Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

Bullies and Bigots

In a few weeks time in Bogota Judge Acosta will rule on the fate of the ‘Colombia Three’, the Irishmen arrested at an airport in August 2001 and charged with training left-wing FARC guerrillas.

Obviously, his decision and his power to sentence the men to anything up to eighteen years imprisonment will have huge, personal ramifications for the families of Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and Jim Monaghan.

The three have been in various prisons, where their lives have been threatened, for two years and almost five months. Their arrest has had a profound effect on the peace process in Ireland and was used by unionists as one of the reasons for their withdrawal from and collapse of the power-sharing executive in the North from which politics has yet to recover.

One month after the arrest of the three Irishmen al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon killing three thousand people. In response the US invaded Afghanistan where it overthrew the Taliban regime. It opened up a prison camp at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba where it has interned without charge or the prospects of trial over six hundred captives from different nations. Then, this year, US and British forces invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein on the false charge that his regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and was colluding with al Qaeda.

In the ‘international war on terrorism’ (where terrorism is defined as a campaign of deliberate killing of innocent civilians for a political or ideological objective) various civil rights and international human rights are being infringed or completely set aside, the body politic corrupted. However, even before this crusade the US and British governments, amongst others, had already considerably lost much of their claim to be acting with moral authority - and not just because they lied about the reasons for going to war.

They have undermined themselves and made the West a byword for hypocrisy by their largely unconditional support for the illegal 36-year-old Israeli occupation and ongoing confiscation of Palestinian land, in breach of UN Resolutions, and the wanton killing of Palestinian civilians.

These double standards towards civil and human rights are dictated by politics and opportunism.

That individual rights no longer matter can also be clearly seen with regard to the Colombia Three. In their case the assumption that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty was abandoned from the very beginning. Before they were even formally indicted the then President of Colombia Andres Pastrana made prejudicial remarks and declared on television that the three were guilty. At a US Congressional Committee hearing General Tapias from the Colombian armed forces said the men were training the FARC and gave evidence from Peter Robinson saying that the three were in the IRA. And earlier this year the current Colombian President Alvaro Uribe told ‘Newsweek’ magazine, “We have in jail three IRA men who trained FARC.”

All of this has undoubtedly placed Judge Acosta under intense pressure to find the three guilty despite there being no evidence against them and strong evidence in their favour. The Colombian government itself stands indicted of human rights abuses and for colluding with right-wing paramilitary death squads. A Human Rights Watch report in 2001 said: “Paramilitary groups working with the tolerance or support of the Colombian military are considered responsible for nearly 80% of all human rights violations documented last year in Colombia.”

And so, for its own political ends, anxious to mask its own record of state terrorism, the Colombian government has actively used the case of the three Irishmen as it lobbies Congress for increased financial and military aid for what is in essence a domestic conflict but one where it tries to portray itself as battling international terrorism, just like the USA.

Not surprisingly, back in Ireland, anti-Agreement unionists using any issue to undermine the Belfast Agreement also dismissed the Colombia Three as having any rights. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair during media interviews twice referred to “activities in Colombia” as being one of the reasons for the breakdown in the peace process (and then called off last May’s scheduled election).

On April 29th Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said: “What is required [of the IRA] is a commitment that paramilitary activity has ceased, will not occur again so that we can get on, so that we do not have another Colombia…”

Worse still came the remarks from Michael McDowell speaking to a Progressive Democrat party conference in 2002. As the Irish Attorney-General he should have known better and that his remarks would be picked up and published in Bogota, as they were. He said: “But I think I speak for the great majority when I say that a political party which sends fraternal delegates to Marxist-Narco terrorists in Colombia, which keeps closer ties with the government of Havana than with any other state…has little moral claim on the electoral support of the Irish people.”

More recently, on Today FM, McDowell, who is now the Minister for Justice, said that Sinn Fein was “morally unclean” and alleged that it is in receipt of IRA proceeds from “organised crime”. He refused to substantiate his remark, which was aimed at damaging Sinn Fein. It would appear that his chief concern is the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, which could displace the PDs in a future coalition with Fianna Fail. He cared not a jot about the effects his cavalier comments would have on attempts to put together a power-sharing executive in the North. Indeed, anti-Agreement unionists to justify their refusal to share power with Sinn Fein seized on his remarks.

Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and Jim Monaghan are supporters of the peace process. To make the peace process work republicans compromised and the IRA engaged in major acts of decommissioning only for the British government to default on the full implementation of the Agreement.

Anti-Agreement unionists have done far more to undermine the peace process than the Colombia Three inadvertently have. They are three innocent men caught up in the power politics of North and South America, and Ireland North and South, and whose legal rights have been dismissed by a right coalition of bullies and bigots.

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