The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #16543 Message #154643
Posted By: InOBU
27-Dec-99 - 06:51 PM
Thread Name: Bobby Sands
Subject: RE: Bobby Sands
The question of why in the issue of the 1981 hunger strike is takes a bit of background knowledge. England began a policy of criminalization of the Irish insurrection, after being held to answer in European human rights courts for treatment of POWs in Long Kesh, at the outset of internment, mass arrests without due process in occupied Ireland. They ended the Geneva Convention rights of being represented by the officers, and attempted to force prisoners to work, against the articles of war. For those who say that the IRA is in violation of those articles for fighting out of uniform, that is a common mistake in interpretation, and I point to the SAS, who not only fight in plain clothes, but murder wounded prisoners with some regularity, not a practice of the IRA.
In response to the criminalization policies, the Republican prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms - the blanket protest,, which meant living in a cell without mattress and living naked save for a blanket. They were subjected to beatings at all hours of the day and night. As English prisons do not have toilets, only a bucket, the prison officials denied the prisoners the ability to leave the cells to empty the buckets. The prisoners broke out the windows and poured the buckets out the windows, so the windows were boarded over. The only solution was to smear the excrement on the walls to dry, so the smell would go away somewhat quicker. The conditions grew so bad that republican officers, like the late Bobby Sands, MP, asked permission to go on hunger strike, and it was reluctantly granted by the IRA general command committee.
It should be remembered that not one of these people faced a jury trial, all were victims of torture, and were jailed as POWs, though expected to accept treatment as common criminals. Impartial courts in the United States found there to be an on going insurrection in Ireland, and not common criminality, as alleged by the British government, and what Bobby Sands and the others were asking where basic rights of decent treatment, without which it is hard to call a nation civilized. He died to preserve the sanity of his comrades, and things did improve to a small degree after the deaths of ten remarkable men.
And in Freedom's days, we will sing in praise
of O'Hara, Hughes, McCreesh and Sands
A peaceful and just new year
Larry