Loyalists Blamed For Seven Deaths
The News Letter
Mar 10 2004

By Ian Graham

LOYALISTS paramilitaries were responsible for seven deaths and carried out 135 shootings in Northern Ireland in the last year, the Government revealed yesterday.

Security Minister Jane Kennedy said they were also behind 41 bombing incidents involving devices which either exploded or were defused.

The number of casualties as a result of paramilitary-style shootings was 107 and the number from paramilitary-style beatings was 110, she added.

The details, based on figures provided to her by the PSNI, cover the 12 months to the end of January.

They were given by the Minister in a written parliamentary answer to Liberal democrat MP Mike Hancock.

The Minister gave her answer on the same day PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde accused both the Provisional IRA and UDA of being behind many of the punishment beatings and shootings in the Province.

He accused the paramilitary groups of " crippling their own communities" and said that the beatings did not even achieve their purported goal of preventing anti-social behaviour in the community.

This meant, he said, that they had not met the requirement of the Good Friday Agreement that all paramilitary activity should stop.

Mr Orde said: "The UDA and the Provisional IRA, in my view and on my judgment, are responsible for a large number of the punishment beatings and shootings that go on.

"Paragraph 13 of the joint agreement is absolutely clear. It says all paramilitary activity must stop, and at the moment what I am saying is, it hasn't."

He stressed that it was not for him to say whether or not a paramilitary group had breached its ceasefire, that was for the judgment of politicians.

And speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said that, as well as being illegal, the punishment attacks were not even effective in the paramilitary groups' own terms.

"The harsh reality is they don't work," he said.

"The vast majority of people injured by these attacks are not deterred, should they be committing anti-social behaviour.

"It doesn't work. These people are crippling their own communities. The vast majority of punishment shootings and beatings take place on individuals under 30 years of age."

The pattern of attacks had changed in recent times, with more beatings and less shootings, perhaps an indication that even the paramilitaries were recognising it didn't work, he said.

His officers, he said, were working " incredibly hard" at the front end of policing to try to stamp out such attacks.

"They are in negotiations - many times behind the scenes - with these paramilitary groups to try to convince them that this doesn't work, it does not help their communities and it has to stop."

And furthermore, Danny Morrison writes about how the loyalist violence isn't given the column inches that alleged republican violence is...




The curious story of five men in a van

Northern Ireland's police service continues to break its promises

Danny Morrison
Wednesday March 10, 2004
The Guardian

On the Today programme yesterday, Sir Hugh Orde, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, spoke about punishment beatings, and once again accused the IRA of the abduction of a man in Belfast on February 20. He claimed the PSNI was "slowly gaining the trust of those who historically may not have trusted us too much".
If elections say anything about the will of the people then nationalists, having chosen Sinn F�in over the SDLP last November, agree with the republican contention that we do not yet have an acceptable police service - despite that promise being made in the Belfast agreement. One has only to compare the PSNI's reaction to other incidents before the alleged IRA abduction to understand why there is so much distrust.

On February 18 gangs attacked seven homes in north Belfast with bricks, paint and petrol bombs. Among their targets were a four-month-old baby and a 105-year-old, bedridden woman. In a press statement, the PSNI reported the attacks but made no reference to who the victims were and who was responsible.

The homes attacked were those of Catholics. The perpetrators were loyalists and the objective was to drive out Catholics. Since the IRA ceasefire, Catholics are still being killed and the number of attacks on Catholic homes runs into the thousands. This is important to consider, given attempts to present the North as a society struggling for normality but being thwarted by Irish republicans.

Just 48 hours later, the PSNI rammed a van in downtown Belfast. It contained five men, one of whom, Bobby Tohill, was already injured. The other four were later charged with abduction. The nature of the dispute between Tohill and the van's occupants rapidly shifted from speculation to "fact", on the basis of the opinion of Sir Hugh Orde that "it was a Provisional IRA operation".

Back in October 2002 Orde was responsible for the televised "spectacular" raids on Sinn F�in's offices. The raid found nothing but, significantly, took place in parallel with the arrests and subsequent charging of three people in relation to an alleged IRA spy-ring at the heart of government.

Those charges led to the current impasse, with Ulster unionists collapsing the executive and the assembly being suspended. The DUP exploited the situation, emerging as the largest unionist party. Significantly, those same IRA spy-ring charges were withdrawn some weeks ago, but with no equivalent media fanfare.

Whereas the authorities can answer unionist demands for clarification within hours, nationalists, it seems, must wait for ever. They have been waiting 15 years for Sir John Stevens to wrap up his investigations into collusion between loyalist paramilitaries, the British army and the RUC special branch. And they have been waiting five months for the British government to publish Judge Corey's report and recommendations for public inquiries into several controversial killings, including those of human rights lawyers Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson.

Over the past six years, unionists have extrapolated from any alleged subversive incident that might be attributable to republicans a pretext for excluding Sinn F�in from power-sharing. For nationalists, what are most frustrating are the double standards applied to the conflict and peace process, despite all the compromises they have made, despite the IRA decommissioning a large number of weapons.

Who is to sanction the British government for reneging on reforms it promised at the Weston Park talks? A high court judge ruled that David Trimble acted illegally when he barred two Sinn F�in ministers from attending meetings of the all-Ireland bodies, yet there were no sanctions against him either.

After Sir Hugh Orde's statement in February, Ian Paisley demanded that the government rule on the status of the IRA's ceasefire and Trimble demanded sanctions against Sinn F�in. It was as if there had been no crisis over the inability of unionism to share the North with nationalists on an equal footing.

The current review of the agreement was going nowhere. Trimble has withdrawn and the DUP's proposals do not refer to North- South relations, policing, justice or human rights. Its models for government give the DUP a veto over nationalists. It envisages Sinn F�in being excluded from office and its ministerial seats redistributed between the other parties.

It was just such practices within the failed political entity that was the North, nationalist alienation from the state and its political police, and a sense among nationalists (their homes burning around them) that Dublin had let them down, that turned many of them to the IRA over 30 years ago.

� Danny Morrison is a former publicity director for Sinn F�in
[email protected]

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