Observer

Analysis: A fatal obsession
By Gerry Kelly MLA (for the Observer)
Januar 31, 2003

Over the past year there has been an intense focus on the IRA. Allegations about IRA activity have been leaked to the media in a constant drip feed, usually from the predictable 'security sources'.

To demands for the IRA to unilaterally disarm are now being added demands that it disband, disappear, dissolve. The unionist parties are citing the IRA as the only obstacle to movement and the reason why they will not participate in government.

This is not unusual or surprising, for it is typical of the manner in which those at the very heart of the British security establishment have approached the entire peace process since its inception.

What is different, however, is the backdrop. Throughout all of the allegations of IRA activity, the staged raids on Stormont or elsewhere, the selective briefings from the local Special Branch and various British Intelligence agencies, the backdrop has been filled with a vicious anti-Catholic campaign. This has been waged in the main by the loyalist Ulster Defence Association, though at times all of the rest of the unionist paramilitaries have been involved.

People have been murdered. There have been hundreds of bomb and gun attacks and countless Catholic homes destroyed. However, the focus of the military establishment remained entirely on the IRA - an IRA which has been on ceasefire for five years; an IRA which is no threat to the peace process and which has publicly stated this.

British Intelligence agencies have been running key figures in the UDA's command structures for a generation. It is well documented that Brian Nelson, William Stobie, Ken Barrett and Tommy Lyttle were all involved in the murder of Pat Finucane. Brian Nelson worked for MI5, the other three for Special Branch.

But it goes much deeper than this. It goes to the heart of British policy in Ireland. It was the British who formed the Force Research Unit. FRU, a shadowy British army unit, was responsible for handling agents in the UDA. Brian Nelson was one of their agents.

Under the direction of FRU, in addition to being involved in the killing of Pat Finucane, he armed the UDA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Resistance (an organisation co-founded by the DUP's Ian Paisley) with South African weapons. FRU and Nelson were key to the campaign of collusion which saw the UDA used as proxy assassins for the British agencies whose own ability to act in this way was curtailed after the public outcry which surrounded the shoot-to-kill policy in North Armagh in the early 1980s.

The British authorities were fully aware of and indeed valued the work of FRU, while the UDA was a tool in the British military's war apparatus in Ireland. It remains so, and is still infiltrated at the highest levels by PSNI Special Branch and military Intelligence.

This is the same UDA who are killing Catholics, dealing drugs, inflaming interface violence and racketeering. This can leave us with only two conclusions. Either the UDA men's handlers are turning a blind eye to their activities and are protecting the killers or they have been directing them. I do not think that anybody is going to argue that they are unaware of what is going on.

Only when the UDA threatened to implode was action taken. This was the same pattern witnessed earlier when the feud between the UDA and UVF erupted. It seems to many within the nationalist community that the UDA are given a free rein when it comes to attacking Catholics, but when it comes to attacking each other a different policing standard is applied. There were no special units to stop nightly attacks on Catholic homes. There were no special units to arrest those involved in sectarian murders in North Belfast and South Antrim. There were no special units to locate the pipe bomb factories.

The rationale behind this is very clear. FRU still exists under a different name, the Joint Services Group. The agents still operate within the unionist paramilitaries. British military intelligence controls the agenda. It points to the fact that the securocrats at the heart of all of this are still at war. They are still obsessed with defeating the IRA. That is their approach to the peace process.

This is why we get the briefings, the anonymous sources, the planted articles. This is why we get the singular focus on the IRA at a time when the loyalists are killing people. This is why a senior loyalist PUP politician recently stated that the issue of loyalist decommissioning has never even been raised with him by the British government.

While all of this has been going on we have seen the IRA make several moves aimed at building confidence in the peace process. These include two acts of putting arms beyond use which have been verified by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning and made numerous statements of their support for the peace process.

Yet still the British government refuses to publish its timetable for demilitarisation which it promised to do under the Good Friday Agreement. Indeed, in some areas the British military has been remilitarising.

In the end one of the most glaring hypocrisies is in response to silent IRA weapons and loyalist weapons in everyday use. The British Intelligence Agencies are silent on the loyalists who are using weapons and on the other hand are scathing about the IRA who are not.