British "Security forces" hand in glove with Loyalist killers
THE ARREST of 28 members of the Ulster Defense Regiment
October 7 for involvement in passing information on suspected militant nationalists to Loyalist death squads is an indication of the extent of the scandal touched off by revelations of collusion between the official security forces in
Northern Ireland and the reactionary murder organizations.
The affair was unleashed by the Loyalists themselves, first in order to justify the August 24 murder of Loughlin Maginn, and then apparently to try to destabilize the Anglo-Irish
Agreement. So far, it is they who have paid the price for it.
International Viewpoint #171 • October 16, 1989
IRELAND GERRY FOLEY U UNDERCOVER British soldiers just happened to be on the spot September 2 when Loyalist murderers shot down a politically uninvolved man in the nationalist Ardoyne district of Belfast. They chased the two assassins, killing one and wounding the other.
Attempt to restore credibility of Crown forces
The unusualness and timing of this incident suggested strongly that it was an attempt to restore the credibility of the Crown forces as impartial peacekeepers, after the revelations of the preceding week. The Catholic bourgeois party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), was quick to take up this incident to defend a greater involvement of the security forces in the ghettos to "defend the people."
The other side of the collusion between the British and pro-British forces and the reactionary murder organizations is that in differing degrees each is at the mercy of the other. The British are always prepared to sacrifice the Unionists for the sake of political maneuvers with the Catholic moderates and the Dublin government, but only partially, because if they cast them off altogether they would destroy the basis of their rule. So, the occasional slaps delivered to the Loyalist mad dogs only make them more rabid.
As the symbol and summit of British maneuvering with the Catholic bourgeoisie North and South, the Anglo-Irish 28 shades of Unionism and most of all to its agreement is particularly obnoxious to all
Loyalist hardliners. So, the revelations of security forces' collusion in communalist murder seem to have been intended to make it impossible for even bourgeois Catholics and the Southern government to collaborate with British "law and order." From the general standpoint of the interests of stabilizing British rule in Northern Ireland, this is an astounding example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face." It reveals the bloodthirsty nature of Loyalism.
The Loyalists' idea of the way to deal with the problem of sympathy in the South with the Northern Catholics is to wage war on the Southern Catholics as well. They have already shown that by the Dublin bombings of 1972, and other incidents and attempts. Their solution for the discontent in the Catholic communities in the North is a regime of communalist savagery.
A system of communalist oppression The British forces involved in defending what is fundamentally a system of communalist oppression in the course of things come to share this outlook. In the wake of the disclosures, for example, BBC's Radio 4 interviewed a former army commander in Northern Ireland who argued that sympathy for "terrorism" was endemic in the South, like "support for the Mafia in Sicily."
The aim of the British political leadership on the other hand is to isolate the resistance in the North. That requires a pretence of "law and order" and an appearance of collaboration with "constitutional nationalists," but the result is to give the communalist killers a free hand. When the resistance was isolated following Operation Motorman in August 1972, which ended the liberated areas in the nationalist ghettos, there was also a wave of communalist assassinations. In its September 7 issue, the republican weekly An Phoblacht noted that two former MIS agents, Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd, had stated publicly that the British secret service was implicated in 30 communalist assassinations in the mid-1970s.
This pattern is long-standing, and the SDLP and the Dublin government cannot be unaware of it. So, their claims now that they were shocked to find that data collected by the Irish political police on militant nationalists living in the South, and provided to the security forces in the North, were passed on to the Loyalist assassins are clearly hypocritical. In fact, they must have hoped that the growing isolation of the Northern resistance would mean that there would be no reaction in the South to such killings.
Need to mobilize public opinion
However great this scandal and however many Loyalist executioners are sacrificed (they are not likely to be too numerous, the communalist terror system in the North will not change unless Irish and international public opinion are mobilized. In the 20-year-old "troubles" in Northern Ireland, there have already been quite a few investigations" and "reforms" that have changed nothing substantial.
Indeed the basic lesson of this affair is that any waning of international attention on the oppression of the nationalist population, any political isolation of their struggle means more murders of innocent people. There is a cost in blood for every delay, every failure in rebuilding a broad international movement in solidarity with the struggle of the oppressed population in Northern Ireland. >