Enough of SF's cherry picking

The current issue of Sinn Féin's newspaper An Phoblacht has a passionate and informative piece about the terror of the early 1970s, the murder and disappearance of its victims and the need to confront the legacy of the past.

It talks of the horrible situation of the families of victims "whose remains have not been found yet". It notes bitterly that "most of those responsible for murders, torture and disappearances have never been incarcerated". It rejects the fudge whereby senior figures in the terror gangs are "offering information on the whereabouts of the bodies of the disappeared in exchange for immunity from prosecution".

All of this is perfectly justified, and it is good to see Sinn Féin taking a strong and principled stance on the legacy of political terror. The only problem is that the piece is about Chile and the unresolved crimes of the Pinochet junta. How unfortunate that it should appear in the week when, as now seems certain, the body of Jean McConville, the widowed mother of 10 children who was disappeared by the IRA in December 1972, was found.

The tone of the An Phoblacht article is nevertheless instructive. It suggests that Sinn Féin members are well able to look at past cruelties and draw the obvious conclusions - provided those crimes took place a long way from Ireland. Their natural sympathies lie with the bereaved families.

An Phoblacht reports, for example, that "Thirteen relatives of the Chilean disappeared are currently on hunger strike, calling on the government to punish those who directly or indirectly took part in the dictatorship's crimes. 'For our part, we are tired of lies, promises and disappointments,' they said in a statement. 'We, who are aware that there is no possible reparation for what happened, because no action or person would be able to return us our relatives, or bring back those fellow citizens who left Chile, start a hunger strike so the country and the world will know that in Chile, the political authorities are resisting to accept (sic) these offences as crimes against humanity.'"

We can take from this that, in the abstract at least, Sinn Féin accepts certain principles. One is that the events of 30 years ago cannot simply be forgotten in the attempt to construct a civilised society, especially when the bodies of the victims have not been returned. Another is that responsibility for those crimes is both direct and indirect - which is to say that it lies both with those who actually killed people and those who were their political and military superiors. A third is that murder and secret burial is a crime against humanity and thus belongs to the most serious category of offence, one which no political cause can justify and for which the passage of time does not obliterate the need for justice.

Any serious political party with ambitions to govern a democratic society has to accept that the standards of behaviour to which it demands that others be held should also apply to itself. Yet, even as one arm of the republican movement is agonising over the plight of the families of the disappeared in Chile, the other continues to play cruel games with the families of the disappeared in Ireland. Not only is the IRA still behaving with appalling cynicism towards the McConville family - trying to suggest that the discovery of their mother's body resulted from its own efforts - but the bodies of at least nine people believed to have been murdered by the organisation are still missing.

Sinn Féin itself, however, has a weirdly dysfunctional relationship with the past. On the one hand, it presents itself as a left-wing party outraged by human rights abuses around the world. On the other, just a fortnight ago, two of its young Dublin stars spoke at a commemoration in Fairview Park for the Nazi collaborator and former IRA leader Seán Russell. This was the man who voluntarily went to Berlin as a guest of the German high command to make an alliance with Hitler while the Holocaust was getting under way.

Yet even bright, clean young Sinn Féin candidates are not at all embarrassed to claim him as part of their heritage. As an indicator of the party's ability to take crimes against humanity seriously, it is hard to imagine a more depressing spectacle.

Sinn Féin has to decide now whether or not it respects human rights and believes that crimes against humanity must be accounted for. If it does, then its leader Gerry Adams, who was a senior figure in the Belfast IRA when Jean McConville was abducted, should account for what he knows of that time. If it doesn't, then it might at least spare us the constant demands that everyone in the world except the IRA must be held accountable for murders and disappearances.

Either a line is drawn under all atrocities in the name of peace or, in the name of justice, all atrocities are subjected to rigorous accountability. Sinn Féin needs to tell us which road it wants to take and to stop the process of picking and choosing in which the victims are treated in death as they were in life - as pieces of meat to be cut up and fed to the cause.