UK state: Northern Ireland

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The securocrats' revenge

The security forces in Northern Ireland continue to manipulate events to
bolster the unionist cause

Roy Greenslade
Wednesday October 9, 2002
The Guardian

Will there ever be justice in the north of Ireland? The Stormont raid on
Sinn Fein's office and the simultaneous arrests of four people are like a
macabre joke, proving that the new police service is no different from the
old one, making a laughing stock of the concept of fairness and equality.
The police can't catch murderers - even when they know their identities -
but they are terrific at hunting down alleged spies.

A year ago, a journalist, Marty O'Hagan, was shot dead by loyalist gunmen.
No one has been arrested. In 1999, solicitor Rosemary Nelson was murdered by
a car bomb. No one has been arrested. It took years before anyone was
arrested for the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989, and when someone
was charged, he too was murdered by loyalists. Again, no arrests.

These are just the high-profile cases people in Britain know about. Very
little media coverage has been given to scores of unpunished loyalist
murders and attacks during years in which they have made a mockery of
previous ceasefire claims.

All manner of provocative acts against the nationalist population,
particularly in Belfast, have failed to achieve the obvious aim of luring
the IRA to retaliate and so breach its ceasefire. There have been sporadic
instances of indiscipline by IRA members, but they haven't been on anything
like the scale of the daily lawlessness of the UDA and its offshoots, such
as the venal Red Hand Defenders.

Yet the loyalist mayhem continues under the noses of police, because the IRA
remains the bogeyman for the security forces - police special branch, army
and MI5 - known in republican terminology as the securocrats.

The securocrats have been sceptical about the IRA giving up the gun. They
have therefore devoted a great deal more time to intelligence-gathering on
the IRA's now peaceful members than to investigating loyalists who continue
to murder with impunity. It is this anti-republican bias that led to those
ridiculous raids and to the breathtaking prejudgment of arrested men who
have been presumed guilty before trial.

But even if we accept that all the leaks about what the police are supposed
to have discovered are correct, we must stand back from the government hype
to consider its implications. Does it really matter a damn if the IRA knows
what the prime minister said to John Reid, the Northern Ireland secretary of
state? Does it matter if it knows the name of every serving prison officer,
every policeman's address, every ministerial security briefing?

The IRA hasn't done anything about it and, most importantly, isn't remotely
likely to, as even that puffed-up, joyless unionist "renegade", Jeffrey
Donaldson, has conceded. He knows how implausible it would be for the
Provisional IRA to go back to war. There wouldn't be any public support and
the leadership of Sinn Fein is now so wedded to the peaceful path it simply
couldn't turn around.

If either Sinn Fein or the IRA has spied on the government, they have done
so either for political reasons or because they know they are still under
constant surveil lance and are merely imitating the spooks. Sauce for goose
and gander, surely? It may well be possible to argue that some material may
be useful to terrorists. But the IRA hasn't engaged in terrorism for years.

Now look at the problem from the other direction: how did unionist
politicians know within minutes of the raids not only why they had taken
place but what was in the confiscated documents? The answer, of course, is
that they were given the information by their contacts in the police and the
Northern Ireland Office. Unionists have traditionally benefited from leaks
by the NIO and the security forces, while their militant supporters - the
loyalist gangs they disdain in public and applaud in private - have been
handed sensitive material to carry out attacks. This case also supports
those who believe that the security forces, rather than the government,
direct what happens. The government is more or less bound by their advice
and, most importantly, by their control of operational matters in which they
can manufacture "events" to suit their political aim (ie to prevent
reunification).

If this sounds too conspiratorial, note the timing of the raids. Reid says
he knew about these matters in July. One of the accused, the so-called
infiltrator, left the NIO in September 2001. If there was real danger, it
was scandalous for the police to have waited so long.

Launching the raid the day before the start of the Colombia trial of three
alleged IRA members may have been a coincidence. But there is a much more
pressing domestic matter because of the unionists' ultimatum to collapse the
assembly in January. Was that prospect too awful for the government and its
securocrats to contemplate? Instead, would it not be far better if
republicans could be blamed?

The sad truth, since partition, is that the British will do almost anything
to frustrate the republican agenda and bolster the unionists. It is
frightening to realise that the only people smiling now are the dissident
IRA members who refused to follow Sinn Fein down the political road.




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