Lessons of Drumcree
Still no peace in the Orange sectarian state!
DESPITE ALL the weasel words about a "peace process" the real face of the settlement being imposed by the British government and its collaborators in the north of Ireland was revealed during the Drumcree events.
While the British press selectively reported a small portion of the illegal violence of the loyalist thugs against the troops and RUC barring them from the Garvaghy Road, and focused on the brutal murder of the Quinn children in a petrol bomb attack in Ballymoney, a full-scale pogrom was being waged by Orange bigots against the nationalist population across the six counties.
Roy Greenslade in the Guardian was one of the few British journalists to draw attention to this, and catalogue some of the unreported incidents of arson, intimidation, hi-jacking, bombing, blockading and systematic terror inflicted by loyalist mobs.
* In Carrickfergus, the last four houses occupied by Catholics on the Glenfield estate were petrol bombed, forcing them to flee.
* In north Antim, 1,000 loyalists blocked three roads to the Catholic village of Dunloy.
* In Lurgan eight fire bombs were set off in a mainly Catholic housing estate.
Greenslade's long list is all culled from Irish papers. He concludes that in one 24-hour period "there were 191 attacks on police and troops, 412 petrol bombings, 73 houses damaged, 93 other buildings attacked,and 136 vehicled hi-jacked. Hundreds of barricades - most of them ablaze - were mounted in dozens of towns and villages by men in balaclavas carrying baseball bats."
It is a grimly familiar tale. The loyalist thugs had their verion of "ethnic cleansing" for decades: kow, with the "peace" deal having consolidated the partition of Ireland they are again determined to assert their ascendancy over the nationalist minority.
The British press, eager to promote the illusion of a new "peace" , cannot face up to the scale of the war that is being waged by the loyalist bigots. There IS no British solution. Instead there is silence as armed thugs "unleash savagery in the name of the Queen".