A former British Army general is calling on Boris Johnston to halt prosecutions against soldiers who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Lord Richard Dannatt made the demand in an interview with The Sun, after 1,000 outstanding allegations of war crimes carried out by British soldiers in Iraq were dropped last week. He claimed it was "grossly unfair" to pursue prosecutions against armed forces personnel who served in Northern Ireland - six former soldiers currently face prosecution by the Public Prosecution Service in connection to allegations associated to their service during The Troubles.
Among the six is Dennis Hutchings, charged with the attempted murder of John Patrick Cunningham, shot in the back in 1974 in Benburb in County Armagh, and a former paratrooper, identified only as Soldier F, charged with the murder of Jim Wray and William McKinney and attempted murder of four others in Derry in 1972 on Bloody Sunday.
“Families of the bereaved have the right to know what happened to their loved ones but not at the expense of stress and worry to 60 and 70-year-old former soldiers. That offends natural justice and must stop. I am delighted the appalling IHAT [Iraq Historical Allegations Team] is now itself part of history, so too must be the witch hunt of former soldiers who did their duty in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister has pledged to act – now is the time,” he said.
The Prime Minister outlined his intention to "tackle vexatious claims that undermine our armed forces" in the December 2019 Queen's Speech - but any attempt to stop the Public Prosecution Service or PSNI from building cases against former soldiers accused of misconduct is likely to be challenged by the families of those killed.
Further complicating the task of securing justice for those killed by the British Army in Northern Ireland, however, is the number of unsolved ‘secret’ killings of Catholics and Protestants by the UK armed forces over the period.
In 1971, the British Army founded a specialist undercover unit, Military Reaction Force (MRF), inspired by Brigadier Frank Kitson, who commanded the British Army in Belfast at the time. A veteran of brutal end-of-Empire campaigns in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus and elsewhere, he wrote extensively about ‘counter-insurgency’ operations, and coined the concept of “pseudo-gangs” - state-run terror clans which conducted operations to discredit the enemy.
The MRF was around forty-strong and based at a covert compound east of Belfast, which was off limits even to other soldiers. Its members always operated in plain clothes, and never carried any distinguishing items that could identify who they were. Its specific objective was to inflame tensions between Catholics and Catholics, and bring the IRA out of hiding.
“At times, we had a distinct feeling we were like trail blazing, Wild West pioneers flying by the seat of our pants. We were regularly reminded that we were operating outside the scope of the regular forces and we had very few restrictions imposed on us. We were a very small unit, often working out on a limb and we had to use maximum force when it was required, to survive. We really weren’t too interested in rules and regulations,” one of its members has said.
On occasion, the unit would open fire on people arbitrarily, whether or not they suspected the individuals in question to be armed, or even have ties of any kind to a paramilitary group.
“We were not there to act like an army unit. We were there to act like a terror group,” another former member has said.
It’s entirely unclear quite how many were killed by MRF over the course of its existence. In June 1972, an MRF sergeant was arrested and charged with attempted murder of three men he’d shot in a street in west Belfast, and with the malicious wounding of a child who was injured when one of the rounds passed through the wall of a house. He was acquitted after telling the jury he’d opened fire only after he was shot at first.
The unit was wound down in 1973, and MRF and its activities have received little mention in the media, or history books. Still, despite operating in total secrecy, former MRF members have indicated they wrote reports at the end of their every shift as a matter of policy, which were then passed to a military intelligence officer attached to the unit for assessment and filing. Not a single document related to MRF can be found in the UK National Archives though, suggesting these internal files have either been shredded, or remain totally censored by the Ministry of Defence to this day.