NORTHERN IRELAND: Britain Begins Withdrawing Troops

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sarah O'Hara

DUBLIN, Mar 14 1995 (IPS) - The British government Tuesday announced the pull-out of 400 troops from Northern Ireland, signalling London’s growing confidence in the peace process and fuelling the debate about who will police the region once lasting peace is achieved.

Currently, there are 18,000 British troops stationed in Northern Ireland which are to be gradually reduced in keeping with the diminished threat of violence following ceasefire announcements by the warring paramilitaries toward the end of last year.

The Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, announced separate ceasefires six months ago after 25 years of violence. The nationalist IRA has been fighting to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic, while the loyalists want to keep the region British.

Now, as the 400 British troops prepare to withdraw in the next two weeks, debate is heating up over the future policing of Northern Ireland with the nationalists particularly distrustful of the armed Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

One in four young people have been harassed by the RUC, according to a survey by a civil liberties group, the Committee for the Administration of Justice, which is respected in both communities.

Young members of the Catholic minority, who want a united Ireland, are three times more likely to be harassed than young Protestants in the majority community, the survey showed.

Sinn Fein, the political ally to the IRA, has said that the RUC is “totally unacceptable” to the 40 per cent of the Northern Ireland population which are nationalist. They want to see the RUC “scrapped”.

The larger, more moderate nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), agrees that the RUC has been less than even-handed in its policing of the region, however it does not believe that the RUC can be “scrapped” in the present circumstances.

“That is a slogan, not an answer to a very complex problem,” said SDLP chairman, Mark Durkan, at a recent debate on policing at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin, the Irish capital.

On the other hand, Durkan said it would also be inappropriate for the RUC to continue to function as it presently does. “That doesn’t solve the problem either.”

Naturally, the main pro-British parties, the Ulster Unionist Party and the demagogic Democratic Unionist Party, who represent the constituency from which over 90 per cent of the police force are drawn, are resisting any change at all.

The Unionists even refuse to send delegations to the weekly Forum for Peace and Reconciliation because they say it is a Republic of Ireland assembly and the Republic has no right to hold debates on issues outside of their jurisdiction.

For the unionists, any cuts in the police force that will take place if the ceasefires shape up into a genuine, lasting stability are a negative peace dividend.

Indeed, even the small Alliance party, which claims to stand for the middle ground, is resisting any “fragmentation” of the RUC.

“There have been failings, but they should not blinds us to the fundamental reality, that the RUC has done a very good job in the most difficult of circumstances,” said Alliance justice spokesman, Steve McBride.

He went on: “(Their professionalism) needs to be honestly recognised. It wouldn’t be realistically possible to simply scrap an establishment of over 10,000 strong.”