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12 July 2001 Edition

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The Battle of the SOM (Silly Old Men)

BY FERN LANE

At three minutes to ten on Sunday morning, the first members of the Orange march made their way past the barbed wire and barricades at the top of Garvaghy Road towards the church on Drumcree hill. By seven minutes past, it was all over. And, apart from one brief exchange, they managed to behave themselves. Notable by their absence - on Sunday that is - were many of the loyalist hangers-on who have given the parade its distinctively sinister flavour in previous years, although members of the LVF were to be seen amongst the sparse groups of supporters along the route and those following on. Also, along with the Drumcree flag (a flag which displays the Order's habit of misappropriating and misapplying the words of others; in this case Martin Luther and his statement ``Here I stand, I can do no other'') there were still plenty of Red Hand and UDA flags around. And there is no guarantee that what such protest as there is on Drumcree Hill will remain peaceful, particularly during the Twelfth `celebrations'.

But as the lights are undoubtedly beginning to go out on its self-proclaimed last stand at Drumcree, the temptation to ridicule the Orange Order at times becomes almost irresistible. The pantomime costumes, the pinched, sour faces and pretend `dignity', which have almost invariably been accompanied by screeching and extremely undignified camp-followers, and the professed godliness of its members contrasts with the profoundly unchristian nature of both its ideology and practices.

The leadership, too, can very easily be held up as figures of fun. Harold Gracey, for example, as he lapsed into spoonerisms in his frustration, speaking of ``brim and firestone'' during his speech after the march, and the fatuous, hyperbolic exhortations of Robert Saulters at the barrier, daring to compare his own discredited cause with victims of genocide. A more honest comparison would have been with Augusto Pinochet or Slobadon Milosovich, both of whom in their fall from power have been quite shameless in their determination to present their reduced circumstances as victimisation. But then, neither Saulters nor the Order would recognise a truly oppressed people if it were beaten off the road in front of their eyes in order to facilitate one of their marches.

But Saulter's language, like previous years, whilst farcical, was that of nihilistic desperation as well as of perverted victimhood. And therein lies the danger, because although they may be hamstrung in Drumcree, there is the distinct likelihood that this suppressed tendency to violence will seep out to express itself elsewhere over the coming days and weeks. Nevertheless, the subdued nature of this year's march may have led many, particularly in the media, to lose their memories. The Order's apologists were keen to lard it with praise, hailing its members as ``Men of Peace'', but in doing so they forgot several important things, which, as I say, despite the temptation to view the Order with a degree of amusement, some of us have not.

One, the previous tactics of these so-called Men of Peace have led directly to the deaths of at least seven people, including three small children. None of these deaths has brought any admission of the part played by the Order or indeed any expression of genuine sorrow.

Two, the residents of the Garvaghy Road are still forced to live in constrained, virtually intolerable conditions - not only during Drumcree itself, when the perimeters of the area resemble a battle zone - but also for the rest of the year when they have to live and work without any protection. Thanks largely to the Orange Order, Portadown has a uniquely poisonous sectarian atmosphere with a corresponding assault and murder rate and the effective exclusion of the Catholic population from the civic and social life of the town.

Three, in respect of Drumcree itself, the Orange Order and its supporters don't actually have much choice but to behave themselves. There are thousands of British military personnel in Portadown, including the Paras (whose maroon berets, incidentally, inspire the same kind of dubious, idolatrous devotion amongst their wearers as that displayed by the wearers of orange sashes). Loyalist paramilitaries only care to operate when the odds are stacked overwhelmingly in their favour and when the British military are holding their hand. Helpless Catholics like Ciarán Cummings are their preferred targets.

Four, such praise for the Order ignores the relentless violence against Catholics which continues to occur away from Drumcree, orchestrated by associates in the UDA, none of which has attracted one word of condemnation from the likes of Harold Gracey or Robert Saulters.

The Order has not experienced a change of heart; it has merely suffered a defeat at Drumcree, but its belief in its own righteousness and right to assert its supremacy over Catholics is immovable. Its false invocation of the language of human rights merely represents a new tactic which is as equally dishonest as any adopted in the past. It is merely trying to get its way by other means, although even still it is too stubborn and too stupid to realise that its best chance lies in the easiest option of all - talking.

 

`A slap in the face'



BY LAURA FRIEL

Racists seek to marginalise the object of their contempt while at the same time adopting extravagant justifications for their own misguided stance.

In Britain, for example, despite clear statistical evidence that identifies Black and Asian communities as suffering from the greatest deprivation and discrimination, the white racist will often cite the myth that ``blacks are taking all the jobs''.

This week, in a similar parody of the truth, Orangemen protesting at Drumcree also sought to portray themselves as the oppressed underdog struggling to defend human and civil rights.

It's nonsense, of course, but also a very potent and dangerous nonsense in that it targets for further attack the already beleaguered nationalist community of the Garvaghy Road.

Standing at the barrier near the grounds of Drumcree Church, Orange Grand Master Robert Saulters described the decision to reroute the Orange march away from the nationalist Garvaghy Road as `evil'.

``We in the Orange Order are good men, fighting a great evil,'' said the Grand Master, referring to Edmund Burke. The Orange Order is ``facing the evil that confronts us, the evil that denies us the fundamental human right to walk away from our church on a Summer Sunday morning''.

Addressing lines of Orangemen, dressed in their collarettes and carrying Orange Order banners, Saulters accused the Parades Commission of ``innate prejudice against the Protestant community'' and of ``cowardly and craven appeasement'' of republicanism.

``This may not be a battle we win today but we can, and we will, continue to fight for the restoration of our fundamental human rights,'' said Saulters. ``A defeat for us on this quiet country road in the beautiful county of Armagh is a defeat for democracy worldwide.''

The blocking of the parade route was ``a slap in the face for enslaved people everywhere and a pat on the back for those who advocate apartheid and genocide,'' concluded Saulters.

There are over 3,000 Orange marches every year in the north of Ireland and despite the fundamental anti-Catholic ethos of the Order, only a handful of these marches have ever been challenged by nationalist communities. Regardless of extreme provocation, which has often included persistent sectarian abuse and attack by Orangemen and their supporters, nationalists have never sought to ban but only to reroute these contentious parades away from nationalist areas.

But through the Orange prism, any resistance to the supremacists' right to `walk the Queen's highway' appears intolerable. To Robert Saulters, it is tantamount to `genocide'. Acknowledgement of, let alone respect for, the wishes of their Catholic neighbours are anathema to Orangemen.

Steeped in the distortion of domination, for the Orange Order the prospect offered by the Good Friday Agreement of sharing a future with fellow Catholic citizens in equality and mutual respect appears as `slavery', while to uphold the right of nationalist communities to live free from sectarian harassment by rerouting contentious parades is to `advocate apartheid'. This rabble rousing self-righteous claptrap is all the more distasteful beside the real suffering and pain it evokes by way of justification.

This week, Washington State will decide whether a former Klansman, Bobby Frank Cherry, is competent to stand trial for his part in the killing of four Black American schoolchildren in 1963. An accomplice of Cherry's, Thomas Blanton Jr., was convicted of murder earlier in the year and is currently serving a life sentence.

Denise McNair (11) and three other girls, all 14, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, died when a bomb exploded outside a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The attack by white supremacists took place during a week of demonstrations challenging Birmingham's racist segregation laws of the time. The church on Sixteenth Street was targeted because it was a venue used by civil rights activists.

Three years ago in the north of Ireland a similar tragic scenario was visited upon three small Catholic boys. A fourth, their eldest brother, escaped death because he chose to stay away and sleep at his grandmother's home that night.

Richard Quinn was ten years of age and his brothers Mark and Jason, were just nine and eight when, at the height of that year's protest at Drumcree, loyalist supporters of the Orange Order firebombed their home.

In the early hours of 12 July 1998, Christine Quinn, a Catholic with a Protestant partner, woke to the cries of her three children but the fire was already raging out of control. Neighbours later testified hearing the children screaming as they were burnt alive.

The Quinns had returned to Ballymoney, a predominantly loyalist estate in North Antrim, just six days earlier. It later emerged that five other Catholic families living on the Carnany estate had received loyalist death threats shortly before the attack. After the sectarian murder of the three Quinn children, all five families fled.

With the honourable exception of William Bingham, an Orange Order Chaplain who condemned the killings unequivocally, pronouncing, ``no road was worth the life of a child'', the Order refused to acknowledge any culpability in the attack.

Within hours of the boys' charred remains being removed from the house, DUP leader and affiliated Orangeman Ian Paisley stood outside and denied the killings had been sectarian. He suggested a family connection with the illicit drug trade.

Two years earlier, standing on Drumcree hill, Paisley had told thousands of protesting Orangemen that they were ``fighting for the promise of the life to come and that's worth fighting for and that's worth dying for''.

A few hours later, on a lonely country road, 31-year-old Catholic Michael McGoldrick did just that. He did not die supporting Ian Paisley's right to march down the Garvaghy Road but in a ``retaliatory'' action by a loyalist death squad. Paisley's silence was deafening.

And this year it was the turn of David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist and former First Minister, an Orangeman who secured his political leadership on the back of the Orange Order's 1995 Protest at Drumcree.

Two weeks ago, as the last act carried out as First Minister before his resignation, David Trimble petitioned the Parades Commission in support of a contentious Orange Order march through nationalist West Belfast.

His first act after resignation was to marginalize the sectarian killing of a young Catholic, 19-year-old Ciaran Cummings, shot dead by a loyalist hit squad as he waited for a lift to work. Within hours of the shooting, separate callers to a Belfast newsroom claimed the Red Hand Defenders and the Orange Volunteers had carried out the attack. A flag of convenience used by the UDA and LVF, the RHD claimed the teenager had been killed because of Sinn Féin electoral success in the area.

Speaking on RTE radio 24 hours after the shooting, Trimble denied loyalist involvement and claimed there was ``good reason'' to believe that republicans were responsible for the Cummings killing. ``I know that, yesterday a statement came from one of these loyalist dissident groups, but there's good reason to suspect that republicans were behind the Antrim murder,'' he claimed. ``It goes back to drugs. A number of murders of Catholics by republicans have been people who haven't been sharing the profits of their business with the republicans in the way they fell they ought to.''

It was a lie and a stupid lie, which public ridicule later forced Trimble to retract.

Questioned about the nightly attacks on Catholics in their homes, Trimble diminished northern nationalists' experience of repeated sectarian attacks and sought to blame republicans. ``The republican movement itself has been responsible for raising tensions in Belfast, particularly in North Belfast over the last few weeks.''

And this is not the first time David Trimble has tried to shift the blame away from loyalist violence. In March 1999, after a bomb exploded under the car of Lurgan defence lawyer Rosemary Nelson, Trimble commented that the device used was ``typical of the type used by the IRA.''

In his response to the killing of Ciarán Cummings, David Trimble sought to marginalise the teenager's death in a way that would diminish the implications of the killing for his own political ends.

The extravagant outpourings of self righteous anger at being rerouted away from the nationalist Garvaghy Road stand in sharp contrast to the Orangemen's lack of empathy and denial of compassion when faced with sectarian violence carried out in the name of Drumcree. At the heart of this moral dichotomy stands a profoundly sectarian vision and the hegemony of the Orange state.


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