After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-Accord Northern Ireland

1. Staying Put

1 Staying Put Paramilitaries respond to formal peace in different ways. Some issue prompt stand-down orders and implement them with efficiency. Others drag their feet, dismantling by fits and starts. Still others stay put, endorsing peace but refusing to stand down. In Northern Ireland a formal peace accord was signed in April 1998. Nine years later the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) finally stood down. Its counterpart, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) remained on the battle- field. Loyalist paramilitary foot-dragging defies the accord they signed and the aspirations of the citizens who supported it. This book is about the delayed business of Loyalist demilitarization. It explains why Loyalist demilitarization included more fits than starts in the decade since formal peace arrived and how Loyalist paramilitary recalcitrance has affected everyday Loyalists. Loyalist paramilitaries are a vestige of Northern Ireland’s thirty-year civil war, known locally and euphemistically as the Troubles. Although the war began in 1968, enmity between the province’s two ethnoreligious blocks— Catholics and Protestants—stretches back to British colonization of the island in the sixteenth century.1 At the time, the British established control through a razed-earth campaign; locals were driven from their land and threatened with reprisal if they returned. Protestant “planters” from England and Scotland were then brought in to resettle the land. The goal of the plantation period was to stamp the island with a politically British and culturally Protestant imprint while developing a thriving export economy in 1 1 Most scholars define Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant populations as ethnoreligious groups. Centuries of each group’s segregation from the other and the secular nature of contemporary Northern Ireland mean that religion is primarily a marker of one’s “descent group” (McGarry and O’Leary 1995, 218). agricultural goods (Mulholland 2002). To secure its objective the British established a rigid social hierarchy in which Irish Catholics were deprived of basic rights and privileges. Protestant settlers often lived marginal lives (the majority were peasants), but they were spared many of the degradations, symbolic and otherwise, of their Catholic counterparts. When Ireland gained its independence in 1921, the British retained control of the northern portion of the island, where Protestants were in the majority. And they continued to support local Protestant dominance in political and economic affairs. The Protestant elite who ruled the province called themselves Unionists and vowed the province would remain British. The war that began in 1968 was set against this historical backdrop. It pit the Provisional Irish Republican Army (known commonly as the IRA or Provos) against the British government and the Unionist elite in a protracted , often nasty fight. The conflict began benignly enough, when Catholics embarked on a civil rights struggle in the late 1960s. A harsh response by law enforcement upped the ante, however, and the civil rights campaign soon morphed into an armed “liberation struggle.” Using guerilla tactics such as targeted bombing and hit-and-run assaults on police and military installations, Republicans hoped to force a British retreat from the province—achieving victory by a war of attrition. Many of their assaults, however, affected everyday Protestants. And not surprisingly, many in their ranks rose up to protect themselves and defend the state. These paramilitaries called themselves Loyalists and vowed to defend the Union to the death.2 Embracing the tactics of their Republican counterparts, they argued that if the Unionist state would not destroy Republicanism, they would do it themselves.3 The UVF and the UDA were seen by many Protestants as an important bulwark against IRA violence.4 After almost thirty years of fighting, the IRA announced a cease-fire in 1994. The UVF and the UDA responded in kind a few weeks later. These announcements were met with relief and guarded optimism by a war-weary population. Four years later, on Good Friday 1998, the province’s armed groups signed a joint peace accord in Belfast. The agreement, known by 2 Chapter 1 冷 2 Scholars of political violence make a distinction between guerilla and paramilitary groups. Both are nonstate actors, but guerillas fight the state whereas paramilitaries fight on its behalf and often have structural links to it. Steve Bruce (1992) uses the terms “anti-state terrorism,” and “pro-state terrorism” to mark this distinction in Northern Ireland. As a matter of convenience , however, most people in Northern Ireland refer to groups on both sides as paramilitaries . 3 This rhetoric signaled the emergence of a key divide within...