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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,743949,00.html Britain's tame death squads The army could never have been neutral in Northern Ireland Niall Stanage Wednesday June 26, 2002 The Guardian -The malignant influence of the British security establishment in Northern Ireland has still not been fully exposed. If the details that have been uncovered so far had emerged in Latin America or apartheid-era South Africa, there would have been outrage. In Britain, the bulk of the media seems uninterested and the government resists demands for a full public inquiry. The British state has been conspiring to murder its own citizens in Northern Ireland. That is the only credible conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence that has seeped slowly into the public domain over the past decade. It now seems clear that members of the security forces, acting in cahoots with loyalist paramilitaries, have facilitated sectarian and political killings. The Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane, shot dead in front of his family in 1989, is the most well known victim, but there have been many others. The star agent of the British army's Force Research Unit, Brian Nelson, is suspected of involvement in up to 15 murders. The commander of the FRU during the Nelson years, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, is now British defence attache to Beijing. Viewers of Sunday's BBC Panorama saw him haughtily refuse to answer questions about his role. The report of the three-year Stevens inquiry into the scandal will be published in the autumn. It is expected to say that the relationship between members of the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries bordered on "institutionalised collusion". Nationalists in Northern Ireland are being told what they have always known - that the police and army have been actively working against them. From their perspective, the chief surprise is that a false image of Northern Ireland's political landscape - in which impartial security forces have held the line against "mindless terrorists", "gangsters" and "psychopaths" - has endured for so long. Britain has consistently tried to conceal the roots of the Northern Irish troubles. In 1976, the Labour government, embarrassed by the international attention afforded to internees in the prison cages of Long Kesh, introduced the policy of normalisation. Its various strands - the ending of special-category status for paramilitary prisoners, the construction of the H-blocks, the designation of the RUC rather than the British army as the primary force against the IRA - had one purpose: to buttress the lie that the conflict was between lawfulness and criminality. Republican resistance to that idea culminated in the 1981 H-block hunger strikes. Bobby Sands was the first of 10 men to die. "I'll wear no convict's uniform, nor meekly serve my time," ran the chorus of one prison song, "that Britain might brand Ireland's fight 800 years of crime." Numerous IRA actions disgraced the noble rhetoric. But although Irish republicanism's armed struggle was inexcusably bloody, it was also political to its core. The war in Northern Ireland has always been about the legitimacy of the state and Britain's right to maintain and rule it. The security forces have never been neutral, nor could they have been, because their purpose has been to uphold the state and implement British government policy. Making the Queen's Writ run in south Armagh or on the Falls Road is by its nature a partial and political act. Bias has not emanated from a few bad apples in the security forces' barrel; it has been an inbuilt function of the police and the British army. It is predictable that the state and its agents would view loyalist gunmen through rosy lenses. Loyalists have been on the state's side throughout. The British government did not even outlaw the UDA until 1992. Street-level realities have also had a damaging effect. The RUC's overwhelmingly Protestant membership was traditionally drawn from the same communities as the loyalist paramilitaries. Opportunistic, low-level collusion - a name dropped, a number plate scribbled down - was an inevitable consequence. The risk of over-simplifying Northern Ireland's tangled recent past remains. One can only guess at the feelings of Constable Frank O'Reilly's family when they see the RUC portrayed as little more than a Protestant militia. O'Reilly, a Catholic police officer, was killed by a loyalist bomb in Portadown in 1998 after the British government refused to let an Orange parade pass along the Garvaghy Road. Such details should never be forgotten. But nor should they provide a smokescreen behind which other unpalatable truths can be hidden. The malignant influence of the British security establishment in Northern Ireland has still not been fully exposed. If the details that have been uncovered so far had emerged in Latin America or apartheid-era South Africa, there would have been outrage. In Britain, the bulk of the media seems uninterested and the government resists demands for a full public inquiry. The promise of a new start offered by the Police Service for Northern Ireland, the direct descendant of a constabulary suspected of murder, rings hollow for many nationalists That poisonous past will remain inescapable while the British government dodges the truth about what was done in its name. � Niall Stanage is special correspondent for Magill magazine in Dublin. [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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