In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  In 1968, when the new civil war broke out, the traditional Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods of Belfast intermingled, mixed marriages were becoming common, religious fanatics and sectarians were regarded as loonies. Sociological research between 1989–95 showed little prejudice among the older generations, in contrast with those who grew up after 1968. A good forty per cent of the Northern Irish surveyed said they wished to be associated with neither the Catholics nor the Protestants.

  What suddenly turned Northern Ireland into a war zone was therefore not latent, widespread religious tension, but the disastrous spiral of violence in which the IRA, the Protestant Unionists, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British troops became entangled.

  The revolt had begun in the 1960s as a moderate reaction to Protestant intimidation and discrimination. In 1967, a number of Catholics, inspired by the student protests elsewhere in Europe, set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Associaton (NICRA). Taking American civil rights activists as their model, they applied peaceful means at first: demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins. For those in power in Ulster, however, this was taking things too far. On 5 October, 1968, a NICRA march in Londonderry was broken up heavy-handedly by police; the demonstrators fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails. The maniacal Pope-hater, Reverend Ian Paisley, fueled the fires even further, his Ulster Protestant Volunteers began terror-ising the Catholic neighbourhoods, and the IRA came back to life.

  On the surface at least, the conflict in Northern Ireland resembled the one in the Basque Country. The movements in both places fought for their own rights. But whereas the issue for the Basques has been the preservation of a vanishing people, for Northern Irish Catholics it was about the ascendancy of a majority that was not yet recognised as such. The Catholics produced more children than the Protestants, they were the winners in a demographic sense, but they remained oppressed. The routes taken by the traditional Orange marches are telling in this regard. Until far into the twentieth century, the Protestants marched only through Protestant neighbourhoods. Gradually, however, those same neighbour-hoods became populated by Catholic families; the routes, though, remained identical to what they had been thirty years before. Detours from the ritual path, after all, would have amounted to a recognition of the fact that those neighbourhoods were no longer predominantly Protestant.

  The Catholics increasingly came to regard the marches as an annual provocation, the supreme symbol of discrimination and humiliation. And so, in summer 1969, things erupted: the Protestant marchers in Catholic districts were pelted with stones and bottles. The neighbourhood riots grew into small-scale popular uprisings. British troops were called in, and within a few months the violence had escalated into a civil war that would last for more than three decades.

  At first most of those killed were Catholics: the retired farmer Francis McCloskey, who wandered into a riot on 14 July, 1969, had his skull bashed in by the police; contractor Samuel Devenney, father of nine, died three days later from injuries sustained in an attack by the RUC in April; bus conductor Samuel McLarnon was struck down in his own living room by a police bullet.

  The British government decided to knuckle down in Northern Ireland. Catholics briefly hoped that the British would rescue them from the harassment of the Protestant militias. But soon the situation deteriorated even further; in 1972, 467 people were killed in bombings and shooting incidents; in 1973 that figure was 250; in 1974, 216 people were killed; in 1975 it was 247, and in 1976 the death toll was 297. Belfast became a war zone, neighbourhoods were cordoned off with barbed wire, sentry posts and armoured cars. Successive British governments proved unable to mediate. During their terms of office (1974–9), Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and his successor James Callaghan allowed the situation to get completely out of hand. Countless IRA suspects were imprisoned without due process. Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that her ‘own instincts were deeply Unionist’. With only a tiny majority to keep him in power, her successor, John Major, was entirely dependent on the Unionist MPs. In 1984, more than a third of all adult Catholic males in Ulster were unemployed. For years, the annual death toll hovered around eighty. Only after Tony Blair's Labour government came to power in May 1997 was there room for a breakthrough.

  Compared with many other twentieth-century conflicts, the civil war in Northern Ireland was relatively limited and isolated. The extent of the drama only becomes clear when one sees how small Ulster really is: not much larger than Friesland province in the Netherlands. The conflict there nevertheless has claimed more than 3,500 lives, and left at least 30,000 people injured. Around 1995, one out of every twenty inhabitants of Northern Ireland had been the victim of a bombing or a shooting, one in five had witnessed a bombing, and the same number knew someone in their immediate surroundings who had been killed or badly wounded.

  The lives, long and short, of the 3,637 victims to date have been detailed in the encyclopaedic Lost Lives, including the circumstances leading up to their deaths: militancy, camaraderie, loyalty, revenge, brotherly love, the luck of the draw. The book had just come out when I was travelling around Ulster, and everyone was talking about it. With its 1,630 pages, it was the result of eight years of research by a little group of independent journalists. Its impact was shattering.

  Take lost life number seven, the first child to be murdered: Patrick Rooney, nine years old, schoolboy, killed on 15 August, 1969 by police bullets while lying in his bed. His mother would later lose a whole series of friends and relatives; because of this book, all those connections have suddenly become clear as well. The chain reactions of revenge, back and forth: in January 1976, three Protestants were murdered in a bar by IRA supporters; in revenge, six Catholic men were shot and killed in a living room during a ‘post-New Year sing-song’ around the piano; in response, the IRA machine-gunned a van carrying ten Protestant workers close to Kingsmills. Nineteen lives lost within a week. The grisliest details: limbs that flew over rooftops, decapitated victims. The weapons: baseball bats, butcher's knives, pistols, fire bombs, fertiliser bombs, machine guns, Semtex bombs. The nightwatchman Thomas Madden, tortured by Unionists, screamed:‘Kill me, kill me now!'The heroic deaths: the woman who threw herself in front of her husband, a soldier, during an IRA attack. The deaths from sorrow: Anne Maguire, whose three children had been killed in 1976 and who cut her own wrists four years later – there was no life for her without her babies. Those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong moment: the old woman in a pub who was struck by a gas bomb. The brutal errors: the IRA gunman who burst through a door, shot the father of the family and then cried: ‘Damn it, wrong address!’

  The IRA and other republican groups accounted for most of the casualties: 2,139. The Protestant Unionists were responsible for 1,050 killings. The British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary killed 367 people. The majority of the victims were, as noted, not activists. An increasing share of the violence, in fact, served only to maintain the groups’ internal authority. The tables drawn up in Lost Lives speak for themselves: 115 IRA members were killed by the police and the British Army, 149 by the IRA itself, 138 Catholic citizens were killed by actions taken by the British Army, 198 by the IRA.

  Worth noting in this regard is the story of Jean McConville from West Belfast, a young widow with ten children, born Protestant but married to a Catholic contractor. The couple lived in a Protestant neighbourhood at first, but were harassed there so badly after 1969 that they moved to a Catholic section of town. In early 1972, her husband died of cancer. Soon afterwards, during a skirmish outside her house, she provided assistance to a young British soldier who had been wounded in front of her door. For the IRA, that deed of compassion was reason enough to put her on its blacklist. On 6 December, 1972 she was abducted and beaten for several hours. She escaped, but the next evening, while she was taking a bath, four young women entered her home and dragged her outside. Her eldest daughter – fifteen at the time – had gone to the chip shop, the youngest children clung to their m
other and begged the women to let her go, the older children were hysterical with fear.

  They never saw Jean again. The children kept quiet about the kidnapping for several weeks, and tried to survive on their own. Finally, welfare bodies pulled the family apart. For the children, that was the start of a year-long odyssey from one orphanage to the next.

  Lost lives. Just outside Belfast, at the foot of a road embankment, lies a wilderness of tall grass, crooked stones, rusty iron and grey Celtic crosses: Milltown cemetery. To the left lie the republicans, finally in possession of their full names and ranks, as in a real war cemetery. ‘Capt Joseph Fitzsimmons, killed in action, 28 May, 1972, IRA’;‘Officer Danny Loughran, People's Liberation Army, murdered 5 April, 1975 by NLF’; ‘Joseph and Pete McGouch, “One day I will walk with you …”’

  On 16 March, 1988, the Unionist Michael Stone disrupted an IRA funeral here with shots and hand grenades: three dead, sixty wounded. He had thrown his hand grenades too soon. ‘If they had exploded in the air, he would have killed a great many more republicans,’ his sympathisers complained later. Stone is still their hero.

  Lost lives. ‘We have good hope,’ says Teresa Pickering. ‘But there isn't a family in Northern Ireland that hasn't been damaged.’ Teresa is a mother of three, one of countless women who have had to pilot their families through this war.‘Whole groups of boys were always on the run, including my own seventeen-year-old brother. There were always people hiding out, police raids, arson.’ She tells me about how one night three British soldiers forced their way into her home one night and pulled her out of bed. ‘I was puking with fear.’ She had to hold down two jobs, because the men of the family were no longer bringing in money. Her sister and her baby were caught in the crossfire, her brother was sentenced to life imprisonment. She got married, her husband was sent to prison, a life of arrests, searches and caring for prisoners. ‘The strange thing was: at the same time, we just lived on as normally as possible, like everyone else. That was pure survival instinct.’

  I had been introduced to Teresa by a mutual acquaintance; now she sits a bit uneasily in the hotel lobby, it's still hard for her to talk about it. Her first husband was tortured: British soldiers blindfolded him and put him in a helicopter, flew around and then threw him out, two metres above the ground. A joke. It led to a ruling against Great Britain by the European Court of Human Rights. Teresa herself was detained for a week, in total darkness, interrogated at the strangest hours, without any charges pressed. ‘When I came out, I was completely disoriented.’ That was only two years ago.

  In 1976, a spontaneous peace movement arose among the women of Belfast; the two initiators, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, actually won the Nobel Prize. ‘I knew both of them well. I sympathised with their idea completely, but of course all those wonderful meetings didn't work. After all, it wasn't about a personal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. It was about a Northern Irish government that treated us like trash, simply because we were Catholic.’ According to her, that is what finally put an end to the women's peace movement as well.

  Now the thaw has truly begun. The police stations are still electronic fortresses, but the armoured cars are off the streets and the men of the IRA are gradually coming out of prison and out of hiding. Teresa knows quite a few of them, they are all thirty-five or forty years old by now. ‘Some of them were always on the run, had all kinds of girlfriends, marriages fell apart. Most of them have spent a good part of their lives in prison. They were already falling behind when the civil war started, and now it's even worse. What's more, today we have a completely different Northern Ireland from when they went into prison. That whole generation has to find its way back to a normal life.’

  Teresa was divorced, and recently remarried. ‘When I go out these days, I'm still afraid. But then, so many women have led a life like mine.’

  Lost lives. Jean McConville's children never stopped looking for her. This spring, the IRA finally admitted that she had been murdered. In June 1999, a search began of the beach at Templetown to recover her remains. The McConville children, adults by then, gathered in the dunes and watched as policemen dug a huge L-shaped hole behind flapping plastic curtains, then systematically dug up the rest of the beach. ‘Finding her body would bring us back together again as a family,’ Helen McConville, the eldest daughter, says. ‘This is destroying us.’ A reporter from the Independent wrote: ‘One of Jean McConville's daughters walked across the car park, her eyes fixed on the ground, full of sleeplessness and worry, an attitude of pain and despair. She walked to a car in which other members of the family were sitting. The digging was over for the day, and there was little reason to stay any longer, but the family remained, maintaining their endless wake for reasons deeper than any logic …’

  Jean McConville's remains were finally found in summer 2003. For the IRA, her death had been merely a working accident: she had been interrogated with a plastic bag over her head, and had suffocated.

  Chapter FIFTY-EIGHT

  Berlin

  ‘FAMILY,’ MY GERMAN FRIENDS TELL ME, ‘FOR US IT WAS ALWAYS family ties that determined the choices we made in life.’

  There are eight of us at the table, it's a chance get-together, and I cannot remember how we hit on the subject. ‘I was born and raised in Wuppertal,’ the woman across the table from me says. ‘But only because my mother was bombed out of her house in Berlin while she was still pregnant, and the only thing she could think of was that she had family there somewhere. That's how I became a real Wessi.’

  ‘With my mother, it was completely the other way around,’ says the woman next to her, who comes from the former DDR. ‘She was pregnant too, my father was in the army, and he had family in Rostock. That's how I ended up there.’

  Her husband: ‘Almost all of us have a story like that.’

  The woman beside me starts talking about the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘I'll never forget it. 13 August, 1961. I was eighteen. I was standing there in Oranienburger Strasse when workers began rolling out the barbed wire and throwing up a wall. Meanwhile, the most amazing things were happening. It's been described so many times, but I saw it with my own eyes: how two friends were standing on the east side, they said goodbye, one of them took a running jump over the wall into the West, the other one started a life in the East. A Wessi and an Ossi, and no doubt it was years before they saw each other again.’

  She herself had felt absolutely no urge to jump over the low wall; there was no way she would have left her mother behind. ‘Everyone around me had been thinking about it for a long time, most of them had already decided what they would do even before they started building the wall. My older brother chose to go to the West, he was seventeen, and he left as soon as he'd finished his final exams. My closest girlfriend went too, suddenly she was gone, without a word. That was terrible. Now she lives in Nancy, she married a Frenchman.’ She herself met a Pole, and these days she lives in Warsaw.

  Everyone at the table starts talking at the same time. ‘Yes, that's exactly the way it was at first, in the East: as far as you knew, you were making a decision for the rest of your life, for ever.’

  ‘There was hardly a German family that didn't have brothers or sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces and nephews on the other side.’

  ‘You weren't even allowed to cross the border for your parent's funeral.’

  ‘It was only in the 1970s that Wessis were first allowed to travel to the East, every now and then. Finally you saw the brothers, uncles, nieces and nephews who you'd been talking about and writing to so much.’

  ‘And then it turned out that you really didn't have anything to say to each other.’

  Berlin, 9 November, 1999. In the dilapidated head offices of the former national bank of the DDR, just off Unter den Linden, the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall is being commemorated by an unusual concert: the favourite music of both former chancellor Helmut Kohl and former DDR leader Erich Honecker. We listen to the Hennigd
orf brass ensemble (‘My Way’), the Berliner Schalmeienexpress (stalwart DDR marches) and the Generation Berlin Orchestra with a special piece composed for the opening of a lignite mine. Between the pieces of music, someone reads out texts written by Kohl and letters from Honecker. The arches of the great hall of the old bank have been patched with bare brick, there are huge holes where the proletarian art once hung, the rain rattles on the roof and drips through the ceiling. The audience, mostly young people and artists, listens intently.

  A record player starts up with the song ‘Ein Augenblick der Ewigkeit’, a hit from the old DDR radio programme Stunde der Melodie. The evening's host reads a letter, written to Honecker when he was in prison. ‘Dear Mr Honecker, thank you very much for the lovely music we were able to listen to for thirty years, thanks to you.’ Outside, the great celebration is being skilfully stage-managed by the new Germany: the Brandenburg Gate glistens in a firmament of television camera lamps, there are three police cars on every corner, and through it all the Berliners walk in the rain, drinking beer and being mostly silent.

  Later, for no real reason, I stroll over to the playground close to Hotel Adlon. There is no one there. I sit down on a bench. Pop music is blasting in the distance, to the left are the bright lights of the new Potsdamer Platz, to the right the fireworks. Beneath the grass and the climbing frame lies the bunker, forgotten now. Four mentally handicapped people are taking the S-Bahn home, accompanied by their supervisor. They cheer at every illuminated glass palace they pass, sing along with every electronic peep, admire the new glass dome of the Reichstag as though it were a firework display. They are the only ones who view the new Berlin with unadulterated pleasure, ten years after the collapse of the wall.