Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Policing must be centre stage

BY MICHAEL PIERSE

The demise of loyalist Mark 'Swinger' Fulton comes in the same week that the Six-County Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) called for an independent, international, public, judicial inquiry into the assassination of Rosemary Nelson. Fulton was a chief suspect in Nelson's killing, and that of Sunday World journalist Martin O'Hagan.

After keeping the ongoing criminal investigation into Nelson's death under review for three years, the NIHRC now believes that a fresh process, impartial and international, is most likely to arrive at the truth about her death.

Article 2 of the European Covention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to life, the Commission said, had not been fully complied with, not just in respect of the investigation of the killing itself, but also regarding the threats made against Nelson by members of the RUC prior to her assassination.

Significantly also, two weeks ago the NIHRC called for an investigation into the assassination of Billy Wright in 1997. Wright and Fulton had been behind dozens of deaths in Mid-Ulster in the past decade, including the foundation of the LVF and an extensive drug-dealing network.

Fulton was the organisations's representative on General John de Chastelain's commission on decommissioning - facilitating the small but well publicised destruction of a quantity of antiquated weapons.

Wright was assassinated by the INLA, within the grounds of Europe's most secure prison, Long Kesh, in circumstances that seemed to point at a set-up. And now thereis the death of his lieutenant and friend, Mark Fulton, who had information on, and first hand experience of, Britain's direction of loyalist death squads.

William Stobie, who admitted, as a UDA quartermaster, to colluding with British forces in the killing of Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane in 1989, was killed in December last, as the campaign for a judicial inquiry into Finucane's death was gaining steam. This, and the disappearance of fellow former UDA/MI5 operative Ken Barrett from his Belfast home that same month, prompted UN Special Rapporteur Dato Param Cumaraswamy to call for an independent investigation into Stobie's death.

It seems strange that most media observers hit a blind spot when it comes to recognising the significance of recent loyalist deaths.

Peter Taylor, former BBC journalist and author of the book 'Loyalists', has asserted that loyalist killings in East Tyrone and Mid Ulster, in which the involvement of Wright and Fulton was pivotal, were "unlikely to have been carried out without some degree of assistance from the security forces". Many people in towns like Cappagh, home of 1981 hunger striker Martin Hurson, and assassinated IRA volunteers John Quinn, Dwayne O'Donnell and Malcolm Nugent, together with civilian Thomas Armstrong, are in no doubt as to British collusion with the UVF's Mid Ulster Brigade.

Many people in Lurgan - where Catholic taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick, was shot dead by the UVF in 1997, Rosemary Nelson was killed, by the LVF, in 1999, and Martin O'Hagan was killed by the same organisation last year - may have come to the same conclusion.

Inquiries into the past, however, must not be the sole focus. The circumstances in the Short Strand should also be viewed with British and loyalist collusion in mind. A republican community of just 3,000 people, surrounded by a loyalist community 20 times its size, has been accused in the media of giving as good as it gets.

Despite a litany of loyalist attacks, the 'all-new' RUC/PSNI has focused its attention on hemming in the smaller community and attacking its members, such as Paud Devenny, who was lucky to survive a batoning last month.

Few loyalists have been arrested, let alone charged, only republican homes have been raided and pulled asunder. The attackers of the Short Strand act with impunity, as the British government does nothing.

In the long term, the solution to sectarianism is not just a law and order issue, but in the meantime, as the loyalist pogrom continues, policing changes must be put centre stage.