"FOR WAR IT IS," IS IT?
Matters have come to a pretty pass when, in the governing of an important and constitutionally integral part of the United Kingdom, the interrogation of British citizens, arrested on suspicion and detained under emergency regulations, is conducted with methods and rules model led on those used in Aden; when there are parts of one of our greatest cities into which the local constabulary are forbidden to go and heavily armed troops make only token patrols; when the demand is made by responsible members of parliament for the introduction of censorship in the reporting to the British public of what is happening within the United Kingdom; when women are tarred and feathered, and men shot through the mouth, as punishments and executions enacted by selfappointed revolutionary tribunals; when.
• snipers killing British soldiers are afforded continuous cover and protection and sustenance by the local people among whom they shelter; when women and children are used as shields for gunmen and bomb-throwers; when every day and night bombs, of increasing size and sophistication, are used indiscriminately to kill and maim bystanders and to destroy property; and when the Prine Minister, speaking of the British army and citizens in Ulster and extending "admiration and gratitude for their fortitude in this war against the gunmen," adds, to emphasise the point, " For war it is."
It is of minor consequence that the Compton Report prefers the phrase " phy sical ill-treatment" rather than "physical brutality" to describe the procedures for questioning in depth. Following the deci sion to intern suspects on August 9 a few men were hooded, subjected to constant noise, fed on bread and water, prevented from sleeping, and forced to stand against a wall with their legs apart and their arms above their heads supporting them on the wall, for periods of up to 43 hours. This is brutal, and brutalizing. But war is brutal and brutalizing. If it is, as Mr Heath says it is, war, then the criticism that may be justly levelled at our conduct of it is that it has been, and remains, too soft, not too hard.
In war, such justice,as survives is rough. The leaders of the IRA, are doubtless already greatly flattered and gratified by Mr Heath's declaratory "For war it is." This serves their purpose and fortifies them, as interment has done, as the Compton report now does, as the demands for censorship and for rougher and tougher behaviour must do. Insurrectionary guerilla movements feed on blood and are sustained by violence. The destruction of law and order, of peace and of just procedure, is the aim of such revolutionaries. They are frequently too weak to bring about such destruction themselves. It is their chosen tactic to provoke the authorities themselves into replacing civil with martial law, meeting revolutionary violence with official violence, and discarding, under the presumed necessities of the situation, the rule of law and the liberties of the subject which it is the chief duty of the civil authorities to uphold and preserve.
The IRA, and more particularly its extreme right-wing nationalist Provisional wing, has successfully taken over what began, in 1968, as a Civil Rights movement with legitimate political aspirations and a good deal of left-wing sentiments and sympathy. Since those days, the Irish mess has got messier and messier, bloodier and bloodier, more and more brutal, until now we have the Compton report, an emergency debate in Parliament, and the Prime Minister declaring" For war it is."
But is it? If it were, then Mr Heath and his administration should meet the demands made by Mr Enoch Powell and others, and prosecute that war with an appropriate vigour: in particular, the land, sea and air borders between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland should be closed; Irish citizens should cease to be treated as the most favoured of all foreigners and be treated instead as potentially hostile aliens; after sufficient time for their inhabitants to be evacuated, the" no-go "areas of Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere should be occupied by the military; and the most rigorous sanctions should be applied to the Republic in the likely event that the Dublin authorities would continue to permit the IRA men fighting in the north to return to the south for succour and re-grouping. It may indeed come to this; the pass we are now at is on the way,: tiat; There remain only two kinds of solution. The first is that of the present and last government's policies, of doing as little as possible as late as possible. Stormont is propped up and undermined at the same time, forced into reforms it possesses neither the political will nor mind to make, but kept in being. This kind of policy each day looks more exhausted. It is a policy of despair which produces despair. The other kind of policy involves the recognition of the failure of the Stormont regime as made evident by the discontent which was the cause of the crisis in the first place. It accepts that the Stormont experiment was a constitutional anachronism which, having evidently failed, is best dispensed with. 'Direct rule,' which is the name under which this kind of policy goes, means essentially the withdrawal from Northern Ireland of its privileged degree of self-government, which, instead of solving the province's problems, has made them worse, and thereupon treating Ulster as a part of the United Kingdom requiring, in its present great distress, all the energies and resources of the British Government to deal with it. 'Direct rule,' which we advocate, means that the British Government should accept its full responsibility and govern Northern Ireland without, not through, the discredited Stormont regime: for war it is not yet; but war it is, at the end of the present slide.
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