Reid must face facts
What was lost amid the outlandish hype that followed the arrest of three Irish men in Colombia last week was a sense of perspective on the peace process and the problems currently facing it, never mind the right of the men to be presumed innocent before proof of guilt.
Despite the absence of any conclusive evidence, the arrests were presented by the media and by leading politicians as a dire threat to the stability of the Irish peace process. The men were accused of liaising with Colombian rebels FARC, of having traces of illegal substances on their clothes, of having being filmed carrying out illegal activities, of having being involved in making ever more extravagant bombs. All of these allegations were unsubstantiated and based on later-to-be retracted 'evidence'. All were reprinted and taken for granted by a pliant and reckless media.
This hysteria, peddled by British securocrats and fed through unionist politicians, served to divert attention from the real difficulties facing the peace process, difficulties created by the British government which has reneged on policing and other issues and caved inti unionism by suspending the institutions for a second time.
Further, An Phoblacht yesterday learned of two, very serious, loyalist attacks on republicans. In Armagh on Wednesday morning, a sophisticated mercury tilt-switch bomb was discovered under the car of a republican former prisoner. It was a device similar to the one used to kill civil rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson. The other discovery, on the same morning, was of a pipe bomb at the constituency office of Martin McGuinness. Elsewhere in this edition, we detail a litany of loyalist attacks against nationalists in the past week alone.
This brings the number of UDA-orchestrated attacks on nationalists and republicans this year alone to a total of nearly 200. Yet, amazingly, the mass media and leading politicians still find this campaign astoundingly easy to ignore and downplay.
A number of weeks ago, British Secretary of State John Reid said he would keep the UDA ceasefire under review. In the meantime the RUC have facilitated and even stewarded a march by 15,000 UDA members and supporters - many masked and wearing military paraphenalia - down the Shankill Road.
It is time for Reid and the securocrats to face facts. Nationalists and republicans (and Sinn Féin is the largest nationalist party in the Six Counties, not the SDLP) will not swallow the 'Colombia Conspiracy', we will not accept a repackaged RUC that stewards marches for people who try to bomb our homes, nor will we accept anything less than the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.
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