State Violence Read Online Free PDF Page B

focusing narrowly on a section of people, victims and their relatives who feel they have been neglected and ignored. The ghetto poor have to a great extent been a voicless people – although they can be eloquent – voiceless because they are without power. Government officials, religious people and academics were not always willing to listen to them and so their lack of human rights and civil rights and justice went unredressed. They found it difficult to get their story told. The people represented here, madam chairperson, have been the victims of the corruption of law. Such a problem is worldwide. We are focusing here on Northern Ireland and Britain but we have also a speaker here to challenge governments and politicians in the Republic of Ireland whose silence on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings is as deafening as the explosions themselves. The agents of the law in Northern Ireland and Britain, people in charge of the law, have violated the law to use it as a weapon to torture men in interrogation centres, to send some innocent people to jail for life, to kill and injure civilians with plastic bullets, to shoot citizens with army guns, to act in collusion over twenty-five years with the murderous intent of the loyalist paramilitaries. A second hurt, added to the injuries, is that the law has provided no adequate remedy for proper investigation; no truth or justice for the Relatives for Justice. Hence the appreciation of our groups to have a voice here today.
    The British government does not hold the high moral ground. Like the paramilitaries it should also acknowledge and repent for its crimes, the deaths and suffering of innocent people it has caused. Truth helps a peace process and has healing effects. Justice and charity flow from it. Our submission to the Forum outlines 16 classifications of the violations of human rights. The headings are:
    1. Murder and unjust killings by the security forces. 148 members of paramilitary oganisations and 138 innocent civilians have been killed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army; some of these can be classified as murder and some as unjust killings. Prosecutions and convictions of members of the security forces have been avoided in most cases.
    2. Collusion of the British Intelligence system, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Irish Rangers (RIR), members of the RUC, with loyalist paramilitaries leading to the murders of hundreds of Catholics.
    3. Widespread and deadly use of rubber and plastic bullets resulting in severe injuries and the deaths of 17 people, of whom 8 were children and one was a woman.
    4. Internment of c. 2,000 Catholic men and 32 women under special powers and the cruel ill-treatment of same.
    5. Inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in Palace Barracks, Holywood, and Girdwood Barracks, Belfast, 1971–2.
    6. Torture of 14 hooded men by sensory deprivation in Ballykelly Barracks in 1971.
    7. Duress: Arrested people in the 1970s were forced to sign statements admitting crimes the police wanted to connect them with.
    8. Harassment: For 20 years nationalists were subjected to arbitrary house searches, house wrecking, beatings, verbal harassment, and census taking by security forces.
    9. Ill-treatment of arrested persons in RUC stations 1972–75.
    10. Ill-treatment of arrested person in the interrogation centres at Castlereagh and Gough Barracks 1976–77.
    11. Alleged verbal statements of accused given out by the police were accepted on their word in the Diplock Courts; beating, thumping and kicking prisoners and interrogating them for long periods and putting them in positions of stress, were not accepted as cruel and degrading treatment and statements taken after these forms of ill-treatment were accepted in court. There followed great disparity in sentences and some of the sentences were inhuman. Despite the censures of the British domestic report, the Bennett Report, in 1979, ill-treatment