An Phoblacht 2/10-99
Policing the colonies
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A central tenet of any colonial police force, especially those locally
recruited from a loyal tribe, is that they are totally expendable.
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BY MICK DERRIG
There's a spiritual crisis in the RUC. I tell you, I'm worried about
them. They feel let down and betrayed. Perhaps we should arrange for
them to go on a pilgrimage - no, wait a minute. A trip to the Holy Land
is what they need! For in Jerusalem they will
find their history. It will help them put it into perspective and then -
perhaps - move on.
There they are in ordered rows. In their own little corner that is
forever Kipling's Britain - the colonial Brit of sterling tale - the
Colonial Policeman. The Palestine Police - fittingly - have their own
graveyard- for they never belonged to the place. The British-run
Palestine Police fought a vicious campaign against a vicious Zionist
enemy at the end of WWII.
Top of the Palestine Police's most wanted list was Menachim Begin,
leader of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The Irgun prosecuted their war against
the British with ruthless efficiency. In 1946, Begin's unit bombed the
King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing over 100 people.
Begin also taught the British a lesson in reprisals. The day that the
British hangman did his work on a young Zionist, two British Army
sergeants held captive for the purpose were taken and slowly hanged with
piano wire in an orange grove. The only reason Menachim Begin survived
into old age was that the British couldn't catch him.
The Palestinian Police also sought simultaneously to control the
Palestinian people, who wanted rid of the Brits but who didn't want to
become chattels in a sectarian Jewish State (which is, of course, what
happened). The Palestine Police died in a war that was - given the
realpolitik that was sweeping Westminster at time about the region -
futile.
A central tenet of any colonial police force, especially those locally
recruited from a loyal tribe, is that they are totally expendable.
History moves on, times change, only the minor functionaries of the
colonial state are left to take it personally and get impotently bitter.
Thirty years after fighting the British and beating them, the young
Irgun leader was Prime Minister Begin of Israel. The leader of the
right-wing Likud Party, he formed the government of Israel from 1977
until 1983. As he arrived in London on a state visit he had the
obnligatory afternoion tea with the queen - the Palestinian Policemen's
queen. Outside Buckingham Palace stood the old comrades of the fallen in
Britain's war in Palestine. The old men looked discarded and ignored.
They were.
Just to rub it in to these old colonial soldiers - it seemed to them -
they gave Begin the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, a prize he shared with
Anwar Sadat for the Camp David Agreements. Of course, dishing out the
Nobel Prize to the man who had gone through their comrades like a bad
curry wasn't any act of vindictiveness to the maemory of the Palestinian
Police. The Palestinian Police didn't matter in 1946 - they certainly
didn't matter after they had been disbanded - and disbanded they were.
They weren't the only ones that the British administration in
Palestinian discarded. The Palestine Police used both Jews and Arabs and
left them to an uncertain fate when they finally pulled out. Unwanted,
unconsidered.
For some time, though, a stint in the Palestinian Police was a career
maker. As long as you didn't take it personal and realise that you were
there to stiff natives at the behest of the big boys in London. A young
English Palestine Police commander who made a name for himself around
Nablus was later to become the top copper in another British colony -
the last British colony. RUC Chief Constable Kenneth Newman transformed
the Six-County ``force'' from hick B-Specials to hi-tech assassins. The
common thread was their relationship to the nationalist community - the
natives. Whether it was old Webleys or HMSUs, their
role was to make croppie lie down, and stay there. Newman was always
reticent about his Palestine days - but his experiences there came out
in the way he directed his men to deal with the wogs of the Creggan.
The embodiment of colonial rule and the settler identity is found in the
Colonial Police officer. He marks the territory between human and native
- because natives are not fully human. You know them by their names,
Yids, Wogs, Chinks, and Fenians.
Franz Fanon wrote of the psychological significance to the native of the
police station, with its foreign flag reminding the colonised person
that they are squatters in their own land. The foreignness of the police
is central to constructing - within the mind of the colonised and the
coloniser - the status of native and settler. Basically, no colonial
police, no natives, no colony.
The construction of colonial policing is central to the construction of
what it means to be British over the last 300 years. As the empire was
developing, the British themselves realised that within Britain there
needed to be another form of policing that would
produce docile, but industrious plebs. Feudalism could afford to kill
off peasants in the fields - capital needed labour and lots of it. Not
in a seasonal fashion, but everyday in the factory. Controlling them had
to become non-lethal.
Thus it is an irony here in Ireland that we refer to the RUC as
``peelers''. For that is exactly what they are not. Peel's reforms in
law enforcement in Britain came at the end of a period when the British
state realised that they would need to move on from
essentially placing British cities under martial law every now and
then. The ``Peterloo'' massacre in Manchester in 1819 was a
grisly debâcle in which 11 people were killed and 500 wounded. A
peaceful crowd had turned up to hear radical speakers demand change to
parliament. Enter stage right the B-Specials on horseback. Locally
recruited, part-time cavalry, called the yeomanry, charged into the
crowd. The site of the slaughter was St. Peter's Fields and the incident
took its name from
Waterloo four years earlier.
The British government decided then that there had to be a graduated
response from the state. Robert Peel, the British Home Secretary, was
decisive. The unarmed copper - The Peeler - was born. In Ireland,
another model of policing was developed.
Ireland was a colony. Despite the fiction of the act of Union, it wasn't
and never was Britain. Here, the population were natives. Or, of course,
settlers. Here, the big house were they live has always been called
``the Barracks'' - a fortified strongpoint
constantly on guard against attack, native attack. In the settler
worldview, the native people were constantly suspected, always prone to
rebellion, never to be trusted.
The relationship between the police and the community is at the core of
this difference between Britain and its colonial possessions. In
Britain, an unarmed police force enforced the law by consent. In the
colonies, the natives were held down by force or by the threat of force.
The existence of a colonial police force announced to the world of its
lack of legitimacy among the subject people who they oppressed. Young
Newman earned his stripes in a wild colonial war and then honed
anti-rebellion strategies in Britain's last colony, the Six Counties.
His time at the police version of the army's Sandhurst - Bramshill -
brought home colonial policing to
Britain. The black communities of London and Liverpool were made the
natives of England's new post-war internal colonies. The new hi-tech
colonial policemen played wargames where the Scots and the Welsh were
constructed as natives to be crushed and controlled at some future date
- perhaps. Better to be ready.
Britain's last great act of decolonisation was, of course, Hong Kong.
Chris Patten can recognise a colonial police force when he sees one.
Did the Palestinian Police die in vain? Yes. The graveyard is but a
short walk from the Wailing Wall.
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