Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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for a human rights-based approach, are evident in even the roughest figures. The lethality of nonstate actors indicates a central challenge for human rights discourse in Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, scholars frequently focus on state actions rather than engage with the problems that nonstate lethality creates for human rights certainties. Possible and proven instances of collusion by state actors and loyalist paramilitaries, as well as republican informers paid by security agencies, offer more straightforward examples of human rights violations.40 For example, Rolston’s (2000) analysis of an increase in loyalist killings between 1990 and 1994 concludes that 56 percent are likely to have involved collusion. Bell and Keenan (2005) argue that “these figures leave open the ‘dark figure’ of collusion” between loyalist paramilitary and state actors” (72). But focusing on state collusion with paramilitaries does not eliminate the problem of how human rights talk can acknowledge nonstate violence. McEvoy (1999, 2001) notes that humanitarian law—international law regarding armed conflict—seems an attractive alternative for acknowledging the violence of nonstate actors in Northern Ireland. But he concludes that this vehicle embroils human rights groups in the parsing of “legitimate” targets, debates about which population groups suffered most, and the legitimacy of different causes.
For many of my research participants, the collision of principles with particular circumstances makes both human rights law and talk inadequate to acknowledge or describe important qualities of the conflict. “I was burned out of my home by Protestants…. My brother-in-law was shot dead by the British Army, and my best friend, who was in the police, was shot by the IRA. Who am I the victim of?” one woman asked me rhetorically in 2010, frustrated by ongoing debates about past violence. Each violent episode presents its own challenges. For example, in 1997, Darren Bradshaw, an RUC constable, was shot dead by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) at a gay bar while he was suspended from duty. Gay rights activists suspect he was a soft target as well as a “legitimate” one, by the paramilitaries’ standards.
The Bradshaw case demonstrates how context is lost in the logic of both human rights law and talk. A police officer was killed by a nonstate organization; this may be a terrorist action or a legitimate military action, depending on perspective, of course. The targeting of a gay man was politically problematic for a group that positioned itself as leftist, and a gay spokesperson justified the operation to the media. In addition to these political dimensions, the shooting demonstrates the intimate dimensions of the conflict, through which victims frequently became vulnerable to targeting. At the time, conservative Belfast had only one gay bar. Bradshaw was most likely targeted through proximity and social knowledge in a gay community that at the time was discreet.41 Furthermore, from the standpoint of gay activists, homophobia casts a shadow of suspicion on the killing, in light of republican bombings of gay clubs during the years of conflict. Such subjective, social dimensions of violence, like the conduct of nonstate actors, are lost in legalistic understandings of human rights.
McEvoy (2011) has described how legal practice was shaped by the small size of Northern Ireland. So, too, was violence. This meant that daily life was permeated by fear and suspicion, particularly in the areas where I conducted research, where most residents had connections with both victims and perpetrators. The proximity of combat also engendered allegations of cooperation between enemies, in addition to state collusion. For example, some claim that IRA and loyalist contact enabled the 1982 killing of loyalist Lenny Murphy (who was responsible for some of the most horrifying murders of the 1970s) and the 1987 killing of Ulster Defence Association (UDA) leader John McMichael. More mundane connections also existed: the young republican who died planting the Shankill bomb was enrolled in a job training program alongside young people from the loyalist area; indeed, the loyalist who ran the program told me he had been concerned about the young man and contacted his mother a few weeks before the bombing.
Fear and actual risk, then, combined with geography to create a social paradox: profound segregation, which has intensified in the postconflict era, exists alongside the intimate knowledge that characterizes life in small places.42 I was introduced to this sense of knowing one’s enemies, or at least having grounded suspicions about them, in typical Belfast form—a joke. A pro-GFA loyalist community organizer once informed me that he had been threatened frequently by the INLA when the group increased armed operations in opposition to the agreement. But, he said, darkly, “Last night, they called me on my mobile, and I says, ‘Right, lads, if youse call me again, I’ll fucking kill both of youse’.” He watched my face and laughed as I absorbed his slight to their membership numbers—as well as the implication that they had his cell phone number.43 Acknowledging this social dimension of the conflict is not intended to depoliticize; rather, it is to highlight the contradictions that are glossed over by both human rights discourse and the GFA’s solution. The existence of possible and actual enemies beyond the state, living within communities of civilians, create conditions in which human rights discourse appears contradictory or even disingenuous.
In an attempt to address the issue of nonstate violence, international human rights NGOs began including nonstate actors in their research and documentation on the conflict the late 1980s and early 1990s. They published reports scrutinizing abuses by the British state, republicans, and loyalists—three broad “sides” containing many fine distinctions (e.g., Helsinki Watch 1991; Amnesty International 1994). In July 2011, I interviewed a former Amnesty International staff member about a shift in organization policy regarding lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) rights. His explanation of the organization’s policy on gay rights led to a defense of another contentious decision made by Amnesty in 1991: to acknowledge abuses by nonstate actors. He argued that as an NGO, rather than a legal body, the group need not be limited by legal definitions. For example, he said, a beating produces similar subjective pain whether inflicted by the RUC or a paramilitary group, and requires recognition in either instance. Yet McEvoy (1999, 2001), an experienced practitioner and scholar, has argued that shifts like Amnesty’s were problematic both in terms of reporting on the conflict and in practice for local NGOs. He writes that, for local human rights advocates, extending attention beyond the state would have been untenable for maintaining the organization’s local credibility. Such a change could have involved greater condemnation for loyalist paramilitaries than republicans and thus undermined the group’s influence.
Nevertheless, local NGOs’ emphasis on state violence convinced many unionists that human rights are a nationalist issue. Generally speaking, many loyalists interpreted human rights criticisms of the state as opposition to union with Britain. Since the basis of republican rhetoric was a challenge to the legitimacy of the post-partition state and British jurisdiction, the focus of human rights discourse on state violations seemed aligned with that larger political project. Efforts by international NGOs to consider nonstate violence intensified critiques of local campaigns’ silence, contributing to the longer-term skepticism that is problematic in the postconflict era.
Today, human rights skepticism exists beyond loyalism. Most strikingly, it is apparent among people charged with upholding human rights standards in the postconflict era. Attorney General John Larkin, the first attorney general since Sunningdale, has argued that rights claims are ubiquitous in the region and that these claims trivialize human rights. Addressing a Human Rights Commission conference in 2010, he noted that the public housing agency had recently asked residents of a particular housing development not to wear pajamas outdoors. Residents’ response to the rule, he said, was “This is our culture,” to which they had a human right. Larkin argued that “Perhaps the outdoor wearing of pyjamas is a useful emblem of our contemporary malaise” regarding human rights and concluded that “Wearing pyjamas outdoors should be left for regulation simply to social courtesy and social decency (and a strong sense of the ridiculous)” rather than treated as a human rights issue (16).44 In a less humorous example, in February 2011 the policing federation’s newsletter decried the policing board’s “one-sided” approach to human rights. The newsletter claimed rules regarding human rights protections disregard the rights of police officers facing threats from both rioters and dissident republicans. The editorial condemned legal advice not to publish photographs of wanted rioters under age eighteen as “human rights nonsense.”45
Punishment attacks underscore key problems of human rights discourse as peace promotion and highlight