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Bernard Ingham: Legacy of Lockerbie in fight against terror
WHY, I ask myself,with 100 British soldiers dead in Afghanistan this year, is it the apparent fate of Britain to fight terrorism?
Is it our colonial past continuing to haunt us after such notable operations against insurgents in Malaya and the Mau Mau in Kenya?
Is it that we cannot get out of the habit of policing the world 50 years after the fall of the empire?
Or is it that terrorists are determined to break the British bulwark of democracy – "crack them and the rest will fall" – and that, deep down, we are equally resolved to demonstrate we cannot be intimidated by bombs and bullets?
These unseasonable thoughts are also prompted by the 21st anniversary, on Monday, of that appalling event going by the name of Lockerbie, the little town in southern Scotland on which mass death rained as I was at a Christmas celebration in the Royal Albert Hall.
By then, I had got used to terrorism, mostly of the IRA variety. It had nearly taken my Prime Minister at Brighton in 1984 while I was safely in Bristol – as a Civil Servant, I took a break while she was at her party conference.
It brushed me in 1987 when my wife intercepted a book bomb at home and put it in the garden for the police to make safe.
Like Lord Mountbatten, Airey Neave, Margaret Thatcher's faithful lieutenant, had been blown up – a fate later visited on her former Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow.
Many more had died in such IRA atrocities as Warrenpoint, Chelsea Barracks, Hyde Park, Regents Park, Harrods, Mill Hill, Ballygawley and, of course, during an Enniskillen Remembrance Day service.
Why, even Mozabique's RENAMO rebels got in the act later when they loosed off a few missiles at the Prime Minister's plane as we flew from Zimbabwe to Malawi in 1989.
And then there had been the IRA hunger strikes of 1980-81, which was terrorism by another means.
Two conclusions can be drawn from all this. Margaret Thatcher was a lucky Prime Minister. She has also been exceptionally well guarded by her security for a good 40 years.
But after the IRA's present to me of a bomb-in-a book, and the Brighton atrocity, nothing quite shook me as did Lockerbie, the sad destination of Pan Am's Clipper Maid of the Seas and its 243 passengers and 16 crew en route from Heathrow to JFK.
The day began with the discovery of an IRA bomb gang in Clapham. It ended with us waiting for the Prime Minister's return from the Commons to No 10 to face, with her steely calm resolution, the possibility that the plane had been blown out of the skies. But by whom? After 24 hours, we still did not know or, precisely, the cause or the death toll.
That was not surprising, Bodies were scattered over the countryside. In Sherwood Crescent, where 11 residents were killed, we found a 150ft-long crater and houses vaporised where the wings had fallen, the black stink of kerosene polluting the air.
Three miles east of the town, we were taken to the nose cone of the plane in a field, surrounded by belongings and bodies, and the gruesome visible remains of two stewardesses frozen in death in the wreckage. It seemed an awful intrusion just to look, but there was no point in going unless we took in the full horror.
It was a very shaken and troubled party that returned to No 10, leaving Britain's smallest police force – the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary – leading Britain's largest criminal inquiry.
They eventually put Abdelbaset al-Megrahi behind bars, only for our contemptible politicians to release him after only eight years
allegedly on compassionate grounds but really to oil the wheels of trade with Libya.
It is not that which unduly troubles me. I have grown used to Labour's perfidy. Incidentally, I do hope they don't make things worse by trying again to kid us it was all the governing Scottish Nationalists' doing.
Instead, I can never work out what manner of people can make a profession out of blasting jumbos out of the sky. What cause can possibly be enhanced by following up Lockerbie by flying jets into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon?
Who will benefit from the Taliban and al-Qaida murderously and repressively taking over Afghanistan as a base for more potential terrorist spectaculars?
These are the questions first posed by Lockerbie that every Islamic leader now has to answer. In our season of goodwill, their silence is deafening.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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