Home - Info Nordirland home

"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"

Sunday Journal, 13. January 2008:

The trouble with war

by Mary Nelis

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.


home Info Nordirland