April 18, 2003

Leading article: It happened here: Come clean about the dirty war
The third Stevens report is one of the most shocking commentaries on British
institutions ever published. It is necessarily brief for fear of prejudicing any
number of possible future criminal prosecutions. But even the sparse 19-page
document released yesterday tells a shameful story of state-sanctioned murder,
collusion and obstruction more commonly associated with South American
dictatorships than with western parliamentary democracies.
Some of the events in the report date back 15 years, at a time when the IRA was
waging a bitter war against the British state. In the view of some, even today,
it was legitimate for the forces of the state to fight dirty in return - "big
boy games where big boy rules prevailed". Sir John Stevens, who was brought in
to investigate these big boy games 14 years ago, begs to differ. He assumes that
those involved in policing and security duties in Northern Ireland "work to, and
are subject to, the rule of law".
It is not an academic point. Sir John, the most senior policeman in Britain, is
one of those most directly involved in a new, and even more dangerous, fight
against terrorism. Politicians need to level with us about the nature of that
fight. Is the state going to get down in the gutter with the terrorists, or is
it going to operate to clearly defined and properly monitored standards? There
are few more fundamental questions for a civilised democracy.
It is now clear that, for a period in the 1980s and early 1990s, a small group
of policemen and army officers decided the normal rules did not apply to them. A
few people within the force research unit - a firm within a firm inside a force
within a force - decided to team up with loyalist terrorists in targeting and
assassinating people they decided were IRA terrorists. It is likely that dozens
of victims - some involved in terrorism and others not - were killed through
this unholy alliance between the state and terror groups.
Apologists for this dirty war - including Brigadier Gordon Kerr, once of the
FRU, now military attache in Beijing - have argued that hundreds of lives were
saved by preventing attacks, or simply by murdering suspected terrorists. Even
if it were true, this would still be no justification for this kind of
unapproved, unsupervised, freelance killing spree. In fact, Sir John's team can
only identify two occasions on which murders were prevented.
Almost as shocking as these killings has been the subsequent cover-up. The RUC,
the army and the Ministry of Defence have used every possible weapon - including
obstruction, intimidation and arson - to prevent Sir John and his team from
discovering the truth. As recently as last November the MoD reluctantly handed
over a mass of documents which it knew were central to the case.
Geoff Hoon owes parliament an explanation for these disgraceful delaying
tactics. Those responsible should be sacked. The former minister, Douglas Hogg,
should identify the RUC officers who briefed him and they should be brought to
account for the repulsive smear which led - directly or not - to the murder of
the solicitor Pat Finucane. Hugh Orde, the chief constable of the Police Service
of Northern Ireland, needs to act quickly to reassure Catholics that rogue
elements - particularly within the old RUC special branch - have been purged
from his force. The director of public prosecutions should expedite all the
cases referred by Sir John. And Tony Blair should not only ensure that Sir
John's recommendations are implemented in full, but that he can finish his
inquiries with no further obstruction - wherever they may lead.
Copyright 2003