Spurious bid to link atrocities to Lisbon Treaty result

I DO not share Maurice O’Connell’s historically and politically flawed analysis (Letters, September 22) that the inability of British and Irish Lisbon ‘no-noes’ to understand the European project is due in part to the fact that they did not share, “even in a grandfather’s memories”, the types of atrocities experienced in Europe, including Auschwitz, the Katyn Woods, Lidice, or Oradour — the French town destroyed (by mistake?) by the Nazis, or jails in Franco’s Spain or the Colonels’ Greece.

This and other spurious attempts to link opposition to the Lisbon referendum result to such atrocities must be rejected.

I am a grandfather. I have visited Holocaust death camps and seen more recently some mass graves and atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia, East Timor and Zimbabwe. Opposition by peace activists to Lisbon and to militarisation of the EU is based on our knowledge of such events, and not on ignorance of them.

Just for the record, the Greek Colonels and the Portuguese dictatorship continued to be acceptable members of NATO. The Nazi massacre at Lidice in Czechoslovakia in 1942 was a revenge atrocity that cost the lives of up to 400 people. In Iraq in 2004, following the deaths of four American contractors, the US military launched revenge attacks against Fallujah where at least 6,000 civilians were killed.

Cluster bombs, depleted uranium munitions and white phosphorous were used in contravention of the Geneva conventions.

At least 500 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan by US and Nato air strikes over the past two years. How many Afghan wedding parties have been “destroyed by mistake”?

Ireland is complicit in these atrocities by allowing US troops and CIA torture planes to refuel at Shannon. Soldiers from most European countries, including Ireland, are serving with the so-called peacekeeping occupation force in Afghanistan

The crisis in Georgia, and the probable future crisis in the Crimea, are avoidable if a peaceful, non-threatening approach had been maintained towards Russia, with membership of a non-militarised EU being offered to the states on Russia’s borders, but on condition that they remained neutral and refused Nato membership. Let’s not forget also the 50,000 young Irishmen who died needlessly in the mud of Flanders having been conned (but not conscripted) into fighting for a “small nation” called Belgium that was itself committing colonial atrocities in the Congo.

There is a way forward for the Lisbon impasse.

This involves enshrining genuine neutrality in the Irish constitution, denying Shannon airport and Irish airspace to all armed troops involved in wars, including a protocol in the Lisbon Treaty giving Ireland an opt-out on EU defence issues, and an additional clause to article 29 clarifying that neutrality is binding on the Government and is not just “aspirational” as implied by recent court rulings and Government malpractice. The Katyn Woods was a dreadful Soviet atrocity. Are one million Iraqi dead, with Irish and European complicity, just collateral damage? The Irish people have done humanity a favour by calling time-out for reflection.

Edward Horgan

Peace and Neutrality Alliance

Castletroy

Co Limerick