Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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formed by middle-class Catholic residents of Dungannon, County Tyrone, in 1964. Their main concern was discrimination in the Dungannon Urban District, where the council gave Protestants preferential treatment in public housing allocations (McCluskey 1989). With leadership from Dr. Conn McCluskey, a general medical practitioner, and his wife Patricia, the CSJ began organizing protest marches. The group’s first publication, “Northern Ireland: The Plain Truth,” compiled figures on housing allocation, council employment, and political representation according to political identification in Londonderry, Enniskillen, and Dungannon districts (CSJ 1964).
The CSJ also initiated legal challenges, including applications to the European Court of Human Rights, but they were unsuccessful (Dickson 2010; McEvoy 2011). Although Dickson (2010) contends that the group’s U.S. lawyers provided inadequate counsel, the CSJ members believed state denial of their legal aid application also hurt the cases (CSJ 1966). Alongside CSJ, other civil rights groups began to emerge in the 1960s, such as the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC). The movement quickly realized legal challenges were not an effective tactic (McEvoy 2011). Direct actions, such as marches and protests, became their preferred approach, along with rhetorical appeals to audiences in Britain, North America, and Australia (Maney 2000).
In 1966 and 1967, a new group emerged to coordinate the various civil rights groups: the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The Wolfe Tone Societies, republican groups established in 1964 to commemorate the leader of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion against Britain, were a primary force behind the creation of NICRA (Purdie 1990: 122). The Wolfe Tone Societies’ engagement with civil rights activism was a break from the republican ideology of armed struggle. In the 1960s, many republican groups, including the IRA, increasingly embraced leftist and Marxist ideology and became receptive to other political tactics (see Moloney 2007). Nevertheless, this early alliance of civil rights activism with republicanism added to unionist suspicions of the movement, even among the Protestant working class who could benefit from civil rights reforms. In 1967, NICRA publicized five objectives shared by civil rights groups: “To defend the basic freedoms of all citizens; To protect the rights of the individual; To highlight all possible abuses of power; To demand guarantees for freedom of speech, assembly and association; To inform the public of their lawful rights” (NICRA 1978: 20). In 1970, the group created a more specific list of demands: the individual franchise in local government elections, an independent boundary commission for local constituencies, a points system for housing, fair employment legislation, and a bill of rights. (Inclusion of the first demand, individual franchise, was mostly a propaganda device, since it had been established more than a year earlier in April 1969.)
The civil rights movement’s rhetorical appeals for international sympathy established a tactic that subsequent activists used for a variety of causes. Yet appropriating rights discourse is not a simple task, especially when movements in other places and times are treated as comparable to different situations. So, for example, civil rights activists in Northern Ireland faced a significant rhetorical challenge when they compared arcane local council voting practices or discrimination in public housing allocation to U.S. laws disenfranchising African Americans (e.g., poll taxes and literacy tests), to systematic, state-mandated racial segregation (Jim Crow laws), and to the historical legacies of the mass kidnap, transport, and enslavement of African peoples.5 At the same time, the Irish Americans who supported the Northern Irish campaign, but not the U.S. civil rights movement, were discomfited by these comparisons (Maney 2000; Dooley 1998). James C. Heaney of the American Congress for Irish Freedom warned in a letter to Dr. Frank Gogarty, a civil rights campaigner, “There is not a single Irish American group in the United States which has worked with the Colored Civil Rights movement…. So don’t expect this of any of us.”6
The other primary tactic, street protests, catalyzed broader political conflict throughout 1968 and 1969. On October 5, 1968, the DHAC, with support from NICRA, organized the first civil rights march in Derry. Police and loyalists attacked the protestors, and intercommunal rioting raged across the city and the region for two days. These events inspired the formation of a new, more strident civil rights group, People’s Democracy (PD).7 On October 9, to protest these events, about 3,000 students and staff from Queens University attempted a march to Belfast City Hall and were blocked by loyalist counterdemonstrators. PD was formed following this incident, and Northern Ireland’s 1968 arrived. PD initially outlined a list of conventional civil rights demands regarding voting, housing, employment, and civil rights (Arthur 1974), yet from the beginning it was more explicitly oriented to a class-based analysis than was NICRA. On October 24, marking the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Day, PD was allowed to hold a three-hour sit-in at Stormont (see Arthur 1974).
Student radicals introduced several fissures in the civil rights movement. Purdie (1990) writes that the PD coalition with civil rights campaigns was a temporary, instrumental move, because members were “almost as hostile” to middle-class nationalist elements within the movement as they were to Stormont (198). Arthur (1974), a PD leader from October 1968 to Easter 1969, argues that PD members were not seeking revolution and in the beginning innocently believed that, once civil rights reforms were achieved, they could retreat from broader politics. What is certain is that, during 1968 and 1969, PD members disagreed repeatedly with NICRA members, pushing for more street marches. NICRA’s (1978) account reflects the suspicions that PD members were attempting to undermine the group and push a more leftist agenda.
The PD quickly began organizing protests the other groups found controversial. In January 1969, a small number of PD activists staged what they called the Long March, walking from Belfast to Derry. However, they never reached their destination. An organized loyalist contingent brutally attacked the marchers at Burntollet Bridge outside Derry. PD participants said the police did nothing to defend them. Conflict intensified after this event. As summer approached, both nationalists and loyalists lived in fear of their neighbors. Nationalists told me they had feared a sectarian onslaught from loyalists; loyalists said they were anxious the IRA was going to mount a full military campaign for a united Ireland.
On August 12, 1969, violence escalated in Derry and Belfast. Nationalists in the Bogside and Creggan areas of Derry directly engaged police and loyalists after a loyalist parade. By the next day, rioting had spread across the region. After two days, with police staff strained to the breaking point, the British Army stepped in at Derry. In Belfast, the rioting intensified, and intense sectarian battles led to six deaths. The most intense riots took place in mixed neighborhoods located between the lower Falls and lower Shankill areas of west Belfast. In Bombay Street, forty-four houses owned by Catholics were burned to the ground by loyalists. A barricade was set up between the Falls and Shankill Roads, the IRA surged, and conflict escalated from this point throughout the 1970s. The cityscape became a patchwork of embattled “communities,” separated by makeshift walls, later institutionalized as “peace lines.”
The political reforms proposed in the 1960s were ultimately implemented, but only after conflict had erupted. Individual franchise in local elections came earlier, in April 1969, but sporadic street violence had already become widespread civil disorder. Other reforms followed in the next decade, also too late to forestall the violence and conflict. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), established in 1970, gradually took over administration of public housing from elected representatives (see Brett 1986). The Fair Employment Act banned discrimination in 1976.
In 1972, the most violent year of the conflict, 496 people were killed, and some of the most horrifying violence occurred (McKittrick et al. 1999: 138). Potentially lethal violence became a daily occurrence: police records show 1,853 bombs and 10,631 shooting incidents in 1972 alone (PSNI 2012b: 2). At the beginning of the year, on January 30, civil rights marchers in Derry protested the practice of internment. Shockingly, British paratroopers monitoring the march shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians; seventeen others were injured, one fatally. The incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.” These killings were seen by nationalists as conclusive evidence of the local state’s failure. In March, devolution was suspended, and Britain instituted direct rule, dissolving the Stormont parliament. Local authorities were restricted to governing matters such as refuse collection, recreation, and community services. Yet the abuses of the Stormont era remained a potent rhetorical weapon in political battles for decades.
After Bloody Sunday,