[This is the heading over an article by David Benson published in today's edition of the Belfast Telegraph. It reads as follows:]
My last visit to the Queen's Festival was in 1997 with my show Think No
Evil of Us: My Life With Kenneth Williams, and one might reasonably
expect to be asked why a man best known for impersonating dead camp
comedians should now be appearing in a drama of intense seriousness.
I
was living in Edinburgh when the most deadly terrorist atrocity in
post-war British history occurred. On December 21, 1988, I was working
on the door of a nightclub earning £10-a-night when one of the bouncers
wandered over and whispered that a Jumbo jet had gone down in the
borders. Soon the city was buzzing with stories of devastation at the
scene: the pretty, secluded border town of Lockerbie and the land for
miles around strewn with the dead and their belongings, seat-belted
corpses left for days in trees and on roofs or to be stepped over on
garden paths.
Nearly 23 years later, the events surrounding that
atrocity formed the basis of a one-man show that I wrote and performed
at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe and which I am privileged to be bringing to
the Queen's Festival for one performance. The man whose story I tell is
one touched as cruelly by the crime as it is possible to be. Dr Jim
Swire's daughter, Flora McDonald Margaret Swire, was on Pan Am 103 from
Heathrow to JFK the night before her 24th birthday.
Just before
Christmas such flights are usually at capacity, but Flora was one of the
unlucky recipients of a stroke of fortune: this flight had a
substantial number of late cancellations; she was able to get a ticket
for it at the last minute and so set off to spend the Christmas in New York with her boyfriend, Hart.
Just 38 minutes after
take-off, a bomb went off in the hold and the aircraft was lost, along
with its 259 passengers and crew. Eleven people in Lockerbie were killed
as the aircraft hit the ground.
The events are still fresh in the
minds of everyone who lived through them. I performed the show earlier
this year in the towns of Dumfries and Langholm, close to the heart of
the catastrophe, and heard testimony from eye-witnesses in the audience.
A
woman described seeing the fuselage crash with its jets still screaming
as she washed her dishes; and how their cat, in its terror, tore round
the walls of the living room like a motorcycle on a wall of death. There
has since been a trial, a man was convicted of the crime, and
compensation was paid to victims' families by the recently-overthrown
Libyan regime.
So why is Jim Swire still fighting so doggedly in
his 76th year and in defiance of many who have begged him to 'retire'
and let his daughter rest in peace?
Because, in his view, justice
has not been done. In fact, anyone who examines the events of the trial
in the Netherlands will see that the prosecution case against Abdelbaset
al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhima was laughable, a grotesque parade
of paid witnesses, corrupt evidence and dodgy 'experts'.
Fhima was
totally cleared of involvement and, since the prosecution case was
built on the fantasy that the two accused had acted in concert,
al-Megrahi should have been found not guilty, too. Instead, he was
sentenced to 20 years in a Scottish jail, later increased to 27 years,
all the time protesting his innocence.
His release on
'compassionate' grounds was an opportunity for howls of manufactured
outrage from politicians deeply relieved that the questions a second appeal would have raised would now, they hoped,
never be asked. The findings of a three-year investigation by the
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which identified six major
points suggesting a miscarriage of justice, would never be published and
a largely compliant media would go on forever referring to al-Megrahi
as the Lockerbie Bomber.
But the controversy refuses to go away. A
phony 'humanitarian' invasion of Libya is raging as I write, with
defenceless civilians in Sirte and elsewhere, under siege by forces we
are paying for, with the Lockerbie bombing persistently held up as
part-justification for the carnage.
In spite of the initial
claims of Gaddafi regime members to have positive proof that he ordered
the bombing, not a shred of evidence has been laid before our eyes.
Meanwhile, Obama, Clinton and a nest of cynical senators in the USA
repeatedly call for the dying al-Megrahi to be unhooked from his drips
and oxygen mask to face a new, totally illegal trial in America, in
spite of the fact that they accepted the verdict of the first. There is a
special poignancy in bringing this play to a province whose people are
no strangers to terrorism. To lose loved ones in criminal circumstances
is to risk finding out how hard-hearted and cynical our guarantors of
justice can be when the demands of truth run counter to the dark
currents of Government business.
It cannot be easy for any
politician to face a Jim Swire, or a Michael and Patsy Gallagher, or
anyone motivated solely by finding the answer to the question: Who
killed my beautiful child?
My play is an attempt to pay tribute to
these reluctant, heroic campaigners and to show also what it costs them
to pursue truth and justice, while retaining dignity, integrity and
compassion - every virtue their tormentors lack.
