Veterans Strategy

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Thursday 15th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to speak in this debate. I will take up where my noble friend Lord Attlee left off about the pursuit of former servicemen who may have committed, or are alleged to have committed, some crimes in the past. The veterans strategy does not address that. It should be in the veterans strategy because, frankly, it is a disgrace that historic allegations which have been investigated in the past are now being dragged out. This is what I intend to look at. I intend to look briefly at Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan.

I should say that I served in Northern Ireland, where I did a couple of long tours. I never did anything very exciting, although many of my friends did, and I suspect that many of them now fear being reinvestigated. I also served in the first Gulf War, and then worked in the Ministry of Defence and the Northern Ireland Office in the coalition Government. I shall look at government responsibility, parliamentary responsibility, the issue of equivalence, and the passage of time.

Responsibility for sending young men, and now, indeed, young women, to war rests with the Government —the state, if you like—and this Parliament, so we are all to a certain extent responsible. I was involved in voting occasionally on the Iraq war and on the war in Afghanistan. Parliament sends young men to defend British interests as we perceive them to be abroad or, indeed, in Northern Ireland. Those young men and women should expect our support. Who do we send? I will speak from my experience, which is that we send young, scared soldiers who may not have been out of this country before—who may not have been out of England before when they are sent to Northern Ireland—with lethal weapons to places where others are trying to kill them. They are not overpaid lawyers like those who now pursue them around the courts, and they are not policemen. They are not trained as policemen, and they do not necessarily understand all the niceties of the law.

That brings me on to equivalence. These young men—I speak particularly about Northern Ireland—faced terrorists who were trying to kill them. On the one hand, you had public servants doing their duty as requested by Parliament and the Government and trying to do the right thing, and on the other hand, you had terrorists in Northern Ireland acting illegally against our state. There is no equivalence, and the idea that equivalence should be considered is quite wrong.

In Northern Ireland I saw young, scared, jumpy men being shot at and trying to do the right thing. They did not always get it right. Did they behave badly or illegally? Well, sometimes people did. I shall name three cases, the first from Northern Ireland: the Fermanagh pitchfork murders, which the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, may know about, where people behaved atrociously and murdered a couple of farmers with pitchforks. I am glad to say that those people who murdered, who obviously behaved very illegally, finally went to jail for life. Secondly, the case of Baha Musa in Iraq is well known. The soldiers there behaved atrociously, and indeed several of them went to detention and jail. The third is the very sad case in Afghanistan of Sergeant Blackman, who actually said, and was recorded saying, “This is against the Geneva convention”. There was a big campaign about it. The truth is that he broke the Geneva convention and knew he was doing so, and he went to jail. It seems to me that that is the right way for these things to be handled.

However, do people make mistakes? If you send these young men with rifles on to the streets of wherever it may be, Northern Ireland or Basra, they will make mistakes. They are scared for their lives. I will bring up one case that is currently in front of the courts. Dennis Hutchings is alleged to have shot a young man called John Pat Cunningham in 1974. The man he shot, Cunningham, was alleged to have had a mental age of six or seven; he was challenged on several occasions and ran, and they shot him. Obviously that was a mistake. They did not intend to kill this young man with a mental age of seven. In fact, I believe I may have been the Minister who apologised to the family from the Ministry of Defence for this mistake—for it was a mistake. However, to return to equivalence, there is no equivalence between public servants who make mistakes and terrorists who murder civilians. In Northern Ireland, 9/10ths of murders took place because of terrorists and 1/10th of the deaths took place because of security force work.

On the question of the passage of time—I refer again to Northern Ireland, which perhaps I know most about—there is currently a coroner’s inquest into the Ballymurphy killings, which is referred to by many as the Ballymurphy massacre, of August 1971. As it happens, I know Ballymurphy quite well, having walked round and round it for four months. In 1971 I was at university. To me, the General Strike and Hitler’s putsch in Munich were old history. That is what we are doing now; we are looking down back at 1971 and saying, “What happened then?” Guess what: half the people who were there are dead, particularly the defence witnesses. The Army of course has records but there are no records of whatever happens from the other side. In my own view—I am lucky to be covered by privilege in Parliament—I suspect that the soldiers in Ballymurphy were not fully in control, and I suspect some of the people killed there should most certainly not have been shot, in the same way that those of us who remember the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday knew in 1972 that the Parachute Regiment in Londonderry at the time was actually not properly under control. However, what are we to do about this? My own preference on these things is for a statute of limitations, but I am not going to put forward too many views because I want the Minister to think about it.

I turn to the current situation and where things are going at the moment. Relatively recently, in Iraq and indeed in Afghanistan, the British Government were supporting—if one can believe it—the investigations of money-chasing lawyers running around these fields. Phil Shiner, who has now been struck off the solicitors register, and his own company, Public Interest Lawyers, got over £2 million of legal fees paid by the British taxpayer, by us. There is Leigh Day, where the lead solicitor was in fact found to have behaved badly but is now back on the register because he appealed successfully so I will not deal with that. Other people have also been chasing around, trying to find young people in Iraq and Afghanistan who know that compensation is on offer if they can make a case stick against the British Army. We are talking about fighting a war in these places. We are allowing our decency and our liberal democracy to be used against us. Of course soldiers should not misbehave, but at the same time they should not be pursued.

I return to the subject of Northern Ireland. I have talked about the pursuit of public servants. If we look back to 1973, the dogs on the streets will tell you that Gerry Adams, who has always denied being a member of the IRA, was in charge of the IRA in west Belfast. He was arrested about five years ago over the murder of Jean McConville. That is a very tragic story—if noble Lords want to know about it I can tell them, but I do not have time now—of a Protestant woman, the widow of a Catholic in the Divis flats, who tried to help a dying soldier. She was taken away, in front of her 10 children, and murdered, but Gerry Adams will not be prosecuted. We have the case of John Downie, who was given a letter by the Blair Government saying that he would not be prosecuted. Apparently he has now been arrested and charged in the Republic with the murder of two other people. By the way, I knew one of the people in the Hyde Park bombing; Denis Daly was murdered in 1982. However, Downie got off, whereas soldiers are still being pursued for allegations of crimes that took place further away.

I will raise one case from Iraq that I was tangentially involved in. The case of Trooper Williams reflects incredibly badly on the Army establishment, the Ministry of Defence and indeed our society. Trooper Williams, aged 18, discovered along with a patrol a barrow-load of mortar bombs being pushed through, I believe, Basra. They did not shoot; they chased the man pushing that barrow-load of mortar bombs—I think it is reasonable to say that he was going about nefarious activities—into a compound where he got into a struggle with another soldier, and Williams, aged 18, shot the man. He was taken before his commanding officer, the case was considered and, on legal advice, dismissed by the commanding officer. I quote from the letter which I have from the adjutant-general at the time, which said, “We must reopen this case because it would become a cause célèbre for single-issue pressure groups”.

I think that the British Army and the Government should be supporting their own people as far as they might, not looking out for single-issue pressure groups. As it happens, this case, for which Williams spent a year in open arrest, in custody, before going to the High Court, was dismissed by the judge on the first day.

I say to my noble friend, knowing that he knows that a lot of people will agree with me, that the situation is a mess. The Government and Parliament, which send young men and women to war, need to support their public servants, so we need to sort out the situation. Of course those who commit crimes should be punished, but we should not allow this unreasonable pursuit that has taken place 47 years later. That should be in the veterans strategy.