Sectarian killings in Armagh

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THREE men were killed and seven wounded last Sunday when the crowd of men, women and children at a Pentecostal church service at Darkley in Catholic South Armagh was machine-gunned.

An organisation calling itself the 'Catholic Reaction Force' has claimed responsibility and threatened more sectarian slaughter. Nobody had heard of the Catholic Reaction Force before, and it is probably a name of convenience for some other organisation - probably, according to the best available informed guesses, the Irish National Liberation Army.

This sectarian atrocity has all the marks of a calculated political provocation. The Orangemen don't need much provocation.

Every incident leads them to renewed calls for draconian measures by the British Army against the Catholic community. The Official Unionist Party has now withdrawn from Mr Prior's Northern Ireland Assembly, already boycotted by the Catholie SDLP and by the five elected Sinn Fein representatives).

This leaves the Paisleyite Democratic Unionist Party as the main organisation still in the Assembly, which looks about ready to be interred. The OUP is calling for internment without trial for Republicans.

Darkley is the latest in a long series of spectacular sectarian slaughters in the last decade, many of them in South Armagh. In 1976 ten Protestant workers were taken off a bus and slaughtered there by the local Provisional IRA, in retaliation for the earlier sectarian killing of five Catholics.

Of the 1584 civilians who died in Northern Ireland between 1971 and June 1983, many have been slaughtered just for being Catholic or Protestant. Far more Catholics have died this way than Protestants. The Protestant backlash against direct rule after 1972 took as one of its weapons indiscriminate sectarian slaughter of Catholics.

The Republican movement has always denounced sectarian attacks, but inevitably the logic of 'tit for tat' and 'fighting fire with fire has attracted some 'Republicans'. There is also, it must be said, an undergrowth of sectarian feeling in the Catholic community, whatever the Republican politicians may say.

The Provisional Republicans have denounced the sectarian attack, and so has at least part of the INLA's political front, the Irish Republican Socialist Party. But the INLA is an extremely loose and uncoordinated organisation. It is also - according to recent testimony in Belfast courts - heavily infiltrated by state provocateurs.

One interpretation of the attack in Darkley is that it is part of a growing conflict between the INLA and the Provisional IRA. Irish newspapers have carried reports of clashes between the two groups on both sides of the Border, and of kidnapping of IRA supporters by INLA.

The IRA's turn to politics has led it to tone down some of its militarism. Martin McGuinness, abstentionist Sinn Fein assemblyman from Derry, has publiciy attacked the INLA for aspects of its mindless militarism.

Many acknowledged INLA actions can only be understood as attempts to stir up sectarian conflict - the attempt to kill Paisley, for example.