RIGHTS-N.IRELAND: Concern Over Demands For Security Clampdown

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dipankar De Sarkar

LONDON, Aug 18 1998 (IPS) - Human rights groups are urging British premier Tony Blair not to let a hardline security clampdown in Northern Ireland threaten human rights following Saturday’s bomb blast, which left at least 28 people dead and scores wounded.

“We have concerns about calls for a security clampdown in Northern Ireland,” said Jane Winter, director of British Irish Rights Watch, which monitors the human rights dimension of the Irish conflict. “While the perpetrators of Saturday’s terrible atrocity must be punished, such security measures have failed in the past, falling on both the just and unjust,”

Calls for swift retribution came within hours of Saturday’s blast at a busy shopping area in the small town of Omagh — the worst terrorist atrocity in the history of the current Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’

No one has yet positively claimed responsibility for the attack, but the attack has been blamed on the so-called ‘Real IRA’, which favours a military solution to the conflict. The Real IRA is a breakaway Catholic armed group composed of disgruntled membe rs of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which announced a ceasefire last year and backed a politically negotiated settlement.

Five men have already been arrested by police investigating the bombing. All were detained in dawn raids Monday and all are being questioned by Northern Irish police in Belfast. More arrests are expected.

On Monday British Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam and the Irish Justice Minister John O’Donoghue met for three hours to discuss new security steps. They include more border operations by Irish and British police and measures to make it easier to convict people for being members of ‘terrorist organisations’.

There were ‘a whole host” of other measures but it would be “stupid” to disclose them in advance, Mowlam told reporters.

But hardline Northern Ireland politicians belonging to the majority-Protestant community are demanding reintroduction of indefinite internment of terrorist suspects without trial, deployment of more troops in the British-ruled province and abandoning pla ns to release Irish political prisoners.

“We did not want internment removed from the Prevention of Terrorism Act because when you’ve got an emergency like this it helps to have powers like that for the government to do something,” said British opposition Conservative Northern Ireland spokesm an Malcolm Moss.

In addition to mainstream politicians, well-known former IRA hitman-turned-informer, Sean O’Callaghan, joined in the chorus for decisive action. He said it is not only the British government, but also authorities in the Irish Republic – where Catholics are in a majority – which needed to act swiftly.

“Intern them. Break their backs. Lock them up and throw the keys away,” O’Callaghan wrote in an editorial-page comment in the pro-Conservative ‘Daily Telegraph’ newspaper.”By interning roughly 100 terrorists, the Irish government could, with one surgical strike, do more for the long-serving people of Northern Ireland than any amount of waffle about cross-border bodies ever achieved,” he added.

But Maggie Burns of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a Belfast-based human rights body, said she would be “very concerned” if the human rights focus of the peace accord hammered out earlier this year was rolled back.

“We would argue that emergency powers in force in Northern Ireland, and in particular internment without trial, have not just been ineffective, but in fact have fuelled the conflict. They have been a part of the problem — They have created enormous backlash,” Burns said.

Rights groups point out that emergency provisions have existed in Northern Ireland in one form or the other ever since the partition of Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921.

Suspected ‘terrorists’ are still tried without a jury. In addition, stop and search powers are routinely exercised by British security forces, mostly in Catholic areas and in working class neighbourhoods of both Catholics and Protestants, Burns said.

Rights groups are also worried about suspects being held without access to solicitors — a violation that has been criticised by the European Court of Human Rights — and provisions that allow terrorist suspects to be held for seven days without being produced before a court.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers visited Britain in October 1997 to investigate the effects of emergency legislation on lawyers’ ability to practise in Northern Ireland, including complaints about police intimidation of lawyers.

“The actual perpetrators must be arrested, tried and punished. If you lock people up without giving them rights, you create martyrs,” said Winter. “And there is the danger of innocent people getting caught up.

“Our concern is that when there is such a dreadful atrocity, and public opinion calls for swift retribution, then police and army come under pressure to deliver that retribution,” Winter said.

Northern Ireland forms the bulk of the section dealing with Britain in the 1998 Amnesty International annual report, which points to “allegations of ill-treatment by police officers and reports of human rights violations by security forces.”

“Conditions in Special Security Units constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment… Reports were received indicating a continued lack of even-handed policing in Northern Ireland,” the Amnesty report says.

Independent medical reports indicated that conditions in so- called Special Security Units led to a serious deterioration of prisoners’ physical and psychological health, it added.

“It is unfortunate that although the peace process has been advancing since 1994, we get new cases every week,” Winter said.

A spokesman for Sinn Fein, the Catholic political party regarded as the political wing of the IRA, said it would be “a disaster” to resurrect internment without trial.

“If you look at the evidence of the last 30 years, you will see that there were numerous security crackdowns but all of them didn’t work,” Sinn Fein spokesman Michael Browne told IPS.

“You have to compare that with the progress made in the last few years through the political process. It’s the political process that will take us out of this conflict,” he added.