The introduction of the Special Powers Act in 1922 provoked the following comment from the Manchester Guardian: «Whilst envenomed politicians in the Ulster Parliament are voting themselves power to use torture and capital punishment against citizens , whom they forbid to defend themselves... some of their own partisans in Belfast carry wholesale murder to refinements of barbarity hardly surpassed in Armenia and Constantinople".
Recent anti-terrorist laws are the latest descendants of the SPA. They might provoke similar comments.
Oppressed communities
state which, with its international allies, is perpetrating "refinements of barbarity" in Afghanistan, Palestine, and possibly Iraq.
Piers Mostyn reports.
T he SPA was introduced 'by the Unionists on the basis that it was only required for a matter of months or perhaps year. It had to be renewed annually and this made it more palatable.
But in 1933 it was made permanent.
In the 1960s a campaign for basic rights in the North of Ireland was mel Wiln Drogroms ggainst the nationalist community and a military suppression of the Civil Rights Movement. Under the SPA's pow1971. The response was a mass rent ers, internment was introduced in and rate strike and the creation of IRA no-go areas.
These events finally exposed unionist rule. It was replaced by direct rule the SPA scrapped. But if the political structures were changed, the transition to new legislation was seamless.
The Emergency Provisions Act (EPA) and Prevention Terrorism Act (PTA) were no less sweeping in their scope - giving the police and the army "draconian"
powers to stop, question, search, arrest and detain.
This period witnessed a catalogue * of human rights abuses against the nationalists. On Sunday 13 unarmed civilians were murdered by the British army. The Dublin government (no friend of Republicanism) took Britain to the European Court of Human Rights for the use of torture. And jury trial was abolished.
The EPA and PTA were defended by the Tories and Labour as draconian measures that, like the SPA, would require annual renewal and were necessary responses to strictly short term emergency. Like the SPA, annual renewal went on for decades until the laws became permanent.
T errorism was said to he 'such a threat to the fabric of society that the normal rules for protecting individuals against the abuse of state power had to be Temoved. The deep irony of abandoning "the rule of law" in the name of a defending "the rule of law" - was explained away on the basis that it would stop the violence and "normality" would soon be resumed. Of course the opposite happened. The "troubles" raged on as their basic causes the partition of Ireland, the institutionalisation of unionist supremacy and the oppression of the nationalist community opposing this. were if anything entrenched.
The key effect of these laws was intimidatory: to marginalise, criminalise and silence targeted communities.
An infamous catch-all clause in the SPA revealed much of the true intention of the later legislation:
"If any person does any act of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland and not specifically provided for in the regulations, he shall be deemed guilty of an offence against the regulations".
No wonder South African Justice Minister John Vorster when introducing a new Coercion Bill under apartheid in 1963 said he "would be willing to exchange all legislation of that sort for one clause of the Special Powers Act"
The real impact on individual alleged "terrorists" was virtually irrelevant to this process. On the August 9 1971, the first day of internment, raids began at 4.30am and by evening 342 had been rounded up. Only a handful of these could in any way be described as "terrorists"
But they did include the secretary of the Northern Civil Rights Association, a Belfast City councillor, a blind man, and a 77 year old who had first been interned in 1929.
Over the next four years 2,000 were interned only 5% of whom were Loyalists despite years of very serious Loyalist violence). A large number were beaten up and tortured. In all, over 7,000 were detained under the PTA over the period up the IRA cessation. But less then 5% were ever charged with a "terrorist" offence - some of these simply for wearing a badge or "withholding information". A far smaller proportion were ever convicted.
Hundreds including present Sinn Fein MPs) were arbitrarily a UK citizen who had not been charged with any offence was no protection.
Every year for two decades some 50,000 Irish people were stopped, searched and questioned. They missed travel connections, were separated from loved ones and subject to traumatic harassment and humiliation.
witch-hunting of those who dared question this status quo and statesponsored media censorship.
the 1990s the Republican Movement decided to abandon its military struggle. It welcomed the re-introduction of a parliament based on The partitioned are seeing an even greater extension of oppressive state powers.
The Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security ACT became law in December 2001. It was passed in great haste in 1n resnonse to the September 11 attacks.
It introduced a power of intern(detention without trial). This simply requires pected "may" be involved in nonGets, threatening the life of the nation". Other measures include:
Additional powers to expel refugees;
Police powers to obtain personal information on individuals from government departments;
Bloody Sunday: 13 unarmed civilians were murdered by the British army. Increased police powers to photograph, take fingerprints and "intimate samples";
• Police power to use force to remove items or substances from the head (including headscarves)
without any need for terrorism to be suspected;
A new offence of failing to provide information to the police that might prevent acts of terrorism anywhere in the world;
• Provisions that could create, for the first time, a nationwide paramilitary police force.
This Act follows the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which puts wide-ranging powers of surveillance and communications interception on a statutory footing.
And the Terrorism Act 2000 radically extended the existing definition of terrorism from "the use or threat of violence to achieve political ends".
It is now defined as the use - or threat - of "action" designed to influence the government, or to intimidate the public or a section of it for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
It must involve serious violence against a person, serious damage to property, endanger life, create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or be designed seriously to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system.
The "action" can be anywhere in the world. Guilt can simply be for inciting. This catch-all definition is eerily reminiscent of the infamous SPA clause. It could be applied to union pickanti-globalisation protests, anti-GM crop protests, non-violent direct action by peace activists, solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles or any kind of mass action. In addition the TA contained: • Police power to stop, detain and search without reasonable susDIcIon • A new offence of arranging a meeting to be addressed by a person belonging to a "terrorist" organisation, or sharing a platform with It took a decade of hard political work in difficult conditions (an ongoing IRA bombing campaign) for Irish, left and trade union activists to break the silence of the 1970s and start building opposition to the PTA. In the teeth of opposition from the leaderships, a string of unions were won to a position of supporting the scrapping of the laws and defending the lengthening list of its Birmingham 6 etc). victims the Guilford 4, the By the 1990s opposition to the PTA was official Labour Party policy, and this was not even abandoned with the junking of Clause 4 and other progressive policies.
With the Republican military cessation followed by a Labour election victory, even cynics assumed that a new dawn of rights and liberties beckoned.
Instead Blair has maintained and extended these state powers with little opposition despite the absence of the fig leaf of a "terrorist emergency" in this country.
It is vital that a campaign is built that understands the role these laws play and starts building opposition to them • in the left, the unions and the communities most directly effected by them.
They are a legislative counterpart to the war drive since September 1l, and a propaganda flagship of the new assault on the communities isteged to be harbouring "terrorists" and anybody seen to defend them.
Resisting the war must involve defending the communities under attack not just from racists but also the state.
In a whole series of countries a similar backlash has been unleashed. In the US over a thousand Arab Americans have been detained incommunicado without access to lawyers and without trial.
There has been the scandal of the treatment of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners who now face "trial" by secret military tribunals, presumably because there is no evidence against them that could possibly stand up to public scrutiny.
The EU has scrapped its extradition procedures, has clamped down on cross-border political protests and has made parallel moves to redefine terrorism in ways that are - a threat to any international socialist movement.
Most serious of all, Blair and Bush's stance has given a green states can act with impunity so long against the light for an Palestinians. onslaught These as there is no great political price to pay.
for many years such laws succeeded in silencing the Irish community and intimidating Irish and activists from speaking out, let alone organising against the iniquities of British policy in Ireland.
Although the TA and ATCSA has yet to have a significant impact it would be mistaken to allow complacency to lead to a similar history.
Opposition to the PTA and the miscarriages of justice in the 1980s was made possible by a vibrant left in the labour movement. This connected the abuse of British state power in Ireland with the experience of sections of the British working class under Thatcher - particularly the miners and the black community. The current mobilisations against the war greatly exceed anything that was possible on Ireland. This, and the emergence of a new left through the Socialist Alliance and the anti-globalisation struggle, suggest possibilities for taking up these issues with greater urgency on nationally and internationally.
Outlook
prevented from traveling from the North of Ireland to England. To be
All this was against a background of anti-Irish racism, the political
had ended. One might expect the draconian powers to go with it. Far The laws remained, and now we
Secretary to believe that a person is a risk to national security or has "links" with someone that it is sus-
To get this through, the govern- European Convention on Human Rights, on the basis that there is a "war or other public emergency