Loyalist violence fills vacuum
A nationalist family in the Twinbrook area of Belfast was this week the latest target of loyalist pipe-bombers. It was a miracle that nobody died in the attack.
Five years ago, in October 1994, an umbrella group for the various loyalist death squads calling itself the `Combined Loyalist Military Command' (CLMC) announced that the various loyalist groups who had carried out a vicious campaign of random assasinations and bombings against the nationalist community to varying degrees of intensity for 30 years was to desist. It insisted that this was permanent.
Since then loyalist groups have killed 41 people, mostly nationalists, and have launched hundreds of pipe bomb and petrol bomb attacks on the homes of nationalists throughout the Six Counties.
Although most of these attacks have been attributed to so-called fringe groups such as the Red Hand Defenders and the Loyalist Volunteer Force, there is ample evidence to show that the larger loyalist groups have been in involved in and supported these killings.
Among those killed were the three Quinn children, petrol bombed to death in Ballymoney, and solicitor Rosemary Nelson, killed by a booby trap bomb as she drove from her home in Lurgan.
The last killing to be attributed to loyalists was that of Elizabeth O'Neill. A Protestant married to a Catholic, O'Neill was blown up in her home in the Corcrain area of Portadown last June.
This is the backdrop against which the failure to find political progress is occurring. Some commentators and journalists have remarked that the ongoing impasse has made the peace process a `turn-off' and that the international audience is losing interest. This may well be true but what journalists have a duty to do in this context is present the consequences of political failure and the daily realty of a political vacuum for people on the ground. It is a matter of life and death.
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