In
the 1970s when I heard the South African Justice
minister, Jimmy Kruger, claim that the death in
custody of Steve Biko had left him cold, an involuntary
shiver probably rippled through me. It seemed to
epitomise heartlessness and arrogance. The antithesis
of empathy, there existed as much human warmth within
the mind of Jimmy Kruger as in the lifeless corpse
of the murdered Biko.
Steve
Biko was not a man who would have taken lightly
to being compared with East Belfast murder victim
Jim Gray, ironically enough nicknamed Freddie Kruger
by some from the area who were today celebrating
that there would be no sequel to last night's grand
finale. This time there would be no Freddie returns.
Relief not grief seemed to be the catchword. Biko
was a militant anti-apartheid activist determined
to free the people he was part of from the grip
of a murderous white supremacist regime. By contrast
Gray was a narcoloyalist who saw in the people around
him a potential market for his drugs business. Poison
the lot of them if need be, blight their lives,
destroy their children - as he destroyed the life
of his own teenage son - in the interests of nothing
other than profit and power.
The
sole reason for juxtaposing Biko alongside Gray
is to illustrate the manner in which a death can
leave people cold. I suppose that and being white
is all I have ever shared in common with the racist
Jimmy Kruger. When the phone rang minutes after
the evening news and a friend told me of Gray's
murder, I was not frozen to the point of agreeing
with H.H. Munroe who famously said of someone he
cared little for, 'he is one of those people who
would be enormously improved by death.' Nevertheless
what I did feel was that sense of Kruger coldness.
It is not PC to subscribe to the idea that there
should be a hierarchy of victims, but in our minds,
intellectualise as we might, that hierarchy has
firm emotional founds. Killing Gray was a poisonous
act. It is no more just merely because it pushed
out another noxious substance. But Salman Rushdie's
maxim rushes in to tilt the scales of justice away
from the flat plain of rich and poor alike being
equal in the eyes of the law, and to reinforce that
emotional hierarchy: 'when a tyrant falls, the world's
shadows lighten, and only hypocrites grieve.' Listening
to women merrily discussing Gray's death on radio,
followed by political and community personalities
on television dispassionately and perfunctorily
condemning it, it was clear enough that yesterday
was not National Hypocrites Day. Gray paddled his
own canoe right into the eye of the storm, and public
sympathy, not being a finite resource, declined
to follow.
Such
sentiment serves neither to recommend the type of
cold dish served up to Jim Gray at his father's
home as a panacea to the problem posed by the oleaginous
operatives of narcoloyalism nor to offer by way
of mitigation a rationalisation on behalf of those
who killed him. The ethical challenge once posed
by Holly Near is possessed of a timeless and universal
validity: 'why do we kill people who are killing
people to show that killing people is wrong?'
Viewing
the life and death of Jim Gray is a lot like watching
a film. When Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas,
Tommy DeVito, received what gangster jargon terms
'One Behind the Ear' (OBE), the setting - he was
about to become a made man at a mafia ceremony -
gave cause for surprise rather than the event. The
temporary shock soon gives way to something else
and the viewer gets on with it. The audience deprived
of all input into the narrative no more shapes the
film than society here seems to impact on the affairs
of gangster loyalism. Unless, unfortunate enough
to live in Ahoghill or some place similar where
the monsters and mobsters aggressively intermingle
with the local population as if they were the creatures
of some malign theme park, viewers have no more
influence on what goes on in here than they would
have over a Scorsese film. The producers and directors
are in the service of the British state. Society
is reduced to being a passive audience.
Loyalist
gangsters like Gray are a species protected by government,
the malignant outcome of a British political strategy
that is quite content to promote gangsters as community
leaders. What government gets in return is dubious.
David Hanson made a very poor show of detailing
the quid pro quo when interviewed on Spotlight last
evening, behaving as if he was on a postmodernist
quiz show where points were awarded for avoiding
every question.
Before
his arrest on money laundering charges earlier this
year, it was common place to hear allegations from
within the loyalist community that Gray frequently
drank with senior PSNI members in the Point at Ballyhackamore,
the Culloden Hotel, and in Bangor bars. Was he only
permitted to run his crime empire with the approval
of officialdom while he was in the UDA and as soon
as it ditched him, then it was considered timely
to remove him? If so, that is an open invitation
from government to aspiring crime bosses to join
the UDA and live under the considerable benefits
of protectionism rather than risk their 'business'
ventures in the more laissez faire world outside
the paramilitaries.
Frankie
Gallagher of the UPRG was scathing of Gray on BBC
Talkback this afternoon. Refreshingly, speaking
no ill of the dead did not figure centrallly in
Gallagher's sense of propriety. Continuing in the
same vein that saw him pillory Gray on Spotlight
a short time after the drugadier's arrest, the UPRG
spokesperson hardly broke stride as he accused Gangster
Gray of having created hundreds of victims within
the East Belfast unionist community. The flamboyant
thug - who gave Hawaiian shirts a bad name - was
depicted as a tyrant who strutted around East Belfast
like some Serbian warlord. There would be no mourners
from Tullycarnet, Gallagher assured his listeners.
Gallagher
is fearful that people like Gray are allowed to
run for as long as they are because of their use
either as informers to the PSNI or as community
enforcers similar to the manner in which borstal
screws make use of a 'daddy' from amongst the prisoners.
He argues that while policing on behalf of the community
depends in large part on the police getting good
information, the PSNI has lost the plot and employs
informers who torment their communities.
For
Frankie Gallagher, British government strategy is
to criminalise and contain Protestant communities.
Whatever about the accuracy of that, if the type
of loyalism he ostensibly represents is to make
its presence felt, its success will be measured
in terms of how rapidly it divests loyalist communities
of the UDA and fellow gangsters. There is nothing
to be carved from rotten wood, from maintaining
that there is a problem in the UDA rather than the
UDA being the problem. Throwing more public money
at that shower has a parallel in giving foreign
aid to corrupt African dictators whose bank balances
go up while their citizens life expectancy goes
down.
