British security forces colluded in B
the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in February 1989. It took top police officer John Stevens three reports, 14 years, £4 million and interviews with 15,000 people to come to this remarkable conclusion. Remarkable only because the following was public knowledge within a year of the murder.
Pat Finucane had been indirectly threatened with murder on several occasions by RUC officers. Three weeks before his murder, government minister Douglas Hogg stated in the House of Commons "as a fact" that, "there are in Northern Ireland a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA".
The implication of this statement was so obvious that SDLP MP Seamus Mallon responded that, "people's lives are in grave danger... it will be on the head of this Minister and Government if the assassin's bullet decides to do, by lead, what this Minister has done by word".
The murder was set up by a senior British agent Brian Nelson. RUC roadblocks near the Finucane home were lifted shortly • before he died. The murder, coolly executed by two gunmen pumping 14 bullets into Finucane in front of his family required intelligence and self-confidence. The main gun, a Browning, was from a British army armoury.
The Finucane family have called for a full public judicial inquiry, refusing to have anything to do with the Stevens Investigation because they never had any confidence that it would reveal the truth.
As Pat Finucane's son Michael put it, the report is
"an examination of what went wrong in a were Go Britise Northern Ireland and how that can be prevented in the future...
"Stevens " work is flawed. Nothing went wrong. The 'system' worked exactly as intended and, in the British Government's eyes, it worked perfectly.
"The policy in Northern Ireland was -and may yet be -to harness the killing potential of Loyalist paramilitaries, to increase that potential through additional resources in the shape of weapons and information and to direct those resources against selected targets so that the Government could be rid of its enemies.
"Simple policy. Simple operation. Simply
.. 'Nothing went wrong. The 'system' worked exactly as intended and, in Government's eyes, it worked perfectly ... chilling •.. many people were murdered by these agents of the British state, and this is the real price of Sir John Stevens' report" Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and three other human rights organi• sations have indicated their lack of confidence in Stevens, even before he went public. The 3,000 page report was reduced down to 20 pages: that the rest has been withheld from the public to prevent prejudicing potential prosecutions "beggars belief", according to their joint statement
f there was any prospect of such prosecutions being pursued to a serious
conclusion, then the twenty officers currently suspected would at least have been suspended from duty - if not arrest ed or charged. And yet what do we find?
The army has promoted prime suspect Gordon Kerr, the boss of the Forces Reconnaissance Unit responsible for handling Nelson, to Brigadier, and appointed him military attaché in Beijing.
According to the BBC, he is currently serving in Iraq. His contribution to the Iraq war, given his expertise and seniority, can only be running agents. In other words, he has been given the green light to carry on as before.
Stevens never had any hope of publishing the truth. This is his third report. He faced obstruction at senior levels - including arson, document shredding and the like. not have the power to hold up such inves tigations over such a long period. This is merely one instance in a 30 year history of murder, cover up and dirty tricks from before Bloody Sunday in 1972 to after the murder of solicitor Rosemary Nelson in 1999. Experience that, the army boasts, is now being applied in Iraq
The Times revealed that the Ministry of Defence only released vital documents to Stevens after a personal plea by Stevens to Tony Blair last autumn. That the Prime Minister was able to resolve the problem so quickly, after such a long time, confirms that decisions about the investigation's outcome were made at the very top. If not, why hac Tony Blair not used his influence at some previous stage in his six years in office?
Blair no doubt felt it expedient to make a very limited admission of collusion as part of a carrot and stick offensive towards Sinn Fein, to tease it into backing the police. The crunch time has come for Republican concessions - or the "Peace Process" goes into deep freeze.
Other questions are being brushed under the carpet. The idea that Hogg was simply "misled" by RUC Special Branch in making his statement in parliament is not credible. He repeated it three times during his speech.
He knew exactly what the implication was - as Seamus Mallon made explicit. He was not just a minister, but a barrister whose father and grandfather were Lord Chancellors. People like that da not make such repeated statements without knowing exactly on what basis. They cannot be "mis. led" in that way.
Similarly, recent claims by former Tory Northern Ireland Ministers Peter Brooke and Brian Mawhinney that they didn't have any idea what FRU was up to, don't hold water.
The Finucanes and many other victims families are fighting for truth and justice. Whether they will ever get it from the British state, implicated at the highest politi cal and military levels, is another matter They deserve our full support.
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20 social International resistance nce May 2003