Examination of Witness (Questions 300-306)
DR BRANDON
HAMBER AND
MS KATE
TURNER
19 MARCH 2008
Q300 Sammy Wilson: I just wonder
how widespread this desire for a public Truth Commission happens
to be. Let me give you some of the information which we have received
and you would imagine these would be people who would be particularly
interested in truth. The Historical Enquiries Team yesterday told
us that about 55% of people they have contacted so far and told
them they were going to look at a case and wanted to interface
with them were prompted. A very small minority of people actually
go to the Historical Enquiries Team and ask, "Would you initiate
an investigation into my case". Even when prompted only 55%
have asked the Historical Enquiries Team, "Keep me informed,
I want to know what is happening", et cetera. That is amongst
people who have lost relatives, which would indicate to me that
there is not a massive desire for this. Take Stephen's point,
I do not see any mad push within the communities which were perhaps
most affected by the Troubles to have all of the past spelt out
again in some kind of truth and reconciliation group. I take it
that people from your group are self-selecting, people who for
one reason or another want to be there, either because they like
talking about things or sometimes have an agenda, they want to
find a mechanism to get the state under the spotlight again through
truth and reconciliation. What evidence do you have that wider
society actually wants this opening of the box to spell out what
happened in the past and the reasons why it happened, who did
it, why they did it and where they did it, et cetera?
Ms Turner: From our very beginning,
as I said at the start, we were set up to exist for a week, we
did not think there was that much interest in this debate, but
the organisation has grown and continued to grow because more
and more people are interested. We get newspaper clippings and
in the early days we got a few a day, but now we are getting dozens
of clippings each day because there is more and more stuff in
the media about the past and dealing with the past. We are living
in this uneasy peace and are very wary of doing anything that
unsettles it. A lot of people will say, as you heard earlier,
that they are scared that looking at the past is going to destabilise
that, and I agree that is a very common feeling. A lot of the
people who are involved in Healing Through Remembering have that
view. There are people in the organisation now who say, "I
sat outside the organisation four or five years ago and thought
what are these people doing, but I started to look around and
realised we need to decide what we are doing about dealing with
the past or else it is going to come back and affect the future".
There are people in each of the groups who do not think that the
recommendation we are looking at is a good idea and that is part
of the dialogue we have within the organisation. Healing Through
Remembering is definitely not a group of people who are saying,
"We want a Truth Commission", it is a group of people
saying, "We want a dialogue about how we deal with the past",
and part of that dialogue is around truth recovery, not even necessarily
around a Truth Commission. The difficulty is that when you talk
to people who have not been debating on this issue they immediately
think any kind of truth recovery means a South African-style Truth
Commission and they perceive that as being a big, public, televised,
media-driven event. They also see it as an event where victims
and perpetrators encounter each other. Brandon can explain better
that these perceptions are not what happened in South Africa,
but it is also not what happened in the 30-odd other countries
where there have been Truth Commissions, so the trouble is the
debate is at a fairly naive level, which is understandable, and
that is why the group who are undecided on this issue produced
this report, Making Peace with the Past, because they wanted
to inform the debate.
Q301 Chairman: You keep using the
word, "the group" and you have used the word "members",
and you have told us there are 108 members. Is the group and the
108 members one and the same body or do you go out and embrace
a lot more people because that is very relevant?
Ms Turner: When I refer to "the
group", I am referring to one of the sub-groups. That is
a group of between 16 and 26 people looking at this issue on a
month-to-month issue.
Q302 Chairman: But drawn from the
108?
Ms Turner: Yes.
Q303 Sammy Wilson: I am at a loss
to understand. If you say, first of all, one of the reasons we
need to talk about the past and truth and reconciliation to remember
and whatnot, that strikes me as something which if it is going
to have wider public benefits needs to be public, yet you are
saying it does not necessarily have to be public, this can be
something which can be done presumably between individuals or
behind closed doors or whatever. How do you get this wider reconciliation
if it is not at the public Truth Commission level where it is
all going to be held in public?
Ms Turner: You should come and
join one of the sub-groups, this is the kind of thing we debate
on a month-by-month basis. The second option in this report is
about internal investigations and, as Brandon said, it was mirrored
on the disappeared and is about going to an intermediary who goes
to organisations to get individual answers. That does not feed
the wider debate in society about dealing with the past but the
group recognise maybe that cannot be done through truth recovery
and that is why they presented that as one of the options for
discussion, but when we took that out to our 12 public roadshows
we have had with this report, that was the one that the audience
in a whole range of venues said, "That is not going to give
us answers".
Q304 Chairman: What sort of audiences?
What size of audiences?
Ms Turner: Some of them were small.
The largest one was about 50 and the smallest one was about four.
Sammy Wilson: Presumably the Historical
Enquiries Team does that on a one-to-one basis, the Police Ombudsman
does that on a one-to-one basis with people who have had members
of their families killed or whatever. Dr Hamber talked about something
much wider than that. He talked about a kind of truth body which,
I think I wrote the words down, "subpoena, search, et cetera".
I know it was a personal opinion that he was expressing, but if
that is the route we are going down I would see that as fairly
one-sided for two reasons. First of all, if you are going to have
people to search and subpoena, et cetera, you are more likely
to be searching through police and Army records, et cetera, you
are not going to be searching through the records of the paramilitaries
or the UDA or the UVF, there is nothing to search there. It is
going to be very much one-sided. I can understand why some republicans
would love that because not only do they get what the Historical
Enquiries Team is doing in a very controlled way at present but
they get this done in the full light of publicity and, of course,
they can learn lots of things from that. The second thing is I
know lots of people who previously never were convicted but were
involved in paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland and some
of them are now teachers, some are businessmen, some look back
on their past and wonder how they ever got involved in that, "Thank
God, I was never charged. Thank God, I was never in a police station",
but they know they were involved in it. Do you honestly think
that those people who now have a stake in society, now have a
job where they are looked up to, are ever, ever going to volunteer?
You say we need a debate on this but this is one of the reasons
why I think what you are suggesting can only go in one direction,
and that is to expose the police, the Army, the state, to the
full scrutiny and never get anywhere near the people who performed
terrorism.
Q305 Chairman: Could I ask you to
make a fairly brief, succinct reply to that because we are nearing
the end of our 45 minutes and there are some more witnesses to
appear before us before we fly back to London. The essential point
of Mr Wilson's question was that this would become rather one-sided
and biased. How do you answer that?
Dr Hamber: I will be succinct.
Firstly, I feel I set the tone off in the wrong way at the beginning
of the hearing. My task, or the way I saw what I was trying to
say, was not to try and divert attention from the Healing Through
Remembering project, which is what this is essentially about,
it is about debate and a wider process and they are putting options
on the table. I expressed an opinion, so I do not want that to
be confused. When I raised that issue, what I was trying to say
was I feel if we discount that issue we need to put out a very
coherent argument saying why we are not going down that route.
That is both a practical argument on some of the points you have
just outlined as well as a principled argument because we need
to bear in mind that in a lot of other societies around the world
the opinion is they need to account for the past, there needs
to be an uncovering of the truth, so if we are not choosing that
route in this society we need to be very clear as to why we are
not choosing that route. That is simply what I was trying to say
and I feel I set the tone incorrectly and perhaps created the
impression that Healing Through Remembering is advocating a Truth
Commission, which it is not, and it has those diversity of opinions.
In terms of the specific question, equally if we were to debate
this as a simple point of debate rather than trying to put this
forward as, "This is what has to be done", you could
probably make an argument that if there was a wide-ranging process
that looked at all the types of violations there would be very
few armed groups in this society that would come out looking very
good. For example, it is absolutely clear that paramilitaries
killed more people than anybody else, so if there was a wide-ranging
process trying to paint a broad picture of the past, there is
the potential that could be balanced against other types of issues
and, in fact, they could come out looking a lot worse from that
process with very poor structures of how that was authorised,
how they understood what was legitimate and what was not, et cetera.
I am just saying at the level of argument there is the chance
those issues could be looked at differently.
Sammy Wilson: We do not need a Truth
Commission to tell us how many people were killed by the UVF,
the UDA and the IRA, there are books written on it, statistics
given. If you ask for it in Parliament you will get that. If that
is the only benefit you see, that everybody will come out looking
bad, I have to say that is a fairly weak argument for having that
kind of thing. Why have you given us a personal opinion? The answer
Ms Turner gave links the two in. If this is going to be about
some wider good for society and if you want to go down the route
we are talking about then you cannot have it anything other than
public and all the dangers that there are will come to the fore.
Q306 Chairman: Do you want to respond
briefly to that?
Dr Hamber: No, it is okay.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Thank
you for seeking to clarify in your last remarks. I think we all
accept and appreciate that you are seeking to do good and find
a way forward. What you have said will certainly be taken into
account. When you leave today, if you feel there are points you
wish further to clarify, things that you have not been able to
get across to us for whatever reason, perhaps you could send a
further written submission to our clerk. We shall be continuing
to take evidence for at least another couple of months, so there
will be ample opportunity for any supplementary material to be
read by all the Members of the Committee and taken into account.
Thank you very much.
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