Never Never Land

By AM Friday, May 1, 2009

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A great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth - Niels Bohr

For a while Truth & Reconciliation again became the buzz term with the publication of the Eames-Bradley report. While not as false sounding as 'courageous and imaginative' it is every bit as steeped in the peace process which lends artificiality to all it comes into contact with. In a way that we assume was never the objective of Eames-Bradley we can at last settle down to the knowledge that we will have neither truth nor reconciliation. We will get a bit of one, some of the other but most likely a situation where each will remain in a state of mutual antagonism. The North’s way of fusing them together is like giving two blind men motivational shoves rather than guide dogs.

Reconciliation can never grow from an expectation that the truth being insisted upon must be accepted: ‘do not challenge our truth and we will reconcile with you.’ Not much justice in that. But then why would there be? Truth and justice has now been usurped by truth and reconciliation? And as our truth is not your truth and is never likely to be your truth then the one truth is that accurate truth as distinct from exculpatory truth shall never creep into the crevices and pores of the one eyed Northern Irish moral universe. It remains hermetically sealed against truth infiltration.

A lot of truths in the above paragraph which goes to show that no matter how many truths there are they do not necessarily lead to clarity.

Truth is closer to justice than it ever is to reconciliation. Justice divides, it always does. When the perpetrator of some horrendous crime is sent down for life it may be justice but it is unlikely to lead to reconciliation. The reconciliation the perpetrator wants is one that will keep him out of prison whereas the victims, to the degree that they might want reconciliation at all, need the sentence of life imposed.

Truth and reconciliation are words that do not sit comfortably alongside one another. Despite the manifold attempts to weave them together as part of the discursive fabric of the peace process the awkward seams are still there and as badly sewn as anything on the face and neck of the monster from the old Frankenstein movies.

Reconciliation if it evolves will be just that; a process of evolution rather than the revolution envisaged by some. It will evolve rather than be created. It shall lay its own deposits layer upon layer. There will be no overnight panacea. Are people so constituted as to be able to reconcile themselves to the loss of their loved ones particularly their ‘irreplaceable children’? Jo Berry who lost her father in the Brighton bomb and Pat Magee who took her father’s life make the news because they are the exception rather than the rule of reconciliation. And they are forever accompanied by the thought that Berry is simply the re-emergence of the Stockholm Syndrome albeit in a different context and location.

When it emerged a number of years ago that one of the British gun gang that had mown down unarmed IRA volunteers in Gibraltar in 1988 was later killed, some of the families who lost loved ones at the hands of the British refused to play the game of forgiveness, rather opting to express the sentiment that he got what was coming to him. Although unable to source it, somewhere in my mind Jim Clinton figures. His wife was gunned down by Jackie McDonald’s UDA in her South Belfast home as she sat with her family. He commented in similar vein supporting those who felt no regret at the SAS killer’s passing. It all might have sounded raw in its expression but it had a particular honesty and human passion to it so lacking in the managed ersatz world of ‘oh let me feel your pain.’ Clinton may echo the sentiments of the Abuelas group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in their affirmation ‘we do not forget, we do not pardon, we do not reconcile’, but he sounds all the more authentic for that. He would seem to be the rule, Berry the exception.

Just as the Argentinean experience has been described, memory is a battlefield. The Argentine, home to the worst state atrocities committed in the entire Latin American region in the 1970s and ‘80s, is instructive if only for the differences that have characterised the approach of those tackling the problem of reconciliation. The regime of Nestor Kirchner, in power and able to push things through, wanted reconciliation linked to justice, truth and memory. Carlos Menem, one of his predecessors and operating in les propitious circumstances where the military had not yet been sufficiently brought to heel, started a process premised on reconciliation emerging only as a result of oblivion.

While there is something deeply unjust about oblivion – the victims having being obliterated were now to have their memories obliterated – there have been voices raised against ‘having the country’s highest executive authority put to the service of truth, justice and human rights’ on the matter of the past and how to reconcile. For some, neither oblivion nor reconciliation offers answers. Guillermina Seri writes ‘people cannot reconcile with El Proceso’s terror.’ One woman quoted in the same Seri piece, who had been held in one of the many torture centres belonging to the Argentine military, argued that reconciliation is something deeply personal ‘not a political thing’.

Yet in Ireland we throw committees at it, forgetting the memorable quip of James Boren that nothing is impossible until handed to a committee.