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The Hunger Strikes – Fact and Fiction (part 2)
Having posted the introduction to my hunger strikers series and a first post looking at the background and events surrounding the hunger strikes, questions remain. Who were the 10 men who chose death rather than serve out their sentences like any other prisoner, who thought they somehow deserved special treatment? With the 25th anniversary of the hunger strikes taking place this year, I think it's only fair that we remember just exactly who these men were – and why they were in prison in the first place.
First though, perhaps a more important question - why does it all matter? As well as prompting the huge electoral successes of (as well as marketing opportunities for) Sinn Fein, the hunger strikes provoked international concern about and condemnation of the British government's actions.
Blame the Brits
The British government would be condemned all over the world for allowing the men to die. While an emotional reaction to prisoners committing serial suicide is understandable, it's not, given the circumstances, the most logical. Students in Milan burned British Flags chanting "Freedom for Ulster" (the irony), while in Paris marxists would march behind portraits of Sands shouting "The IRA will conquer." In Oslo, a balloon filled with tomato sauce (more irony) was thrown at Queen Elizabeth and that bastion of impartial reporting, Soviet state newspaper Pravda, described the event as "another tragic page in the grim chronicle of oppression, discrimination, terror and violence" in Ireland.
Follow up:
India's Hindustan Times blamed then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for allowing a fellow MP to die (in keeping with his wishes and those of his family, of course, who could have intervened at any stage). Looking back, it's hard to see what else the government could have done.
- Allow Sands to "martyr" himself, in keeping with his wishes
- Concede the demands and set precedent that the British government can be easily blackmailed over petty issues like the clothes their prisoners wear, paving the way for many more hunger strikes.
- Intervene; have Sands force-fed a la Guantanamo Bay, in direct contravention of the World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration* (and be derided for abusing his human rights, probably by the same people criticising them for not intervening)
"Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the doctor as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgement concerning the consequences of such voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not not be fed artificially."
World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration
I certainly don't think the second choice was a realistic possibility, and either of the remaining options was bound to lead to widespread condemnation - a fact which is a sad commentary on how easily the mass public can be manipulated by romanticism and drama over pragmatism and mundane reality.