Book Reviews
| Date | 01 June 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00191 |
| Published date | 01 June 2001 |
Book Reviews
UNFINISHED BUSINESS: STATE KILLINGS AND THE QUEST FOR
TRUTH by BILL ROLSTON
(Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 2000, 325 pp., £12.99)
Northern Ireland is a society experiencing conflict transition. It is also a
society which struggles to come to terms with its recent and extended
history. Defining the past is a challenge. This is in part because disputed
ownership of history has been a defining element of the conflict itself, and is
inherent in its resolution. Key to defining that history is an acknowledge-
ment of human rights violations which have been a consistent feature of the
Northern Ireland conflict since its inception. In this, defining who is a
victim is not only a pressing political matter, but a vexed legal and social
issue. Bill Rolston’s Unfinished Business: State Killings and the Search for
Truth is a compelling recording of the experiences of a particular group of
conflict victims. Tellingly, many of these victims are unacknowledged by
the state.
The victims identified by this book are the relatives of individuals killed
by state actors during the conflict. While there has been a significant degree
of legal and political analysis directed at the use of lethal force by the state,
much less attention has been aimed at the secondary victims of such loss of
life – family and other relatives of the deceased.
1
This book redresses that
gap. These victims are particularly marginalized by the state, primarily
because the loss of life was caused by a state actor, secondarily, because the
state has persistently claimed that the taking of life was justified or excused
by the exigencies of the particular circumstances in which the soldiers or
policemen found themselves.
2
The book starts from the implicit premise that the taking of life constitutes
a human rights violation which a democratic state is bound to address in
order to maintain its legitimacy in the domestic and international spheres.
The book demonstrates the extent to which human rights violations can
become a banal feature of a society which has, and continues to experience,
311
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1F.Nı´ Aolaı´n, The Politics of Force Conflict Management and State Violence in
Northern Ireland (2000); K. Asmal, Shoot to Kill? International Lawyer’s Inquiry
into the Lethal Use of Firearms by the Security Forces in Northern Ireland (1985); S.
Doran, ‘The Use of Force by the Security Forces in Northern Ireland: A Legal
Perspective’ (1987) 7 Legal Studies 291.
2 See, generally, G. Fletcher, ‘The Right and the Reasonable’ (1985) 98 Harvard Law
Rev. 949; E. Colvin, ‘Exculpatory Defences in Criminal Law’ (1990) 10 Ox. J. of
Legal Studies 381.
conflict. Both individually and communally, a conflict-driven society
becomes accustomed to hearing statistics, media reports, and occasionally
legal outcomes arising from denials of human rights. However, rarely does
such a society get to hear the voices of those who experience loss, trauma,
and personal transgression. By this I mean that society does not hear their
voices first-hand, unfiltered, and without being diluted. This is especially
true when the state has been responsible for taking the life of a citizen. The
highest virtue of this book is that it functions as a platform for that powerful
and unheard narrative.
The strength of this book is that the voices of those bereaved are given full
and uninterrupted scope to speak. They speak powerfully and the chorus is
unmistakable – that they have been denied the status of victimhood, that they
have experienced secondary violations of their own dignity as a result of
bereavement, and that the failure by the state to address meaningfully the
primary violation constitutes an ongoing denial of accountability. Narrative
is an extra-ordinarily powerful tool, both for the academic and the social
commentator. One of the constant tensions for the academic in the use of
primary narrative in their work is the extent to which the observer has a right
to manipulate and use the words of others to their own ends. When one
describes atrocity, violence, and violation, there is the tendency to impose a
moral meaning, to create order on the chaos which is recorded and to redeem
that which is deplorable. Laurence Langer writing of the function of
narrative in dealing with Holocaust memory speaks of the observer’s
dilemma when he states:
Description can scarcely do justice to this testimony, whose visible moment
lapses into silence as words exhaust their possibilities. Unlike a blank page,
(or, indeed, a written one), the mobile, anguished face before us duplicates the
internalized drama of remembering and evaluating, regarding regretfully the
spectacle of a self for which the speaker can find no role in his present
existence.
3
Rolston has admirably avoided super-imposing his own voice on those of the
victims. Rather, the bulk of this work is a platform for the uninterrupted
monologue of the victims themselves. In this way, the full force of their
alienation, exclusion, and hurt is felt. It is also experienced by the reader as
authentic, and not contrived by the overlay of the observer’s own views.
However, the downside of this approach for the academic is that he simply
becomes a conduit for others, and the extent to which he can comment on the
wider social significance of the individual experiences is limited. Thus,
while the book presents a powerful soliloquy by the victims, which is
admirably free from external interference, the concluding chapter which
reflects on it all, leaves the reader with a sense that more could have been
said in the author’s own voice about what he has recorded.
312
3 L.L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991) at 83.
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001
To continue reading
Request your trial