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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘The reputation of British justice, once peerless throughout the world, has not survived 25 years of trouble in Northern Ireland,’ said the Guardian’s Hugo Young in calling for the release of a British paratrooper found guilty of the murder of an 18-year-old girl in West Belfast, shot while a passenger of a car driven by a joyrider.
The list of victims of British injustice in the juryless courts of Northern Ireland is long. So too is the list of innocent people who have served decades in British prisons for crimes which they could never have committed.
Yet it took the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four many years to remedy the injustice they suffered. Now the massed ranks of Daily Telegraph readers, Tory MPs and army veterans are campaigning to get the soldier released immediately. Their campaign intensified with massive sympathetic press coverage, when the House of Lords rejected his appeal last month.
Private Lee Clegg is only the second soldier to have been convicted of murder while serving in Northern Ireland, despite British troops having killed 300 people since the troubles began. The first was Private Ian Thain, who was given a life sentence but was quietly released after less than three years – only to be reinstated in the army. It seems that this process is to be repeated in Clegg’s case.
Leading the campaign is defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind, whose concern for the wrongly imprisoned is highly selective. Rifkind claims that had there been a jury Clegg would never have been convicted. The fact that prisons in Northern Ireland are filled with people for whom that is the case doesn’t seem to worry Rifkind or his allies. They claim that the conviction was politically motivated to placate those who say that members of the British army and the RUC seem immune from the law whatever they do.
Any scrutiny of the facts of the case show that – far from it being politically motivated – this case was so clearly one of soldiers acting unlawfully that the courts had no option but to convict. The force used was out of all proportion to the crime, it was decided.
Initially Clegg claimed that he had only opened fire after the joyriders’ Astra had hit one of the soldiers. This was later admitted to be false. In fact after the shooting one soldier was heard to shout, ‘Get down, you’re it,’ to a soldier, who then lay on the ground while another stamped on his leg and hit him with a rifle to make it appear that the car had smashed into him, thus justifying the shooting. The three soldiers later accused of perverting the course of justice in this case were all acquitted.
Even worse is the evidence of how the paratroopers celebrated the double murder. Back in their canteen they built a model of the car complete with a bloodstained head and poster proclaiming, ‘Vauxhall Astra. Built by robots. Driven by joyriders. Stopped by A company.’
The hypocrisy of the government and the security forces has rarely been more stark. On duty soldiers have killed hundreds, including unarmed civilians and children, yet it seems in the only two cases where a murder conviction has succeeded that the law will be ignored and the soldiers back on patrol as soon as possible. The Tories’ policy of longer sentences for violent crime obviously does not apply to those wearing uniform.
Michael Howard, the home secretary, has let it be known that he will be sympathetic to Clegg’s case.
The talk in Ireland may now be of peace and reconciliation and of taking the troops off the streets, but this case shows that the British government still regards the oppression of Irish Catholics as the legitimate role of the British army.
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