Peace, Justice and Morality
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2017
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How far should we be willing to forgive and forget past crimes in the interests of building lasting peace? The issue has been a running sore in Northern Ireland politics despite the Good Friday peace agreement. The Police Service of Northern Ireland has a special unit, the Legacy Investigations Branch, to review more than 3000 murders during the Troubles. But there are allegations it is prioritising re-opening the killings where soldiers from the British Army were involved, over those carried out by terrorists - the majority of which were by Republicans. There are practical issues of getting evidence for crimes that happened so long ago and the cost of investigations, but the moral questions are harder to answer. How do you weigh the right and the need of the families of victims to get justice for their loved ones, against the need to move on and find peace for the whole community? A general amnesty might solve the narrow question, but does that serve the interests of justice? And can you find reconciliation and peace if people feel they've been denied justice? As we move further away from the conflict, does the current generation who lived through it (and in some cases took and active role in it) have a responsibility to set aside their history in the interests of peace for the next generation? These are questions for Northern Ireland, but also around the world - in Cyprus, where there are renewed hopes for a peace deal that can united the island; in Colombia where, in a referendum, the people rejected a peace deal between the government and Farc rebels that would have ended the 52-year-long conflict that has killed more than 220,000 people; and in the Balkans where the truth and reconciliation process is struggling. What price peace? Producer: Phil Pegum.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.7 | Good evening. It's not that long ago, but it's sometimes difficult to remember when Northern Ireland was a war zone on our doorstep, |
| 0:10.1 | a part of the UK where armed troops scurried through shopping centres fearful of ambush, |
| 0:14.9 | and whole districts had to be patrolled in armoured cars. More than 3,000 people died. |
| 0:20.1 | For BBC reporters of my generation, Belfast was our |
| 0:23.1 | backyard and sectarian violence the punctuation of our working lives. Peace seems a miracle. |
| 0:29.2 | It comes at a prize, though. Some say at the price of justice. In Northern Ireland, in South |
| 0:34.2 | Africa, after apartheid, in Colombia, the Balkans, in Cyprus. We're told a line |
| 0:39.1 | has to be drawn, peace brought bought by allowing some at least of those who did terrible |
| 0:43.9 | things not to face the consequences. And the security forces made subject to the kind of |
| 0:48.8 | retrospective scrutiny that seems to many to treat them as morally equivalent to those |
| 0:53.3 | we've regarded as terrorists. |
| 0:55.4 | In Northern Ireland, there's controversy and real anger in some quarters |
| 0:58.8 | that the so-called legacy investigation branch is reopening cases of hundreds of deaths in the troubles. |
| 1:05.4 | Critics say the emphasis is overwhelmingly on those killed by the army and police, |
| 1:09.9 | rather than by terrorists who killed |
| 1:11.7 | ten times more people. One side sees it as a betrayal of those who fought and died for us |
| 1:16.8 | and law and order. The other says it's a legitimate search for truth, if not a rebalancing |
| 1:22.0 | of history that's essential if the settlement is to hold. Are reconciliation and justice incompatible? |
| 1:29.2 | What price, peace? |
| 1:31.2 | Our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:32.2 | The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times, |
... |
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