British Nuclear Test Veterans Association
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A Sermon on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the British Nuclear Tests Programme
Professor N.J. Biggar
Leeds Parish Church
17 February 2002
Fifty years ago, the British Nuclear Weapons Test Programme began at Monte Bello; and it continued for a further fifteen years elsewhere in Australia, over Christmas Island, and in the Pacific. Since that time evidence has emerged which indicates that exposure to radiation was responsible for causing thousands of British and Commonwealth military personnel to fall prey to leukemia and other cancers. There is suspicion among the victims that the authorities of the day were aware of the dangers of radiation, but did little or nothing to protect the servicemen - even that they deliberately used them as guinea-pigs. Since 1983 the British Nuclear Tests Veterans Association has been campaigning for Justice, and they have achieved some notable successes. Nevertheless, their experience of frustration has been such as to make them feel that today's authorities are dragging their heels in owning the responsibility that is properly theirs.
The motto of the Veterans Association is 'All We Seek is Justice', and it's about the pursuit of justice that I'd like to talk this morning - in particular about what it is that we are pursuing, and in pursuing it, about the need for patience and for hope in God.
I begin with justice. What is it? In response to an injury done us, one of the things we most naturally pursue is the conviction and punishment of the guilty party. And there are, of course, good reasons for this. Wrongdoers need to be identified, restrained, and, ideally, reformed, if the innocent are to rest secure.
Sometimes, however, our injury is not someone else's fault. Sometimes, it is the result, not of ill will or culpable neglect, but of excusable ignorance. For example, my own reading of Bloody Sunday, when British paratroopers shot dead thirteen rioters in Londonderry, and whose 30th anniversary fell last month, is that it was probably not the result of the malice of British troops and Government, but rather of a tragic combination of factors: soldiers rendered tense and aggressive by recent IRA killings of their comrades; military lack of experience in dealing with civil unrest; young men insensitive to the folly of provoking armed and angry soldiers by showering them with bricks and nail-bombs; and republican paramilitaries egging them on, perhaps in hope of reaping political benefit from the ensuing violence. That there were terrible injuries committed on Bloody Sunday is certain. But what is not certain is whether, and how much, anyone is to blame.
Nevertheless, even in cases of injury where no one deserves to be blamed and punished, or where it is impossible to calculate the distribution of guilt, other kinds of justice remain to be done. One of these other kinds of justice is the telling of the truth. The importance to the victims of getting at the truth is something that I have found striking, and intriguing. It struck me first when I saw the film version of Ariel Dorfman's play, Death and the Maiden. This is set in a South American country (presumably Chile, since Dorfman is Chilean) where a woman, Paulina, realizes that her neighbour, Roberto, is the man who raped and tortured her in prison during the previous, military regime. She kidnaps him and puts him on trial in her living room. The subsequent interrogation reaches this climax:
Paulina: ... I'm not going to kill you because you're guilty, Doctor, but because you haven't repented at all. I can only forgive someone who really repents, who stands up amongst those he wronged and says, I did this, I did it, and I'll never do it again.
Roberto: What more do you want? You've got more than all the victims in this country will ever get. What more do you want?
Paulina: The truth, Doctor. The truth, and I'll let you go 1
The importance of getting at the truth also struck me when watching film-footage of the operation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In one of the Commission's hearing's Joyce Mthimkulu, whose son, Siphiwo, had been murdered by the police, said this: "If they can just show us the bones of my child, I'll be grateful. Where did they leave the bones of my child? Where did they take him? Who handed him over to them? What did they do to him?" 2
In both these cases, there is a strong desire, on the part of victims or their surviving relatives, to know the truth - quite apart from the desire to see wrongdoers convicted and punished. This is striking,, and it's also intriguing. Because what, exactly, does discovering the truth achieve? What difference does it make?
These are questions that deserve a lot more attention that we have time to give them now. One answer, however, is this: that, by simply exposing the truth, whether about a culpable wrongdoing or about an excusable error, one makes it less likely that it will happen again.3 And where public authorities have been responsible for the wrongdoing or the error, and where these authorities endorse the truth that has been exposed and accept responsibility, then victims can begin to trust them again. The telling of the truth, and the owning of the truth, are necessary for the restoration of confidence.
So, quite apart from the conviction and punishment of wrongdoers, the doing of justice involves the simple telling of the truth, and its owning by those who are responsible for error, if not guilty of crime.
There is, of course, another part of justice, namely, the making of compensation. It seems to me that a community ought always to support those of its members to whom fortune has been less kind - at very least on the ground that, but for the grace of God, there go the rest of us. And in the case of members who have suffered as a result of exposure to extraordinary risks in public service, the community has a special duty to support them readily and generously. After all, it is in our name and on our behalf that they have suffered. So, even if a national community's government cannot be blamed for the unjust suffering of military personnel those personnel nevertheless deserve ungrudging public support in their suffering and appropriate public compensation for it. Because they suffer for us.
That's all I want to say about the different things that we seek, when we seek justice. Now, more briefly, a word about patience, and a word about hope in God.
The truth is that the kind of justice of which human beings are capable is a very limited, haphazard, fragmentary thing. It always has been, and it always will be. This was brought home to me when, a year or so ago, I read that at the current rate it will take 200 years to bring to trial all those accused of genocide in Rwanda during the 1990's; and that whereas the leading shakers and movers of the genocide, sentenced in an international court, will be spared the death penalty, their humbler minions, tried by local courts, will not.
In addition, there is no justice that we can do for the dead. Those who have died from the effects of radiation are beyond our reach. We can't restore their lives to them. Likewise, those survivors whose lives have been blighted by illness. We can't restore to them the years of healthy living that they have lost. There is no human compensation that can possibly make up for chronic illness or death.
Human justice is a limited, haphazard, fragmentary thing. If we seek it - and we should - we had best do so with patience. For if we expect too much, too fast, we risk becoming distorted with bitterness, and crippled by despair. But in the face of irremovable limitations, and recurrent frustration, patience is a hard line to hold.
This, I think, is where hope in God can help. It is easier to suffer frustration, and to resist the temptations of bitterness and despair - it is easier to remain patient - if we are able to hope that the little justice we can do, is not the only justice that will be done. If there is a power greater than us that is also working for justice, if there is a power who is able to give back life to the dead, then we have reason to hope that our little, fragmentary victories might yet, by the grace of God, meet with completion.
The hope for an afterlife or heaven long remained for me a rather empty, abstract thing, until I experienced the death of someone close to me, someone with whom I had had a turbulent relationship, and with whom, when she died, there was a truce, but no peace. Then, for the first time, I found myself yearning for a time and a place, where all the sad, tragic knots that could not be untied here and now might yet be unpicked. This life cannot be the end, because there is fat too much business left unfinished - far too much justice left undone.
Therefore, if we can hope in a God who has the power to bring us to that place where our fragments of justice can be made whole, then it will be easier for us to value those fragments - not to cast them away in frustration, not to surrender to bitterness or despair, and to fuel our continuing search for justice with patience and resilience and a humanising measure of good humour.
Let me conclude now by inviting you to join me in two prayers. The origin of the second will be familiar to you. The first was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who spent an early part of his career as a pastor in Detroit during a period when workers in the Ford car factory there were engaged in a bitter struggle for justice from their employers.
Let us pray.
God, give us grace
to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Amen.
Our Father in heaven,
may your kingdom come.
Amen.
1. Ariel Dorfmann., Death and the Maiden (London: Nick Hern Books, 1991). p. 44.
2. In 'Getting Away with Murder'. Recorded in 'Getting Away with Murder',a BBC TV documentary about the TRC, which was presented by Michael Ignatieff. Originally broadcast on 1 November 1997 as part of the 'Correspondent' series, it subsequently won the Royal Television Society Award and the Golden Nymph and Unda Awards at Monte Carlo.
3. This I take to be implicit in Chartes Villa-Vicencio's evaluation of the TRC: "Suffice it to say, that, for all the failures of the Commission, it is largely as a result of its work that few, if any, South Africans can ever again... say, "We did not know" ('Learning to Live Together with Bad Memories', a paper delivered at the University of Leeds, 25 November 1999). The point is made explicit in Reconciliation through Truth, where Kader Asmal and his co-authors assert that the public establishment of the truth about the old Apartheid regime is a vital step toward both bolstering support for the new one and ensuring that it really is different: "In these early years of consolidating democracy, there must be a galvanising and self-critical vision of the goals of our society. And such a vision in turn requires a clear-sighted ... grasp of what was wrong in the past" (Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, Robert Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth: a Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance [Oxford: James Currey New York: St Martin's Press, 1997], p.6); "An important goal of the Truth and Reconciliation commission is to act as a catalyst for swift and thorough disclosure of past horrors, in order to .. end ... the steady and corrosive drip of past pathologies into the new order" (p. 26).