UDR men on murder charges

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On December 4 the Sandinistas called Reagan's political bluff.

In response to the hypocritical US clamour about 'democracy' in Nicaragua, they announced a package which, among other things, demonstrates their self-confidence. It includes the following:

• The state of emergency will be lifted in mid-1984, to prepare tor a general eleccion 1985. (The Sandinistas set 1985 as the date of elections as long ago as 1980).

• Habeas corpus will stored, and so will • the right to strike, • the right of political parties to hold public demonstrations and meetings.

• Press censorship will be brought to an end.

• Within six months control of the two TV stations will be handed over to an independent electoral commission, charged with ensuring access for opposition parties to that medium.

• A general amnesty has been announced for all counter-revolutionaries. They will be free to form political parties and to contest the elections.

• There will be 'dialogue' with the Catholic Church in Nicaragua - whereas recently clashes took place in churches because the hierarchy opposed conscription.

• In a big show of departing aeroplanes, it seems that some Cuban advisers have left Nicaragua - though many remain.

The leaders of the FMLN of El Salvador are shifting their headquarters from Nicaragua to. Mexico. There were reports in the press last week that they had been asked to be out of Nicaragua before Interior Minister Tomas Borge was due to arrive in the USA. (He was refused admission).

The Sandinistas also took the latest steps in a process which has been going on for months, to try to 'reassure' the USA about 'the Central American region'.

Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega said: 'We have decided to discuss all the problems that Our achedules have been shaken up in the last couple of weeks becanse me have had to respond to the crisis around the NGA and the lam courts. The main cassaty has been the third and final pars of John O'Mabony's - of the recent Sinn Feis Ard Freis. I will appear next week worry the US"

The Sandinistas have already signed a 'peace treaty' jointly worked out with the so-called Contadora countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Mexico) which commits them explicitly not to "support or assist any group seeking to attack, overthrow or destabilise another state" • The Sandinistas have always said that they would not do that anyway.

These moves came in the aftermath of the invasion of Grenada, and are seen by many as a result of it. Some reports say that they are the outcome of long and painful debate within the ruling Junta.

The Nicaraguan government's first response to the invasion of Grenada was to harden its heart against the internal opposition and to prepare tor invasion. They raised the slogan, "Today Grenada, tomorrow Nicaragua' They called a proposal by some Nicaraguan businessmen to set a date for elections in November 1984, 'an insult to sovereignty'.

Trenches were dug in the streets, air-raid shelters were built, and the drive to conscript everyone between 17 and 25 was intensified.

They had reason to be alarmed.

To the north, on the Honduras border and making incursions across it, were as many as 10,000 'contras' of the Nicaraguan Democratic Front (FDN), many of them ex-Somocistas. There were also 5000 US marines, doing provocative 'military exercises' . The US has built a field hospital there with the capacity to care for big battle casualties.

Congress had seemed ready last summer to stop Reagan's involvement, but it has just voted $24 million aid to the 'contras'. The US ambassador to Costa Rica said recently in public, "An invasion of Nicaragua is not impossible" To the South, 1000 US army engineers have been moved into Costa Rica, where the 'moderate' contra guerillas of the AntiSandinista Democratic Alliance (ARDR) led by ex-Sandinista Eden Pastora and bourgeois former junta member Alfonso Robelo are based.

The ARDR talks of the revolution being betrayed by the Sandinistas, and say they oppose a US invasion. They pretend they do not take money from the CIA, but the US press says they do. Most likely they do, but the CIA may just want to discredit Pastora for refusing to merge with the Somocistas the Honduras border.

Serious blows have been struck at the Nicaraguan economy by saboteurs - including the loss of 400,000 gallons of fuel and attacks on Managua airport. But the main blows to the economy have come from US economic pressure.

In October the Central Ameriéan Council was reactivated, and generals from El Salvaar Guatemala, Panama and Honduras discussed a possible invasion of Nicaragua once a 'rebel government' had got even a toe-hold inside the country.

Against this harassment and war of nerves has to be balanced the fact that the USA's own military assessment is that the contras have no chance of overthrowing the Sandinista government. They lack popular support and have little possibility of gaining it - especially the exSomocistas on the northern border.

This could of course lead the US government to conclude that if it wants to overthrow the Sandinistas, the only option is invasion.

But the Sandinista army is 25,000 strong and well-armed. The Nicaraguan people would have strong motivation to defend their country, and experience of guerilla warfare. Nicaragua would be no pushover, even for the US.

After the difficulties they had in taking Grenada with 6000 US troops, they will surely think carefully before invading Nicaragua.

What, then, are the Sandinistas doing?

It is highly unlikely that there has actually been a break with the Cubans. In fact there have been press reports that Castro has been trying to reconcile Pastora and the Sandinistas.

The Sandinistas have been committed to elections in 1985 since 1980, even though it is under extreme pressure that they now announce them.

Sandinistas like FSLN founder Tomas Borge are known to have long favoured elections. There can be little reason to doubt that they will win them.

Junta member Carlo Nunez said that they will invite observers to the election from the contras, the UN, the International Commission of Jurists, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The Economist (November 26)

said: 'The American occupation of Grenada last month sent Nicaragua's Sandinistas running for cover... The Sandinistas are taking the invasion seriously enough to pause in their plod towards collectivism... The Sandinistas may be playing for time. Or they may be discovering that revolution, too, is the art of the possible"

It is not at all clear that the Economist is right and the Sandinistas are scurrying. The Salvadoreans' account of moving to Mexico is that they don't want to be trapped if the US invades. That the move will materially hinder them is not obvious.

It is not in the Sandinistas' power to 'turn off' the Salvadorean revolution. It is not whatever material aid they may have given the FMLN which is their great crime in the eyes of the US. It is the example they set. It is their existence.

The Contadora 'peace treaty' which is due to be presented for signature in mid-December requires not only that the Sandinistas do not support the FMIN and other movements, but also, more importantly, that US troops and funds be withheld from El Salvador and Honduras.

For the US to cut off support to its stooges in El Salvador would be to give up the game, and open the way for the FMLN to win. It is highly improbable, whatever the Sandinistas do, that the US will do this.

Of course, for the Sandinistas even to appear to concede in principle that the US has rights to tell them not to aid the revolutionaries in El Salvador is unfortunate. But Nicaragua is a very small country, living in the shadow of the US imperialist government. Even the Russian Bolsheviks, under pressure from German imperialism in 1918, had to make concessions which seemed in principle to accept outrageous German imperialist claims.

The Bolsheviks had a programme of international working class revolution, while the Sandinistas are nationalists who look to aid from the Mexican bourgeoisie rather than a revolution by the Mexican working class, the most powerful in the region.

But it is too early to say that the Sandinistas' latest move, as such, represents any fundamental concession to Us imperialism.

The US has made some wel coming responses. But nothing the Sandinistas have announced will give the US government any of its basic objectives either in El Salvador or in Nicaragua.

Elections are not the US's goal in Nicaragua. The overthrow of the regime is - and they won't get that from Whatever the genesis of the liberalisation promised for next year, it is good news for working class socialists. Not only the right to strike and the right to fight for the independence of the unions, but democratic rights in general, are important for the possibility of the emergence and free development of a socialist labour movement in Nicaragua. HOT ON the heels of the massacre in the Pentecostal church at Darkley, and the sectarian attacks on Catholics immediately following it, two members of the British Army's part-time Northern Ireland regiment, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), have been charged with sectarian murder.

Over a dozen UDR members from South Armagh were taken into custody and questioned last week about the spate of killings attrihntna force. "Some are still Action being questioned.

The sectarian killers of the 'Catholic Reaction Force' claimed that they killed Protestants at Darkley in retaliation for the bloody work of the Protestant Action force, which, they said, had killed eight men, "operating under the protective umbrella of the UDR". It seems that they were right about that.

The UDR was set up at the beginning of 1970 as part of the then Labour government's efforts to reform and de-sectarianise Northern Ireland. It was to be the replacement for the avowedly sectarian Orange and Unionist 'B Special Constabulary'.

What happened to the UDR is one of the proofs that it is hopeless to try to reform the Six County entity.

Catholics were encouraged to join the new body, to help ensure that its composition would reflect both Northern Ireland communities. In fact a lot Catholics did join it in the 'Year of Transition' between the British Army's taking to the the streets in August 1969 and the Provisional IRA going on the offensive. 16 per cent of UDR members were Catholics. (Catholics are 35% of the Six County population):

But within the year most of them had left. Today there are virtually no Catholics in the UDR, and it is an arm of the Protestant community. Behind the front and veneer of Londonimposed non-sectarianism, it is riddled with sectarianism and with organised sectarian groupings like the Ulster Volunteer Beating down Why has the UDR gone this way? Because the British Army - including the UDR - has spent most of the last 14 years beating down the Catholics. The Catholics were quickly alienated and left. Protestant militants naturally find the UDR a congenial home.

In places like South Armagh the UDR is nothing but a Protestant militia helping to keep down mainly Catholic territory. What better cover could Protestant sectarian murder gangs desire?

The UDR has from time to time been purged of 'infiltrators' . But such purges - in a force which, in the circumstances, is inevitably, even organically, sectarian - are not much more than cosmetic exercises.

The number of incidents of the UDR being used as a front for Orange intimidation or murder have mounted over the years. The best-known case is the Miami Show Band massacre.

The UDR stopped the Band's mini-van on its way South and killed three men. Two of the UDR men then accidentally blew themselves up.

Of course the Catholics, who meet the UDR face to face, know exactly what the UDR is. The IRA treat its members - all of them - as fair game. Protestants see attacks on off-duty UDR men as sectarian. It is a vicious spiral.

Logic

Now the arrests in the wake of Darkley will seem to justify that terrible deed in the eyes of some Catholics. The investigation and arrests came after Darkley, not before... So the arrests will seem a response to the killing, which will thereby seem to have 'worked' The logic of fighting sectarianism with 'counter-sectarianism' is built into the Six County bearpit, which pits community against community within an artificial framework maintained - despite its internal collapse and obvious unviability - by outside force, and which thus murderously intensifies the communal antagonisms.

In his valuable book on the IRA Tim Pat Coogan recalls the attitude of a representative Republican to the massacre of ten Protestant workers at Bessbrook in Armagh in 1976.

"'Why?' ', I asked an IRA spokesman. Looking me straight in the eye he replied, 'Why not? It stopped the sectarian killings in the area, didn't it?' "

It had - for a while. (Though of course Darkley didn't).

At a certain level, tit-for-tat sectarian attacks intensify into the rash of reciprocal sectarian clashes, population movements and slaughters, which communal civil war.

That the foul anti-Republican, anti-nationalist deed at Darkley now probably makes sense to people with the hard-edged narrow communalist realism of Coogan's 'IRA spokesman' , and that they will thus in the future be likely to remember it as a model - that is the responsibility of the British government, which imposed the partition of Ireland and props up the Six County unit today.

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Socialist Organiser, 8 December 1983 Page