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10 September 1998 Edition

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The forgotten victims

This week sees the first prisoner releases under the terms of the Good Friday document. It also sees the first week of freedom for Scots Guards, Fisher and Wright, who murdered teenager Peter McBride in a Belfast alley six years ago.

Fisher and Wright were the last of the scant few crown force members to serve any time for the murder of over four hundred nationalists in the North in the last three decades.

They were freed outside of the arrangements for early release and normal procedures were not followed. As Peter McBride's mother, Jean, has pointed out, the reason is plain- ``the victim was a working-class Catholic while the perpetrators were members of the British Army.''

The focus of debate on the release of political prisoners has centered on the feelings of the relatives of victims in the conflict. However it is a debate which has been entirely one-sided and it is never the relatives of state killings who are featured or highlighted.

In the McBride case Mo Mowlam lied when she told the family there would a meeting between herself and the relatives before the Guards were released. It didn't happen. She assured the family that the Guards would not be released in the first wave of releases. Yet they were released before anyone else.

Earlier this year former NIO apparatchik, Kenneth Bloomfield, published a report on victims in line with the Good Friday document. The Relatives for Justice group, which campaigns on behalf of victims and relatives of state aggression, had to lobby hard to be consulted by him before the publication of the report. Their concerns were noted then ignored.

A crucial issue for the relatives of state violence is the establishment of a truth and justice commission, similar to the South African model, to help them come to terms with their loss. This idea received a few short and dismissive lines in Bloomfield's report.

To further compound the anguish of these `forgotten victims' the British government subsequently appointed as Victims Commissioner Adam Ingram- the security minister responsible for the crown forces in the Six Counties.

It is time the British state honestly addressed their part in the conflict, treated victims of British forces and their families with sensitivity and respect, and sincerely worked to end injustice.

Without such commitments those victims gain no release and are forced to struggle on for justice in their own war without end.


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