Don't mention the war. Don't mention the fact that thousands of British
soldiers occupied the highways and byways of this wee place for over thirty
years and that all of them had a licence to kill. 'The professionals,' the
foot soldiers of the British Government, must have wondered at times what
they were doing here, for in the words of one Colonel, interviewed on
television, 'the wogs have all white skin'.
Since that day in 1969, when British soldiers dragged barbed wire barriers
across Nationalists areas and terrified people welcomed them as their
deliverers from the sectarian hatred of the armed militia of the six County
State, few expected that they would still be here thirty years on.
But it wasn’t a war it was only a bit of trouble. Wasn’t it?
The bit of trouble needed some 30,000 trained British soldiers, armoured
cars and tanks and guns to sort it out. It wasn’t a war dirty or otherwise,
even though some 763 of the highly trained soldiers were killed during the
bit of trouble and a cartoon in a local magazine summed it all up with a
caption that read, ‘You fight people, you massacre them, you invade and
occupy their country, and you wonder why for no reason at all, they turn
against you’.
Last week, Unionists of all shades and the SDLP to a lesser degree were
aghast that anyone should describe what has happened in the North over the
past thirty odd years, as a war. The Consultative Group set up by the
British Government leaked a suggestion that it might ask that Government to
state that it had fought a war against the IRA even though the implications
of such an admission would be to confer legitimacy on the protagonists
engaged in the war. Unionist politicians who for years demanded that the IRA
declare their war was over, have suddenly realised that in making this
demand, they conferred IRA volunteers with the legitimacy, they are now
asking the British to refuse.
In addition they are also demanding that the names of soldiers in the
British Army and the UDR/RIR, killed in the conflict are added to war
memorials.
They want people to accept that the bloody conflict of the last three
decades which at any given time involved between 27,000 British soldiers and
a further 18, 000’ Ulster Forces’, in effect a full time member for every
sixty nine of the population in the North was a result of ‘trouble’. At the
height of this ‘trouble’ there were fifteen British Army battalions in
Belfast alone more than has been deployed since in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
In the British House of Commons last week, Nigel Dodds pressed the British
Prime Minister not to ‘validate the terrorists and criminals in their sordid
terrorist’s war by describing it as a war’. Brown didn’t take up the
challenge.