ULSTER
Long Kesh
John Graham
Belfast There is at least one similarity between the British Army efforts in Northern Ireland and the Vietnam fiasco: the British are stuck with the wrong sort of allies. Just as the Americans have always had trouble with the Saigon regimes, so the Unionist government in Belfast is not making things any easier for Mr Heath. To be sure, Westminster has a fair degree of control over what the Northern Irish government does, but it has an imperfect control over what it says, and this is important when one of the battles being fought is the propaganda battle.
Take the incident on Monday last week at the internment camp at Long Kesh, when the internees in one of the compounds took four prison officers hostage. The camp is run by the Northern Irish government, and guarded on the outside by the British Army. The camp governor called in the troops, who put down the disturbance and freed the officers. There followed charge and counter-charge of rotten conditions inside the camp and brutality by the soldiers.
Three days later the Ministry of Home Affairs at Stormont — which is responsible for Long Kesh — issued a statement intended no doubt as a definitive explanation. It began by saying that the disturbance "was entirely unprovoked and no reason for it is known by the authorities there." However, it had been common knowledge for two days at least that one of the reasons — not the only reason but certainly the trigger — was the serious wounding of a Belfast woman in a shooting incident with British soldiers the previous Saturday. The woman was the wife of one of the internees.
Not to know this, or to know it and deny it, was incompetent, but this was nothing to a paragraph later on in the statement which said: "As a result of the disturbance five men were taken to Musgrave Park Hospital, but they will be returning to the camp within the next few days. None of them are suffering from anything more serious than minor lacerations and bruising."
This claim was not merely untrue, but ridiculous on its face. A senior army officer told me that very day that one of the men had both arms broken, which means that "minor lacerations and bruising" were doing a linguistic Job that would have made even Humpty Dumpty blush. But in any case, if all they had were scratches and bruises, why did they need four days in hospital? Such malingering would never be allowed by a prep-school matron; how the IRA must be rubbing its hands.
Naturally, the internees, the Catholic community, the anti-British forces, the IRA, and indeed anyone prone to disaffection has made propaganda capital out of the incident. Stormont's bungling of the affair lends credibility to the earlier, more serious, accusations of brutal interrogation methods, It will be impossible now, indeed it may always have been impossible, for any tribunal to convince the people of Northern Ireland that the internees have been properly treated.
This is only one example of the British position being weakened by what local politicians say — a weakness, incidentally, that could be remedied if the British took over completely. There has recently been another example, in all the ' short haul' talk that became so fashionable. Northern Irish politiclans, and British Army officers, went about creating the impression that the authorities had made decisive gains against the IRA, and that victory would come relatively quickly.
In the first place, such talk sounds empty; how often have we heard American Presidents and Vietnam commanders indulging in it? In the second place, if it was true, there was no need to say it, since it would soon have become obvious. And in the third place if it was false — as appears to be the case — the official propaganda would be devalued and the IRA's claims correspondingly fortified. The British civil authorities have now passed the word both to Stormont and to the army to cut out the euphoria, and a senior officer I talked to last weekend, not noted for taking a pessimistic view, admitted that the prospect was of a fairly long haul.
It is the amateurishness of the propaganda exercise that is so disturbing. There is little reasonable doubt that the Army ground operations have become much more efficient, and that more IRA men have been killed than British soldiers as a result. Nor is there any reasonable doubt that the Army's intelligence has greatly improved in the last two months; their weapons searchers are more successful, they have been able to lift a large number of men on the wanted list, and the IRA's cover is being damaged so much that they have been driven to executing people who they think are acting as informers for the Army. But propaganda is also a standard tactic in a guerrilla war, and here the Army has played into the IRA's hands, despite the known brutality and sheer callousness of the IRA's own actions. Internment, as Is well known now, is the villain of the piece. At the time the only person in authority who appeared to recognise this was the general in command, General Tuzo. By all accounts — though not yet by his own — he was strongly opposed to the introduction of internment, for political reasons. He understood the hopeless political situation in which it would place the Army and I suspect his worst fears have materialised. It may yet be possible for the Army to restore order en the ground, but if the propaganda battle is lost, the crisis for the British government will have been merely postponed. But granted that internment was the political price paid by Mr Heath for keeping Mr Faulkner in power, surelY someone could have insisted that the propaganda defeat was palliated hY treating the internees properly. The internees are precisely that — internees, not prisoners. They should not have been Put into uncomfortable prisons, however savage the crimes of which they were sus' pected. Comfort, even luxury, should have been the order of the day, not durance vile. Long Kesh should have been set up as sybarite's dream, not as the university Of the New Left it's now become. Westmins' ter should have leant on Stormont and everyone should have leant over back' wards. It is only by leaning over back' wards that you save yourself from fallin$ flat on your face.
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