The only way republican dissidents can win

international | crime and justice | opinion/analysis Saturday March 14, 2009 20:44 by Dr John Coulter - Irish Political Journalist

Provoking the dissident loyalists

In spite of the massive community support across the North, the only way dissident republicans stand any chance of bringing down Stormont, is to provoke their counterparts in dissident loyalism to go back to war.

Northern Irish Political Columnist DR JOHN COULTER assesses the threat to the peace process from loyalist dissidents who may go back to war in retaliation for the murders of soldiers and a police officer by the Real IRA.

The Troubles will only erupt to seriously threaten the Stormont Assembly if dissident republicans can provoke loyalism’s lunatic fringe into a sectarian slaughter campaign.
The Real and Continuity IRAs – in spite of killing two soldiers and a copper in less than a week – lacks the terrorists and weapons for a Provo-style long war in the North.
The most the Real and Continuity IRAs can hope for is to increase the trickle of defectors from the mainstream Provisional republican movement, or recruit young fresh blood into its ranks.
These would either be experienced republicans disillusioned with the Gerry Adams/Martin McGuinness Sinn Fein peace strategy, or young post-Troubles republicans who still believe in a terror war to get a united Ireland.
The only other immediate outcome of the Real IRA’s current terror strategy would be to unite the various dissident movements militarily under a Combined Republican Military Command.
This would include the Real and Continuity IRAs, the INLA, and the equally fringe groups calling themselves the Irish Republican Liberation Army and Oglaigh na hEireann.
This would be a tactic similar to dissident loyalists opposed to both the 1994 mainstream loyalist death squad ceasefires and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Dissident loyalists representing the Orange Volunteers, Red Hand Defenders, Loyalist Volunteer Force and hardliners in the mainstream UVF, Red Hand Commando and UDA, formed the Protestant Military Alliance umbrella group in the late 1990s.
This was in direct competition with the umbrella group speaking for the loyalist terror gangs on ceasefire – the so-called Combined Loyalist Military Command.
Given the cross-community outage against the Real and Continuity IRAs because of the recent shootings, the British security forces will probably be able to contain the dissident republican terror campaign to hardline Catholic heartlands.
To stand any chance of toppling the power-sharing Assembly, dissident republicans ironically will have to rely on sectarian backlash from loyalist dissidents equally opposed to the DUP/Sinn Fein government at Stormont.
While loyalist leaders – and especially Progressive Unionist MLA Dawn Purvis – have appealed for calm in the loyalist community, they have very little influence over loyalism’s exceptionally volatile dissident fringe.
The most dangerous of the Protestant dissidents are the Orange Volunteers, which was formed in 1999, borrowing the title of a terror group which had been defunct since the late 1970s.
The modern OV has indulged in arson attacks on Catholic churches, schools and GAA property – in retaliation for a campaign of arson raids on Orange halls on both sides of the Irish border.
The LVF – formed in the mid 1990s by the late Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright from elements in his Mid Ulster Brigade of the UVF – has descended into nothing more than a drug-dealing criminal gang.
The Red Hand Defenders has attracted hardmen from the existing UVF and UDA, who are disillusioned with the peace process.
However, internal loyalist feuds and turf wars over criminal empires – especially drugs – has so far stopped Protestant dissidents from turning their guns on innocent Catholics.
In the meantime, such loyalists prefer to kill each other for control of Protestant working class areas.
But there is the danger a sustained – even brief – dissident republican campaign could refocus dissident loyalists away from killing each other, and back into an openly sectarian slaughter strategy.
Given that mainstream loyalist death squads have so far refused to decommission their arsenals, there is the additional headache for the security forces that dissident sympathisers within the ranks of the UDA and UVF could pass on their weapons caches to arm the OV, RHD and LVF.
This would be similar to a situation in the late 1980s when the legal Ulster Resistance terror gang gave a substantial part of its South African arms cache to the banned UVF and Ulster Freedom Fighters.
Dissident republicans are trying to create a political situation similar to March 1972 when the then British Prime Minister Edward Heath scrapped the original Stormont Parliament because it could no longer cope with the increasing republican and loyalist terror campaigns.
In the early 1970s, the Provisional and Official IRA campaigns alone were not sufficient to topple Stormont. It needed the added push from the loyalist death squads, especially the UVF.
The ultimate fear is that republican dissidents would target Unionist politicians in a bid to push the peace process to the brink, especially with a tense European poll to take place on 4 June.
This would be a carbon copy of the Provos tactics in 1981 and ’82 when the IRA murdered top Unionist politicians Rev Robert Bradford and Edgar Graham.
The effects of both killings was to ensure the 1982 Assembly never made it beyond the stage of a glorified talking shop, eventually collapsing in 1986.