UDR charges

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SEVEN members of the British Army's Northern Ireland- recruited auxiliary force, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), have now been charged with involvement in the sectarian murder of Catholics in Armagh.

Five others are in custody being questioned at the time of writing (December 14th).

It looks like the British authorities intend to do a thorough job of rooting out this particular pocket of organised sectarianism in their Army's Northern Ireland ranks.

But they don't deserve any credit for it.

They have taken action not in response to the rampant sectarianism in the UDR - the existence of which has long been a matter of general knowledge and public comment - but in response to the Catholic sectarian backlash it provoked in South Armagh.

Their motive for action came from the lurid atrocity at Darkley's Pentecostal church, not from the day-by-day routine atrocity the British authorities themselves perpetrate against the Catholics of Northern Ireland by setting the inevitably sectarian UDR force to "police' their areas.

They are rooting out one pocket of UDR sectarianism in THE KILLING OF Edgar Graham, the Official Unionist spokesman on Northern Ireland Home Affairs, last week, led to predictable accusations from politicians and churchmen that the Provos are deliberately trying to incite civil war. Whatever the IRA's intentions, such actions do edge Northern Ireland towards civil war.

The polarisation between the Catholic and Protestant communities is now, according to commentators from all shades and stripes of opinion, extremely tight. The killing of a man such as Edgar Graham is a sectarian act. It will certainly be seen by Protestants as an attack on the Protestant community. It is one more incident in the escalation of sectarianism and its identical twin, 'countersectarianism' Graham was a lawyer and an advocate of repression against the IRA and INLA. He also had a reputation as impartially opposed to all paramilitaries, speaking out against Protestant gunmen and sectarian attacks on Catholics, in sharp contrast to most Unionist politicians whose denunciations tend to be limited to the IRA and INLA. He was an elected representative of the Protestant community.

If he was a legitimate target, then which Protestant - sharing his opinions or going further, as most of them do - would not be?

INLA has long rationalised a scarcely disguised Catholic sectarianism as political hostility Armagh so that this other atrocity can continue throughout Northern Ireland. It is therefore mainly a cosmetic exercise.

The energy with which the authorities pursue this nest of sectarians is the latest example of the 'politics of the last atrocity' . The authorities tolerated the activities of the sectarian UDR in South Armagh until Darkley signalled to them that things were getting out of control.

So, they increased the activities of the SAS in South Armagh on the one hand; and on the other they are acting to remove the rampant sectarian provocation which the sectarian murder gang operating under cover of the UDR had become to the Catholics of South Armagh.

Sectarian force

But there are other organised sectarian murder groups in the UDR, and the UDR is everywhere a Protestant sectarian force - even when its members are 'disciplined' and refrain from inflicting freelance murder and mayhem on the 'Papist enemies of Protestant Ulster' who happen to make up 35% of its population. The UDR is nothing but a Protestant sectarian militia. All of it and every bit of it, everywhere in Northern Ireland.

Putting a few of them on trial for murder in South Armagh won't change that, and will in fact be used to hide it and pretend it isn't so. to 'pro-imperialists'. There is the same Catholic-sectarian logic in the Provisional IRA's recent decision to withdraw from the Protestant community recognition as a distinct part of the Irish people, and to substitute for it the 'political' redefinition long favoured by the INLA, that the Protestant community is just a pro-imperialist political group. Incidents like the killing of Graham bring out the sectarian logic - plainly.

What the Provos intend is probably to complete the wrecking of Prior's Assembly. The Official Unionists withdrew from it (leaving only Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party and Alliance) in response to Darkley. Graham's killing makes it much more difficult for them to return.

Tragically, the lesson some Republicans seem to have learned from the Protestant General Strike which wrecked the powersharing executive in 1974 that the Protestants, stoked up, or detonated by Republican activity, have the weight and power to wreck anything Britain tries to do in Northern Ireland. So it makes sense to stoke them up.

The Provos are right to want to smash the Assembly. But to do iț by massively increasing the already lethal level of sectarianism in Northern Ireland is both short-sighted and, inevitably, counter-productive for the goals of Republicanism — not to speak of the goals of socialism.