Examination of Witnesses (Questions 731-739)
MR MICHAEL
POTTER, MR
BRANDON HAMBER,
PROFESSOR ROY
MCCLELLAND,
MR OLIVER
WILKINSON AND
MR ROBIN
WILSON
28 FEBRUARY 2005
Q731 Chairman: Thank you all for coming.
We are, as you know, looking into the problems of reconciliation
and whether there is a way forward, and we have spent the last
month or two addressing ourselves to victims and victims groups,
of which you are representative of four of them. If you could
just answer our questions as briefly as you can and we will see
how we go. The question really is whether approaches to reconciliation
should be victim-centred or not. Has anybody got examples of a
country which has succeeded in designing an effective victim-centred
approach to reconciliation? Can anyone drag anything out of their
memories? We do not think we have found one. (After a pause).
Good, that is the first answer, the briefest answer of all.
Professor McClelland: I think
that centring on victims and their special needs has informed
a number of initiatives. There is the South African initiative,
and Brandon Hamber would be much better at talking about that
but, equally, having just come from meeting people from Peru this
afternoon, the Peruvian initiative also was cognizant of the hurt
and the legacy of that hurt that needed to be dealt with as a
moral prerogative, to take initiatives and to move processes forward.
For me, in terms of our own community, it gives us the moral prerogative
of responding to the hurt where hurt has been most felt.
Q732 Chairman: Do you want to add anything,
Mr Hamber?
Mr Hamber: I think most of these
initiatives start out very much with the idea of being victim-centred.
Some of them might have a political background at the start, like
in the South African case with issues around amnesty questions,
but in terms of what they are subsequently trying to do, they
will often try and put the victims at the centre of it. Whether
they achieve that fully or not I think is another issue. There
are other examples that I think one could think of; for example,
there was recently a commission looking at the issue of torture
in Chile, following initial truth commission reports. That has
very much built on the testimony of victims and arguably we could
say actually that in both Argentinean and the Chilean cases they
really did focus on victims. It is a case, I suppose, of how we
define what we mean by the issue of victim-centred, but I think
many of them set out, certainly, to focus on victims.
Q733 Chairman: A number of victims and
victims groups seem to be sceptical about whether their views
have been taken into account by the Government; do you think that
is a justified criticism, not least of the groups we have just
had in? Do you think the Government has done all it should do,
enough of what it should do, or do you think that that is a justified
complaint on behalf of the victims?
Professor McClelland: I think
there have been significant efforts on the part of Government.
The initiative, for example, of trying to deal with trauma and
trying to deal with physical trauma as well as psychological trauma
is really quite palpable. I think victims are in the best position
to read out just how much has been committed, but I do sense,
as a trustee of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation,
and being in receipt of quite a large donation from the central
Government, without that we could not do our work. I sense that
there is at least one major gap, however, where issues about truth
and other issues about the past perhaps have not been taken up
at all by Government, and that is a gap that I do believe needs
to be addressed.
Mr Hamber: I think you can draw
a distinction between two separate things: one is about the actual
support or dealing with the consequences of what happens to victims,
and that might be about counselling, it might be about finding
support and other sorts of things. Since 1998, as you know, there
have been a range of initiatives to try and set that up, as Roy
has mentioned. The second component of it is much more around
the issues that affect the victims, which are these questions
of truth, justice, compensation and these sorts of issues, and
I think when one starts to look at that it is quite clear, speaking
to victims, that certainly they feel that that has not been fully
addressed. Having said that, that is the more difficult part to
address because that is fundamentally about political questions
rather than actual service delivery, so I think that fact, that
there are two separate needs, can be quite important.
Q734 Chairman: What about the dilemma
as to whether you talk to victims groups or the victims themselves,
some of whom of course do not belong to any group? Which of those
approaches do you think is the most likely to get us where we
want to go?
Mr Potter: From a political perspective
there are a number of victims groups who see themselves as representatives
of victims in Northern Ireland. The problem is that the victims
sector is very divided and those who are parts of groups are a
tiny minority of those who have been affected by the conflict.
What we have found through our research is that people seek help,
guidance and support in a range of areas within society itself
and not necessarily from victims groups—and there are a
number of reasons why that happens. Talking to victims groups,
therefore, will only really reach a small proportion of people
generally. Most ordinary human beings who do not feel themselves
politically disposed one way or the other might seek help through
the family, churches, other community organisations, but predominantly
we have found that women's centres have sustained communities
during the conflict, and if we are talking about support to organisations
that have supported victims and will support victims in the future,
the fact that a lot of women's centres are having to close because
they do not get funding from the Government beyond March this
year will probably be very detrimental to the communities they
serve.
Q735 Chairman: Do they know they are
not going to get it, or do they not know whether they are going
to get it?
Mr Potter: They have been told
that they will not receive emergency funding and a number have
closed already.
Q736 Chairman: Would you very kindly
let us have a note of those groups which have been told that their
funding has been cut off because that would be very helpful to
have on the record?
Mr Potter: We will try and dig
that out.
Mr Wilson: It is worth adding,
chair, that even with the best will in the world, in terms of
the victims groups every victim is an individual victim in terms
of their experience, in terms of their needs, and unfortunately
we tend to bracket people together and say they are victims in
a homogenised, collectivised way. Secondly, a lot of people who
have had the experience of being victims are actually struggling
to get out of that sense of being a victim and that should be
a key psychological point, how they can manage to make the best
of their lives so they are no longer feeling consumed by that
sense of victimhood.
Chairman: Thank you so much. Mr Gregory
Campbell.
Q737 Mr Campbell: On the issue of the
role of the victim-centred approach, I am just wondering if any
of you have a view on that approach being more difficult to break
out of the cycle of victimhood remaining and continuing, or does
it in some ways keep on the continuum. Is there a consensus on
that?
Professor McClelland: I think
there are views and I think the way you phrased the question points
to some of the difficulties here. It is a bit like dealing with
the past; the view is that the best way to deal with the past
is to leave it behind and then go forward, but I think the past
invades the present. One thing about trauma—and that characterises
victimhood, that people have been traumatised—is that it
leaves a lot of psychological hurt, social group hurt, and it
does not go away just by ignoring it. I do believe that practically
speaking it is problematic to leave it, but also it is morally
inappropriate, and we need to start to listen to what they are
asking for and take their questions seriously. I sense that is
the view coming out, certainly from Healing through Remembering,
which I am deeply involved with.
Mr Hamber: In many senses what
is important in terms of that is that victims are all seen within
some sort of a context, so that if one strictly focuses on victims
as if they exist as a subset somehow outside of the broader political,
social and other context, then I think we run the risk of ghettoising
that focus on victims, but if one places it within context—and
that is where it goes back to what I was saying about having to
deal with all the other issues in a society, recognition, acknowledgement
and other sorts of issues—I think then you have a much better
chance of that becoming much more of a social problem that somehow
needs to be dealt with. I know that the first time I spoke with
you I mentioned the idea of a process being victims centred but
society wide, and I think I would stick with that, that although
it has got to be victim-centred it has to engage the whole of
society, and if it does not I think that could lead to victims
becoming more and more marginalised and more and more isolated,
but the moment you engage society then you are into the politics
of it and that is the difficult part.
Q738 Mr Campbell: On the issue of official
victims strategies, some of the victims themselves and victims
groups who have appeared before the Committee have indicated that
they feel the official strategies do not address what they want
to see addressed, they do not see issues such as acknowledgement
of the hurt, the anger, they have a sense of being forgotten,
they do not see that acknowledgement, they do not see the official
strategy as recognising where they are or what they have gone
through. Do you think that is an accurate reflection?
Mr Potter: Generally in our research
that is a feeling within the victims sector itself, of being ignored.
That is also a symptom of trauma itself and the result of trauma,
but I think one of the main problems is that because the victims
sector itself is divided, both on conflict lines but on other
lines as well, it is very difficult to put your finger on something
and say that we will be seeing to the needs of these particular
victims. You are inevitably leaving out another group that considers
themselves as victims, and I think that is something that we have
not really managed to resolve yet, and it is something that needs
to be done over a long period of time between people within the
victims sector itself rather than people imposing solutions to
that dilemma.
Mr Wilkinson: If you ask people
who have been hurt it is a very difficult story that many of them
have to tell and there is then a realistic expectation on their
part that something will be done about it. I think the experience
over the past 10/20 years is that people feel, to the extent that
they have told their story, that the fact is that they have told
it over again, over again and nothing has ever really happened
with it. The second point is that some people who have not told
their story, and perhaps have been coping perfectly well, when
they hear stories of others it causes them perhaps to feel that
there must be something wrong with me, and the kind of intellectualisation
of the whole process creates a problem of its own. Maybe there
is no answer, but by talking about it and not getting the answers
in the right way it encourages people to come forward, perhaps
more confused than they previously were.
Mr Hamber: If I can add something
about the victim strategy issue, the victim strategy that was
produced clearly says "We did not deal with questions of
truth and justice in this strategy" and we really focused
on service delivery. It in fact goes on to say that it was then
waiting for the report of the Healing through Remembering Project
before it was going to say anything in that regard, and I think
there has been a real gap in waiting for the next strategy. I
think that first strategy created a sense of momentum, even if
it did not address those questions which I think are difficult
questions, and it created an expectation, and there seems to now
have been quite a long gap before the second strategy has arrived.
I think there are some issues there.
Q739 Mr Campbell: Just on the service
delivery, do you think in the round, looking at the victims sector,
both groups and individual victims, that they can credibly claim,
as many of them do, to have been let down significantly on delivery?
Mr Hamber: You mean in terms of
them actually being able to deliver the services themselves or
giving money?
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