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Over
the past number of weeks, West Belfast has witnessed
an upsurge in shootings carried out against victims
ranging from local hoods to republicans who dissent
from Sinn Fein’s brand of state republicanism
and remain loyal to the old Fenian tradition of physical
force exclusivism. It stretches credulity to believe
that such attacks, widely assumed to have been carried
out by Provisional nationalists, are not related to
Sinn Fein feeling itself squeezed in the wake of the
assembly elections despite its success at the polls.
With the DUP bouncing on the balls of their feet,
determined that Sinn Fein’s balls will be tightly
squeezed, the nationalist party can do little but
huff and puff. It knows the terrible political price
that will be exacted at home and in the US if it targets
British security personnel or members of the unionist
community. And when its leaders hint at dire but unspecified
consequences if the DUP is permitted to renegotiate
the Good Friday Agreement, most observers accept that
the only people under threat are those from within
the nationalist community. Evidence, if any were needed
that the British still treat some as second class
citizens, whose lives and physical wellbeing should
not, unlike other citizens, be allowed to stand in
the way of the peace process. They alone can be murdered
and maimed for peace. A friend who still subscribes
to the physical force tradition captured both the
irony and the bankruptcy of Sinn Fein.
You
know, I can join the UVF, the UDA or the cops in
these areas and I will not be touched. But I stand
to be shot by the Provos if I go to an alternative
republican organisation.
Such
a fate is what befell Geordie McCall, who defiantly
detailed to a number of media outlets how a gang of
Sinn Fein Greenshirts arrived at his Twinbrook home,
manhandled his elderly mother, pulled him out to the
garden and then shot him in the ankles. McCall said
he believed he was targeted because he opposed the
peace process and worked on behalf of IRA prisoners.
Others say matters are more complicated than that.
According to McCall, when the intruders arrived:
"One
identified himself when he came in through the door
as Provisional IRA. They then proceeded to drag
me to the garden area where another four men were
waiting. They held me down on the ground and consequently
shot me twice, once in each ankle."
Listening
to a Greenshirt leader being interviewed on New York
Public Radio yesterday and spuriously claim that his
organisation's guns were silent was less irritating
than the failure of the interviewer to point out that
the vow of silence is invariably broken in the presence
of physical force republicans. The dearth of probing
was all the more remarkable in such a forum as WNYC
due to the fact that Geordie McCall is a US citizen.
Least
amongst the things that worried people who supported
us while we were prisoners was armed SDLP gangs breaking
into their homes and shooting the occupants; that
task belonged to the loyalists ably assisted by British
state security agencies.
As
a means of protecting themselves, some supporters
of the Fenian physical force tradition have been toying
with the idea of disclosing the identities of their
attackers and intimidators to Sinn Fein leaders Martin
McGuinness and Gerry Adams, and then telling the International
Monitoring Commission that they have done this, but
without providing any information to the Commission.
A different route they could consider would be to
seek to enlist the support of Sinn Fein MLA Catriona
Ruane who gave as her reason for joining the party:
‘apart from all its great community work, Sinn
Féin has placed human rights at the core of
its agenda, and this is very important to me.’
Perhaps it is time to find out just how important.
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