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Category: Archive

Editorial Normalizing the North: Part I

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The news that eight wanted men, seven of them prison escapees, have been allowed to return home, is a welcome step down the long road of normalizing Northern Ireland.

Decades of conflict have left a large but unknown number of republican activists, as well as a few loyalist paramilitaries, stranded. Wanted for crimes committed perhaps 20 or more years ago and fearing prosecution, the so-called OTRs (for on the run) live still in a kind of limbo, usually far from home, uncertain as to their fate. The British government was correct to include them in the process, since the cases of those who escaped after conviction cannot morally be distinguished from those already freed under the Good Friday agreement’s auspices before completing their sentences. Politically and legally, however, the OTRs present some real problems.

It will require an act of the British parliament to allow those against whom proceedings might yet be taken to go free of prosecution. It would be, in reality, an amnesty.

Many people who were angered by the freeing of men convicted of violent crimes would be perhaps even more outraged by the prospect that the law is not even going to pursue others, against whom there is evidence of involvement in serious offenses, including killings. At least those convicted and released had received some sort of punishment. Nonetheless, their lenient treatment drastically undermined support for the Good Friday agreement among moderate Unionists. So anything that could be interpreted as a form of "amnesty" could be expected to further reduce support for the agreement in that part of the community.

However, if the agreement is going to work, then such moves are necessary. Whatever one thinks of what was done, it was done as part of a conflict that the Good Friday agreement is meant to resolve. Many suffered in that conflict, and many continue to suffer as a result of the compromises that have been made. Their suffering cannot be underestimated nor taken for granted. But the recent move on wanted men involves no approval of the acts they might have committed, but simply the recognition that they were the product of a situation that was politically abnormal and that must not be allowed to reoccur.

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