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Showing posts with label Legitimate targets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Legitimate targets. Show all posts
From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a fifth piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.
For an overview of the ‘Killing by Numbers’ series, please see Part 1.

Part 5: The UDA and the Ulster Freedom Fighters 

The Ulster Defence Association was formed in September, 1971, as an umbrella organisation for the various local vigilante groups that had sprung up in and around Belfast to physically defend Loyalist neighbourhoods from violent republican attacks.

 The UDA quickly grew into a mass movement and by about 1974 had over 40,000 members across Northern Ireland. Throughout the 1970s, uniformed UDA members openly patrolled working class Loyalist areas armed with batons, cudgels and other weapons (often homemade) and held huge public marches and rallies.

By the Mid 1970s, the Ulster Defence Association was truly a mass movement, with 10 brigades across NI and a large number of battalions in England and Scotland. Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Ayrshire and the Greater Manchester area all had a significant UDA presence, with volunteers providing financial, moral, logistical and sometimes physical support to their comrades in Ulster.

Although the UDA drew most of it’s membership from working class districts across Northern Ireland, it was not an exclusively working class movement, nor (as is often portrayed) was it an exclusively male movement.

Continue reading @  It's Still Only Thursday.

Killing By Numbers ➤ Part 5

From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a fourth piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

For an overview of the ‘Killing by Numbers’ series, please see Part 1.

Part 4: The Ulster Volunteer Force

Previously we have looked at republican armed groups and re-analysed the violent campaigns of those groups and those that they considered to be ‘legitimate targets’.

We will now look at Loyalist armed groups, beginning with the UVF and it’s smaller satellite organisations, namely the Red Hand Commando and Protestant Action Force.

The original UVF

The original Ulster Volunteer Force was formally established in 1913, in order to resist, by force if necessary, the imposition of ‘Home Rule’ on Ulster. At it’s height, the original UVF had more than 100,000 members organised into a multitude of brigades across the (then) nine counties of Ulster and including machine gun units, a medical corps, logistics corps etc.

Contrary to popular belief, the original UVF did not disappear when the Ulster Volunteers joined the British Army en masse in 1914/15, forming the 36th Ulster Division and going on to win eternal fame for their gallantry and heroism in the battles of the Great War, in particular the Battle of the Somme.

After the war, as Ireland slipped into the bloody and brutal War of Independence, the Ulster Volunteer Force remobilised to defend their homeland.

At one point, in May, 1920, the UVF even seized and (relatively briefly) held the city of Londonderry, an event now all but forgotten, apparently because it does not suit the Irish nationalist narrative.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday.

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Killing By Numbers ➤ Part 4

From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a third piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

For an overview of the ‘Killing by Numbers’ series, please see Part 1.
OIRA, INLA & IPLO


The ‘Official IRA’

In early 1970, the organisation which styled itself as the ‘Irish Republican Army’ broke into two acrimonious factions- the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA.

The Officials, or ‘Stickies’ as they became known, had in fact a greater claim to be the ‘inheritors‘ of the title of ‘IRA’, since they retained as members most of those who had been active during the abortive ‘Border Campaign’ (Operation Harvest) of 1956-62.

Under their Dublin based leadership, the Officials adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology, through which they sought to unify the working classes of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, overthrow the state of Northern Ireland (and the Irish Republic) and thereafter establish a unified, 32 county communist state.

Because of their doctrinaire Marxism and their stated aim of unifying the working class, the Official IRA are widely regarded as being much less sectarian and markedly more cautious than either their Provisional IRA rivals or the splinter groups (INLA/IRSP and IPLO) which would later emerge from within the ‘Stickies’ own ranks.

This is somewhat borne out by the statistics, however, those statistics are skewed by the fact that the Official IRA largely abandoned violence in 1973/74 and thereafter engaged in violence only sporadically.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday,

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Killing by Numbers ➤ Part 3

From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a second piece in a series looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

For a summary of the methodology used in the Killing by Numbers series please see Killing by Numbers: Part 1.

We will begin our re-analysis of The Troubles with a study of the republican armed groups, since they were responsible for most conflict related deaths.

In Part 3 we will deal with the smaller republican groupings but we will begin with the Provisional IRA, since they were by far the largest of such groupings and because they were also the organisation involved for the longest period of time, 1970-1998, whilst the Official IRA had all but abandoned violence by about 1975, the INLA only came into being in 1975 and the IPLO was formed only in 1985/86.

Legitimate targets

First we must ascertain who exactly the Provisional IRA regarded as “legitimate targets”. Something which is not as straightforward as one would assume.

Of course the Provisional movement regarded the Army, RUC and UDR as so-called “legitimate targets” but that particular list does not end there.

For as well as all serving soldiers and police, the Provos also regarded all former members of the Armed Forces (resident in Northern Ireland) and former police officers as legitimate targets too.

Add to that list all members of the judiciary, all serving and former members of the Prison Service, all members of the Ulster Unionist Party, the Ulster Democratic Party, the Progressive Unionist Party, the Conservative Party (at least after 1975), members of the Royal household and so-called “collaborators”, ie civilians employed in a clerical role, or as “searchers”, by the RUC and Army, those employed as cooks or cleaners in Army barracks and police stations, those who supplied foodstuffs and other goods/services to the Security Forces and those who built, maintained and repaired police stations, Army barracks and UDR bases.

In fact, the list of so-called “collaborators” was extended in the late 1980s to such a degree that even those who supplied building materials or sub-contracted to those involved in “Security work” were regarded as “legitimate targets” by PIRA/Sinn Fein.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday.



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Killing by Numbers ➤ Part 2

From the Loyalist blog It's Still Only Thursday, a piece looking at 'legitimate targets' during the North's politically violent conflict.

Statistical reanalysis of The Troubles

Over the course of the past 2 years, myself and my fellow ISOT ‘admin’ have re-examined approximately 75-80% of all Troubles related deaths, those attributable to either Loyalist or republican armed groups.

Our objectives were relatively simple-

1: To ascertain who exactly both sets of ‘combatants’ regarded as being “legitimate targets“.

2: To calculate how many of the aforementioned “legitimate targets” each armed group actually killed.

3: To calculate, or in some instances estimate, how many “legitimate targets” were available over the course of the conflict.

4: To calculate, as a percentage, the total number of “legitimate targets” actually killed by each ‘side’.

At first glance, this seems a straightforward, if somewhat time consuming, task. In reality however, it is nowhere near as simple as it sounds. Take, for instance, the question of just who was regarded as a “legitimate target”. At first glance it seems easy to answer but it is, in fact, anything but.

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday.
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Killing by Numbers ➤ Part 1

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