alliskey on the platform upon which she had earlier spoken in February 2014 at a rally following the annual Bloody Sunday Commemoration/ March for Justice.
Bernadette Mc Alliskey on the platform upon which she had earlier spoken in February 2014 at a rally following the annual Bloody Sunday Commemoration/ March for Justice.

Bernadette has walked the walk and thought the thought too but she can also talk the talk. With one A4 sheet in front of her, she spoke for over an hour, hardly ever glancing at her notes. Her talk was as part of Trinity College’s MPhil Alumni Conference on ‘Power, Conflict, Resistance’ organised by the Department of Sociology for its Mphil course in “Race, Ethnicity and Conflict”.

Bernadette McAlliskey began her talk with the theme of fear of conflict, developing the thesis that this fear is inculcated in us from childhood, as conflict arises out of challenging power and hierarchy. She traced this further back to religious indoctrination where dogma is to be accepted without question and finds its reflection in all aspects of life but particularly in the political.

Talking about Tom Paine, who expounded the theory that human beings, each independently, are responsible for themselves, she stated that this is fundamental to citizenship. Some aspects of this self-responsibility are delegated to institutions when we live in large groups but any decisions made for us without our consent are “an usurpation”. Tom Paine was an English Republican, author of, among other works Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1791). He had to flee England because of disseminating his ideas, which were considered revolutionary in his time.


Much of Bernadette’s talk was given over to this theme, to the lack of consideration of women even by such as Tom Paine, and also to the racism spread by colonialism, which the Christian hierarchies condoned and even encouraged.

When she finished to sustained applause and took questions, there were two from people identifying themselves as Travellers, another from a person from an NGO working with migrants, another regarding anti-Irish racism in English colonial ideology and the continuing power of the Catholic Church in the education system.

One question seemed to throw her and she admitted that she found it difficult to answer. Ronit Lentin, Jewish author, political sociologist and critic of Israeli Zionism asked Bernadette was it not true that racism in the Six Counties came mostly from within Loyalism, allied to anti-Catholic sectarianism. Bernadette struggled in replying, at one point denying it and pointing to anti-Traveller discrimination in the ‘nationalist’ areas but following this up by observing that Travellers would only camp in or near ‘nationalist areas’ (presumably because the hostility in a ‘unionist area’ would be worse).

Bernadette then went on to recall the recent anti-Muslim remarks made by a prominent Belfast evangelist preacher, James McConnell, and how the First Minister of Stormont, Peter Robinson, had defended the evangelist’s right to free speech. Asked for his own opinion of Muslims, the First Minister had replied that he also distrusted them “if they are fully devoted to Sharia law” but would trust them to go to the shop for his groceries and to bring him back the correct change. All the examples Bernadette drew on, apart from the generalised one about Travellers in ‘nationalist’ areas, were in fact from the Unionist sector.

The final question was from an SWP activist who pointed out that the State does not admit to its institutional racism and often takes no action on racist attacks or denies that the motive for the attack was racism. The activist asked Bernadette how she thought racism can be dealt with in this context. She replied that the legal structures are there and should be used and persisted with.

It seemed a strange response from one who would have described herself in the past as a revolutionary. Earlier in her talk she herself had quoted the black Caribbean lesbian, Audre Lorde, who said that the instruments of the State could not be used to dismantle it (actually I.V. Lenin had made the same point in The State and Revolution in 1917, nor was he the first to do so). A revolutionary’s answer to that question would presumably have been that while the structures should be used in order to expose them that ultimately the capitalist State’s power is the enemy of unity among the people; disunity rather than unity among the people is in the interest of the system. Mobilisation of the people against racism and directing them towards the source of their ills, the capitalist system, and building solidarity in action, is the only realistic way forward. Perhaps Bernadette felt constrained by the academic environment in which she was speaking but that is not the answer she gave.

End.

Interesting retrospective piece on McAlliskey’s visit to the USA in 1969: http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/fidel-castro-in-a-miniskirt-bernadette-devlins-first-us-tour/

Interview with McAlliskey at a Scottish conference on radical independence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4LdcnxMb9Q

IRELAND AND KENYA – SOME ESCAPES FROM THE GRISLY BRITISH BAG OF SECRETS

On By rebelbreezeIn Civil Rights, History, Ireland, Irish Republicanism, Mass Media Criticism, National Liberation, Political AnalysisLeave a comment

[First published by Bristol Radical History Group on their s site earlier this year as “Some Hidden Histories of the British State Revealed in 2013”; reprinted by kind permission from same.]

In ten years we’ll leak the truth By then it’s only so much paper[1]

According to the U.S. punk band the Dead Kennedys it takes about 10 years before our ‘democracies’ decide to “leak the truth” about activities of secret arms of the state. In the current world of social media and the information highway there seems to be a perception that no secret is safe and that “it will get out somehow”. This suggests the cosy idea that somehow the internet is leading us to a more open society with rapid access to the ‘truth’. In the US things certainly seemed to have been speeding up lately with the ‘Wiki-leaks’ by the ex-National Security Agency spook Edward Snowden becoming almost real-time in relation to the recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course the joke is on us, as Snowden’s exposés demonstrated that the sword of internet cuts both ways with comprehensive spying by the secret state on home populations facilitated by social media such as Facebook. However, Snowden’s revelations are the exception to the rule; I would argue the lack of concrete information on the activities concerning the ‘secret state’ on the internet leads to speculation and conspiracy theories rather than openness and ‘truth’. Interestingly, 2013 provided plenty of evidence of long-term strategies of secrecy in the British state which seem to be working on a minimum of 40-50 years and unbelievably up to 350 years before the ‘truth’ becomes “only so much paper”. I am going to concentrate on two particular ‘hidden histories’; the Mau Mau court cases relating to the Kenya ‘Emergency’ of 1950s-60s (Part 1) and British Army death squads in Northern Ireland in the 1970s (Part 2). Both of these stories hit the headlines in 2013 and demonstrate the lengths to which the British state will go to hide information in order to mythologise its history as well as the methods that are used to neutralise problematic fragments of the ‘real’ history of the British Empire.

Part 1

May 2013: The Mau Mau victims

If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly[2]

In May 2013, the British government, after it had failed in its disgraceful attempt to avoid responsibility for the torture of five Kenyans during the ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion in the 1950s, finally agreed to negotiate ‘out-of-court’ compensation for up to 10,000 similar victims[3]. Revelations about torture, rape and murder carried out by British police and army units during the Kenya ’emergency’ have sporadically hit the headlines over the last few years, whilst debates have raged between historians as to their scale, longevity and systemic nature[4] of the main problems in answering these questions has been getting at concrete evidence. What became clear during the ‘Mau Mau’ case in 2013 were some aspects of the British state’s enduring strategy in covering up its numerous crimes against humanity in the post-war era. The two practical features of this policy seem to involve time and suppression and/or destruction of information.

The four Kenyans at the high court who have been given the go-ahead to sue the British government over alleged atrocities committed during the Mau Mau uprising.
The four Kenyans at the high court who have been given the go-ahead to sue the British government over alleged atrocities committed during the Mau Mau uprising.

Many journalists and commentators complained about the length of time it had taken to bring the ‘Mau Mau’ cases to court; their naiveté is astounding. For British citizens seeking justice who have had a relative killed by the Police[5], to the family of Stephen Lawrence[6], the families of the Hillsborough victims[7] or those gunned down by British paratroopers in Derry in 1972[8] or in Ballymurphy in 1971[9]; time is clearly a weapon of the British state. In many of these cases decades passed, interspersed with botched, half-arsed and faked inquiries, before anything like the ‘truth’ was even hinted at. As for ‘justice’ well you might as well be searching for Shangri-La! For the various arms of the British state this ‘war of attrition’ aimed at its victims and their relatives, often not only breaks their resolve, their families and personal relationships but crucially demoralises future victims from taking them on. In the case of the thousands of surviving victims of torture and rape in Kenya, the British state clearly followed this delaying strategy. They relied on the Kenyan authorities enforcing colonial-era legislation which outlawed Mau Mau and branded them ‘terrorists’. This law stopped victims coming forward through fear of prosecution and was not repealed until 2003, over 50 years since the start of the uprising[10]. After the rejuvenation of the status of Mau Mau veterans in Kenya, a number of civil cases were launched against the U.K. government, which responded by trying to claim any legal technicality, however ludicrous, it could find to hold up the proceedings. For example in 2010, I kid you not:

The British government claimed the issue was the responsibility of the Kenyan government on the grounds of “state succession” for former colonies, relying on an obscure legal precedent relating to Patagonian toothfish and the declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1860[11]

Clearly the plan was to hang on for as long as possible trusting that most of the victims and crucially the perpetrators would be deceased when finally some of the truth was revealed[12]. Then it would just be a matter of (if absolutely necessary) making a ‘statement of regret’ about some ‘bad apples’ to put this particular isolated fragment of colonial history to bed for good. Not only would this save significant compensation money but more crucially avoid the possible embarrassment of having to expose systemic murder, rape and torture by the British state. As one commentator noted this could challenge the “British people’s carefully nurtured narrative of the final days of their imperial mission”[13].

The Road to Hanslope Park

So despite international criticism[14], the British government lawyers forged ahead with their time-wasting strategy. Years passed, until horror of horrors, in July 2011, a judge granted the surviving elderly Kenyan test claimants the right to sue the UK for damages. This allowed the claimants lawyers to demand access to documents pertaining to the ‘Kenyan emergency’ which a number of historians, called as expert witnesses in the case, believed were secretly held by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). Finally in April 2013, after decades of consistent denials (that is lies), the FCO suddenly “discovered” the “existence of an enormous secret archive at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, a repository for more than 8,000 files from 37 former colonies”.[15]

Hanslope Park, where the secret archive of colonial papers was held.
Hanslope Park, where the secret archive of colonial papers was held.

As the Guardian noted, amongst the contents relating to the ‘Kenyan emergency’:

was a damning memo from the colony’s attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, a man who had described the mistreatment of the [Kenyan] detainees as “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia“. Despite his misgivings, Griffith-Jones agreed to draft new legislation that sanctioned beatings, as long as the abuse was kept secret. “If we are going to sin,” he wrote, “we must sin quietly.”[16]

More than 50 years later, with the imperial endgame long over, evidence of those sins remained quietly concealed in a secret archive within one of the British government’s most secure facilities. Set deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside and surrounded by 16ft-high fences topped with razor wire, lies Hanslope Park, home of, Her Majesty’s Government Communications Centre, where teams of scientists – real-life versions of Q, the fictional boffin of the James Bond films – devise technical aids for the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6. What better place to bury Griffith-Jones’s letter to Baring, along with thousands more documents from colonial-era Kenya and countless others from 36 other former colonies and protectorates? Were this secret archive to be stacked upright, it would create a tower 200 metres tall. And every document was selected for concealment on the basis of an instruction that nothing should be handed over to any post-independence government that might “embarrass HMG or other government” or cause problems for any colonial policeman, civil servant or member of the armed forces.[17] The documents suppressed for so long by the British State not only provided further evidence of systemic abuses during the ‘Kenyan emergency’ (including forced labour, organised starvation and the burning of detainees alive) but crucially demonstrated that:

The government in London knew what was going on, Anderson states. “These documents contain discussion of torture and abuse and the legal implications for the British administration in Kenya of the use of coercive force in prisons and detention camps, by so-called ‘screening’ teams, and in other interrogations carried out by all members of the security forces.” The legal limits of coercive force were debated. “They reveal that changes to legislation, and additions to the emergency powers regulations, were made retrospectively in order to cover practices that were already normal within the camps and detention centres.”[18]

Throughout the legal saga of the 2000s, FCO lawyers had consistently denied that the abuses in Kenya in the 1950s had been systemic or widespread and a central plank of their defence was that “London knew nothing”. The newly released information seriously undermined their position and once again demonstrated that they had systematically lied over a number of years. In October 2012, after the judgement which granted the right of the victims to sue the British government, the FCO ironically responded:

The judgement has potentially significant and far reaching legal implications. The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is 3 to 6 years. In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their account of what happened. Since this is an important legal issue, we have taken the decision to appeal[19]

This is a bit like a Mafia boss complaining that if key witnesses (who he had arranged to be killed) had been present in court he would have been found innocent! The disgraceful and widely condemned decision of the FCO to continue to fight the case against the Mau Mau victims was followed by an embarrassing climb-down, leading to ‘out-of-court’ negotiations in May 2013. The FCO response to the release of the secret information and their ‘U-turn’ was characteristically nauseating: “We believe there should be a debate about the past. It is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history.”[20] You have got to be joking!   From a historical perspective the opening of the secret files or as the FCO called them, the “migrated archive” (sic) seemed to be the final act in the Mau Mau case, but this was far from the end. The suspicious historians, who had struggled to uncover the suppressed history of the Kenyan emergency over many years[21], were at best sceptical and at worst paranoid[22]. The Guardian naively noted:

Hague ordered an independent review of the “migrated archive” before its transfer to Kew, overseen by Professor Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge. The first documents, representing about a sixth of the total archive, are now available at Kew, with Badger promising that very few have been redacted, usually to conceal the identities of informants.

Many historians remain suspicious of the FCO and believe it may seek to retain some of its secret files. Caroline Elkins, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian of the Mau Mau rebellion, warns that the FCO’s history of concealment and denial is such that the public should also continue to sceptical.

As the files come available, Badger admits that many of his colleagues wondered whether the FCO was “up to its old tricks again”, and adds: “Given the failure of the Foreign Office to acknowledge the existence of the migrated archives, I understand the legacy of suspicion. It is difficult to overestimate the degree of suspicion.” But he believes the depth of embarrassment suffered by the FCO over the Hanslope Park scandal offers the best reassurance that it will now finally offer up the full archive.

It may be significant, he adds, that Hague and David Lidington, the junior foreign minister responsible for the transfer process, are both historians and should be conscious of the potential for further “reputational risk” if the FCO continues to conceal documents.[23]

“Embarrassment” and “reputational risk”, you are having a laugh! The British state is covering up a recent history of mass rape, torture and murder; do you think they give a toss about these? What about getting obstruction of ‘war crimes’ trials onto the agenda; that might concentrate some minds!

End of Empire: “The great destruction”

Of far more interest than dubious assurances from Cambridge dons and government ministers was the revelation uncovered in the ‘migrated archive’ files that:

many of the British empire’s most sensitive and incriminating documentation was not hidden at Hanslope Park but simply destroyed – sometimes shredded, occasional dumped at sea, but usually incinerated – as the British withdrew from one colony after another[24]

Starting in the mid-1950s and then formalised in 1961 by the secretary of state for the colonies, Iain Macleod, the British state activated a plan to deny post-independence governments and others access to colonial documents that:

“might embarrass Her Majesty’s government”, that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others e.g. police informers”, that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might “be used unethically by ministers in the successor government”[25]

In at least 23 countries and territories, from Kenya to Malaya, documentary evidence of systematic torture, murder and other crimes was removed from the colonial archives in an operation kept secret from British subjects both in the colonies and on the mainland. Interestingly, and this is something for historians to note, the plan made provision to hide the fact that the ‘sifting’ had even happened by creating sanitised ‘dummy’ files to replace those that had been selected. It was imperative that post-independence colonial administrations (or future historians) were unaware that the selected files existed or that a “cleaning” process had taken place. Finally, the colonial cleaners were told that the ’emphasis is placed upon destruction’[26] rather than transferring the selected files to London. So the files recovered from Hanslope Park are probably the least “embarrassing” tip of an iceberg of destroyed information. This was backed up by a memo from an MI5 liaison officer in 1957 which stated after an 8 month long incineration operation of files pertaining to Malaya that “the risk of compromise and embarrassment [to Britain] is slight”[27]. One of the ‘Mau Mau’ case historians, Professor Anderson, sarcastically noted:

As a nation Brits nurture memories of empire that are deceptively cosy, swathed in a warm, sepia-tinted glow of paternalistic benevolence. The British empire, so the story goes, brought progress to a primitive and savage world. Education, hospitals and improved health, steamships, railways, and the telegraph – these were the tools of empire, brought to colonised peoples by the gift of commerce and good British government.

We take pride in this imperial heritage, pointing with scorn at the lesser achievements of other European powers – the French, Italians, Germans, Belgians and Portuguese – whose empires we variously view as haplessly mismanaged, malignly exploitative and brutally coercive. Britain’s empire was better than all the others, historians such as Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Lawrence James have assured us, so why should we worry?’[28]

It amazes me after revelations concerning the suppression and mass destruction of the colonial records that famous ‘establishment’ historians have the gall to peddle this nonsense. After all, if the ‘official’ evidence has been destroyed, this means you have to turn to other sources, not just assume it was all a bed of roses. Caroline Elkins faced this very problem when researching her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya published in 2005, which helped begin the process of uncovering the systematic campaign of brutality during the Kenyan emergency. Elkins faced a barrage of criticism particularly over her assertion that “tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands” of Kenyans died during the ’emergency’[29]. To a certain extent, Elkins had a point regardless of the figures, that is if the evidence had been wilfully sanitised and thousands of ‘dirty documents’ destroyed by the British who could say she was wrong or in fact what was correct? In October 2013 she wrote:

“Africans make up stories.” I heard this refrain over and again while researching imperial history in Kenya. I was scarcely surprised when it came from former settlers and colonial officials living out their days in the country’s bucolic highlands. But I was concerned to find that this position took on intractable proportions among some historians.

At the time of decolonisation, colonial officials destroyed and removed tons of documents from Kenya. To overcome this, I collected hundreds of oral testimonies and integrated them with fragments of remaining archival evidence to challenge entrenched views of British imperialism.

My methods drew sharp criticism. Revising the myths of British imperial benevolence cut to the heart of national identity, challenging decades-old scholarship and professional reputations.

Some historians fetishise documents, and historians of empire are among the most hide-bound. For decades, these scholars have viewed written evidence as sacrosanct. That documents – like all forms of evidence – must be triangulated, and interrogated for veracity using other forms of evidence, including oral testimonies from colonised populations, mattered little.

Instead, many historians rarely questioned the official archive, nor the written, historical record. Instead, they reproduced a carefully tended official narrative with either celebratory accounts of empire, or equally pernicious, by turning their collective heads away from the violence that underwrote Britain’s imperial past and towards more benign lines of inquiry. Either way, their document-centred histories served as excuses for liberal imperial fictions.[30]

Elkin’s point about the discrediting victims of British torture, emasculation and rape has a horrific resonance with Holocaust deniers. How would it have sounded if subsequent to 1945 historians had said “Jews make up stories”?

October 2013: Hanslope Park and the dam busters….

It appeared by the summer of 2013 that the revelations about secret archives and the destruction of colonial documents on a massive scale was the final chapter of the story. However, the cracks that had appeared in the wall of secrecy erected by the British state were beginning to spread, and in October 2013 the dam burst. Having originally been caught out by an eagle-eyed historian who “had located a 45-year-old Whitehall memo that referred to the material” stored in the secret archive in Hanslope Park, a court directive led to the FCO effectively admitting it had hidden 1,500 Kenyan files[31]. This was the first crack in the dam. Then:

Ministers then informed parliament that there were a total of 8,800 files from 37 former colonies being stored at Hanslope Park; when these were finally handed over to the National Archives at Kew, the true figure was found to be nearer 20,000.

What the Foreign Office did not disclose at that time was that the colonial-era files were just a tiny part of the vast repository at Hanslope Park. Instead, it has since acknowledged, it asked the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to sign an authorisation for the retention of 1.2 million files, putting them on a legal footing for the first time while a plan could be devised for their transfer to Kew. That was done without any public announcement. The exact number of files within the archive that have been withheld in breach of the Public Records Act is unclear. Initially, the Foreign Office said there were 1.2 million[32]

As the FCO admissions began to turn from isolated torrents of ‘hidden’ information into a deluge, the volume of the dam became apparent:

The scale of the hidden archive is demonstrated by an inventory that the Foreign Office has published, which appears to show that one of the listed items may itself contain 2.9 million documents

So one ‘file’ may comprise 2.9 million documents and there are 1.2 million files! No wonder one estimate put the length of the shelving at Hanslope Park at 15 miles; potentially representing tens or even hundreds of millions of documents! Even more incredible was the scope of historical periods covered by the secret archive which dated back over 350 years to 1662 and which ranged in content from the West African slave trade to Nazi war criminals in the U.K, including documents right up to the present day. The sheer volume and historical sweep of this evidence demonstrates the systematic suppression of information in the British state for hundreds of years; which comes as no surprise to some of us, but absolutely crucial for all historians of Britain and its Empire to confront. Of course getting access to all this information is another matter. Ostensibly it is meant to be handed over to The National Archive (TNA) at Kew, but despite the information spewing from the shattered dam, the FCO are still trying to hold back the flood water by a series of stalling measures:

The Foreign Office has presented its plans for the release of some of the Hanslope Park files during a meeting of the National Archives’ advisory council, which usually scrutinises government departments’ requests to retain or redact a small number of files beyond the 30-year disclosure rule. The meeting, held last November, was closed to the public.

In a statement to MPs the following month, Foreign Office minister David Lidington said a portion of the files would be transferred over a six-year period.

However, it remains unclear what proportion of the archive will be transferred during this period. Although Lidington said the Foreign Office was “committed to meeting our public records obligations in as transparent a manner as possible”, the department has released no details of its transfer plan, declined to say how long it will be before all the files are made public and given no details of expected cost.[33]

It is hilarious to hear so many historians from Oxbridge to Harvard complaining of the underhand methods used by the British state to obscure its real history. Many are threatening legal action against the UK government and FCO to gain access to the information; others are in shock:

Mandy Banton, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, said it was “extremely likely” that the archive had been culled to remove material that would most damage the reputation of the UK and the Foreign Office. Banton, a Colonial Office records expert who worked at National Archives at Kew, south-west London, for 25 years, said she had been “very angry” when she discovered that the migrated archives had been withheld. “I would have been incandescent had I learned while still working there. In lying to me, the Foreign Office forced me to mislead my readers.[34]

Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King’s College London angrily added:

For decades, historians of diplomacy and empire have spoken of the “official mind”, and have assumed it was possible through diligent work in the Public Record Office to know the “truth” of how policy was made. What do we do now that we know officials have had such an extraordinary power to sculpt the archival trace? It seems likely that no one individual even knows what this Babel of documents actually contains. These collections have the potential to force historians to revise their explanations of such major diplomatic questions as the partition of Africa, and the origins of the first and second world wars[35]

Professor Margaret MacMillan, warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford complained:

I am one of many historians who has benefitted from using the British archives and who had confidence that the documents had not been weeded to suit particular interests. Now I am wondering whether I will have to go back and rethink my work on such matters as the outbreak of the first world war or the peace conference at the end. But when are we going to get the complete records? So far the pace of transferring them is stately, to put it politely[36]

The Guardian estimated the rate of declassification by the FCO employing its spoiling tactics and came to the conclusion that it would take 340 years, ironically longer than the history of the modern British Empire![37] What is really shocking is the naiveté of these academics in swallowing the British lie, hook line and sinker. After all, how do they think the Brit ruling class seized the Empire in the first place and then defended it? By telling the truth? By openness and honesty? As for the establishment historians of Britain and its Empire; Ferguson, Schama, Starkey et al.? The silence was and remains deafening.

Part 2

November 2013: Northern Ireland

The evolution of British death squads

Unfortunately, for the establishment historians of ‘Empire’ the 2013 Annus horribilis continued apace. In November some more pieces of the jigsaw of colonial repression undertaken by the British state in the mother country, that is Northern Ireland, also began to emerge. The BBC Panorama documentary Britain’s Secret Terror Force[38] exposed the activities of the Military Reaction Force (MRF) a secret British Army unit which operated in Belfast from the summer of 1971 to early 1973. The programme was based on a series of interviews with former MRF operatives who described the organisation’s tactics and a number of operations it undertook. From this and other evidence it appears that the MRF had two main purposes, intelligence gathering and an offensive mode which was primarily to assassinate (or if necessary apprehend) suspected members of the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) and its more important split the Provisionals (PIRA) as well as to generally terrorise the republican movement. The MRF’s actual offensive practice included targeted assassinations, random ‘drive-by’ attacks with automatic weapons on unarmed civilians, kidnapping and torture. In the context of the rest of this article, it is interesting to see how the BBC handled this particular fragment of hidden history of the activities of the British state. Consider the following passage which advertised the programme on the BBC website (my emphasis in bold):

In the early 1970s, the British Army ran a secret undercover unit. Its existence was deniable and its tactics were so controversial that the unit was disbanded after just 14 months. Now, for the first time in 40 years, some of the unit’s former members break their silence and talk candidly to John Ware about how they took the war to the IRA, sometimes even imitating the IRA itself. The soldiers believe they saved many lives. But Panorama’s new evidence reveals that some members of the unit operated outside the law, firing on and killing unarmed civilians. The Ministry of Defence says it has referred Panorama’s allegations to the police.[39]

A simple deconstruction would suggest:

  • The unit was short-lived, and by implication so were these ‘controversial’ tactics.

  • The MRF fought ‘dirty’ just like the IRA did and may have saved many lives.

  • Some operatives in the MRF went too far.

  • Something is being done about this by the MOD and the police.

Though what we actually have here is:

  • Isolation of this fragment of history from any contextual political-military strategy, tactics or policy during the war in N. Ireland.

  • Justification of the general tactics of the MRF in the context of the Irish conflict.

  • The use of some ‘bad apples‘ to obscure the practice of terror as a military policy and objective of the MRF.

  • Paternalism; the British state will investigate these ‘bad apples’ to see how bad they really were.

All of these tactics are standard practice in dealing with fragments of ‘controversial’ history concerning the British state. Of course, historians shouldn’t accept this nonsense. It would be like suggesting the Nazi counter-insurgency campaign in France during WW2 was an isolated ‘mistake’ but perhaps justified under the circumstances, the work of a few ‘bad apples’, or that the Nazi state would have investigated these miscreants and pressed charges after ‘stabilisation’ (sic) had occurred. Instead we have to look a bit deeper than this BBC fluff, albeit with the limited evidence we have available[40]. As briefly explained in the programme[41], the MRF was probably the inspiration of Brigadier Frank Kitson who pioneered and then theorised the post-WW2 British counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya[42], and was appointed commander of the 39th infantry brigade in Northern Ireland from 1970-72[43]. Kitson’s tactics for counter-insurgency in Kenya were based upon mirroring the tactics of the insurgents; that is capturing enemy operatives, ‘turning them’ and then along with specialist British army personnel setting up ‘counter-gangs’ (as Kitson calls them). Armed with the grass-roots knowledge of the insurgent double-agents these forces could then be used in a number of ways; to carry out surveillance in order to capture insurgents, as death squads to assassinate opponents or as terror units to demoralise the guerrilla’s civilian support base. Interestingly it did not take much imagination for states who employed these tactics to move towards the concept of ‘pseudo-gangs’, that is forming fake insurgent groups, equipping them with typical insurgent arms and kit and then directing them to carry out attacks which discredit the enemy or create confusion and divisions amongst dissenting civilian populations. Many of these tactics were present in the MRF, for example:

  • The MRF was a full on undercover unit; they were given false identities, dressed like their enemy, drove unmarked vehicles and prowled Republican areas looking for targets.

  • The MRF operated a series of ‘front companies’, that is business premises and vehicles which were used for surveillance purposes and for isolating potential targets for assassination.

  • Significant use was made of double-agents within the republican movement to provide intelligence information.

  • The MRF copied the style of attacks by loyalist para-militaries on republican areas, such as ‘drive-by’ shootings at community barricades. This exacerbated sectarian violence.

  • The MRF also began to act as pseudo-gangs employing weapons (such as the Thompson sub-machine gun) which were associated with the PIRA or OIRA in order to sow confusion amongst the victims of their attacks.

  • The MRF were colluding with loyalist para-militaries (often acting as pseudo-gangs) to carry out terror attacks on the republican/nationalist community[44].

All these forms of activity have the stamp of Kitson and his theories all over them, and if we want to believe it was just a bunch of senior ‘bad apples’ that were leading the British Army astray, then the BBC documentary has something interesting to say about this. Tony Le Tissier was a Major in the Royal Military Police brought in Belfast to deal with legal complaints against the army in Northern Ireland in the early 70s:

BBC Interviewer: “There were elements in the army that had imported a colonial approach to Northern Ireland”

Le Tissier: “Virtually the whole lot had imported this, it wasn’t just elements, it was a strong theme in the armed forces. That was the experience they were bringing to Northern Ireland… Well I mean you could do just about anything you wanted“[45]

The point is that these counter-insurgency strategies and tactics were entrenched in British Military theory by the early 1970s; the troops had been trained in these methods which had been employed in many places in the ’empire’ in the 50s and 60s[46] and were then applied to the colony of Northern Ireland[47]. This should come as no surprise. However, what should not be assumed is that the British Army had some kind of operational autonomy in Northern Ireland which allowed Westminster and Whitehall to duck responsibility for control of the ‘dirty war’. In fact the British Army’s own assessment of its involvement in Northern Ireland states:

At no stage in the campaign was there an explicit operational level plan as would be recognised today. This may appear surprising….It had been entirely normal to conduct campaigns, such as the Mau Mau or the Malayan Emergency, by a series of directives. The modern understanding of the operational level of war did not exist in the British Army until the mid-1980s[48]

These ‘directives’ came from Chief of the General Staff (the head of the British Army) who was directly responsible to the Secretary of State for Defence. So to a certain extent both Whitehall and Westminster were closer to day-to-day tactical control of the British Army in Northern Ireland in the 1960s-70s than they may have been if an operational plan had been agreed and the Army allowed to run it unmolested, as is more common today. The key points about all this are:

  • The British counter-insurgency doctrine was in place and had been tested in colonial wars.

  • Top level political and military authorities in London decided to apply it to Northern Ireland.

  • The Military Reaction Force was a small but important part of this counter-insurgency campaign.

The end of the MRF or a new strategy?

So what happened to the MRF? According to the BBC documentary the unit was wound down after an MOD report stated that there was “no provision for detailed command and control”[49] implying that it had gone ‘rogue’. What is certainly clear is that Republicans had begun to piece together the modus operandi of the MRF during 1972 and had concluded that their attacks on civilians were for two reasons:

Firstly, to draw the IRA into a sectarian conflict with loyalists and divert it from its campaign against the state; and secondly, to show the Catholic community that the IRA could not protect them, thus draining its support[50]

The problems of the MRF were that the terror attacks on republicans had left piles of civilian bodies on Belfast streets and some British soldiers had been ‘accidentally’ arrested by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) after drive-by shootings. Despite the ‘pseudo-gang’ approach of the MRF in hiding behind supposed sectarian violence, it wasn’t just Republicans who had become aware of these British Army ‘death-squads’. As a result of persistent rumours and press articles, official denials followed, for example in May 1972 the Army Under-secretary stated: “In no circumstances are soldiers employed to assassinate people or in any way which would involve deliberately going outside the law”.[51] It was no surprise that the Provisional IRA struck back against these British Army ‘terror squads’. In September 1972 the PIRA exposed two MRF double-agents, who were interrogated giving up valuable information about the MRF and were then summarily executed. In October the Belfast Brigade of the PIRA launched coordinated attacks against several of the MRF’s ‘front companies’ and claimed to have killed six members of the undercover unit[52]. This effectively shattered the MRF’s cover and is a far more plausible reason for the shut-down of the unit’s operations than a sudden change of heart in Whitehall. In fact, rather than a change of heart in the British state, it appears a modification of tactics was underway. The MRF seemed to ‘disappear’ in early 1973, but according to several sources was in fact reorganised as the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), expanded to over three times the number of active personnel and deployed more widely in Northern Ireland[53]:

In late 1972, according to a Northern Ireland Office brief, its (MRF) operations were brought under a more centralised control and a higher standard of training was introduced by establishing a Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) of 130 all ranks under the direct command of HQNI. It was classic British modus operandi in the wake of bad publicity – to re-form and re-name….The Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, sent a…minute to the Prime Minister on 28th November in which he sought agreement for the use of volunteers with SAS training as the basis for reorganising “the old Military Reaction Forces” into what became the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU). He agreed that….every attempt would be made to conceal SAS involvement[54]

The SRU is also noted in an April 1974 briefing for Prime Minister Harold Wilson which states:

The term “Special Reconnaissance Unit” and the details of its organisation and mode of operations have been kept secret. The SRU operates in Northern Ireland at present under the cover name “Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Teams (Northern Ireland)”

NITAT(NI)[55]

 So we have two Prime Ministers Heath and Wilson (Tory and Labour), briefed about the existence of the new, MRF inspired, secret Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU). This evidence clearly scotches any idea that Westminster was uninformed. The expanded SRU marked a move away from two phases of British Army engagement with the Republican movement and its armed wings. The first was the straight-forward deployment of Army units, in a colonial style, to put down protests and urban disorder. This had led to massacres of civilians in Belfast and Derry in 1971-2, which were international propaganda disasters for the British state and massively increased IRA recruitment. Their response to the intensification of armed Republican violence as a result of these and other incidents was to ‘take the war to the enemy’ using units such as the MRF. Within a year this tactic had been rumbled by the Republicans, so a new approach was needed. The subsequent phase had two main characteristics:

  • Comprehensive intelligence gathering as crucial to the counter-insurgency war.[56]

  • The use of proxy-groups (loyalist para-militaries) to carry out the targeted assassination and terror attacks against republican organisations and communities.

So rather than the British Army gathering intelligence and sending out its own assassination squads such as the MRF, the emphasis would be on coordinating all intelligence gathering by Special Army units, the RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment. This information would then be used to help inform and plan attacks on the Republican movement by loyalist paramilitaries[57]. The beauty of the approach was that British soldiers would not now be directly implicated in killings whether in uniform or under-cover. This would help neutralise Republican propaganda and could draw the IRA into retaliatory sectarian warfare, thereby diverting them from their primary objective of direct attacks on the British state in an attempt to force negotiations for their withdrawal. Collusion between British state and proxy-forces would take a number of forms; by the mid-1970s a number of collaborations were underway including:

  • The official Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) which sat right between the British Army command and the paramilitary groups. This was effectively a ‘dual card’ organisation.

  • Unofficial ‘terror’ networks such as the ‘Glenanne gang’ which was comprised of British soldiers from the UDR, police officers from the RUC, and members of the illegal para-military Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).[58]

  • Collaboration between special units in the British Army such as the SRU and the numerous loyalist paramilitary organisations.
Republican mural drawing attention to the complex web of organisations involved in the counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland
Republican mural drawing attention to the complex web of organisations involved in the counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland

The difficulty in disentangling the nature of this collusion is that it came in several forms. The active version involved the British state arming and supplying loyalist para-militaries with information on potential targets and then facilitating their operations on the ground. In some cases however the loyalist para-militaries were unaware of the ‘long-hand of Whitehall’, as operations were instigated by British double-agents in their organisations. They may have believed they were carrying out missions for the ‘loyalist’ cause, but in fact were being controlled indirectly from London. A large amount of collusion was passive, in the sense that the British state did not organise it, but instead allowed it to occur as it suited their aims. This appears to be the case within the RUC and UDR and their relationships with loyalist para-military organisations. There is also significant evidence that ‘unofficial’ secret networks such as the murderous ‘Glenanne gang’ which obscured their origins, were actually orchestrated by British Military Intelligence and RUC Special Branch.[59] The evolution of special British Army units such as the MRF from self-contained intelligence gathering and assassination/terror squads to organisations gathering information and colluding with loyalist para-militaries who would undertake the operations was paralleled by changes in policing and army structure. The emphasis in intelligence gathering was marked by a fundamental alteration of policing philosophy in the RUC in the early 1980s:

Within the RUC this change gave supremacy to Special Branch (SB), which could now decide who should or should not see particular intelligence, who should or should not be arrested and whether or not criminal investigations should or should not be carried out. Informers, whatever they did, from murder to exhortation, became the backbone of the new policing strategy and were to be protected at any cost.[60]

Similarly, the British army aimed at rationalising its intelligence gathering networks and operations:

It is now apparent that the reform of the police was part of a wider, more deadly security strategy that had been devised at the very highest echelons of government and included fundamental changes in the Army and the way it collected, collated and disseminated intelligence. Until 1977, each battalion ran its own agents who were then passed on after the four month tour of duty. This practice was stopped and brigades became responsible. A short time later in 1980 all intelligence gathering was centralised in what was euphemistically called the Force Research Unit (FRU), based in the Northern Ireland Headquarters in Lisburn (HQNI). It was tasked with the responsibility of looking after all recruits from all the various units of the armed forces. It trained them to go under cover in Northern Ireland. [61]

Republican mural explaining collusion between Force Research Unit operatives and the Ulster Defence Regiment
Republican mural explaining collusion between Force Research Unit operatives and the Ulster Defence Regiment

The FRU’s covert role was not only to coordinate the gathering, analysis and dissemination of intelligence information but also to run ‘double-agents’ in both the loyalist and republican para-military groups. How ‘double’ the loyalist agents were, is up for debate; there is plenty of evidence that the relationship between the FRU and loyalist paramilitaries was cosy and productive in terms of dead republicans. The FRU provided reams of intelligence information about republican targets, helped organise arms shipments to loyalist gunmen, facilitated para-military operations and protected operatives from arrest and prosecution[62]. The British Army’s assessment of its 37 year campaign in Northern Ireland Operation Banner states: “By 1980 almost all the military structures which eventually defeated PIRA were in place”[63]. Clearly the evolution of British repression from trigger-happy Paratroopers via Army under-cover terror units to paramilitary proxy death-squads was a key part of this supposed ‘victory’. It is interesting to note that the PIRA in Northern Ireland was slowly strangled during the 1980s to the point where loyalist paramilitaries were in the ascendancy:

Reorganised, armed, trained and directed by the British state, Loyalists groups intensified their campaign. During the 1980s, Loyalist groups had been responsible for about 25 percent of conflict related deaths, but from the early 1990s onwards they were responsible for well over 50 percent outgunning republicans. In the six year period from January 1988 to their ceasefire on 13 October 1994, they were responsible for 229 deaths, 207 of which were sectarian assassinations. Between 1989 and 1993, loyalists killed 26 members of the IRA, Sinn Fein and relatives of republicans… “These lethal attacks on both wings of the republican movement by the SAS and loyalist paramilitaries, as well as conventional attrition by the police and the army through the courts were no doubt an important contributory factor in the IRA’s decision to call a ceasefire in 1994”[64]

The evolution and use of the death squad during the struggle in Northern Ireland demonstrates both the ruthlessness and innovation of the British ruling class in its attempts to defeat the republican movement and hang onto Northern Ireland, bucking the trend of decades of colonial withdrawal. Now the so-called ‘victory’ has been achieved there are new problems for our rulers and their historians to contend with. As part of the ‘peace agreement’ in 2005 the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), a unit of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, was set up to investigate the 3,269 unsolved murders committed during the Troubles (specifically between 1968 and 1998). This has presented a number of problems for the British state as it has to maintain its historic image as the benign democratic state attacked by ruthless republican terrorists. Interestingly as a result of the HET investigations and demands of relatives of victims, the Provisional IRA has been making frank statements concerning many of those killed or executed by the organisation during the war.[65] No one expects ‘justice’ from the British state, but some ‘truth’ about systematic collusion with loyalist paramilitaries or the activities of British Army ‘death squads’ would at least allow us to write the history. I suspect this will not be forthcoming.

Epilogue: How to protect myths of the benign British state when the cat is out of the bag?

When faced with evidence of state sponsored murder, rape and torture and other crimes, there is an interesting parallel in the actions of ‘patriotic’ historians and their allies in the British ruling class. Both groups have an interest in protecting the benign ‘history’ of Britain and its Empire, although the latter may have more immediate concerns in dealing with the claims of victims and/or protecting the perpetrators. What is crucial to both is to avoid exposing patterns, policies or strategies systematically and consciously undertaken by the British state across time and geography. When caught out by ‘unethical’ (sic) use of information, there are a number of ways our rulers and their lackeys have learned to deal with the problem:

  • Temporal and spatial isolation: It is unusual for a great deal of damning information concerning the repressive activities of the British state to be released into the public domain. More typically, some investigative journalists write an article or make a documentary uncovering a particular incident or some fragment of hidden history. The approach of the journalists is in itself useful as it ‘ring-fences’ the issue by default. The rules are ‘keep it local’, do not disclose and hope it goes away.[66]

  • Discrediting the ‘whistle-blowers’: Persistent critics or witnesses need to be demeaned as unreliable sources, as ‘having an axe to grind’, a drug or alcohol problem or simply mentally ill.[67] Often personal information unrelated to the issue is leaked to the press by the state in order to undermine the ‘whistle-blower’ or victim.[68] Or a good old dollop of racism can do the job…after all “Africans make up stories”… don’t they?

  • The ‘inquiry’: Classically used by politicians and others to make some time for a ‘cover-up’ or for damage limitation. Inquiries create the idea that ‘something is being done’, despite the fact that the state usually withholds evidence and consequently it can take literally years to come to dubious conclusions. The aim is to draw a line under an incident, hopefully putting it to bed for good. State inquiries are also perfect for stifling debate about an issue, as politicians and other implicated figures can hide behind ‘I cannot comment as there is an inquiry underway’. It is also rare for inquiries to get translated into meaningful legal action. Perfect for delaying tactics, that can sometimes last decades.[69]

  • The ‘bad apple’ strategy: That is blaming and in some rare cases sacrificing a few low-level miscreants, in order to limit the issue to a local problem, rather than being systemic. For establishment historians it is symbolic, where the delinquent colonial administrator or military officer becomes responsible for the ‘crimes’ rather than a centrally driven policy or strategy of the British state. For the state it is a practical issue of deflecting blame away from the organisation and towards deviant individuals. If a sacrifice is required to bury the issue, then usually the ‘lamb’ is portrayed as having mental health problems or some other dysfunctionality.

  • The ‘justification’: Usually appears when the state officials (or historians) are on the ropes after their persistent denials have been exposed as lies. It is an appeal to the public to understand the context of some war crime or other in order to justify it. So the ‘troubles’ in Ireland suddenly become a ‘dirty war’ which justified assassination and torture; the torture camps in Kenya become necessary in order to fight the ‘psychopathic’ Mau Mau; and of course suspension of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition (international kidnapping) and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture) during the so-called ‘war on terror’ were essential to fight ‘Al Qaeda’.

  • The ‘statement of regret’: This is an end-game move for the state which is part of the process of ‘drawing a line’ under some infamous history. However, a ‘statement of regret’ is a (reluctant) benevolent gesture not a legal apology, that is, it is not an admission of responsibility. This protects the state from both compensation claims and crucially from exposure of comprehensive evidence of systematic crimes in the courts.[70]

End

 Notes

  1. [1] I Am The Owl from the Dead Kennedys’ album Plastic Surgery Disasters (1982) ↩

  2. [2]  “In June 1957, Eric Griffith-Jones, the Attorney General of the British administration in Kenya, wrote to the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, detailing the way the regime of abuse at the colony’s detention camps was being subtly altered. From now on, Griffith-Jones wrote, for the abuse to remain legal, Mau Mau suspects must be beaten mainly on their upper body, “vulnerable parts of the body should not be struck, particularly the spleen, liver or kidneys”, and it was important that ‘those who administer violence … should remain collected, balanced and dispassionate’. Almost as an after-thought, the attorney general reminded the governor of the need for complete secrecy. “If we are going to sin,” he wrote, “we must sin quietly.” – The Guardian 18/04/2012 – Sins of colonialists lay concealed for decades in secret archive ↩

  3. [3] Interestingly, “One of those abused was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barack Obama. According to his widow, British soldiers forced pins into his fingernails and buttocks and squeezed his testicles between metal rods. Two of the original five claimants who brought the test case against the British government were castrated”. It should be noted that the 10,000 claimants were selected on the basis that “they suffered personal injury and grievous bodily harm, such as castration or rape”. Compensation was not extended to the hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu who had their property and land seized from them by the colonial authorities, reducing them to poverty which remains to this very day. The Guardian 05/05/2013 – Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement ↩

  4. [4] See the BRHG article Kenya At Last ↩

  5. [5] See for example the film Injustice (2001/98 minutes/UK/Dir: Ken Fero & Tariq Mehmood/Migrant Media) http://vimeo.com/34633260, which the UK Police attempted to suppress in 2001 and has yet to be shown on national TV stations. Central to this film is the extraordinary length of time (sometimes decades) it takes in order to get an inquest verdict if police officers are suspected of ‘unlawful killing’. Achieving a conviction against police officers is of course almost impossible. ↩

  6. [6] Stephen Lawrence was murdered on 22 April 1993. Nearly twenty-one years later the full facts of the effect of police corruption on the original investigation have yet to be addressed. Another inquiry is underway: “The Home Secretary said an existing inquiry by Mark Ellison QC into allegations of corruption and incompetence by officers investigating Lawrence’s murder would now be widened to incorporate claims that undercover police spied on the family” The Independent 06/03/2012 – The Lawrence case is far from over  and The Guardian 24/06/2013 – Stephen Lawrence’s father demands judicial inquiry into police spying ↩

  7. [7] The Hillsborough disaster occurred on 15 April 1989. The crush resulted in the deaths of 96 people and injuries to 766 others. Despite more than 40,000 witnesses, the South Yorkshire Police force and an MP with the collusion of the national press conspired to cover up their crimes. The incident has since been blamed primarily on the police and remains the worst stadium-related disaster in British history and one of the world’s worst football disasters. Not a single police officer has been charged as yet. Wikipedia – Hillsborough Disaster ↩

  8. [8] Thirteen unarmed civilians taking part in a Civil Rights March in the Bogside area of Derry were shot dead by British Army paratroopers on 30 January 1971 (and a 14th died as a result later). It took nearly 40 years for the British state to issue a formal apology.Wikipedi – Bloody Sunday ↩

  9. [9] Eleven civilians were shot dead by British Army paratroopers between 9 and 11 August 1971, otherwise known as the ‘Ballymurphy Massacre’ or ‘Belfast Bloody Sunday’. “The families of the victims…seek acknowledgment from the British government that those killed were innocent of any wrongdoing”. As yet, more than 40 years later, this has not been forthcoming. Wikipedia – Ballymurphy_Massacre ↩

  10. [10] See The Guardian 01/11/2003 ↩

  11. [11] Wikipedia – Mau Mau Uprising and Huffington Post – The Mau Mau Were Vile, but So Was the British Response to Them ↩

  12. [12] In 2011 George Morara, a program officer with the Kenya Human Rights Commission stated “For the British government to continue to press its case for dismissal makes the issue ‘a war of attrition; these veterans are old.’ He estimated there are as many as 75,000 former Mau Mau fighters, scouts, and sympathizers still alive in Kenya. Most are 70 and older. Among the official claimants, the youngest is 75 and the oldest 84.” Harvard University News – Professor Elkins helps make the case that aged Kenyan veterans deserve justice. One of the five test case claimants, Susan Ciong’ombe Ngondi, died in 2010.  ↩

  13. [13] The Guardian 28/10/2012 – The Mau Mau may rewrite the history of the British empire ↩

  14. [14] This included the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, a host of civil rights organisations and politicians including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Vince Cable, and Professor Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture. Current United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, “called publicly on the government to ‘provide full redress to the victims, including fair and adequate compensation’, and writing privately to David Cameron, along with two former special rapporteurs, to warn that the government’s position was undermining its moral authority across the world”. See The Guardian 05/04/2011 -Kenyans sue UK for alleged colonial human rights abuses, BBC: Today Programme – Mau Mau blame ‘goes right to the top’ and The Guardian 05/05/2013 – Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement ↩

  15. [15] The Guardian 05/05/2013 – Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement ↩

  16. [16] The Guardian 05/05/2013 – Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement ↩

  17. [17] The Guardian 18/04/2012 – Sins of colonialists lay concealed for decades in secret archive ↩

  18. [18] The Guardian 07/04/2011 – Mau Mau victims seek compensation from UK for alleged torture ↩

  19. [19] ‘FCO statement on Mau Mau court judgement‘ ↩

  20. [20] The Guardian 05/05/2013 – Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement ↩

  21. [21] For example, Professor David Anderson author of Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. Weidenfeld & Nicholson (2005), Caroline Elkins author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Henry Holt (2005) and Dr Huw Bennett author of Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya. CUP (2012). All three acted as expert historians for the Mau Mau compensation cases. ↩

  22. [22] The Guardian 18/04/2012 – The colonial papers: FCO transparency is a carefully cultivated myth ↩

  23. [23] The Guardian 18/04/2012 – Sins of colonialists lay concealed for decades in secret archive ↩

  24. [24] The Guardian 18/04/2012 ↩

  25. [25]Ironically, “unethical use” probably meant exposing war crimes and other abuses of human rights. The Guardian 18/04/2012 – Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes ↩

  26. [26] The Guardian 18/04/2012 – Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes ↩

  27. [27]The Independent (I) 29 November 2013 p.21. ↩

  28. [28] The Guardian 25/07/2011 – It’s not just Kenya. Squaring up to the seamier side of empire is long overdue ↩

  29. [29] Wikipedia – Mau Mau Uprising ↩

  30. [30] The Guardian 21/10/2013 – Listening to the voices from Kenya’s colonial past ↩

  31. [31] “It was only the persistence of a handful of FCO officials, notably Edward Inglett, and a witness statement by Oxford professor David Anderson in December 2010 alleging ‘systematic withholding by HMG of 1500 files in 300 boxes taking up 100 linear feet’, that eventually resulted in the migrated archives coming to light in January 2011” – Wikipedia – Foreign and Commonwealth Office migrated archives ↩

  32. [32] The Guardian 20/01/2014 – Slave trade documents among illegal Foreign Office cache ↩

  33. [33] The Guardian 20/01/2014 – Slave trade documents among illegal Foreign Office cache ↩

  34. [34] The Guradian 18/10/2013 Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive ↩

  35. [35] The Guardian 27/10/2013 – The Foreign Office secretly hoarded 1.2m files. It’s historical narcissism ↩

  36. [36] The Guardian 13/01/2013 – Academics consider legal action to force Foreign Office to release public records ↩

  37. [37] The Guradian 18/10/2013 Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive ↩

  38. [38] You can watch the doc on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  39. [39] BBC: Panarama Britain’s Secret Terror Force ↩

  40. [40] According to the BBC documentary documents relating to the MRF were destroyed, but perhaps they are amongst the 66,000 files relating to Northern Ireland hidden in another secret vault by the MOD in Derby? See The Guardian 06/10/2013 – Ministry of Defence holds 66,000 files in breach of 30-year rule ↩

  41. [41] Panorama: Britain’s Secret Terror Force. See 19:15 to 20:15 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  42. [42] he two key texts (manuals?) which Kitson produced were Gangs and Counter-gangs (1960) and the seminal Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (1971) ↩

  43. [43] The 39th infantry brigade had previously seen service in counter-insurgency campaigns in both Kenya and Aden. It was deployed in Northern Ireland in August 1969 with responsibility for the security of Belfast and the eastern side of the province. Wikipedia – 39th Infantry Brigade ↩

  44. [44] For example, McGurk’s Bar bombing in Dec 1971, the most deadly attack in Belfast during the conflict, was attributed to the MRF who allegedly both organised the attack and with other security forces, helped the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) bombers enter and escape the area. Fifteen civilians were killed and seventeen injured in the attack. The original target was a bar frequented by the OIRA, but the UVF attackers were scared off and impulsively chose a softer target. The MRF planned to blame the attack on the Provisionals (PIRA) in order to divide the republican movement. Wikipedia – Military reaction Force ↩

  45. [45] Panorama: Britain’s Secret Terror Force. See 20:45 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  46. [46] In Kenya, Aden, Malaya and Cyprus. ↩

  47. [47] It is interesting how Le Tissier remarks in the film that such tactics were not appropriate to Northern Ireland; suggesting that either it is not a ‘colony’ or at least the full-on dirty war tactics are only applicable to colonial subjects rather than British citizens. Panorama: Britain’s Secret Terror Force. See 21:10 in  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  48. [48] Operation Banner: An analysis of military operations in Northern Ireland MOD (2006) Para. 408-9.  ↩

  49. [49] Panorama: Britain’s Secret Terror Force. See 55:40 in  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  50. [50] Wikipedia – Military reaction Force ↩

  51. [51] Panorama: Britain’s Secret Terror Force. See 17:16 in  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhI_vs1gAX0 ↩

  52. [52] The British Army only referred to one victim. Wikipedia – Military Reaction Force ↩

  53. [53] The SRU was deployed in three detachments based in Belfast, County Londonderry and Fermanagh. ↩

  54. [54] spinwatch – The long shadow of the Military Reaction Force ↩

  55. [55] Wikipedia – 14 Intelligence Company Interestingly, in the conclusion to the British Army assessment of their campaign in Northern Ireland, ‘Operation Banner: An analysis of military operations in Northern Ireland’ MOD (2006) Para. 856, a major tribute is paid to NITAT as ‘having high quality instructors and frequent visits to theatre so that troops deployed with confidence after training in appropriate tactics’. Is this a nod to the death squad? Operation Banner – An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland. ↩

  56. [56] Perfidious Albion: Cover-up and collusion in Northern Ireland by Paddy Hillyard ↩

  57. [57] “The De Silva report found that, during the 1980s, 85% of the intelligence loyalists used to target people came from the security forces” Wikipedia – The Troubles ↩

  58. [58] “It has been claimed that permutations of the group killed 120 people – all but one of whom were “upwardly mobile” Catholic civilians with no links to Irish republican paramilitaries. The Cassel Report investigated 76 murders attributed to the group and found evidence that British soldiers and RUC officers were involved in 74 of those.” Wikipedia – Glenanne Gang ↩

  59. [59] Collusion in the South Armagh / Mid Ulster Area in the mid-1970’s ↩

  60. [60]This change was hidden from the public for 20 years. Perfidious Albion: Cover-up and collusion in Northern Ireland by Paddy Hillyard ↩

  61. [61] Perfidious Albion: Cover-up and collusion in Northern Ireland by Paddy Hillyard ↩

  62. [62] Wikipedia – Force Research Unit ↩

  63. [63]Operation Banner: An analysis of military operations in Northern Ireland MOD (2006) Para. 812. ↩

  64. [64] The Irish Revolution – A history of the Provos – part three ↩

  65. [65] CAIN Web Service – Statements by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ↩

  66. [66] For example, spatial isolation; in the Mau Mau case the FCO claimed for many years that the issue was ‘local’ to Kenya and that the authorities in the Britain had no idea what was going on there. This defence was patently ridiculous and has now been proved to be so. Also, temporal isolation; the Military Reaction Force in Northern Ireland is portrayed as having a short, ‘rogue’ life before it is supposedly shut down as an embarrassing liability. This fragmented approach obscures the long-term strategy and tactics of the British state in dealing with the Republican movement. As we have seen the British state actually expanded its operations based on the MRF tactics with a similar (though more developed) approach to eliminating its military enemies and terrorising their supporting communities. ↩

  67. [67] Two recent examples include: Craig Murray, the ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who exposed systematic torture and rape of so-called suspects in the ‘war on terror’ by the regime to obtain what he called “dross” information for the CIA and MI6. Murray was accused of 18 offences by the FCO including being drunk and selling visas for sex; these were leaked to the press to discredit him. All the charges were eventually dropped, though Murray was removed from his post by the FCO for “operational reasons”. He finally resigned from the FCO after being charged for “gross misconduct” for speaking to the press about the torture allegations. Wikipedia – Craig Murray. The exposure of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret police unit used to infiltrate activist groups, by The Guardian and Channel 4 Dispatches programme in 2013 also uncovered the fact that its operatives had been used to spy on the family of Stephen Lawrence in order to gain information which could be used to discredit the campaign as well as family and friends of the victim. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIK5IAQkeII. In June 2013 right-wing journalist, nationalist and establishment historian, Max Hastings opposed paying the paltry compensation to the Mau Mau victims on the basis that 1950s “were a long time ago” and that the oral history evidence given by the victims “couldn’t be trusted”. ↩

  68. [68] In 2006, a completely bungled police operation involving 250 officers and costing more than £2 million in Forest Gate, East London led to raids on two innocent families and the shooting by police of 23 year-old Mohammed Abdul Kaha. Police subsequently ‘discovered’ indecent images of children on Kaha’s computer and mobile phone, which he strenuously denied having put there. No case was ever brought against Kaha as the CPS was not satisfied that he had the knowledge to transfer the images. However, the wounded Kaha had been successfully discredited and the origin of the images was never established. Wikipedia – 2 June 2006 Forest Gate Raid ↩

  69. [69] For example, the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 led to three inquiries (Taylor, Stuart-Smith and Hillsborough Independent Panel) spanning nearly 25 years. The first two attempted to definitively draw a line under the dubious official ‘history’ of the event, however thanks to the endurance of the campaigners, a cover-up which connected the police, politicians and the media was finally uncovered in 2010. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre carried out by the British Army in Derry in 1972, had two inquiries (Widgery and Saville), the first a complete ‘whitewash’ and the latter launched in 1998 took twelve years to come to a conclusion! ↩

  70. [70] The Foreign Secretary William Hague gave such a statement in June 2013 concerning the Kenyan ’emergency’ of 1952-63 but it had a significant caveat: “We continue to deny liability on behalf of the Government and British taxpayers today for the actions of the colonial administration in respect of the claims, and indeed the courts have made no finding of liability against the Government in this case. We do not believe that claims relating to events that occurred overseas outside direct British jurisdiction more than 50 years ago can be resolved satisfactorily through the courts without the testimony of key witnesses, which is no longer available….we will also continue to exercise our own right to defend claims brought against the Government, and we do not believe that this settlement establishes a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration.…” The BBC – Mau Mau torture victims to receive compensation – Hague ↩

POLITICAL PRISONERS – are they really “part of the solution”?

On By rebelbreezeIn Basque Country, History, Ireland, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, Kurdistan, National Liberation, Palestine, Peace Process, Political Analysis, Political Prisoners, Socialist Revolution, South Africa, Workers' StrugglesLeave a comment
Political prisoners
Political prisoners
Diarmuid Breatnach

Campaigners fighting for the release of individuals or of small groups of prisoners do not usually make the case that the release of those specific prisoners will affect the macro issues which led to their activism and encarceration. This has occurred on a number of occasions, however, those of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the Kurdish PKK leader Ocalan and Basque movement leader Arnaldo Otegi being cases in point.

However, when the numbers of prisoners is large, their release is often connected by the campaigners to the objective of resolution of the conflict.

 The line often taken is that “the prisoners are (or should be) a part of the resolution of the conflict” or that “release of prisoners is necessary to create goodwill” or “to win support for the resolution process”. These lines emerged here in Ireland, in Palestine, South Africa and in the Basque Country; they form part of a popular misconception, all the more dangerous because of its widespread acceptance and seductiveness.

At first glance this kind of line seems reasonable. Of course the political activists and the prisoners’ relatives, not to mention the prisoners themselves, want to see the prisoners home and out of the clutches of the enemy. The prisoners should never have been put in jail in the first place. And all the time they have been in the jail has been hard on them and especially on their relatives and friends. An end to the conflict is desirable and so is the release of the prisoners.

But let us examine the proposition more carefully. What is it that the conflict was about? In the case of the recent 30 years’ war with Britain, it was about Britain’s occupation of a part of Ireland, the partition of the country and the whole range of repressive measures the colonial power took to continue that occupation. In the case of the Basque pro-Independence movement, it was also about the partition of their country, occupation and repressive measures (particularly by the Spanish state). But what was the fundamental cause? In each case, occupation by a foreign state.

OK, so if Britain and the Spanish state ended their occupations, that would end the conflicts, would it not? It would end the anti-colonial conflicts – there would be no British or Spanish state forces for Irish or Basque national liberation forces to be fighting; no British or Spanish colonial administration to be issuing instructions and implementing repressive measures. Other struggles may arise but that is a different issue.

So, if Britain and the Spanish state pull out, leave, those struggles are over. What do prisoners have to do with it? They are obviously in that case not part of the solution, which is British or Spanish state withdrawal – though their release should be one of the many results of that withdrawal. Prisoners may well be part of rebuilding a post-conflict nation but that is a different issue. They are not part of “the solution”.


PART OF THE PACIFICATION

As pointed out earlier, here in Ireland it was said that “the prisoners are part of the solution” – and most of the Republican movement, some revolutionary socialists and some social democrats agreed with that. And British imperialism and most of Irish capitalism agreed too. But what happened? Only those Republican prisoners who agreed with the abandoning of armed struggle and signed to that effect were released. And they were released ‘under licence’, i.e. an undertaking to “behave” in future. And as the years went by, a number of those ex-prisoners who continued to be active —mostly politically — against the occupation, or against aspects of it like colonial policing, had their licences withdrawn and were locked up. Some who had avoided being prisoners because they were “on the run”, or had escaped – many of those, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, had been given guarantees of safety from future arrest but this too, it soon became apparent, could be revoked.

 In other words, the prisoners’ issue became part of imperialism’s ‘peace’ or, to put it more bluntly but accurately, part of imperialism’s pacification. The issue also became part of the selling of the deal within the movement, on one occasion prisoners being released early, just in time to make a grand entrance at a Republican party’s annual congress.

The release of prisoners can be presented by those in the movement supporting pacification as evidence of the “gains” of the process. Those who argue for the continuation of the struggle then find themselves arguing not only against those who pushed the pacification process within the movement but also against some released prisoners and their relatives and friends.

THEY ARE NOT LEAVING

 And prisoners continued to be hostages for the “good behaviour” of the movement. If British imperialism had left, there would have been no cause for the anti-colonial struggle to continue – so why would there be any need for any kind of release ‘under licence’ or any other kind of conditional release? Besides, the British would not be running the prisons in the Six Counties any longer. But the British are not leaving, which is why they need the guarantees of good behaviour.

Suppose the British were serious about leaving, sat down with the resistance movement’s negotiators and most details had been sorted out, including their leaving date in a few weeks’ time say, what would be the point for the British in trying to hang on to the prisoners? Can anyone seriously believe that they would take them with them as they left? If perhaps they had some in jails in Britain and were trying to be bloody-minded and hanging on to them there, well of course we’d want our negotiators to put as much pressure on the British as they could to release those as well.  It would be in the interests of British imperialism to release them but the reality is that the anti-colonial war would be over, whatever ultimately happened to those prisoners.

In South Africa and Palestine, the prisoners’ issue became part of the imperialist pacification process too. It did not suit the imperialists to have numbers of fighters released who would be free to take up arms against them again. So in South Africa, they were incorporated into the “security forces” of the corrupt new ANC state, forces the corruption and brutality of which were soon experienced by any who argued with them or opposed the policies or corruption of the ANC, NUM and COSATU leadership – including the two-score striking miners the “security forces” murdered over a couple of days at Marikana in 2012.

 In Palestine, the prisoners also became part of the “security forces” of Al Fatah after the shameful agreements at Madrid (1991) and Oslo (1993). The level of corruption of the Al Fatah regime and their “security forces” became so high that in order to oust them, in 2006 the largely secular Palestinian society voted for a religious party, the opposition Hamas. And then the “Palestinian security forces” took up arms against Hamas in order to deny them the fruits of their electoral victory. Unfortunately for them, Hamas had arms too and used them.

In both those countries, the occupiers had no intention of leaving and so it was necessary for them, as well as using the prisoners as bargaining chips, to tie them in to a “solution”. In fact, many of the prisoners became “enforcers” of the “solution” on to the people in their areas, i.e pacifiers in imperialism’s pacification process.

Teased out and examined in this way, we can see not only that the prisoners are NOT “part of the solution” but that accepting that they are plays right into the hands of the imperialists as well as facilitating their agents and followers within our movement, within our country.

Political prisoners, as a rule, are an important part of the struggle and need our solidarity. But for anti-imperialists, prisoners are not “part of the solution”, to be used as hostages for a deal with imperialism, even less as enforcers of a deal, forcing it upon the colonised people.

Our call, as anti-imperialists, without conditions or deals, is for the prisoners to be released and, while they remain in prison, to be treated humanely. We also call for them to be recognised as political prisoners. With regard to the solution to the conflict, there is only one: Get out of our country!

POSTSCRIPT:

The organisation representing relatives and friends of Basque political prisoners is Etxerat http://www.etxerat.info/. A separate organisation concentrating on campaigning, Herrira, has suffered a number of arrests and closure of offices by the Spanish state in 2013 and is under threat of outright banning.

Regrettably, I cannot give a similar link for Irish Republican prisoners, because of the existence of a number of organisations catering for different groups of prisoners and often with tensions between them. One day perhaps a united non-aligned campaign will emerge, along the lines of the H-Block campaign of the past, or the Irish Political Status Campaign that arose in London after the Good Friday Agreement. There is also a non-aligned Irish Anti-Internment Committee (of which I am a part), campaiging for an end to long periods of incarceration imposed on political “dissidents” through removal of licence, refusal of bail or imposition of oppressive bail conditions.

end

Did Mandela really change South Africa?

On By rebelbreezeIn Capitalism, History, Irish Left, Mass Media Criticism, National Liberation, Palestine, Peace Process, Political Analysis, Socialist Revolution, South Africa, Workers' Struggles2 Comments

[Article by TOM, a contributor to Socialist Voice, newspaper of the Communist Party of Ireland and reprinted with their kind permission.  In essence it agrees with the analysis of Mandela and South Africa given by Stephen Spencer and Diarmuid Breatnach in an article reviewing statements of the Irish Left and Republican movement following the death of Mandela — Rebel Breeze]

The presence of such friends of genuine democracy as the war criminals George W. Bush and Tony Blair, David Cameron, Bill Clinton and such right-wing media hangers-on as Sir Bob Geldof and Sir Paul Hewson (Bono) at Nelson Mandela’s funeral raises questions about the real content of the new South Africa that appeared in 1994, when the apartheid elite seemed to cede political power to the African National Congress.

Twenty years later, given the continuing racial inequality in present-day South Africa, the much lower life expectancy of blacks and their much higher rate of unemployment, the increased vulnerability of the country to world economic fluctuations and accelerated environmental decay during his presidency, did Mandela really change South Africa? And, if not, how much room had he to manoeuvre?

For many are still remembering the Mandela years as fundamentally different from today’s crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian South Africa. But could it be that the seeds of the present were sown earlier, by Mandela and his associates in government?

Ending the apartheid regime was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest events of the past century. But, to achieve a peaceful transition, Mandela’s ANC allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants and financial institutions, and to export vast quantities of capital.
The ANC could have followed its own revolutionary programme, mobilising the people and all their enthusiasm, energy, and hard work, using a larger share of the economic surplus (through state-directed investments and higher taxes), and stopping the flow of capital abroad, including the repayment of illegitimate apartheid-era debt. The path chosen, however, was the neo-liberal one, with small reforms here and there to permit superficial claims to the sustaining of a “National Democratic Revolution.”

The critical decade was the 1990s, when Mandela was at the height of his power, having been released from jail in February 1990, taking the South African presidency in May 1994 and leaving office in June 1999. But it was in this period, according to the former minister for intelligence services Ronnie Kasrils, for twenty years a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, that “the battle for the soul of the African National Congress was lost to corporate power and influence . . . We readily accepted that devil’s pact and are damned in the process. It has bequeathed to our country an economy so tied in to the neo-liberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the dire plight of the masses of our people.”

Nelson Mandela’s South Africa fitted a pattern, that of former critics of old dictatorships—whether from right-wing or left-wing backgrounds—who transformed themselves into neo-liberal rulers in the 1980s and 90s: Alfonsín (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haïti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Kim (South Korea), etc. The self-imposition of economic and development policies, because of the pressures of financial markets and the Washington-Geneva multilateral institutions, required insulation from genuine national aspirations—in short, an “elite transition.”

This policy insulation from mass opinion was achieved through the leadership of Mandela. It was justified by invoking “international competitiveness.” Obeisance to transnational corporations led to the Marikana Massacre in 2012 and the current disturbances on the platinum belt, for example. But the decision to reduce the room for manoeuvre was made as much by the local principals, such as Mandela, as it was by the Bretton Woods institutions, financiers, and investors.

Much of the blame, therefore, for the success of the South African counter-revolution must be laid at the door of the ANC leadership, with Nelson Mandela at its head. Hence the paeans of praise for the dead leader from the doyens of international reaction.
[TOM]

TONY BENN (1925-2014)

On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-Fascism, History, Ireland, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, Mass Media Criticism, National Liberation, Political Analysis, South AfricaLeave a comment
Tony Benn
Tony Benn

He was a friend of Ireland, it is true — I often heard him speak on Irish solidarity platforms in England. I don’t remember him supporting the hunger strikers in 1981, however. You may recall that Concannon, representing the Labour Party, visited the dying Bobby Sands to tell him that Labour would not support him or his comrades. In London, we marched to Benn’s house (VERY long, hot  march) to get him to break with Labour on this but I don’t remember whether we were successful.

In the balance must also be put that when Secretary of State for Energy in a Labour Government, along with the rest of the Gvt, he conspired to break the embargo on apartheid South Africa by covertly selling them oil routed through Portuguese African colonies.

Someone referred to him as an “Ant-fascist fighter” — I don’t know about that.  He served as a pilot in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa during the war.  Hundreds of thousands joined up during those years and many others were conscripted.  His reasons for joining could have been any, whatever  he may have said afterwards.  He certainly didn’t fight fascists on the streets of Britain as some did, both before and after the War.

RANT FOR MARGARETTA

On By rebelbreezeIn Anti-War, Capitalism, Civil Rights, Creative writing, Human Rights, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Irish Left, National Liberation, Poetry, Political Analysis, Rap, Rhyming Rapping & RantingLeave a comment

RANT FOR MARGARETTA

(click on the title immediately above to access the video)
(A mobile-friendly version is also available, click on the author’s name below the video and the other version should show).

RAP POEM, VIDEO IMAGES WITH MUSIC IN PROTEST AT THE 3-MONTH INCARCERATION OF MARGARETTA D’ARCY, 79 YEAR-OLD ACTIVIST AND DRAMATIST, BECAUSE OF HER PROTESTS AGAINST THE CONTINUING USE OF SHANNON AIRPORT BY THE US MILITARY IN COLLUSION WITH SUCCESSIVE IRISH GOVERNMENT IN VIOLATION OF OUR NEUTRAL STATUS.

RANT FOR MARGARETTA

Diarmuid Breatnach

Forgive my confusion …

I was under the illusion …

or was it a delusion?

That we are a democracy,

not an autocracy

nor yet a plutocracy ….

That we citizens had the right

to decide whether a war to fight;

That we could choose with whom to ally …

Or was that all a cruel lie?

Listen now to the warning bell,

an Irish citizen in a prison cell;

Put there for taking a stand

against murder in foreign lands.

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

Well yes, it was all a delusion

and our government’s in murder collusion;

To murder planes turns a blind eye,

making accomplices of you and I!

Because the US is a superpower,

before them are we supposed to cower?

Are we to turn our hearts to stone,

to ignore the unmanned murder drones?

Surely not! Margaretta stands not alone —

we are of her blood and of her bone!

Listen now to the warning bell,

an Irish citizen in a prison cell;

Put there for taking a stand

against murder in foreign lands.

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

Our rulers fumble in a greasy till,

They never cared and never will:

Little women and little men,

Hucksters and middle men —

Believe me they don’t dither

to sell us out to the highest bidder!

Ach seo hé an scéal,

this is the story:
Ní chuirfidh muid fáilte

roimh – dúnmharthóirí!

Listen now to the warning bell,

an Irish citizen in a prison cell;

Put there for taking a stand

against murder in foreign lands.

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

Drone in the sky: someone’s crying …

Drone in the sky: someone’s dying …

If we allow it then we share the blame

so say we all: NOT IN OUR NAME!

Visitors are welcome from any land

but don’t come here with bloody hands;

Using Shannon as a staging post,

making our land a murder host —

we won’t pretend that we don’t know —

like Margaretta, we’re saying “NO!”

Listen now to the warning bell,

an Irish citizen in a prison cell;

Put there for taking a stand

against murder in foreign lands.

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

FREE MARGARETTA D’ARCY! FREE HER NOW!

 

 

HOW TO SILENCE AN ETHNIC COMMUNITY

On By rebelbreezeIn Civil Rights, History, Ireland, Irish Diaspora, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, National Liberation, Political Analysis4 Comments

Diarmuid Breatnach, Feabhra 2014.

When the civil rights movement began in 1968 in the Six Counties, the general attitude in Britain, on the street and even in much of the media, was supportive of the campaigners.  This was reinforced by the majority of the Irish community there, an estimated average of 10% of the population of most British main cities.  The Irish were the largest ethnic minority in Britain and the longest-established, constantly renewed by high emigration since the Great Hunger of 1845-1849 (although seasonal and other migration had been a pattern long before that).

In the Six Counties, the sectarian police force were unable to vanquish the resistance  and “liberated areas” emerged.  The British imperialist ruling class could no longer tolerate this state of affairs and sent in its Army to “restore order” and also to “clear the no-go areas”.   As the Provisional IRA (mostly), later also the INLA, entered the struggle against the British Army in the Six Counties, the mood in Britain began to shift somewhat.  After all, a British soldier dead meant a British family mourning, whilst the same did not apply at all with an RUC or B-Special killed (however they might think of themselves as “British”).  But still the Irish community in Britain held the line in solidarity with the support of large sections of the British Left (many of whom happened to be Irish or of Irish descent as well).  Regular demonstrations were held, as well as pickets and public meetings.  People wrote leaflets and letters.  Solidarity delegations were sent.  MPs were lobbied to ask questions in the House of Commons, which some did.

The introduction of Internment without trial in the Six Counties in 1971 was strongly protested, as was the Ballymurphy Massacre by the Paras that same year.  The Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972 led to protests in many areas of Britain, including solidarity strikes on building sites and a huge demonstration in London — as the head of the wide packed march passed Trafalgar Square on its way to Downing Street, the end of it was still leaving Hyde Park Corner, where it had begun some time earlier, about 3 kilometres away.  When the lines of police in Whitheall stopped those leading the march from presenting thirteen “coffins” to No.10 Downing Street, the residence of the Prime Minister, some of the “coffins” were thrown at the police and a riot began.  Nor was it the only riot — an earlier march had tried to break through the heavy police cordon in front of Northern Ireland House at Green Park, a couple of mounted police had been knocked off their horses and the demonstration had ended with protesters being chased through Green Park by police on foot and in vehicles.

Protests even made it into the House of Commons as in 1970 when an Irishman called Roche threw a tear gas cannister in among MPs to make them aware of the tons of CS gas being pumped into the Bogside and other areas by the RUC (later by the British Army too),  while in 1972, after Bloody Sunday, then People’s Democracy MP Bernadette Devlin (now McAlliskey and no longer an MP) walked up to the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, and slapped him in the face.

The IRA bombing campaign in Britain in particular impacted negatively to some extent on sympathy for the Irish struggle but solidarity from the Irish community, along with large elements in the British Left was still strong, despite some potentially lethal explosions such as postal pillar box bombs and the Post Office Tower bombing in 1971, which luckily did not cause any injuries.  All that was to change in 1974.

The Birmingham Pub Bombing

In October and November 1974, the Guildford and Woolwich Pub Bombings killed six soldiers and two civilians whilst a further sixty-five people were injured (mostly in the Guildford explosion, where five of the dead had been).  The pubs had been in regular use by personnel of the British Army but were also used by a number of civilians.

In between those two bombings, another two bombs exploded in completely civilian bars in Birmingham, killing 21 and injuring 182.  It stunned the Irish community and the friendly British Left.  The media of course went to town with “Bastards!” being used as a headline for the first time by a British tabloid, over a photograph of the atrocity.  At first no-one claimed the Birmingham bombing and then it was denied by the IRA, who up to then had a very reliable record with regard to taking ownership of events (which could not be said of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or of the British Army).  Some kind of “black operation” was the suspicion of many.  As we know now and as some in the IRA admitted quite some time later, it had been an IRA bomb and the person whose responsibility it had been to telephone the warning, in a time long before mobile phones, had found a number of out-of-order public telephone kiosks and the warning had been too late.

Up to then, the Midlands IRA unit or units had been exploding bombs at targets without injury to civilians when one of their volunteers, James McDade, was killed in a premature explosion while planting a bomb at a telephone exchange in Coventry.  His remains were prepared for return to Ireland and burial in his native Belfast.  McDade had been well known in the Birmingham Irish community and through much of the Midlands as a talented GAA (Gaelic sports) player and was popular as a singer with a tenor voice.  Eddie Caughey, of the Birmingham branch of Provisional Sinn Féin (later the party closed down all branches outside Ireland), was among others accompanying the coffin on McDade’s last journey.  Another group of people set off from Britain to attend the funeral, including five Irishmen from the Six Counties resident in Birmingham, catching a train to connect with the ferry at Heysham.

Coincidentally, the Birmingham group arrived for the Heysham ferry the same evening as the Birmingham bombs exploded, although they were unaware of this.  The five men were taken from the ferry at Heysham by police and interrogated, later beaten up by the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad and threatened with guns and dogs, four of them forced to confess to things they had not done; they were then were charged with multiple murder along with another Irishman from the Six Counties who had seen them off at the New Street Birmingham train station.  They six men were taken to Winson Green prison where they received another savage beating from screws so that when they turned up in court all were bruised and battered.  One screw witness many years later was reported to have said that he had not participated and found the brutality sickening (he may have been the inspiration for the scene in the H-Blocks 2008 film “Hunger” directed by McQueen, where a screw hides away from the other screws in riot gear as they go in to beat the “blanket men”).

The six Birmingham Irish were found guilty in a travesty of a trial and became “the Birmingham Six”.  Another three, at least one of whom was an IRA volunteer and probably the organiser of the bombings, were convicted on charges relating to explosives and received nine years’ jail.

The Birmingham Six in 1974
The Birmingham Six in 1974 — innocent but Irish in Britain — sixteen years in prison, twenty-six before compensated. No state employee has ever been convicted for this deliberate injustice.

Subsequent appeals and prosecutions by the Birmingham Six of officers for assault etc. were all dismissed or ruled out of order by the state judicial system. Individuals in the Irish community, such as Sr. Sarah Clarke, began to campaign for them. In 1976, Fr.s Raymond Murray and Denis Faul in the Six Counties published their booklet The Birmingham Framework: Six innocent men framed for the Birmingham Bombings.  In 1981 the newly-formed Irish in Britain Representation Group became the first wide Irish community organisation in Britain to take up their case and made representations on behalf of the Six, including to the Irish Embassy in London (“The Birmingham who?” asked the Ambassador at the time, according to some IBRG who participated in the delegation).

In 1985 after repeated lobbying by the Birmingham Six Campaign, the IBRG and individuals, World In Action (Granada, ITV) made the first programme throwing doubt on the guilt of the Six. A year later, Chris Mullins (a researcher for the World in Action programme and later an MP and a Government Minister) published his book declaring their innocence. Campaigning continued in Britain and in Ireland.

But it was not until 1991, SIXTEEN YEARS after their unjust conviction, that they were finally released, their convictions quashed. The lives of many of them were ruined — marriages had broken up, livelihoods were gone, some never recovered from the trauma. It was not until ANOTHER TEN YEARS before they were awarded financial compensation.

Not one judge, one police officer or one prison officer was ever convicted of assault or perversion of the cause of justice. The British forensic scientist whose “evidence” and “expertise” were used to sway the jury to convict the Birmingham Six, Frank Skuse, suffered a blow to his professional reputation but that was all.

The impression is often given that the Birmingham Six jury was blinded by expert forensic evidence and/or that it could not be known then that the evidence was wrong. But it is also often forgotten that Skuse’s “evidence” contained contradictions suggesting interference and that his forensic conclusions were contested at the trial by those of another forensic practitioner, Dr Hugh Kenneth Black FRIC, the former HM Chief Inspector of Explosives, Home Office. The judge chose to believe Skuse and to sway the jury in that direction. Part of the judgement of the Court of Appeal that freed them in 1991 was that  “Dr. Skuse’s conclusion was wrong, and demonstrably wrong, judged even by the state of forensic science in 1974.”

The Guildford and Woolwich Pub Bombings

In 1977, the “Balcolme Street” IRA unit (so named because of the address where they were trapped and besieged before capture) informed the authorities through their trial lawyers that they were responsible for the Guildford and Woolwich bombings.  This was an unprecedented step for the IRA but their claim was denied by the State.  The Home Office accepted in a memorandum at some point later that the Guildford Four were “probably not terrorists” but thought there was not enough to justify their release.  Eventually falsified police notes were found by an investigating police detective and they were used as a reason to throw doubt on the whole case against the Four and they walked free in 1989.  They had spent fifteen years in British jails and the father of one, Gerry Conlon, had died in prison.

Guildford Four
The Guildford Four around the time of their arrest in 1974. Three of them were Irish in Britain but although obviously not anything like IRA, were framed and jailed. No state employee has ever paid for this crime against them or the other Irish framed prisoners.
Giuseppe Conlon
Giuseppe Conlon, who came to London to help his son Gerry when he heard of his wrongful arrest for the Guildford Pub Bombings. Incredibly, he was also convicted, along with the Maguire Seven — all innocent, but Irish in Britain. Giuseppe Conlon died in prison before the Maguire Seven were finally found “not guilty” on appeal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Maguire Seven had to wait another two years before their convictions were quashed in 1991, so that they spent 17 years in British jails. The court accepted that members of the London Metropolitan Police beat some of them into confessing to the crimes as well as withholding information that would have cleared them (this last was also a feature of the Guildford Four case).

In 2005, Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, apologised to the surviving ten and to relatives of all the eleven for their “ordeal and injustice”.  The British media, which had played a key role in creating the public atmosphere in which huge injustices could be and were done, never apologised nor even reviewed their procedures and guidelines and in fact even after their release, one British tabloid had to pay out libel compensation for suggesting that some of the framed prisoners were guilty but had got off on some kind of technicality.  And again,  not one forensic expert, not one Judge or state Minister was ever charged; some detectives were eventually charged with perjury but were never tried, nor were they ever charged with assault — not to mention torture.

The Prevention of Terrorism (sic) Act 1974

Back at the time when those bombings occurred, a legal measure of huge importance was being planned: at the end of November 1974,  the Prevention of Terrorism Act was rushed through British Parliament.  The PTA superseded the regulations requiring the police to charge a suspect within 48 hours and to bring them before a judge as early as possible or to release them on bail.    The PTA legislation permitted holding of “suspects” for 5 days without charge and without access to lawyers, visitors or their own doctor; it also permitted stopping and questioning and searching without need to establish a reason and house raids and searches.  Later this power was extended to seven days.

Finally, it permitted exclusion from Britain and deportation to the Six Counties (even though that was classed as part of the United Kingdom and therefore constituted internal exile), without any need to charge or show evidence of wrongdoing.  One victim of such banning for a number of years was Brendan McGill, Provisional Sinn Féin organiser in Britain at the time (but who joined Republican Sinn Féin in 1986; deceased in 2011); he was banned from Britain despite having been a resident  for 21 years and had his home, family and a shop in London.

Inside Birmingham Pub Bombing
Inside the Mulberry Bush, one of two target pubs in Birmingham in which 21 people were killed and 182 injured by two failed-warning IRA bombs in 1974. The horror helped disarm people ideologically and prepared the public, including the Irish diaspora, for the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and a campaign of terror against the Irish community in Britain.

It was clear to observers that the Act had been already in preparation; the shocking Birmingham explosion a few weeks earlier provided the right atmosphere for its introduction.  Eddie Caughey, the Birmingham-based Irish Republican who had accompanied the remains of IRA volunteer James Mc Dade to Belfast, became the first person to be detained and questioned under the PTA but that was to happen to thousands in the decades to follow, nearly every one of them Irish.  According to the West Midlands PTA Research & Welfare Association (set up by Midlands activists of the IBRG), 7,192 people were detained under the PTA between 1974 and 1992.  Only 629 of these (8.7%) were subsequently charged with any offence and most of those were totally unrelated to any “terrorist” acts.  Even when charges came under the Act they were only such charges as being a member of a proscribed organisation, assisting a proscribed organisation etc; one such conviction was of a young man for having pro-IRA posters and a badge in his possession.

Again according to the West Midlands organisation, 86,000 people each year between 1987 and 1990  were ‘examined’ for more than an hour at British ports and airports under the PTA.  The watchdog organisation admits that these are only recorded stops and also did not include anyone stopped at a port or airport for less than an hour.

It only happened to me once: travelling alone from London home to Dublin on holiday with my daughter of seven years, I was taken aside by Special Branch at Heathrow and questioned as to my London address, occupation, destination in Ireland, length of stay and purpose in travelling to Dublin.  The questioning was not heavy and probably lasted less than ten or fifteen minutes and, unlike many others, I was not made to miss my plane.  But it was really frightening to know that I could be taken in for up to seven days and the overarching apprehension was about what would happen to my daughter.   Those days it was not unusual for people, as did I, to make arrangements if they were not going to be met upon arrival, to telephone a friend or family each side, so that in the absence of such, enquiries could be initiated with the police.

“PTA Telephone Trees” were established and those who volunteered for service on them might receive a phone call in the early hours of the morning to say that this or that person had been arrested, or was missing, and to begin making phone calls to other people on the “tree” and/or to a named police station.  The purpose of the calls was not only to gather possible information (the police often denied the presence of someone known to be in their cells) but also to make the police aware that their detainees had friends outside who were making enquiries.

It was a testament perhaps to the level of fear engendered that although Irish solidarity pickets were taking place in various places, including of course London, it was not until the early 1990s that a picket was first placed on Paddington Green Police station, the usual destination of people detained under the PTA in London. “The Lubyanka of the Irish Community”, with its sixteen windowless underground cells, too hot in summer and too cold in winter, with a 7-day incommunicado detention period, was frightening enough but had developed a terror mystique.

It was a Kilburn-based British Left group (but with high Irish membership and which had been expelled from the Troops Out Movement) which placed the first pickets on Paddington Green  and some time later the Saoirse campaign and the Wolfe Tone Society (Provisional SF support group in London) did so too.  These symbolic acts helped to somewhat erode the terror of the place but the overall atmosphere had been dispelled by the mobilisations in solidarity with the Hunger Strikers a decade earlier.

Spokespersons of the Irish community and some others repeatedly warned the British Left, social-democratic and liberal sections of society that if they allowed the PTA to be used temporarily against the Irish community, it would become permanent; and if they allowed it against the Irish community it would be used against others later.  In 1991, an article published by conservative British newspaper The Telegraph complained that the police were using “anti-terror” legislation against people who were clearly political protesters; the article cited 1,000 anti-war demonstrators including an 11-year-old child at Aldermaston and 600 protesters at a Labour Party Conference, including an 84-year-old man, all of whom had been questioned under “anti-terror” legislation (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3620110/The-police-must-end-their-abuse-of-anti-terror-legislation.html?fb).  Since then, Muslim communities have also complained about the way in which “anti-terror” is used against them, in violation of their civil and human rights.

Repressive legislation labelled “anti-terror” in Britain since the 1970s began with the PTA and detention for five days, then for seven; subsequent legislation authorised it for 14 days; an attempt was made to extend it to three months on police recommendation but failed in Parliament; however the Terrorism Act 2006 authorises 28 days detention without charge.

Not “miscarriages of justice” but exercise in mass intimidation

The convictions and jailing of innocent Irish people were not “miscarriages of justice” but rather an exercise in the mass intimidation and coercion of the Irish community in Britain by the British state. The jailing of six innocent men for murder in 1975, who would have been hung were the death sentence for murder still on the statutes, was part of a campaign of terror against the Irish community in Britain which included the Prevention of Terrorism (sic) Act in 1974 and the convictions of Judith Ward (1974), the Maguire Seven (1975) and Guildford Four (1975).

As remarked earlier, the Irish community in Britain was the largest and longest-established ethnic minority in Britain; it was and had long been a source of solidarity to the struggle in Ireland.  It had also contributed significantly to the British Left and the struggle for socialism in the past:  Bronterre O’Brien and Feargus O’Connor were renowned leaders of the Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s, The Red Flag was written by Jim Connell in 1889, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists was written by Robert Tressell (real name Noonan) in 1914, the Irish were to the fore in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and so on.

Chartist demo
Artist’s illustration of Chartist demonstration in Britain. The largest-ever popular political movement of the working class in Britain, two of its leaders were Irish.

The British police had a long hostile relationship with the Irish diaspora, both because of the social position and conditions of the majority of the Irish community but also due to the Irish diaspora’s support for the struggle “back home”.  Scotland Yard set up “The Irish Special Branch” to gather intelligence on pro-Fenian activity in the Irish communities in the cities in British cities during the later 19th Century — it was later renamed simply “the Special Branch”, as they are (politely) known today in Britain, the Six Counties and in the Twenty-Six.

Irish communities could be insular in some places and Irish “ghettos” existed: among “The Rookeries” in London (several areas around the city centre) and Wapping, “Little Ireland” in Manchester and so on.  But the community also had a high impact on the British working class, particularly in England and in Scotland but also in Wales (the SW Miners’ Federation originally featured Connolly’s image on their banner, alongside those of Lenin and Kier Hardie).  The Irish community were ideally placed to call for solidarity for the anti-imperialist struggle in the Six Counties and to counter British media disinformation and censorship.  In most places, Irish worked alongside British workers, married among them, followed sports teams and also played sports with them.  In many places they also lived in the same streets or housing blocks.

The British ruling class realised the potential of the Irish diaspora in Britain even if the Provisionals seemed not to.  When ordinary repression — surveillance, questioning, agents provocateurs, spies and informers, arrests and occasional police charges into demonstrations, along with a hostile media campaign — did not work, something stronger was needed.  Very repressive legislation, a high level of arrests, thousands of detentions and jailing of 18 (there were a few other cases too) innocent people in four different high-visibility trials might work instead.  Especially if allied to some atrocity with which most Irish people could not agree, so that they felt morally undermined too.  For a while, with the combination of the Birmingham Pub Bombing, the framing for murder of innocents and the Prevention of Terrorism, largely this approach did work, with most of the Left running for cover and most of the Irish community keeping their heads down.

Many, many people in the Irish community in Britain knew for certain that the Maguire Seven, Guildford Four and Judith Ward were not IRA and could not be: the Guildford Four were living in a squat, taking drugs and engaging in petty crime and Judith Ward had been mentally ill and had accosted police to claim responsibility for a bombing.  The Maguire Seven were a family including two minors, a family friend and a relative, Giuseppe, who had travelled over from the Six Counties to support his son Gerry of the Guildford Four.   The feeling that the Birmingham Six were innocent too quickly gained momentum. But for the British authorities, it was actually GOOD that the Irish community knew they were innocent because, if innocent people can go to jail for murder, everyone is vulnerable and the only possible way to safety would be to keep one’s head down and one’s mouth shut.

This was the period in which the Troops Out Movement (TOM), initially founded to bring Irish solidarity into the broad British society, the Left and trade unions, largely abandoned that task and began instead to concentrate on the Irish community.  In that pool were now swimming Irish Republican political activists, the IBRG, TOM, some British Left and, in some places the Connolly Association.

Hunger Strike solidarity Britain
One of many Hunger Strikers solidarity march in Britain 1981. The effort to save the ten brought the Irish and some of the British Left out on to the streets, effectively breaking the terror grip of the Prevention of Terrorism (sic) Act and the jailing in separate murder trials of an innocent score of Irish people.

It was the Hunger Strikes of 1981 that broke the stranglehold of repression and fear on the Irish community and brought them out on to the streets again, in solidarity with prisoners and trying to save the Hunger Strikers’ lives.  And after a columnist in The Irish Post noted that Bobby Sands had died during the AGM of the Federation of Irish Societies in Britain and not one word from the top table had marked his passing, not even in condolences to Sands’ family, it also led to the founding of the Irish in Britain Representation Group, a broad organisation campaigning on a wide range of issues, from anti-Irish racism in the media to framed Irish prisoners, from a fair share of resources from local authorities to self-determination for the Irish people in Ireland.

Irish solidarity work enjoyed a resurgence for the next decade and longer but external influences began to affect the work and divisions arose as the long road to the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland began to pull and push against different elements in the solidarity movement in Britain.  But that’s another story.

End.

¿CÓMO PUEDE UN PUEBLO DERROTAR A UN INVASOR MÁS FUERTE O A UNA POTENCIA OCUPANTE?

On By rebelbreezeIn Análises Político, Historia, History, Internationalist Solidarity, Ireland, Irish Diaspora, Irish Left, Irish Republicanism, Irlanda, Izquierda Irlandesa, La Diáspora Irlandesa, Liberación Nacional, Luchas Obreras, National Liberation, Peace Process, Political Analysis, Proceso de Paz, Republicanismo Irlandes, Revolución Socialista, Socialist Revolution, Sud Africa, Workers' Struggles11 Comments

Diarmuid Breatnach

Noviembre de 2012 (ligeramente revisado enero 2014)

(Originalmente in inglés y traducido por

Miguel Huertas)

PRESENTACIÓN

La pregunta de cómo una nación sería capaz de derrotar a una potencia imperialista o colonial más fuerte que ha invadido su territorio ha ocupado la mente de muchos revolucionarios – principalmente demócratas patriotas (en Irlanda, “republicanos”) y socialistas. La Historia mundial nos muestra algunas victorias en esta lucha, como la de los vietnamitas contra EEUU. No obstante, también muestra victorias parciales, en las que el poder colonial fue forzado a retirarse pero los nuevos gobernantes del país entregan la independencia que ya tenían en sus manos y se convierten en clientes del antiguo poder colonial o en una nueva potencia imperialista.

La historia de la lucha por el socialismo y la de liberación nacional, separada pero conectada de numerosas maneras, nos a entregado muchos ejemplos de los que extraer lecciones generales que puedan ser aplicadas a las luchas de la misma naturaleza en el presente, el pasado, y el futuro.

 

VIETNAM

Los vietnamitas tenían a los franceses prácticamente derrotados cuando fueron invadidos por los japoneses, quienes al perder la Segunda Guerra Mundial tuvieron que devolver la mitad del territorio a los franceses, que a su vez se lo entregaron a EEUU, la nueva superpotencia imperialista que había emergido de la Guerra.

Los vietnamitas, en un país que es más pequeño que el Estado de Virginia, combatieron contra EEUU durante otros veinte años, sufriendo tremendos daños y finalmente derrotándoles. Estados Unidos contaba con el ejército mejor equipado del mundo, con la economía más poderosa y una tecnología en constante desarrollo, con una gran población de la que movilizar soldados y un gran presupuesto militar. Y aun así los vietnamitas vencieron.

Vietnamese guerrillas -- the guerilla forces and the North Vietnamese Army together defeated the huge superpower the USA
Guerrilleras vietnamitas — las fuerzas guerilleras y el Ejército Norte Vietnames juntos derrotaron a la gran superpotencia los EEUU.

Por supuesto que estaban luchando por su tierra natal, por supuesto que eran valientes, inteligentes y se adaptaban. Pero esas virtudes, por sí solas, podrían no haber sido suficientes. Tenían otros factores a su favor. Ya tenían liberado la mitad del país (Vietnam del Norte), y EEUU no podía invadir ese territorio sin arriesgarse a que China o incluso la Unión Soviética entrasen en conflicto directo con ellos. Esa parte del país permaneció durante muchos años como una retaguardia segura para los vietnamitas que combatían en las filas de la guerrilla del Viet Cong, y para los soldados regulares del Ejército de Vietnam del Norte, de quienes podían conseguir armas y otros materiales.

En el área de las relaciones internacionales, los vietnamitas tenían el respaldo de la República Popular de China, que podía aprovisionar les con armas y equipo.

En política internacional, todas las fuerzas anti-imperialistas les apoyaron, aislando a EE.UU. políticamente. Ese hecho, combinado con la tasa de mortalidad de los soldados estadounidenses junto con la progresiva radicalización de la juventud, creó un poderoso movimiento contra la guerra imperialista dentro de los propios Estados Unidos que jugó un papel importante minando la moral del personal militar de EEUU destinado en Vietnam.

A powerful movement of opposition to the Vietnam War within the USA itself
Un movimiento potente de oposición a la Guerra de Vietnam dentro del mismo EE.UU.

Los vietnamitas también tenían el apoyo del régimen laosiano y de potentes fuerzas anti-imperialistas en Camboya, quienes proporcionaban pertrechos y rutas de escape alternativas para la guerrilla vietnamita.

El territorio de Vietnam es montañoso, con valles y planicies cubiertas de junglas y arboledas de bambú o con “pasto elefante”, una hierba de altura superior a una persona. Escondía perfectamente a la guerrilla y a unidades regulares del ejército.

Vietnamese liberation forces tank crashes through the gates of the US Embassy in Saigon as liberation forces take the city from the US puppet regime after US forces left
Tanque de las fuerzas de liberación vietnamitas rompe la puerta de la Embajada de los EE.UU. en Saigon tras las fuerzas de liberación tomar la ciudad desde el régimen títere de EE.UU. después de que las fuerzas estadounidenses se fueron

Y, quizá crucialmente, el monopolio capitalista de EE.UU. podía permitirse perder la parte sur del Vietnam – no estaba integrado en su territorio, ni siquiera en su “patio trasero” (como suelen pensar de América Latina). La pérdida les costó prestigio, algo importante para una superpotencia mundial, así como moral en su propio país. Su clase dominante estaba decidida a no perder, y combatieron duramente para ganar, pero las consecuencias políticas y las bajas eran tan elevadas que otro sector de esa clase optaba por abandonar. Ése es el verdadero motivo del escándalo Watergate y de la acusación del presidente Nixon.

 

IRLANDA

Irlanda ya no es un país boscoso, y tiene muchas más zonas urbanizadas que Vietnam; no tiene una zona liberada que le sirva de apoyo (el Estado de los 26 condados o “República de Irlanda” es hostil a cualquier movimiento anti-imperialista en su territorio), ni tiene países vecinos que quieran prestar ayuda o hacer la vista gorda ante el uso de su territorio. Tampoco tiene un buen proveedor de armamento (en realidad, el único fue brevemente la Libia de Gadafi). Además, no sólo Irlanda es considerada el “patio trasero” de Gran Bretaña, sino que la isla entera ha sido considerada como un parte integral del “Reino Unido”, la base del monopolio capitalista británico.

Pero ha habido y hay otros factores que el movimiento anti-imperialista irlandés puede usar en su favor, que serán examinados aquí en el contexto de las luchas anti-imperialistas del país en el último siglo.

Primero sería útil echar un vistazo a un breve resumen histórico de las luchas irlandesas contra el colonialismo y el imperialismo pero, por ser caso que el lector ya conocía bien esa historia, lo hemos puesto en apéndice al final.

¿Cuáles fueron las opciones de las fuerzas irlandesas de liberación nacional en algunos momentos del siglo pasado?

Siempre es más fácil juzgar a los actores y las acciones del pasado, pero es necesario hacerlo para permitir que las acciones pasadas nos enseñen a la hora de llevar a cabo las acciones del presente y del futuro. Las examinadas aquí son las opciones, elecciones, y consecuencias, del

  • Alzamiento de Pascua de 1916,

  • y la Guerra guerrillera de La Independencia de 1919-1921

  • y la guerra de 30 años 1971-1998.

El Alzamiento de Pascuas 1916

En 1914 había empezado la Primera Guerra Mundial imperialista, y para 1915 la escala de la matanza era enorme. Los socialistas revolucionarios (en oposición a los partidos socialdemócratas que habían elegido apoyar a sus burguesías nacionales), querían una insurrección que detuviera la carnicería y también brindara una oportunidad a la revolución socialista – en este sector se encontraban James Connolly y el Partido Socialista Republicano Irlandés, que colocaron en la azotea del edificio de su sindicato una enorme pancarta que rezaba: ¡NI REY NI KAISER!

También 1914 era un año después de que el Sindicato Irlandés de Transportes y Trabajadores Generales, una escisión de un sindicato británico, tratase de romper el cierre patronal de Dublín durante ocho meses. Durante ese cierre patronal, el sindicato había formado su propia milicia –el Ejército Ciudadano Irlandés– para defenderse de los violentos ataques de la policía, y tal organización continuó existiendo pese al fin del cierre patronal.

Los nacionalistas revolucionarios demócratas, es decir republicanos, también vieron la oportunidad de luchar por la libertad mientras el ocupante colonial-imperialista estaba luchando contra otras potencias imperialistas. También pensaron que aquellas naciones que hubiesen ganado su independencia o al menos demostrado con fuerza su deseo de ser independientes verían su derecho de autodeterminación ratificado por las potencias emergentes tras la Guerra.

Los nacionalistas constitucionales, por otro lado, la mayoría se apresuraron a mostrar su apoyo por sus amos coloniales y, en el caso de Irlanda, reclutaron a sus compañeros para que se unieran a la carnicería de los campos de batalla.

En Irlanda, la sociedad secreta revolucionaria Hermandad Republicana Irlandesa y las organizaciones de los Voluntarios Irlandeses (que los anteriores controlaban tras la escisión de los Voluntarios Nacionales Irlandeses, de cual muchos se unieron al ejército británico), junto con la organización de mujeres Cumann na mBan y la organización juvenil Na Fianna Éireann, unieron sus fuerzas a la del Ejército Ciudadano (según Lenin, dicen: “El primer Ejército Rojo de Europa”) en una insurrección armada contra el dominio británico. Principalmente tuvo lugar en Dublín en 1916 y duró una semana. Después de que los rebeldes se rindieran ante las superiores fuerzas británicas, la mayoría fueron enviados a campos de concentración junto con otros que fueron arrestados y condenados sin juicio. Casi todos los líderes del Alzamiento fueron ejecutados por pelotones de fusilamiento.

Planes para el Alzamiento

Hubo ciertos elementos en el plan del Alzamiento que merece la pena considerar. La insurrección había sido planeada en secreto, no sólo de cara a las autoridades, sino también de cara a ciertos líderes de los Voluntarios Irlandeses, incluido su comandante. Estaba planeado para ser una insurrección a nivel nacional, y también se había contado con que la Alemania Imperial, en guerra con el Imperio Británico, aprovisionara al levantamiento con armas y municiones.

La primera parte del plan en fallar fue la dificultad de encontrarse, por cambio de destino, con el buque alemán para coger las armas y llevarlas a tierra firme, y su posterior descubrimiento por parte de los británicos, resultando en la captura de la tripulación (después de hundir el barco) y de Roger Casement, el agente de los Voluntarios Irlandeses que viajaba con ellos.

Lo segundo en desmoronarse fue el secretismo interno y que, cuando el comandante de los Voluntarios Irlandeses supo del Alzamiento y del fracaso al obtener las armas alemanas, canceló las “ marchas y maniobras ” planeadas para el Domingo de Pascua, que eran el código para la movilización de los rebeldes. El Alzamiento comenzó en el Lunes de Pascua, pero tan sólo con un millar de hombres y mujeres movilizados en Dublín, muchos menos efectivos en los condados Meath, Galway y Wexford y sin comunicación entre esas fuerzas a excepción del mensajero, un proceso que tardaba días.

En Dublín, las fuerzas rebeldes fueron desplegadas débilmente y no fueron capaces de tomar ciertos edificios importantes, como el Castillo de Dublín, sede del poder colonial desde la invasión de los normandos (que además tenía en su interior a los dos oficiales británicos más importantes destinados en Irlanda), y el Trinity College, que establecía el canon para la altura de los edificios y desde cuya azotea los francotiradores británicos hostigaban a los insurgentes, matando a algunos de ellos (a parecer, la toma de este edificio no era parte del plan original).

El plan original del Alzamiento ha sido analizado por varias autoridades –algunas de ellas militares, y se ha debatido sobre él largo y tendido.

Sin embargo, una movilización de efectivos que puede ser cancelada o muy debilitada por una sola persona, que además no es parte del plan pero puede suponerse que se enterará tarde o temprano, es una debilidad monumental. Si tal acuerdo es contemplado, al menos se debe tener un plan alternativo en caso de que esa persona decida echar abajo la operación, y que cuente además con líneas de comunicación rápida entre las diversas unidades que se quieren movilizar.

Otra debilidad del plan es no haber bloqueado el río Liffey (por ejemplo, hundiendo barcos en él), lo que permitió a un acorazado británico navegar cauce arriba y bombardear la ciudad. Se dice que James Connolly, comandante del Ejército Ciudadano, había pensado que los británicos no llegarían a los extremos de destruir propiedades capitalistas. Esto no fue finalmente un factor fundamental, pues los británicos emplearon también otros cañones para atacar Dublín… pero podría haberlo sido.

También parece que no hubo planes para la destrucción de puentes o vías de ferrocarril, probablemente debido a que se había contado con esas vías de comunicación en el plan original de movilización de los insurgentes.

¿Podría haber sucedido?

Pero incluso contando con estos elementos y con una supuesta movilización total de efectivos, ¿qué probabilidades de éxito tenía el Alzamiento? Irlanda es una isla, y la superioridad naval de las fuerzas británicas hubiese permitido que desembarcasen tropas a voluntad en prácticamente cualquier lugar, aunque es cierto que en ese momento el Imperio Británico estaba combatiendo a otras potencias imperialistas y había comprometido la mayor parte de sus efectivos en esa lucha. Pero, ¿es probable que estuviesen dispuestos a sacrificar una posesión tan cercana a su tierra natal, que es una parte misma del Reino Unido, y además tan cerca de su flanco occidental? ¿No es más probable que hubiesen decidido perder un territorio más alejado?

Lo más seguro es que, en el caso de haberse dado un alzamiento exitoso en la mayor parte de Irlanda, los británicos hubiesen respondido con el desembarco de tropas en varios lugares del territorio y, aunque sin duda tras cruentos combates, hubiesen tomado todas las ciudades controladas por los insurgentes. Hubiesen salido victoriosos porque eran superiores numéricamente, en armamento, en entrenamiento, y en poder naval y aéreo (de los cuales los insurgentes carecían por completo), y porque hubiesen estado combatiendo en una guerra convencional en la cual estos elementos son cruciales.

Después, se hubiesen desplazado de esas ciudades insurgentes al medio rural de los alrededores para eliminar a las unidades rebeldes aún en activo. En ese tipo de operaciones hubiesen tenido el apoyo de la policía y las fuerzas armadas cuartelizadas allí que no hubiesen sido capturadas por los insurgentes, y de las milicias lealistas (de número substancial en la parte norte del país). El control británico de los mares hubiese prevenido que los insurgentes irlandeses se beneficiasen de cualquier ayuda extranjera.

El coste para los británicos hubiese sido elevado: tanto en la ventaja que hubiesen tenido sus enemigos en la guerra como en consecuencias políticas y quizá en la moral de sus propias tropas. ¿Pero quién puede dudar que se hubiesen arriesgado a todo ello?

O'Connell St (then Sackvill St) from the Bridge looking north-eastwards. Destruction by bombardment of a major UK city shows determination of the British to crush the Rising.
La calle O’Connell (entonces la de Sackville) desde el Puente mirando hacia el noreste. La destrucción por bombardeo del centro de una mayor ciudad del Reino Unido (como lo era entonces) muestra la determinación por los británicos de aplastar el Alzamiento.

Incluso podrían simplemente haber tomado las ciudades en manos de los insurgentes y haber asegurado que el norte del país permanecía leal hasta después de la guerra, y entonces haberse ocupado de los insurgentes que quedasen con más tranquilidad.

Lo que realmente ocurrió, como sabemos, fue que el Alzamiento fue derrotado en una semana, se declaró la ley marcial, los principales líderes fueron ejecutados, y se produjeron subsiguientes redadaspor todo el país, así como arrestos e prisión sin juicio.

La Guerra de la Independencia y el alejamiento de los objetivos marcados

Tres años más tarde, los nacionalistas revolucionarios volvieron a la lucha armada, esta vez sin milicias obreras ni un liderazgo socialista efectivo como aliados, y comenzaron una estrategia de lucha política combinada después con ataques de guerrilla en zonas rurales que pronto se extendieron a ciertas zonas urbanas (principalmente las ciudades de Dublín y de Cork).

La lucha política movilizó a miles de personas y también resultó en una mayoría absoluta en Irlanda de su partido en las elecciones generales (en Reino Unido, del que Irlanda era parte). La lucha en Irlanda y la respuesta británica estaba generando mucho interés y comentarios críticos en círculos políticos, intelectuales y artísticos de la propia Gran Bretaña. Además, por el mundo, muchos revolucionarios, socialistas y nacionalistas, estaban obteniendo inspiración de esa lucha anti colonial tan feroz, que tenía lugar tan cerca de Inglaterra, dentro del propio Reino Unido.

El desmantelamiento por parte de las fuerzas nacionalistas, mediante amenazas y acciones armadas, de la red de control de la policía colonial británica, que consecuentemente también desmanteló la mayoría del servicio de Inteligencia de contra insurrección, llevó a los británicos a formar dos nuevos cuerpos especiales que ayudasen a combatir la insurrección irlandesa. Estas dos fuerzas se ganaron a pulso una siniestra reputación, no sólo entre los nacionalistas sino también entre los lealistas pro-británicos.

Estas fuerzas especiales de paramilitares policiales recurrieron cada vez más y más a la tortura, el asesinato y el incendio provocado pero, no obstante, en ciertas zonas de Irlanda como Dublín, Kerry y Cork, tuvieron que ser reforzados con soldados británicos regulares dado que no eran capaces de combatir de forma efectiva a los insurgentes, que se volvían más confiados, más decididos y más experimentados cada semana que pasaba.

Sin embargo, dos años después del comienzo de la guerra de guerrillas, una mayoría dentro del liderazgo del movimiento nacionalista revolucionario apostó por la partición del país, con cierta independencia para una de las partes, siempre dentro de la Mancomunidad Británica de Naciones (Commonwealth).

Se ha debatido mucho acerca de los eventos que condujeron a este momento. Se suele decir que el Primer Ministro británico Lloyd George chantajeó a la delegación diplomática irlandesa con la amenaza de “una guerra terrible y total” si no aceptaban el acuerdo. La delegación fue forzada a responder a la propuesta sin tener la posibilidad de consultar a sus camaradas.

Algunos dicen que el Presidente del partido político nacionalista, Éamonn de Valera, envió a un delegado sin experiencia política, Michael Collins, sabiendo que acabaría aceptando un mal trato, del cual De Valera pudiese distanciarse.

Michael Collins, encargado del abastecimiento de las guerrillas, dijo posteriormente que les quedaban sólo unos pocos cargadores más para cada combatiente, y que el IRA, el ejército guerrillero, no podría combatir en el tipo de guerra con la que amenazaba Lloyd George. También dijo que ese Tratado era un paso adelante en la total independencia de Irlanda en un futuro próximo.

Ninguna de esas razones me parecen convincentes.

¿Cómo pudo el liderazgo de un movimiento en el punto álgido de su éxito derrumbarse de ese modo?

Desde luego, los británicos amenazaban con una guerra más dura, pero ya habían hecho amenazas antes, y el pueblo irlandés las había enfrentado sin miedo. Si el IRA se encontraba en tal difícil situación con respecto a las municiones (no estoy seguro de que exista ninguna prueba de ello aparte de la afirmación de Collins), hubiese sido una razón válida para reducir la actividad militar, no para retirarse y aceptar un Tratado cuando estaban tan cerca de conseguir aquello por lo que estaban luchando. El IRA era, después de todo, una guerrilla de combatientes voluntarios, la mayoría de ellos a tiempo parcial. Podría haberse retirado de las operaciones ofensivas y muchos de sus luchadores haberse mezclado con la población o, de ser necesario, haberse “dado a la fuga”.

Si la situación de los suministros militares de los nacionalistas irlandeses era tan terrible de cara al mejor equipo y experiencia de los soldados británicos, ¿realmente es eso lo único a tener en cuenta? Un ejército necesita más que armas y municiones para ir a la guerra, sino que hay otros factores que afectan a su habilidad y efectividad.

La situación precaria de los británicos

En 1919, al final de la Guerra, los británicos, aunque eran la parte victoriosa, estaban en una situación precaria. Durante la misma guerra había habido graves motines en el ejército (durante los cuales los oficiales y suboficiales habían muerto a manos de sus soldados), y cuando los soldados fueron desmovilizados de vuelta a la vida civil y sus viejas condiciones de vida, había una extendida insatisfacción. Las huelgas en la industria habían sido prohibidas durante la Guerra (aunque algunas se habían producido igualmente), y un movimiento de huela estaba ahora en marcha.

En 1918 y nuevamente en 1919, la policía se puso en huelga. También en 1919, los trabajadores del ferrocarril hicieron huelga, al igual que otros sectores, en una oleada que se llevaba organizando desde el año anterior. En 1918 las huelgas ya habían costado 6 millones en días laborales. Esta cifra se elevó a 35 millones de pérdidas en 1919, con una suma diaria de aproximadamente cien mil trabajadores en huelga.

Glasgow presenció en 1921 una huelga con piquetes de 6.000 personas que combatieron a la policía. La unidad local del ejército británico fue encerrada en sus cuarteles por sus propios oficiales, y unidades especiales armadas con ametralladoras, tanques y un obús, fueron movilizadas desde otras partes del país.

James Wolfe, en su trabajo ‘Motines en las Fuerzas Armadas Estados Unidienses y Británicas en el siglo XX’(Mutiny in United States and British Armed forces in the Twentieth Centuryhttp://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=8271&pc=9), incluye los títulos de los siguientes capítulos:

Workers pass an overturned tram during in Hackney, NE London, during the 1926 British General Strike. In general, goods travelled through Britain with authorisation from the workers or under police and troop protection.
Trabajadores pasan un tranvía rompehuelgas volcado en Hackney, Londres NE, durante la Huelga General 1926. Por muchas partes, los bienes viajaron a través de Gran Bretaña con la autorización de los trabajadores o bajo escolta de protección policial o militar.

 

4.2 Los motines en el ejército en Enero/Febrero de 1919

4.3 El motín de ‘Val de Lievre’.

4.4 Tres motines en la Royal Air Force (Fuerza Aérea Real), Enero de 1919.

4.5 Motines en la Marina Real — Rusia, Febrero a Junio de 1919.

4.6 Los motines navales de 1919.

4.7 Disturbios de desmovilización 1918/1919.

4.8 Los disturbios del campamento de Kinmel Park 1919

4.9 “No es un país para héroes” – los disturbios de los veteranos en Luton.

4.10 El descontento en curso –Mediados de 1919 a Fin de Año.

El Gobierno británico temía que su policía fuese insuficiente a la hora de reprimir a los trabajadores, y preocupado sobre la confianza en su ejército si era usado de esa manera.

Ya se habían producido manifestaciones, disturbios y motines en las Fuerzas Armadas acerca de los retrasos en la desmovilización (y también en protesta al ser enviados a combatir la Revolución Bolchevique en Rusia).

Los demás lugares del Imperio Británico eran también inestables. Los árabes estaban enfurecidos ante la negativa británica de darle la libertad, tal y como habían prometido, a cambio de combatir a los turcos, y las rebeliones estallarían y se continuarían a lo largo de los siguientes años.

Los británicos también se estaban enfrentando al descontento en Palestina al estar re ubicando allí a judíos que habían comprado tierra árabe. Una rebelión contra los británicos tuvo lugar en Mesopotamia (actual Iraq) en 1918 y de nuevo en 1919. La Tercera Guerra Afgana se produjo en 1919; Ghandi y sus seguidores comenzaron su campaña de desobediencia civil en 1919 mientras que en la región Malabar de la India se levantó en armas contra el dominio británico en 1921.

Comunicados secretos (pero ahora accesibles) entre Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, y el Jefe del Estado Mayor de las Fuerzas Armadas Británicas revelan serias preocupaciones acerca de la capacidad y disposición de sus soldados a la hora de reprimir futuras insurrecciones y acciones en la industria en Gran Bretaña e incluso, si los soldados en servicio activo demandaban su desmovilización, si tendrían suficientes soldados a lo largo del Imperio para enfrentarse a las tareas que tendrían que enfrentar.

Los nacionalistas revolucionarios irlandeses estaban en una posición muy fuerte para continuar su lucha hasta ganar su independencia, e incluso para ser catalizadores de una revolución socialista en Gran Bretaña y la muerte del Imperio. Pero retrocedieron, dándole al Imperio el respiro que necesitaba para ocuparse de las ascuas de rebelión en otros lugares y para prepararse para el enfrentamiento con los militantes sindicalistas británicos durante la Huelga General de 1926.

Así, los partidarios del Tratado volvieron sus armas contra aquellos que habían sido sus camaradas en una cruel Guerra Civil que comenzó en 1922. El nuevo Estado ejecutaba a los prisioneros del IRA (incluso a algunos sin juicio) y la represión continuó con dureza incluso cuando ya habían derrotado al IRA en la Guerra Civil.

Si los nacionalistas revolucionarios irlandeses no tenían conocimiento de todos los problemas a los que se enfrentaba el Imperio Británico, sí que conocían muchos de ellos. La huelga de hambre en 1920 de McSwiney, el Alcalde de Cork, había captado la atención internacional, y los nacionalistas indios se habían puesto en contacto con la familia de McSwiney. La presencia de enormes comunidades de trabajadores irlandeses en Gran Bretaña, de Londres a Glasgow, daban la oportunidad de mantenerse al día de los conflictos industriales, incluso si a los nacionalistas irlandeses no les importaba establecer lazos de unión con los sindicalistas británicos. Sylvia Pankhurst, de una importante familia de sufragistas y una revolucionaria comunista, publicaba cartas en ‘El Trabajador Irlandés’ (The Irish Worker), el periódico del Sindicato Irlandés de Transportes y Trabajadores Generales (IT&GWU- Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union).

La presencia de un número importante de irlandeses todavía dentro del ejército británico también era una fuente de información.

Anti-Treaty cartoon, 1921, depicts Ireland being coerced by Michael Collins, representing the Free State Army, along with the Catholic Church, in the service of British Imperialism
Dibujo de la Lucha contra el Tratado de 1921, representa a Irlanda siendo coaccionado por Michael Collins, en representación del Ejército del Estado Libre, junto con la Iglesia Católica, al servicio del imperialismo británico

La mayoría de los líderes del movimiento nacionalista revolucionario irlandés tenían un trasfondo pequeño-burgués y no tenían un programa de expropiación de industriales y grandes terratenientes. No buscaban representar los intereses del pueblo trabajador irlandés, e incluso algunas veces le demostraron hostilidad, impidiendo que campesinos sin tierra se estableciesen en grandes fincas y se dividiesen después el terreno. Históricamente, la pequeña burguesía se ha mostrado incapaz de compaginar una revolución con sus propios intereses como clase, y en Irlanda era inevitable que los nacionalistas acabasen siguiendo los intereses de la burguesía irlandesa. Los socialistas irlandeses eran demasiado pocos y débiles como para ofrecer un bando alternativo. La burguesía irlandesa había sido revolucionaria por última vez en 1798, y no iba a cambiar en ese momento. Originalmente, junto a una Iglesia Católica con la que tenían muchos intereses en común, se habían negado a apoyar al nacionalismo revolucionario pero decidieron unir fuerzas con él cuando vieron que había una posibilidad de mejorar su posición, y también cuando parecía que la derrota de los británicos era inminente.

Ante estas evidentes posibilidades es difícil evitar la conclusión de que el sector del nacionalismo revolucionario irlandés que optó por el Tratado ofrecido por Lloyd George, lo hizo debido a que lo preferían a las alternativas. Prefirieron rendirse a cambio de un solo pedazo en lugar de luchar por todo el pastel. Y la burguesía irlandesa se beneficiaría del Tratado, a diferencia de la mayoría del pueblo irlandés. Las frase de James Connolly que decía que la clase obrera era la “incorruptible heredera”

Troops of the new Irish government use British-lent cannon to shell Republican HQ in the Four Courts in 1922, starting the Civil War.
Las tropas del nuevo gobierno irlandés usan cañón prestado por los británicos para bombardear la sede republicana en los Four Courts (Cuatro Juzgados) en 1922, iniciando la Guerra Civil.

 de la lucha irlandesa por la libertad tuvo un corolario: que la burguesía irlandesa siempre comprometería la lucha. También es posible que la alternativa que la burguesía nacionalista temía no era tanto la “guerra terrible y total” británica, sino la posibilidad de una revolución social en la que perderían todos sus privilegios.

El siguiente reto al Imperio por parte del nacionalismo revolucionario no ocurriría hasta cincuenta años más tarde, y tendría lugar principalmente en los Seis Condados ocupados.

La guerra de treinta años en los Seis Condados

El IRA no tuvo mucho éxito en la serie de cortas campañas que llevaron a cabo durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial o durante los años cincuenta. El Sinn Féin, su partido político, sufrió una importante escisión durante los años treinta, y la nueva organización, Fianna Fáil, que optó por un camino puramente constitucionalista, pronto se convirtió en uno de los principales partidos burgueses del nuevo Estado irlandés. Este partido estuvo en el poder durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y sintió que su posición de neutralidad sería debilitada por la actividad del IRA contra los británicos. Llevó a cabo redadas contra sus propios camaradas, encarceló a cientos de ellos en unas condiciones penosas, les propinó palizas en las que algunos murieron, así como ejecutó a muchos otros.

El Sinn Féin se reformó en los sesenta, revocó su prohibición de posturas comunistas y aparentemente comenzó a desarrollar un punto de vista socialista; también comenzó a preocuparse por asuntos sociales dentro del Estado irlandés y realizó agitación sobre cuestiones como la vivienda. Además, llevó a cabo campañas de desobediencia civil y de traspaso de la propiedad privada de terratenientes extranjeros que poseían viviendas, tierras y ríos sobre suelo irlandés.

En los Seis Condados, el partido contribuyó a la organización del movimiento de protesta por los derechos civiles, pero pronto éste les sobrepasó. Después de que la policía arrasase esas áreas y matase a tiros a un miembro de la comunidad (irónicamente, una persona de la localidad que era soldado británico y que estaba de vacaciones), las comunidades católicas de Derry y Falls Road (Belfast) levantaron barricadas para impedir el paso de la policía, y en Derry fueron capaces de defender las con éxito contra los repetidos ataques de la policía paramilitar, sus reservas a tiempo parcial, y de las turbas lealistas.

Escisión!

Entonces, cuando necesitaron armas, los republicanos del norte descubrieron que el liderazgo en Dublín había dispuesto de ellas (supuestamente las había vendido a un grupo armado galés), y que lo único que tenían para defender sus zonas era un puñado de armas (y sólo una de las cuales era automática). Esto llevó a una escisión en el partido y en el IRA, llamándose las nuevas organizaciones Sinn Féin Provisional e IRA Provisional. La organización original añadió la palabra “Oficial” tanto a su ala política como a su grupo armado. Los escindidos rápidamente pasaron a ser conocidos como “los provisionales” (o “Provos” o “Provies”). Más tarde los Oficiales pasaron a ser conocidos como “los Pegajosos” (o “Stickies”), debido a una desafortunada innovación que les llevó a hacer sus propios lirios de pascua (flor que simboliza el Alzamiento de Pascua de 1916) con papel y pegamento en la parte de atrás (los otros siguieron sujetando con pin, como antes).

Los Provisionales no tenían tolerancia para el socialismo. Muchos de ellos sentían que había sido la ideología socialista la que les había llevado a estar prácticamente desarmados cuando sus zonas estaban bajo ataque. Reiteraron la clásica queja de los soldados sobre “demasiada política”. Además, entre sus dirigentes no había pocos católicos de ideología conservadora. En su frente internacional, más bien escaso, Fred Burns O’Brien, un estadounidense de origen irlandés y republicano pero también sionista, durante un tiempo publicó en el periódico de Sinn Féin An Phoblacht una columna en la que de vez en cuando ensalzaba el ejemplo sionista. Una carta de protesta de un lector que expresaba que los aliados naturales de los irlandeses eran los palestinos y no los sionistas no fue publicada, y O’Brien continuó escribiendo su columna en An Phoblacht durante algún tiempo más.

Los Provisionales se enfrentaron con el Ejército Británico cuando fue enviado a apoyar al Estado colonial contra los levantamientos populares cuando la policía colonial se mostró incapaz de reprimirlos. Pronto estuvieron combatiendo fundamentalmente con los soldados del Ejército Británico, la policía armada colonial, y los escuadrones de la muerte clandestinos de ambas unidades. Además, aunque en menor medida, también combatieron con los paramilitares lealistas, que mayoritariamente concentraban sus ataques de forma aleatoria en personas de origen católico.

Nuevo liderazgo de los Provisionales

Gradualmente, una nueva hornada de dirigentes comenzó a formarse entre las filas de los Provisionales. Los viejos dirigentes habían quedado desacreditados, Mac Stiofáin por ser capturado con papeles incriminatorios, y después empezar una huelga de hambre hasta la muerte que abandonó al poco de empezar. El liderazgo de Ó Brádaigh perdió cierta credibilidad debido a su declaración de que, primero 1972 y después 1973, iba a ser Bliain an Bhua, el Año de la Victoria (por supuesto, ninguno lo fue). También bajo su liderazgo se produjo el alto fuego y tregua de 1975, de los cuales los Provos no sacaron beneficio alguno cuando los británicos rompieron la tregua y atacaron medidas aún más represivas que las anteriores; además, los posibles beneficios propagandísticos no estaban preparados y no se produjeron. “Moss” Twomey, Jefe del Estado Mayor del IRA y uno de los líderes originales de los Provisionales, no apoyó la tregua pero fue cesado de su cargo debido a su arresto en 1977 por parte de la Garda (Policía) en los 26 Condados.

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Gerry Adams, solidarity conference London 1983. Adams ousted Ó Brádaigh in the Provos' leadership. Ó Brádaigh was twice chief of staff of the IRA between 1958 and 1962, president of Provisional Sinn Fein from 1970 to 1983 and of Republican Sinn Fein from 1987 to 2009,
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh y Gerry Adams, conferencia de solidaridad de Londres 1983. Adams derrocó a Ó Brádaigh del liderazgo de los Provos. Ó Brádaigh era dos veces comandante del IRA entre 1958 y 1962, presidente del Sinn Fein Provisional 1970-1983 y del Sinn Fein Republicano 1987-2009.

El nuevo liderazgo, sobre el cual existe la extendida creencia de que Gerry Adams era el personaje principal, junto con un grupo de militantes afines, tomó el control del IRA y del Sinn Féin; el encuentro anual de delegados del partido en 1986 vio cómo Ó Brádaigh y muchos de sus seguidores (lo que no incluía a Twomey) se marchaban para formar poco después el Republican Sinn Féin (desde entonces ligado al IRA de la Continuidad).

El IRA Provisional (y por un tiempo, el INLA, otra escisión del IRA Oficial), combatió en una guerra terrible contra un ejército imperialista moderno con sofisticados sistemas de vigilancia, contra la policía colón británica armada y contra los paramilitares lealistas, controlados por la policía británica y por los servicios de inteligencia militares.

Infligieron un gran número de bajas entre las fuerzas coloniales, pero también sufrieron muchas bajas ellos mismos. Cientos de ellos fueron encarcelados durante grandes periodos de tiempo, y entonces las prisiones mismas se convirtieron también en áreas de lucha.

El área de operaciones de los grupos republicanos estaba prácticamente confinada a los Seis Condados. El Sinn Féin Provisional organizó y llevó a cabo una serie de campañas en los 26 Condados, pero principalmente concentrados en lograr el apoyo para la lucha que se llevaba a cabo en el norte.

El Sinn Féin Provisional no trabajó de forma seria con el movimiento sindical, y cuando uno de sus miembros del Ard-Choiste (Comité Ejecutivo Nacional), Phil Flynn, era un alto cargo sindicalista, tomó parte en lograr un acuerdo de pacto social con el gobierno irlandés con el resultado que el movimiento sindical no fuese una amenaza real para los planes del capitalismo irlandés de ahí en adelante.

Buscando alianzas dentro de Irlanda, el Sinn Féin Provisional (antes y después de la escisión) realizó movimientos de confluencia hacia el ala “republicana” del Fianna Fáil.

El Sinn Féin Provisional no tomó parte en la lucha por la legalización de los preservativos y la píldora anti-conceptiva.Cuando se produjo el referéndum constitucional sobre el aborto, el Sinn Féin Provisional se mostró en contra, mientras que en el del divorcio respondió con evasivas. Cuando se produjo el referéndum acerca de entregar la nacionalidad a los hijos de inmigrantes que hubiesen nacido en Irlanda, su postura era a favor, pero no hicieron ninguna campaña al respecto, concentrándose en su lugar en promover el Acuerdo del Viernes Santo y discutiendo por la retención de las Cláusulas Constitucionales 2 y 3 (aquellas que reivindicaban para toda Irlanda). En otras palabras, en cuatro principales áreas de los derechos civiles, o se tomaron el bando equivocado o fallaron a la hora de movilizarse. Es notable que, en esas ocasiones, el Sinn Féin Provisional se posicionara a la derecha del Partido Laborista irlandés, de línea socialdemócrata.

El Sinn Féin Provisional tampoco se organizó en torno al asunto del desempleo y su consiguiente emigración, un problema que afectaba principalmente a la juventud de todas las capas sociales de Irlanda.

De hecho, el único problema social en el que actuaron con decisión fue en el tráfico de drogas. Aun así, incluso en ese caso, su punto de vista moralista les hacía tratar a todas las drogas igual, excepto por supuesto el alcohol, que vendían en sus clubs y al que ponían un impuesto ilegal en sus áreas, y el tabaco, con el que hacían contrabando a través de la frontera. Su solución al problema de la droga era intimidar a los camellos y conducirles fuera de las áreas donde se llevaban a cabo estas campañas. No obstante, hay persistentes rumores de que cobraban un impuesto a estos camellos en otras áreas como una de sus formas de financiación.

No era de esperar que la mayoría de la gente de los 26 Condados, privados de cualquier referente relativo a las cuestiones económicas y sociales que les afectaban, pudiese ser movilizada exclusivamente acerca de problemas que afectaban tan sólo a una pequeña parte de la población irlandesa, que además vivía bajo otra administración.

El apoyo popular de los Provisionales comenzó a menguar en los 26 Condados, ayudado por la hostilidad de su burguesía, sus medios de comunicación, y su entramado político, mientras que en los Seis Condados ocupados comenzó a calar la fatiga provocada por la guerra.

Fue la lucha de los presos políticos republicanos (principalmente hombres a veces pero con bastante actividad por las presas republicanas), dentro de las cárceles y de sus compañeros y compañeras en el exterior, en principio organizada principalmente por mujeres, la que inspiró nueva vida al movimiento republicano, particularmente en los Seis Condados. Primero la “protesta de la manta”, después la renuncia al aseo, y principalmente la “protesta sucia”, llevaron a la huelga de hambre de 1980. Fue seguida poco después por otra huelga de hambre, esta en 1981, que culminó con la muerte de diez prisioneros republicanos, siete del IRA Provisional y tres del INLA.

La lucha de estos prisioneros y la campaña de quienes les apoyaban galvanizó la comunidad nacionalista de los Seis Condados, y reactivó el movimiento Provisional. Esto también llevó a una exitosa intervención electoral en ambos lados de la frontera, con representación parlamentaria en ambas administraciones.

Trayectoria reformista

De ahí en adelante se puede observar una trayectoria reformista en los Provisionales, ligada a una guerra de guerrillas diseñada para presionar a los británicos y para mejorar la posición negociadora de los Provisionales. En 1998 los Provisionales firman el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo que ganó un apoyo mayoritario con un gran margen en un referéndum en los 26 Condados, y una mayoría raspada en las elecciones de los Seis Condados. De este modo, el Sinn Féin Provisional se convirtió electoralmente en el partido político dominante en la comunidad nacionalista y la segunda fuerza en el conjunto de los Seis Condados.

La estrategia electoral llevó a la primera escisión notable de la organización, de la cual rugió en el 1986 el Sinn Féin Republicano, que ha sido en numerosas ocasiones relacionado con el IRA de la Continuidad, que apareció en escena poco después. En el 1997 se produjo otra escisión de los Provos, de la que se formó el Movimiento por la Soberanía de los 32 Condados (32CSM), ligado normalmente al IRA Auténtico. El 32CSM se escindió después, y los herederos de tal escisión se encuentran en la Red Republicana para la Unidad (RNU). Después de la firma del Acuerdo de Viernes Santo en 1998, un conjunto de personas que dejaron el Sinn Féin (y algunos el IRA) Provisional formaron la organización éirígí (“Alzáos”). Todas estas organizaciones se oponen al Acuerdo de Viernes Santo, al igual que otros pequeños grupos. Todas se declaran socialistas, pero ninguna de ellas está construyendo bases en los sindicatos o en las instituciones educativas, y poco es el trabajo sobre cuestiones sociales y de vivienda en las comunidades.

En las elecciones del 2011 en los 26 Condados (el Estado Irlandés), el partido gobernante, Fianna Fáil, vio duramente reducido su número de votos, debido a una letanía de escándalos financiero-políticos combinados con la crisis financiera del sistema capitalista, durante la cual el gobierno pagó a los especuladores del Banco Anglo-Irlandés con dinero público. Sus jóvenes compañeros de coalición, el Partido Verde, vio su representación completamente eliminada.

El triunfador fue el otro partido burgués, Fine Gael, en coalición con los socialdemócratas del Partido Laborista irlandés. Estos esencialmente continuaron aplicando las políticas de sus predecesores. El Sinn Féin obtuvo 14 escaños, otros 14 fueron para independientes (la mayoría de izquierda), y otros cuatro para dos grupos trotskistas.

La respuesta del Sinn Féin a la crisis ha sido hacer un llamamiento a la inversión interior y la creación de empleo, proclamando que había “una mejor manera, una manera más justa” de manejar la economía. Se han opuesto a los recortes en los 26 Condados (mientras los llevaban a cabo en los Seis) pero no han apoyado la campaña de negarse a registrarse o pagar el Impuesto sobre los Hogares (un nuevo impuesto). Esta fue la mayor campaña de desobediencia civil en la historia del estado y fue un éxito, pero el impuesto fue sustituido por otro, el Impuesto de Bienes Inmuebles, con el Departamento de Ingresos responsable de recoger el impuesto.

Dublin demonstration, 13April 2013, part of civil disobedience campaign against Household & Water Taxes which Sinn Féin did not support
Manifestación en Dublín, 13 Abril 2013, que forma parte de la campaña de desobediencia civil contra Los Impuestos del Hogar y del Agua, campaña que no apoyaba el Sinn Féin

En sus formas de organizarse, su énfasis en las elecciones, sus eslóganes, y su respuesta ante una campaña de desobediencia civil, el comportamiento del Sinn Féin en los 26 Condados se enmarca completamente dentro de la línea de un partido socialdemócrata burgués, con la distinción de que al contrario que muchos partidos socialdemócratas, no tiene historia o fuerza dentro del movimiento sindical. Su estrategia parece ser la de formar su propio espectáculo electoral para entrar en un gobierno de coalición con alguno de los partidos de la burguesía en algún momento del futuro.

La trayectoria de los Provisionales de sus inicios hasta el presente puede resumirse en la resistencia anti-imperialista en la colonia (la parte más pequeña del país), intentos de ganar el partido nacionalista burgués del sur (o al menos algún sector del mismo) para su bando, reformismo electoralista con presión militar hasta las negociaciones, después un completo reformismo electoralista en ambos lados de la frontera con participación en el gobierno capitalista e imperialista de la colonia.

La posible alternativa revolucionaria

Había una posible y viable alternativa. En los 26 Condados, hubiese significado movilizar a las masas populares en torno a los problemas sociales y económicos a los que se enfrentaban: desempleo, emigración, escasez de viviendas, falta de desarrollo, erosión de las zonas de habla gaélica, etc. Hubiese significado enfrentarse al capitalismo dominante, a sus partidos políticos, y a su Estado en sus políticas neo coloniales, escándalos, exención de impuestos, derroche de los recursos naturales y sus bases productivas… Para ello, el movimiento de resistencia podría haber construido sus bases en las comunidades, estudiantes y, de forma crucial, entre la clase obrera, organizándose dentro y a través del movimiento sindical, enfrentándose a los líderes socialdemócratas de los sindicatos y luchando contra su ideología y práctica del “pacto social” con la burguesía.

También hubiese significado organizar y liderar a la población en la defensa de sus derechos sociales: divorcio, métodos contraconceptivos, aborto, derechos LGTB, derechos de ciudadanía para inmigrantes, etc. Por supuesto, tres de estos cuatro temas hubiesen significado un conflicto abierto con la Iglesia Católica.

Entonces, la Iglesia misma hubiese tenido que ser atacada para exponer su larga historia de abusos.

En los Seis Condados, la resistencia nacionalista podría haber sido construida en el seno de movimientos populares combativos, siguiendo el modelo de apoyo a los “Hombres de la Manta” y las huelgas de hambre. Estas bases podrían haber sido movilizadas en torno a las políticas sectarias, la represión, el Ejército Británico, vivienda, desempleo, educación, e incluso en el movimiento sindical. Debido a que la comunidad católica sufría desproporcionadamente el desempleo, y la mayoría de los puestos de trabajo estaban reservados para la población protestante, el movimiento sindical hubiese sido el frente con más dificultad a la hora de progresar, pero aún así había posibilidades.

Tales campañas requerirían una disminución, y probablemente una re-dirección, de las acciones militares por parte del movimiento de resistencia. Las campañas electorales podrían haber tenido lugar, pero con el único objetivo de apoyar las luchas populares y de representarlas en las instituciones, no colaborar con éstas o formar parte del Estado.

Había posibilidades y opciones, para una resistencia viable y para la preparación de la revolución social en ambas partes del país, pero no para el movimiento republicano irlandés con su ideología dominante. Un proceso así hubiese requerido una ideología revolucionaria basada en la organización de la clase trabajadora como motor y fuerza dirigente de un movimiento revolucionario.

La mayor parte del republicanismo irlandés nunca ha estado cerca de seguir ese camino, y parece dificíl ver que lo estará.

Aliados en el exterior

Una nación pequeña, con una población total menor que la de Londres, necesita ayuda si quiere enfrentarse al poder del Imperio Británico y su fuerza militar. El republicanismo irlandés siempre ha tenido esto en cuenta, y en 1798 miraron hacia la Francia revolucionaria, en el siglo XVIII a los EEUU, en la primera parte del siglo XX a la Alemania Imperial, y después de nuevo a la EEUU.

Con una excepción, estas eran alianzas temporales y legítimas, pese a que las tormentas impidieron que la Armada de la Francia republicana atracase en Bantry en 1796 y la fuerza que pudo desembarcar en 1798 era demasiado pequeña y llegaba demasiado tarde como para marcar la diferencia, o pese a que el envío de armas por parte de Alemania en 1916 fuese interceptado y que en 1919 no estuviesen en posición de ayudar.

En los Estados Unidos

La excepción mencionada son los EEUU, que al menos desde 1866 en adelante no iba a apoyar a Irlanda en contra el Imperio Británico. La evidencia que permite concluir esto es la invasión feniana de Canadá en ese año, en la que un destacamento de veteranos irlandeses de la Guerra Civil Americana cruzó la frontera con Canadá (entonces colonia británica) apoyados con una fuerza aún mayor esperando en territorio estadounidense. En ese momento, EEUU estaba en una situación contradictoria con Gran Bretaña debido al apoyo reciente de ésta a la Confederación (el “Sur”). Aun así, EEUU cerró la frontera con Canadá, separando a la vanguardia feniana de la fuerza principal y arrestando a un buen número de fenianos (Hermandad Feniano Irlandés).

Hasta 1898, la política estadounidense había sido de imperialismo “interno”: la derrota de las tribus autóctonas y el re-poblamiento de sus tierras con colonos blancos que serían arrastrados bajo la hegemonía de EEUU. La Guerra Estados Unidos-México en 1848, debida a la anexión de Texas por parte de EEUU, tal vez podría ser citada como guerra imperialista, pero había una gran cantidad de población de origen estadounidense en ese territorio, y EEUU simplemente podría haber considerado parte de su territorio.

Pero en 1898, EEUU entró en guerra con el Imperio Español y se anexionó Puerto Rico, invadiendo también Cuba y Filipinas.

Una vez EE.UU. se hubo consolidado como una potencia imperialista a escala mundial, estaba interesado en reemplazar la influencia y el poder francés y británico con el suyo propio, primeramente en el continente Americano y tierras adyacentes, y después en Asia y Oriente Medio (por último en África). Pero no estaba interesado en la eliminación completa de estas potencias imperialistas, sino que más bien estaba encantado de dominar el mundo con Francia y Gran Bretaña como socios menores. Sobre arrebatarles colonias, sólo lo hubiese ocurrido para dominar tal territorio en su lugar. Era muy inocente por parte de los Provisionales creer que podrían apartar a EE.UU. de sus intereses imperialistas, por muy potente que fuese su grupo de presión americano-irlandés.

A medida que la guerra de los Provisionales contra Gran Bretaña en los setenta no mostraba signos de acabar pronto, empezaron a desarrollar relaciones de hermandad con otras organizaciones de liberación en varias partes del mundo, como el Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Vasco, Al Fatah, o el Consejo Nacional Africano (ANC). La relación con Al Fatah no se pretendía desarrollar a un gran nivel, especialmente durante las dos primeras décadas de la guerra irlandesa, debido a que los Provisionales no querían perder el apoyo del lobby burgués americano-irlandés y esperaban cierta ayuda de la Casa Blanca.

Clinton, Rabin & Arafat
Los Acuerdos de Oslo 1993; el presidente EE.UU demócrata Clinton supervisa el acuerdo entre el Presidente de los sionistas israelí Rabin, y Arafat, líder de la OLP. Debido a este acuerdo, la organización Al Fatah, del que Arafat era el líder, perdió su apoyo mayoritario entre los palestinos en los Territorios Ocupados, que posteriormente fue a Hamas.

Después de la actuación de Al Fatah en las negociaciones de Oslo y el “proceso de paz” palestino, la organización comenzó a perder el apoyo de la mayoría del pueblo palestino, y en los territorios ocupados fue reemplazada por Hamás.

El proceso en Sudáfrica parecía haber dado buenos resultados con un gobierno de la mayoría negra, pero con

South African police of the ANC government executed 34 miners in one day for striking against Anglo-American Platinum mine at Marikana. A further10 had been killed in previous days.

Policía sudafricana del gobierno del CAN ejecutó a 34 mineros en un día de huelga contra la empresa Anglo American Platinum en Marikana. Unos diez mas habían muerto en días anteriores.

el paso de los años esa “victoria” ha demostrado estar hueca incluso para las personas más ingenuas, especialmente en las últimas semanas, con la masacre de los mineros en huelga por parte de la policía sudafricana enviada por el Consejo Nacional Africano.

El movimiento de liberación nacional vasca está actualmente en su propio proceso de “paz” que muestra muchos signos de ir en la misma dirección que el proceso irlandés y otros que buscan lograr o han logrado la estabilidad temporal del imperialismo.

Dentro de la Gran Bretaña

Dentro de la propia Gran Bretaña había otro lugar en el que encontrar aliados para el movimiento en Irlanda. El Sinn Féin Provisional había cerrado todas sus filiales allí en los setenta, pero mantenía relaciones abiertas con la izquierda anti-imperialista británica y con el ala izquierda del Partido Laborista, de carácter socialdemócrata.

Con la iniciativa Time To Go (“Es la hora de irse”) de los ochenta, intentó unirles, pero esa alianza se fragmentó debido al comportamiento manipulador y carente de principios del sector del Partido Laborista, encabezado por la parlamentaria Clare Short y por John McDonnell (ahora también parlamentario). La Time To Go acabó con tan sólo unos pocos burócratas del Partido Laborista, apoyados tanto por los trotskistas del SWP (Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores) como por el Partido Comunista de Gran Bretaña y, debido sobre todo a este último, de la pequeña Asociación Connolly de la comunidad irlandesa.

Pero perdieron el apoyo primero de la Campaña contra los Registros al Desnudo, seguido del Grupo de Representación Irlandesa en Gran Bretaña, y finalmente del Movimiento Tropas Fuera. Los Provisionales se mantuvieron al margen de estas peleas, pero de facto promocionaron la campaña Time To Go en Gran Bretaña. Se convocó una gran manifestación en Londres, en la que participaron organizaciones normalmente apartadas de la escena de solidaridad irlandesa, pero poco más salió de esa campaña.

Después, los Provisionales fundaron la amplia campaña Saoirse (“Libertad”) para construir la solidaridad con los prisioneros y prisioneras del republicanismo irlandés, pero redujeron su sección británica cuando comenzó a crecer en tamaño y actividad fuera de su control. La reemplazaron más tarde por Fuascailt (“Liberación”), una campaña más pequeña que también concluyeron al pedir a sus miembros que se uniesen a la Sociedad Wolfe Tone (organización partidaria del Sinn Féin).

El Movimiento Tropas Fuera comenzó a acercarse de nuevo a los Provisionales en el Comité por la Retirada Británica (originalmente un amplio comité que planeaba la conmemoración de la masacre del Domingo Sangriento en Derry), y toda la escena de solidaridad irlandesa comenzó a ser cada vez más pequeña, estando su mayor parte bajo control Provisional, con grupos republicanos más pequeños, y activistas y pequeños grupos no influidos por los Provisionales.

Las conmemoraciones anuales de las Huelgas de Hambre en Gran Bretaña se volvieron problemáticas desde que los Provisionales dejaron claro (sin dejarlo nunca por escrito) que no enviarían ponentes a ninguna conmemoración a la que fuesen ponentes de IRSP (Partido Republicano Socialista Irlandés, ligado al INLA). Como tres de los diez mártires de tales huelgas eran afines al IRSP, ponía a la organización de dichas conmemoraciones en una posición muy difícil. O cedían ante la exclusión y censura por parte de los Provisionales, o se oponían a ello y no tenían ponente del mayor de los grupos republicanos.

Durante la mayor parte de esas décadas, los Provisionales (y en menor medida el INLA, después también en IRA Auténtico –Real IRA– y en una ocasión el IRA Oficial) llevaron a cabo campañas de bombas en Inglaterra. Cierto número de las detonaciones del IRA, algunas por error y otras (en apariencia) deliberadas, mataron civiles. Una de esas explosiones, en 1974, aparentemente previo aviso fallido, mató e hirió a un buen número de civiles en Birmingham. Esto dio al Estado británico la legitimidad para aprobar el Acta de Prevención del Terrorismo, la cual facilitó la represión a gran escala de la comunidad irlandesa. Esto, combinado con las falsas acusaciones y condenas de los Seis de Birmingham, los Cuatro de Guildford, los Siete de Maguire y Judith Ward, junto con la campaña mediática británica, creó en la comunidad irlandesa una atmósfera de miedo e intimidación. Eso llevó a un grave parón de la solidaridad a la causa irlandesa hasta que las huelgas de hambre de 1981 galvanizaron la comunidad irlandesa y a partes de la izquierda británica.

La intención del IRA con su campaña de bombas parecía ser disminuir el apoyo de la clase dirigente británica por la guerra y aterrorizar al público para que presionara a su gobierno para retirarse de Irlanda. Sin embargo, estaba claro desde mediados de los setenta, si no antes, que el Estado británico estaba preparado invertir una gran cantidad de recursos financieros, militares, políticos, y judiciales para combatir en Irlanda.

Claramente, mantenerse ocupando los Seis Condados tenía gran importancia para la clase dominante británica más allá de la comprensión de la militancia republicana (y tal falta de comprensión parece mantenerse en el espectro del republicanismo irlandés hasta hoy en día).

Las masas británicas ya habían demostrado su deseo de que se retiraran las tropas de Irlanda en sondeos de opinión públicos. La campaña de bombas no hizo nada para aportar, sino que más bien creó un clima en el que la opinión pública toleraba el abuso de los derechos de la población irlandesa y su represión en Gran Bretaña, junto con la tolerancia de facto de la represión en los Seis Condados, incluyendo asesinatos por parte del Estado.

El Acta de Prevención del Terrorismo 1974 tenía como objetivo específico la comunidad irlandesa porque era la comunidad con más en juego a la hora de oponerse a lo que estaba ocurriendo en los Seis Condados y porque tenían acceso a los hechos, con lo que podían informar a sus amigos británicos, compañeros y compañeras de trabajo, etc.

A pesar de la falta de progreso en sus objetivos y a pesar de su efecto contraproducente, las campañas con bombas del IRA continuaron en Gran Bretaña esporádicamente hasta 1996. Dos años después, el Acuerdo del Viernes Santo marcó el final de cualquier posibilidad para los Provisionales de seguir con las explosiones, aunque otros grupos republicanos “disidentes” podrían hacer uso de esa misma táctica en el futuro.

De nuevo, había alternativas revolucionarias.

Si los Provisionales se hubiesen esforzado en la construcción de alianzas y la movilización, especialmente en ligarse a movimientos de masas sin tratar de controlarlos, el panorama de Inglaterra podría haber sido diferente.

El sector solidario de la comunidad irlandesa debería haber tenido permitido divergir en varios grupos y lealtades políticas pero siempre animado a formar un gran frente de solidaridad con la causa irlandesa de la retirada británica, con el mismo tipo apoyo amplio hacia los prisioneros y prisioneras republicanas. La comunidad irlandesa constituía alrededor del 10% de la población de las ciudades británicas, y suponía una enorme fuente potencial de solidaridad e información a través de sus enlaces sociales y con el sindicalismo, lo cual hubiese podido minar y sobrepasar la censura y propaganda de los medios de comunicación británicos.

Al mismo tiempo, la resistencia en Irlanda debería haber forjado conexiones con la clase obrera británica: quienes les explotan son a su vez opresores del pueblo irlandés. Estas conexiones deberían haber priorizado militantes y grupos revolucionarios por encima de socialdemócratas burocráticos y, de nuevo, mucho de esto podría haber sido realizado a través de la diáspora irlandesa (de aplastante mayoría obrera).

También se podrían haber construido alianzas con las comunidades asiáticas, afro-caribeñas, africanas, etc de Gran Bretaña, unas comunidades sujetas al racismo y a ataques xenófobos en Gran Bretaña y cuyas tierras natales están siendo exprimidas por el imperialismo británico.

Nada de esto hubiese sido fácil, pero a largo plazo podría haber sido mucho más productivo, y una serie de alianzas progresivas habrían significado la masificación de la solidaridad con la causa irlandesa en lugar de lo contrario.

Sin embargo, los provos (y también un caso común dentro de republicanismo irlandés) prefirieron oscilar entre las acciones militares tales como las bombas por un lado, y propuestas reformistas por el otro. Aquellos que fanfarronean de su grado de compromiso con las campañas militares y sus mártires, marginalizando la importancia de activistas solidarios, finalmente acabaron en la administración del Estado colonialjunto a los unionistas y colaborando con la policía colonial británica. A lo largo del proceso, rindieron el estatus de preso político por el cual tantas personas habían luchado y diez de ellas habían muerto en una huelga de hambre.

Conclusión

Stormont Building, seat of the British colonial government in Ireland since 1932 except during years of direct rule from Britain. Sinn Fein have gone from revolutionary campaigning for its abolition and Britain getting out of Ireland to being part of the colonial government, the Northern Ireland Executive.
Stormont Building, sede del gobierno colonial británico en Irlanda desde 1932, excepto durante los años de gobierno directo de Gran Bretaña. Sinn Féin han pasado de la campaña revolucionaria para su abolición y para que la Gran Bretaña salga de Irlanda a formar parte del gobierno colonial, el Ejecutivo de Irlanda del Norte.

Una lucha militar en una pequeña parte de la isla nunca iba a tener la oportunidad de derrotar al imperialismo británico. Además, era necesaria la lucha de masas social y política en toda Irlanda, o al menos en gran parte de ella, para impedir que fuese confinada a una parte del pueblo irlandés, y finalmente contenida.

También eran necesarias alianzas internacionales de carácter revolucionario, no alianzas que pudiesen restringir y minar las demandas de la revolución irlandesa.

Además, alianzas con fuerzas revolucionarias en Gran Bretaña también hubiesen sido fundamentales y, en particular, una relación simbiótica de la lucha revolucionaria en cada país, alimentándose de las fuerzas compartidas pero sin depender la una de la otra.

Si en el momento en que Gran Bretaña ha enviado o considera enviar fuerzas armadas de represión a Irlanda, la clase dominante británica se enfrenta con estallidos revolucionarios en su tierra y en el extranjero, hubiese restringido considerablemente su habilidad para desplegar las tropas mientras al mismo tiempo detona el colapso de la moral y quizá el comienzo de motines entre sus propias Fuerzas Armadas.

Es posible derrotar al imperialismo británico, pero no con las políticas y métodos del movimiento republicano irlandés. Lo que se necesita es un movimiento socialista revolucionario de carácter obrero, que movilice a la población trabajadora irlandesa en torno a los problemas que los afectan de forma directa, practicando la solidaridad internacionalista y creando progresivamente tanto alianzas anti-imperialistas temporales como alianzas permanentes revolucionarias y de clase.

Por desgracia, tal movimiento u organización no existe en Irlanda en este momento.

(La versión dirigida a los irlandeses terminó con la siguiente pregunta: “¿No deberíamos construirla?”)

Deire-Fómhair/ Octubre 2012 (ligeramente revisado en enero 2014).

APÉNDICE

BREVE HISTORIA DE LA LUCHA DEL PUEBLO DE IRLANDA CONTRA EL COLONIALISMO INGLÉS Y IMPERIALISMO BRITÁNICO

En el siglo XII, Irlanda estaba parcialmente conquistada y colonizada por los normandos, que habían invadido y colonizado Inglaterra y Gales cien años antes. Los gobernantes normandos de Inglaterra habían llegado a acuerdos con los gobernantes sajones previos (que a su vez habían sido invasores y colonos de ciertas partes de la Bretaña celta), y comenzaron a llamarse “ingleses” (en gaélico se siguieron refiriendo a ellos de la misma manera que a sus predecesores, como Sacsannaigh, esto es: sajones; y en irlandés moderno aún se sigue haciendo: Sasannaigh).

Las contradicciones se desarrollaron entre estos ingleses y los colonizadores normandos originales de Irlanda,

Normans from Wales invaded Ireland in 1169 and established a colony. They had conquered England in 1066. Over time they became "the English" and extended their control until they ruled the whole of Ireland.
Normandos de Gales invadieron Irlanda en 1169 y establecieron una colonia. Habían conquistado Inglaterra en 1066. Con el tiempo se convirtieron en “Ingléses”, y extendieron su control hasta que gobernaron toda Irlanda.

a quienes los ingleses se referían como “viejos ingleses” (o, en ocasiones, como “ingleses degenerados”) y los irlandeses como Gall-Ghael (“irlandeses extranjeros”).

Los colonizadores normandos originales se habían mezclado con los nativos (excepto en la ciudad fortificada de Dublín y alrededores), aprendido gaélico irlandés, y adoptado muchas de sus costumbres, así como establecido alianzas mixtas. La exportación a Irlanda de la Reforma en la Iglesia de Enrique VIII e Isabel I, desde mediados del siglo XV a mediados del XVI, junto con las guerras del Parlamento contra sus reyes – Carlos I a principios del XVII y más tarde en ese mismo siglo, la liderada por Guillermo III contra Jacobo II – transformaron a los irlandeses descendientes de normandos en aliados irrevocables de los celtas nativos, y posteriormente ambos grupos de fundieron.

Las sucesivas plantaciones (colonizaciones masivas), dejaron muchas partes de Irlanda ocupadas por comunidades de un origen étnico diferente, de otra adscripción religiosa a la de los nativos, que hablaban otra lengua y ocupaban las mejores tierras, de las que habían sido expulsados los irlandeses. Sin embargo, los colonos continuaban siendo una minoría y eventualmente tuvieron que llegar a ciertos acuerdos con los nativos. Al mismo tiempo, estaba emergiendo una burguesía colonial (similar proceso estaba ocurriendo en lo que después serían los Estados Unidos de América) que veía sus intereses como diferentes en muchas maneras a los de Inglaterra y, como muchos de ellos eran presbiterianos, a los de la Iglesia anglicana (la Iglesia del Estado inglés) establecida en Irlanda. Estas contradicciones crecieron y se mezclaron con ideologías republicanas y anti monárquicas y, envalentonado por la rebelión de los colonos americanos (muchos de ellos presbiterianos) y la Revolución Francesa, un sector de esta burguesía irlandesa (de origen británico) se unió a los irlandeses nativos hacia el final del siglo XVIII y se declararon en rebelión abierta contra el dominio británico.

Notables of the United Irishmen, the first Republican movement in Ireland, mostly led by Presbyterians. After the defeat of its 1798 insurrection, the Presbyterian community came under the idealogical control of the Orange Order and British Loyalism, which is where it has remained to this day.
Notables de los Irlandeses Unidos, el primer movimiento republicano en Irlanda, sobre todo dirigido por los presbiterianos. Después de la derrota de su insurrección de 1798, la comunidad presbiteriana quedó bajo el control ideológicos de la Orden de Orange y el lealismo británico, que es donde se ha mantenido hasta nuestros días.

Las rebeliones republicanas de 1798 (las tres mayores en el noreste, sudeste y oeste de Irlanda) no tuvieron éxito, pero muchos de los que permanecieron en Irlanda se consideraron en lo sucesivo como un solo pueblo, los irlandeses, siendo mayoría pero no todos de fe católica.

La excepción más notable se dio en ciertas partes de Úlster, donde en las consecuencias de la derrota de la rebelión del ’98, la Orden de Orange controló socialmente y más tarde dominio ideológicamente la gran mayoría de la enorme comunidad presbiteriana de allí. Las alianzas políticas de la mayoría de los presbiterianos de allí desde entonces al presente han permanecido fieles a la Monarquía Británica y su Estado. Como sus colonos en Irlanda, siempre se esforzaron por mantener Irlanda para la Corona Británica y a ellos mismos en ascendencia y, al principio del siglo XX, cuando ya no pudieron seguir haciéndolo, trataron de mantener la esquina de Irlanda donde eran más numerosos a salvo para Gran Bretaña y para sí mismos, sojuzgando a los irlandeses nativos bajo su dominio mediante la opresión sectaria y la discriminación en el empleo, vivienda, administración, política y ley.

Sin embargo, antes de esto, al principio del siglo XIX, los irlandeses (ahora una mezcla de nativos con normandos e ingleses asentados) del movimiento de la “Joven Irlanda” habían comenzado a preparar una nueva rebelión republicana. Pero la tragedia de la Gran Hambruna intervino: inanición, hambre, enfermedades y emigración masiva pusieron fuera de juego a la gran rebelión. Años más tarde, otra rebelión a gran escala fue detenida cuando las cuidadosas preparaciones de los Fenianos fueron echadas por tierra con un ataque preventivo de la policía y el ejército británico.

A medida que el final del siglo XIX se aproximaba, los irlandeses volvían a reafirmar su independentismo nacionalista, mediante medios de reforma parlamentaria, agitación agraria (más tarde también con luchas industriales), y preparativos para una insurrección armada. Mientras los Estados europeos y de más allá estaban atrapados en la Primera Guerra Mundial imperialista, los irlandeses se alzaron en una corta y fallida rebelión (Alzamiento de Pascua de 1916) que sin embargo fue seguida por una cruenta guerra de guerrillas (Guerra de la Independencia Irlandesa) en varias zonas de Irlanda.

En 1921 los británicos negociaron un acuerdo que les dejaba ocupando seis de los 32 condados de Irlanda, lo que llevó a la Guerra Civil Irlandesa en 1922 entre el recién nacido Estado irlandés y la mayoría de los anteriores rebeldes, que fueron derrotados.

El nuevo Estado irlandés estaba controlado por los representantes políticos y burocráticos de la burguesía nativa, que continuaba bajo la influencia económica y financiera de la potencia colonial, que también mantenía los seis condados bajo la administración local de la burguesía anglicana y presbiteriana con el control social de los lealistas de la Orden de Orange, y dominando a una minoría católica mediante la policía y el ejército.

El órgano de control social en los 26 condados era la Iglesia católica, conservadora y pro-capitalista.

Ningún gran cambió ocurrió hasta finales de la década de 1960, cuando la agitación comenzó por los derechos civiles en los Seis Condados, oponiéndose a la discriminación contra la minoría católica (casi todos descendientes de irlandeses y normando-irlandeses). A medida que la campaña por los derechos civiles se encontraba con la violencia desatada del Estado, más tarde respaldada por tropas de Gran Bretaña, la minoría católica continuó resistiendo mientras una parte de ella se enzarzó en una feroz guerra de guerrillas tanto urbana como rural. Esto continuó durante prácticamente treinta años, hasta que un acuerdo llevó a la mayoría de las fuerzas guerrilleras a la rendición (Acuerdo de Viernes Santo, 1998).

Ahora, poco más de diez años más tarde, la organización republicana que lideró la lucha contra la ocupación británica de Irlanda se ha incorporado a la administración local de la colonia británica de los Seis Condados y está buscando formar parte de la dirección política de la neo-colonia del resto de Irlanda. El Sinn Féin tiene Ministros en el Ejecutivo del Norte de Irlanda, que es la administración local del Estado colonial británico. El Ejecutivo lleva a cabo recortes en servicios para el pueblo de los Seis Condados, como parte de la estrategia capitalista de trasladar su crisis a la clase obrera, y también reduce los salarios. También administra las fuerzas policiales locales (PSNI), que anualmente refuerza provocativas marchas lealistas que atraviesan zonas católicas enfrentándose a la oposición de la población, y lleva a cabo el acoso tanto individual como comunitario en las áreas de resistencia.

Fin