IOUT NOW!! The Real Irish 70p p&p) from Outlook, PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU David Coen A SENIOR policeman from South London is promoted to a job in Fermanagh; the police pick up several members of Combat 88 including two soldiers, and columnist Andrew Marr denounces the "internal exile" by which certain people from Northern Ireland are forced to live in England.
Perhaps suprisingly, there's a connection between these three events - aside from the fact they. were all covered in a single issue of the Observer.
Supt. Jonathan Mclvor was a Chief Inspector at Plumstead when Stephen Lawrence was murdered, Now he is an RUC Divisional Commander in Fermanagh and told his local paper that he had been vindicated by the Metropolitan Police Inquiry into the way Stephen Lawrence's death had been handled!
Of course, he omitted to say that both he and the Police Inquiry had been criticised in the McPherson Report. Molvor's experience in dealing with black people in South London should be just perfect for handling uppity nationalists in Fermanagh.
The arrest of two soldiers as suspected members of Combat 88 should be no surprise. C88 has close contacts with the Loyalist Volunteer Force - and several members have used their military training in racist attacks, Lenny Henry and Dawn French being among the victims. The dogs in the streets have known for years that the British have used Loyalist murder gangs to kill Nationalists.
A Fermanagh based group, Victims of Injustice, Campaigning for Equality [VOICE] has a list of 12 murders in the area going back over 30 years in which the state was involved. A new edition of Sean McPhilemy's The Committee is available in the US in May. It details the close links between the British Army the RUC and the Loyalist death squads. Recently, a leading loyalist has claimed it was their campaign that brought the Republicans to the negotiating table. It is no surprise that these close links between the army and the far right should extend to England.
By far the most disturbing of these strands was Marr's article. With the help of that tireless Labour Unionist, Harry Barnes MP, and, initially at least, trying to preserve some semblance of liberal "impartiality" by some mild rebukes to the loyalist UDA, he reserves most venom for the Republicans, blaming them for the "exile" of hundreds of people.
The campaign for an end to the "Irish Fatwas" (the "fatwa" word should go down well in the US) is backed, according to Marr "British and Irish MPs, journalists from Left and Right" and .....here a possible source of the "campaign" reveals itself, former MI5 asset and IRA man, Sean O'Callaghan.
Now, it is not unusual for journalists on big national newspapers to be MI5 assets, and it is even less. unusual for journalists to pass off Intelligence (sic!) briefings as their own work. Marr Leaking is part of appears psychological wafare and has unable to been well understand that to worked by the hand over weapons is British in like Kossovans Northern Ireland. However, relying on the Marr is an Serbs to protect unlikely MI5 asset: them after all he spent several years editing the Independent which broke from that house journal of spooks and Tories, the Telegraph. He is too smart just to recycle "securospeak" and more likely wrote the article to help the "peace process". Instead Marr, who ro doubt sees himself as a decent liberal. either off his own bat, or at the behest of others, attacks the republicans. The strategic aim of the Unionists and a large part of the British establishment is to force the Republicans to surrender or fight a new war on terms which could see them obliterated.
Marr may not be consciously part of this manoeuvre, but what he appears to be doing is softening up the largely Labour-supporting Observer readership for one of these outcomes.
His closing paragraph is chilling in its myopic, little Englander rhetoric: "But for the past 30 years our political life in the United Kingdom has been coarsened and degraded by the Irish conflict- the twisting of judicial process, the corruption of policing, the huge sour expense of spirit and money, the sly corrupting of our civic order as we half acknowledge that thugs may rule some villages and that some people are fated to live by lesser rules"
Marr perhaps forgot the exile of the Nationalists in Portadown, driven out of their homes by the loyalists around Drumcree or the attacks in other areas. He ignored the well established links between the bombers in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 and the British security forces. He could have written about the emerging links between the British Army, the RUC and the loyalist death squads. I don't remember a single article by Marr in which he criticised banning orders under the PTA under which people could be legally sent to another part of the "United Kingdom".
He appears unable to understand, for all his concern about what happens in "our backyard", the fact that Nationalists want the RUC disbanded or that to hand over weapons is like Kossovans relying on the Serbs to protect them.
Northern Ireland was a creation of British imperialism and is sustained by it. The "coarsening" of political life in Britain is a direct product of that. Marr's closing sentence, even though he doesn't mean to, proves once again Marx's dictum that an nation which oppresses another can never itself be free.