Democracy "nonexistent"
International Viewpoint 10 November 1986 revolutionary slammers, they are institutions of systematic quasi-racist brutality. They are staffed by members of the Protestant loyalist caste developed by British rule to hold down the majority.
The British themselves have a very tenuous control over a layer trained to function as savage watchdogs. The loyalist riots against the British attempts to make even minor, formal concessions to the nationalist population in the North have again recently demonstrated the paranoid rage of social layers formed as a caste of
IN LATE October, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that Brendan
McFarlane and Gerard Kelly, two escapees from the H-Blocks of
Northern Ireland, could be extradited to the United Kingdom. Nonetheless the court qualified its decision. The two can be extradited only for the acts of violence they allegedly committed in breaking out of
Long Kesh prison camp, and not for the charges for which they had been imprisoned, which include accusations of major terrorist actions against MacFarlane in particular.
Furthermore, the court stipulated that the two could not be extradited unless the British authorities could offer guarantees that they would not be mistreated after being returned to the British prison system.
GERRY FOLEY
There is obviously a fundamental contradiction in this decision.
Mc-
Farlane and Kelly had maintained that they were engaged in a guerrilla struggle against a foreign power illeof their gitimately occuping part and denying them their country national rights. By not granting extradition on charges made against them for such activities, the Dutch court at least partially recognized their tionary terror in violation of human rights and democratic principles?
It appears that it will take a long time, perhaps many months, before a deal can be made for the actual handing over of the prisoners. So there remains time to build pressure on the Dutch authorities to stop the extraditions.
There is a more immediate reason than the question of general political jailers.
While the case of McFarlane and Kelly was being heard in the Netherlands, republican prisoners in the HBlocks smuggled out messages that guards were boasting about what they would do to the two if they were returned.
McFarlane in particular played a major role in the H-Block hunger strikes in 1980-81 that led to the emergence of a mass political base for republicanism in the North of Ireland. The republican political organization, Sinn Fein, now gets nearly half of the Catholic vote in the North, and it is beginning to try to offer a political alternative for the masses of exploited and oppressed in the South.
In the following article, written for the Dutch prestige daily Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, Brendan McFarlane described the conditions that he fought against. The article was not published in its entirety, but was later quoted by the paper in reports, and may have helped to put pressure on the court by influencing Dutch political opinion.
Letters and telegrams opposing the extradition of McFarlane and claims.
If the court did not consider that their actions in engaging in a military struggle against the occupying power were crimes, how could their actions The British army "keeping the peace" in the North of Ireland (DR) in escaping from the captivity of their military enemies themselves be extraditable offences? The court obviously tried to avoid the real issue. But in shifting the final decision on extradition to the political authorities, it handed them an even hotter potato.
The republican prisoners had argued that Britain subjected the nationalists it jailed to systematic mistreatment in order to break them as representatives an oppressed people and therefore to maintain a yoke of oppression over an entire population. By demanding guarantees before McFarlane and Kelly can be extradited, the court also implicitly admitted that this problem existed
Moreover, how can the British authorities give guarantees against mistreatment of these two republicans without implicitly acknowledging that its prisons exercise counter-revoluprinciple for opposing these extraditions. The political prisons in the
North of Ireland are not only counter-
Kelly should be sent to the Minister van Justitie, Schedeldoekshaven 100,
2511 Ex.Den Haag, The Netherlands. D
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IRELAND in the North
International Viewpoint 10 November 1986