Talking about old wounds and impunity….

Thanks to everyone who called me or sent good wishes after reading last week’s post mark London. All is well with me. I am a fighter who has never been known to seat down and wait for things to happen. I took risks, had a wonderful time and then suddenly everything collapsed around us. But I thank God; I can still get up in the morning and fight and hope for better days to come again.
Honestly, in spite of my huge losses, I am still better off than millions of others. This week, the Bank of England announced that millions of households in the UK must brace themselves for a return of the credit squeeze, with mortgages far harder to procure in the coming months. My wife and I can still boast of something despite my losses.
The warning, contained in the Bank’s credit Conditions Survey, underlines fears that Britain may suffer a dip in economic activity later this year as the impact of the austerity measures and the sovereign debt crisis start to bear down on the wider economy. The survey also revealed that in the last quarter the corporate sector suffered its biggest shortage of credit since 2008, reinforcing worries about the health of British businesses.
On Wednesday night, I attended a dinner and roundtable discussion at the Royal Commonwealth Club. It’s one of London’s exclusive and finest eating out places, and the guest of honour was the deputy prime minister of Zimbabwe, Hon. Thokozani Khupe, and I must say, she is a delightful woman fighting hard to bring change to her country Zimbabwe.
As a young man working as a reporter for the defunct Tablet Newspaper in Freetown, I believed that important people where given positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.
Speaking after the dinner at the Royal Commonwealth Club last Wednesday night, the deputy Zimbabwean prime minister, Hon. Thonkozani Khupe, called for an independent inquiry that will look into evidence and allegations of Zimbabwean Security agencies complicity in the torture and abuse of opposition leaders and their supporters in Zimbabwe.
Ms Khupe said that those who are saying such an inquiry would open old wounds should bear in the mind that the old wounds need proper medication for it to be mended. “We need to remove those bandages, clean the wounds of our people, to stop the stench that we come across around the country and apply proper medication so that the wounds could be cured for real.”
Later on while I was roaming the dinner room, talking about the semi final between Germany and Spain, which we missed because the dinner started at 7. 30pm, I challenged the deputy prime minister on her party’s calls for an inquiry in Zimbabwe. Her answer was simple and straight to the point: “Those days of impunity are coming to an end; there must be a pathway to defining the crime of political aggressions.” With those words doing the tango inside my head, I moved swiftly to make enquiries about the match between Germany and Spain, as I had missed the game.
My other interesting encounter this week was at Oxford Circus underground station, one of the busiest on the entire network system. As I negotiated my way into the station, I met the former mayor of London, Ken Livingston, a regular traveller like myself on the underground. I extended greetings and wished him well for the forthcoming nomination battle for the Labour party symbol for the next mayoral elections and continued with my journey. But as I sat down to read my newspapers on the tube, what came to mind was the effortless way the former mayor and many other senior government ministers and officials today use the London underground and buses to move around London conducting government business.
Indeed, if you will recollect not so long ago, I told you about David Cameron’s first acts in office; the new British prime minister got rid of all police dispatch riders who escorted his car, and (at least once) walked to the Houses of Parliament from Downing Street. These are altogether admirable initiatives, demonstrating humility appropriate to a public servant, and healthy confidence that the electorate is not teeming with assassins or unfriendly people who will verbally attack the Prime Minster.
Indeed, since he became prime minister barely two months ago, David Cameron has being displaying a healthy confidence when dealing with sensitive national issues.
Last month, the Saville Inquiry published its long-awaited report on Bloody Sunday when 13 people on a civil rights march were shot dead by paratroops of the British Army in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
Lord Saville’s 5,000-page report on Bloody Sunday makes uncomfortable reading for anyone who wanted to give the Army the benefit of the doubt about what happened that day. Fourteen civilians killed on Bloody Sunday died as a result of “unjustifiable firing” by British soldiers, the Saville Inquiry disclosed in its report to the British government last month.
In Parliament last month, reacting to the Inquiry Report, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the inquiry said none of the casualties posed any threat to British troops. He said the inquiry found that the first shots were fired by British troops, no warnings were given, and some of the soldiers lost control.
Barely weeks into the job as prime minister, I watched closely as he addressed Parliament that day, to see if he will crack, there were no cracks. David Cameron displayed what I can only describe as primus inter pares (first among equals). MPs and journalists in Parliament that day might not have been surprised, but they were certainly stunned.
The prime minister could scarcely have done better. For a man who was five at the time of Bloody Sunday, it was a poised and almost perfectly judged performance. With the report in one hand, David Cameron entered the Houses of Parliament to a sombre, almost fearful silence. The concern was, are British Soldiers about to face charge for the Blood Sunday incident some forty years ago?
When it comes to British soldiers few politicians, least of all the Conservatives, want to say anything that isn’t cut from a template of praise. And this particular Conservative politician has been doing this for months now.
“I never want to believe anything bad about our country,” “David Cameron started in Parliament. He never wanted to call British soldiers into question. They were, he believed, the finest in the world. Clearly an enormous “but” was on its way.
“But. The conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”
The officer who gave the order for the soldiers to deploy, the late Colonel Derek Wilford, either misunderstood or exceeded an order to him to permit limited engagement. His order and the deadly fire of some of the soldiers produced a massacre.
The details are now likely to be as clear as they will ever be. While the prime minister’s statement last month that such a sprawling inquiry will never be lunched again testifies to the general view that it has been excessive, it may still have a value if, that is, the response to it builds not on the spectres of the past but on the promise that the past decade of (mostly) peace has-often shakily- contained.
Putting the ghost of a violent and troublesome Northern Ireland behind him, this week, David Cameron announced an unprecedented inquiry into evidence and allegations of British complicity in the torture and abuse of terror suspects. The British prime minister went further to say that his government will consider offering out-of-court financial settlement to up to 12 former detainees of the infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention centre who have alleged that British intelligence officer were complicit in their torture.
Acting on a pledge made during the election, Mr Cameron said a 76-year old retired appeal court judge, Peter Gibson, would head a three member-panel that would review actions by the security services that have led to about a dozen cases before British courts in which former detainees have made accusations that the British intelligence officer knew-or should have known that the detainees were being mistreated.
My small talk with the Zimbabwe deputy prime minister, and the new inquiry to look into the actions of British intelligence officers and that of the Bloody Sunday inquiry report by Lord Saville, brings me to a subject that has been troubling me and the silent majority in Sierra Leone in recent weeks. But we will talk about that next week.
By Winston Ojukutu-Macaulay