The sorry saga of Colombia Three

You can fully understand how the three Irishmen could not resist visiting idyllic Colombia in the summer of 2001.

According to the Lonely Planet, this South American spot claims to have the highest number of species of plants and animals per unit area of any country in the world.

“Its animals include jaguars, ocelots, peccaries, tapirs, deer, armadillo, numerous species of monkey and the rare spectacled bear.

Packing must have been a nightmare. It would be a real squeeze to stuff in the mosquito nets, the insect repellent, the cameras, the ornithological guides, the binoculars, notes on the life pattern of the rare spectacled bear, and, erm, false passports.

The credibility gaps that have cropped up in the trial of the Colombia Three have been enormous. In the space of eight months, the notion of justice being done has been stood on its head.

The original trial judge heard direct evidence from all the witnesses (including some FARC dissidents whom he accused of perjury) and directed an acquittal. The flip-flopping of that verdict by an appeal court (which heard no witnesses, but relied solely on legal argument) and its imposition of severe 17 year sentences leads to the unavoidable conclusion of a miscarriage of justice and a politicised judiciary.

But the credibility gaps have gone both ways. One of the recurring images in the media over the past day or so has been a mural in Derry depicting the three men. Their portraits are flanked with green peace ribbons. The effect is to raise them to iconic status in the ranks of republican victimhood. Even the name of the campaign group, Bring Them Home, with its neutral and personal connotations, jars with many people.

Mountjoy governor John Lonergan once told me that prisoners always have a well-honed grasp of their rights and entitlements, but were often blind to their own shortcomings.

It seems to me that there is an element of this in the sorry saga of the Colombia Three. Sure, they were meted out rough justice this week. But the three - and the political movement behind them - were hardly gormless innocents who wandered unwitting into political quicksand.

The elephant in the sitting room for the Bring Them Home campaign has been the indisputable fact that they were travelling on false passports. And in the wake of their arrest in August 2001, we were given a couple of lame excuses about what they were doing in the Colombian jungle that were of ‘the dog ate my homework’ variety.

For a while, their supporters persisted with the story that they were eco tourists and bird watchers. There was also a process of distancing by Sinn Fein - it took the party almost a month to finally accept that Niall Connolly was the party’s official representative in Cuba. The final version - a visit to study the peace process - has never been satisfactorily explained. On whose authority did they travel? Who financed it? To whom were they reporting?

Politically, the event turned out to be a watershed for the peace process. There had been a change of administration in Washington and Bush’s point-man on the North, Richard Haass, was not in an understanding frame of mind.

“My understanding is that they were not there for vacationing,” was his curt dismissal of the excuse. The visit, he added, came “under the rubric of terrorism”.

There have been suggestions that there was a bigger, more furtive, game at play. It seems the British secret service had tracked the men and had tipped off the Colombian security forces for what turned out to be a neat political ambush.

The republican movement found itself backed into a corner. The arrests of the men and 9/11 both forced the IRA’s first act of decommissioning in October that year.

Despite the gloating of Ian Paisley Jnr, the latest development will have minimal impact now. There is a compelling argument that the men - having served three years - be allowed home. But it still leaves the niggling sense that they were not guilty, but not innocent either.