Two years after Britain left the EU, the most potent threat of Brexit violence to date has emanated from pro-British Loyalists.
From the announcement that Britain had voted to leave the EU in June 2016, until London finally left the bloc in January 2020, the main criticism leveled by the mainstream media about Brexit was that it would spark a blowout. of violence in the occupied north of Ireland, with the installation of border infrastructure between the southern Irish EU member state and the British-ruled north-east, inevitably becoming a target for the revival of the Irish republican movement.
Although the 1998 Belfast Agreement was hailed around the world as a “peace deal” ending 30 years of conflict, the Good Friday Agreement was effectively a surrender agreement between the British government and the IRA. Provisional, the culmination of years of infiltration at the highest level of the once revolutionary movement by British agents.
However, in the 24 years since the signing of the AVS, many republicans have sought to continue the IRA’s original aim of establishing the 32-county Independent Republic, with more than 40 Irish republican prisoners currently languishing in British and Irish prisons. Free State, and sporadically attacks continue to occur against the British occupation forces, although not at the level of intensity that had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is where the prospect of a “hard border” in mainstream media coverage of Brexit came into play, with customs posts between the two jurisdictions in Ireland manned by the 5,000 British troops still remaining in the six occupied counties. , inevitably becoming a target of physical attack by Irish Republicans.
There is therefore a sense of irony in the fact that two years after Britain’s departure from the EU, the most potent threat of Brexit violence to date has in fact emanated from pro-British Loyalists, the descendants of the English and Scottish settlers planted in the Northern Irish province of Ulster in the 17th century.
The Irish Downing Street Protocol, which effectively keeps the six counties occupied in the EU Customs Union through checks carried out on goods entering the region from Britain by sea, has been viewed by the Loyalists as undermining the British occupation they wish to remain under and also as a stepping stone towards Irish reunification.
Following the end of the withdrawal agreement last year and Britain’s official exit from the EU single market, loyalists reacted to this newly implemented Protocol by rioting across the region, attacking the pro-British colonial police force that traditionally they have supported and brought attention to the occupied north of Ireland not seen in decades.
In fact, tensions would rear their heads again in March this year when the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the 26-county state of southern Ireland, Simon Coveney, seen as a key figure in the implementation of the Protocol by loyalists, had to be evacuated from an official event. in Belfast following a bomb warning from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) loyalist terror group.
Although currently low-key, the current Loyalist campaign bears a grim similarity to the one that began in the mid-1960s in response to calls for equal rights for Irish nationalists living in the six occupied counties, a campaign from petrol bombs to nationalist properties, which would eventually turn into 30 years of ethnic cleansing and atrocities carried out in collusion with British military intelligence.
With peaceful civil rights advocates being beaten and gassed by a pro-British police force every time they took to the streets of occupied Ireland, support for militant republicanism was growing rapidly.
To counter the threat of the emerging Provisional IRA, the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a clandestine unit of British Special Forces, was deployed to occupied Ireland with the intention of sparking a civil war between Irish Republicans and Loyalists, thus seizing the IRA approach, supplemented by British troops that had been deployed to the region in 1969 to enforce orders from Downing Street.
To this end, the MRF would employ the modus operandi of drive-by shootings against unarmed nationalist civilians in the hope that the IRA would blame loyalists.
However, the unit would work directly with the Loyalists in December 1971, when they allowed a UVF team to clear the pass to bomb McGurk’s pub in the staunchly Republican New Lodge area of Belfast, leaving 15 civilians dead and ushering in the formal relations between British military intelligence and loyalist Death Squads.
Indeed, this relationship would rear its ugly head less than three years later, when the UVF, under the direction of the MRF’s successor, the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), detonated three car bombs without warning in Dublin and one in the county. Monaghan border crossing, which caused 34 deaths in what was the largest loss of life in a single day in the 30-year conflict.
The bombing of the southern state capital was seen as a warning to Dublin not to dissent from its traditionally pro-British stance, weakened at the time by atrocities committed by British troops in the occupied north.
Although no more attacks of the same scale as those in Dublin and Monaghan would be carried out in the 26 counties as a result, the British policy of operating death squads in Northern Ireland would continue unabated, which, at dawn the 1980s, it also grows to accommodate the Ulster Defense Association (UDA).
Although still not responsible for the same high-profile attacks as its counterpart, the UDA has dwarfed the UVF in terms of membership, which reached 40,000 at its peak.
Bearing this in mind, as well as the fact that the UDA was involved in the same bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing as the UVF, it was not long before London saw the group’s potential as a proxy for empire, and the UDA was born. Force Research Unit (FRU).
A covert unit along the same lines as the MRF and SRU, the FRU’s purpose was to turn the UDA into a more “professional” force, one that would attack IRA members rather than solely engage in traditional loyalist tactics. of killing unarmed nationalist civilians.
To implement this strategy, they would recruit Brian Nelson, a senior member of the UDA, to travel to South Africa in 1985 in order to obtain weapons from the then Apartheid state’s official defense contractor, Armscor, a deal that would lead to an escalation. part of the group’s genocidal campaign against the nationalist population and would ultimately lead to the execution of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane.
Finucane, from Belfast, would become a thorn in the side of the British establishment throughout the 1980s by defending a number of high-profile Republicans, including hunger striker Bobby Sands.
Placed firmly in the London crosshairs, the last straw would come in November 1988 when he managed to have charges dropped against an IRA volunteer in connection with the deaths of two British soldiers.
Three months later, a UDA unit broke down the door of Finucane’s home while he was having Sunday dinner with his family and shot him 14 times. His execution was effectively sanctioned by Downing Street three weeks earlier, when Thatcher’s Cabinet member Douglas Hogg declared in the House of Commons that there were lawyers “unduly sympathetic to the IRA cause”.
Both the UDA and the UVF would continue this campaign of violence against the nationalist community for another five years, with the official end coming in October 1994, when both organizations declared that “all operational hostilities would cease” in response to the earlier ceasefire. provisional IRA in August of that year.
Although both groups still exist. In the years that followed the ceasefire, they mainly targeted each other in internal fights.
If recent mainstream media reports that the UVF is preparing to rearm should the Protocol remain unchanged are to be believed, the current Loyalist campaign may soon escalate to a level not seen in decades, with the British military intelligence undoubtedly playing an important role. One more time.
Al mayadeen
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