Madam, - In a statement on January 19th in response to the comments from Sinn Féin's Mitchel McLaughlin regarding the killing of Jean McConville not being a "crime", SDLP spokesperson Alban Maginness retorted that this most brutal murder was a "war crime", and something that would be a matter for the International Criminal Court. While the SDLP did acknowledge that the killing was obviously very wrong, this characterisation sends out a very damaging message.
Leaving aside the problem of the lack of retrospective jurisdiction of the ICC, to say this was a war crime implies that the IRA was fighting a legitimate war, which got out of hand in the case of Jean McConville.
Furthermore, it places the IRA, a terrorist organisation, on a par with the British state as combatants of equal status. While there is much scope for criticism of how the British responded to the situation within Northern Ireland, to imply that they were engaged in a war between combatants of equal moral and international standing is simply preposterous.
All right-thinking people should categorise the brutal murder of Mrs McConville as a crime that should be addressed through the domestic legal channels, just like all other terrorist murders, or abuses of power by state forces.
Over the past few years, there have been many demands from both Unionist and SDLP politicians for a trite statement from the IRA that its "war is over". Such language plays into its hands. It implies that there was some legitimacy to most IRA activities and allows it to continue to make arbitrary distinctions between its actions against the British state, and its continued paramilitary and criminal activity directed against sections of the people of Northern Ireland. - Yours, etc.,
Dr STEPHEN FARRY, Alliance Justice Spokesman, University Street, Belfast 7.
Madam, - We are constantly reminded that in many countries former terrorists have beaten their swords into ploughshares and become good, even outstanding, politicians.
However, it is also the lesson of many countries that gangsters invariably remain gangsters or at best highly corrupt politicians, and that once a political system is infected with gangsterism it is extremely difficult to root it out.
Sinn Féin has now spectacularly shown itself to be a party of gangsters, living within their own warped, self-justificatory moral turpitude. It is now up to all democratic parties, north and south, to say this clearly to the electorates, and for the electorates to decide whether they want Ireland to become the fiefdom of gangsters, racketeers and private armies. - Yours, etc.,
ROBIN PATTERSON, Dublin 4.