Even by the IRA's own standards, the murder of Jean McConville was a war crime, writes Fintan O'Toole
Jean McConville was 37. She had grown up as a Protestant in East Belfast but converted to Catholicism after she married her husband, and lived in the Divis Flats on the Falls Road. By December 1972, she was a widow struggling to raise 10 children on her own.
The Belfast Brigade of the IRA, then commanded by Gerry Adams, decided that she was an informer. She was "tried" in her absence by a self-appointed "court" and sentenced to death. According to Ed Moloney in his Secret History of the IRA, "it is inconceivable that such an order would have been issued without [ Adams's] knowledge."
Jean McConville was kidnapped, taken to Shelling Hill beach on the Louth side of the Border and shot through the head. For the next 30 years, the IRA withheld both her body and all knowledge of her fate from her family. In August 2003, a man walking his dog found pieces of her skeleton sticking up through the sand.
When, on Monday night's Questions and Answers, Michael McDowell asked Mitchel McLaughlin of Sinn Féin whether he classified the shooting of Jean McConville as a crime, he replied "I do not". Though he conceded that the act was "wrong", he immediately attempted to shift the debate to the status of Bobby Sands, the IRA icon who died on hunger strike almost nine years after the murder of Jean McConville.
Metaphorically throwing the shroud of Bobby Sands over the bones of the murdered widow, he suggested that the hunger strike had proved the IRA's "sense of honour and integrity". In his mind, it seems, even "wrong" acts, like the murder of a defenceless woman, cannot be crimes because they are committed by men of honour.
This mindset may be disgusting, but it is not surprising. For Sinn Féin and the IRA, the current phase of the conflict is about the definition of the conflict itself. For the self-esteem of the so-called republican movement, and for the political future of Sinn Féin, it is vital that its 30-year campaign of violence be remembered as a just war, a regrettable but necessary method of achieving a legitimate aim. The vile and sordid deeds that run through that campaign may, under pressure, be described as wrong. They may be accepted as "mistakes". The IRA may acknowledge, in the curiously passive language it favours, that these things "should not have happened". But they must never, ever, be called crimes.
It is no accident that Mitchel McLaughlin's immediate instinct when asked about Jean McConville is to start talking about the 1981 hunger strikes. For those protests, in which 10 men starved themselves to death rather than submit to an ordinary prison regime and therefore accept that they were criminals serving their time, were the ultimate statement of how viscerally important the issue is for the Provos.
A less epic version of this struggle for the moral high ground was played out last July at Philadelphia International Airport, when a former IRA member, Joe Black, was briefly detained by the authorities. He had served time for carrying out a kneecapping but answered "no" to a question on the visa form about whether he had ever been convicted of a crime of "moral turpitude". To accept that the deliberate mutilation of a non-combatant involved moral turpitude would be to acknowledge that normal standards of morality apply to IRA operatives. Such a conclusion is, for the IRA and its apologists, unfathomable.
The fact is that even by the IRA's own standards, the murder of Jean McConville and hundreds of other acts of violence it has perpetrated are crimes. The IRA justifies itself by claiming that it was engaged in a war, and that wars inevitably involve the infliction of violence on others. Along with Mitchel McLaughlin, it conveniently forgets that there is also such a thing as a war crime. And by all accepted definitions of war crimes, the murder of Jean McConville was an illegal act. The International Criminal Court, of which Ireland is a member, clearly states that war crimes do apply to "an armed conflict not of an international character", a category which obviously applies to the Northern Ireland troubles.
Under this heading, it defines as crimes a number of acts against non-combatants that the IRA perpetrated against Jean McConville, including "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture", and "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all judicial guarantees which are generally recognised as indispensable."
The IRA's refusal to disclose Jean McConville's fate or produce her body also constituted a war crime, that of "enforced disappearance of persons", defined as "the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organisation, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons."
With a hypocrisy that would be breathtaking had it not become so familiar, Sinn Féin regularly supports calls for these international laws to be enforced - so long as the crimes in question happened elsewhere. At the time when there were attempts to prosecute the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the UK and Spain, for example, An Phoblacht quoted with approval Virginia Díaz, a member of the Spanish prosecution team against Pinochet: "One of the consequences of the Pinochet case has been the creation of an International Criminal Court to take on cases of crimes against humanity. 'But what is more important' , highlights Virginia, 'is the final confirmation that crimes against humanity are imprescriptible and that human rights are inviolable. There is no possible immunity to cover those responsible for those crimes'."
Except, of course, the immunity of those inoculated against guilt by their own tender sense of honour.