BY LAURA FRIEL


Of one thing northern nationalists can be certain. As with the wrangle within unionism in which David Trimble finally surrendered to the anti-Agreement lobby within his own ranks last week, the current bitter and bloody feuding between loyalist paramilitaries will also end with Catholics picking up the price tag.

As Susan McKay of the Tribune acknowledged, "loyalists from both sides of the latest divide predict more violence. They also predict that the violence will turn outwards again as unity is sought in reasserting the common enemy. Any Catholic will do."

Loyalist posters appearing in North Belfast this week proclaimed UDA icon Johnny Adair a criminal. "Guilty," ran the message, "of loose talk, self-profit, drug dealing, gangsterism and demeaning the proud cause of Ulster loyalism." Adair's "only crime", it continued, "was loyalty (to himself)".

Of course, this has always been true. Adair's inability to keep his mouth shut and avoid boasting about how many Catholics he had killed landed him in jail in the mid-1990s. Similarly, drug dealing and gangsterism has become a way of life for members of the UDA.

Adair's journey from loyalist 'hero' to 'traitor' in less then five months is more likely to have been precipitated by his widely acknowledged desire to add 'top' to his epithet 'mad dog'.

Inherent tensions between loyalist paramilitaries spilled into the public consciousness on Friday 13 September, with the killing of LVF leader and close associate of Johnny Adair, Steven Warnock.

According to the media, Warnock's LVF in East Belfast and North Down owed the UDA £100,000 for drug deals. But if the killing was intended to frighten off other loyalists threatening to muscle in on UDA rackets, it was also seen as notice to Adair to curtail his association with the LVF.

The fatal shooting followed an earlier gun attack targeting another associate of Johnny Adair's, Davy Mahood of the UDA. In the wake of the Mahood shooting, three Catholic men were injured in a drive by-loyalist shooting in North Belfast.

Nigel Dodds, DUP Assembly member for North Belfast, later reiterated Mahood's false assertion that the attack against him had been carried out by republicans.

Three days after the Warnock killing, UDA leader Jim Gray survived a gun attack in which he was shot in the face. Gray had been attending Warnock's wake when a lone gunman confronted him.

According to the media, following the Gray shooting, while the UDA leadership plotted revenge, Adair tipped off his associates in the rival LVF. The LVF leadership informed the UDA of the intervention, leaving Adair to play the fall guy.

Citing a catch phrase from a popular television quiz show, graffiti along the Shankill Road declared, "Johnny Adair, you are the weakest link, goodbye".

When Adair was released from jail last May, all six UDA ruling council leaders met him at the gates, but as Rosie Cowan of the British Guardian pointed out, "now it is more likely to be pistols at dawn after five of those commanders unceremoniously dumped him after accusing him of treason" against the organisation. Adair had already ousted the sixth after regaining control of the lower Shankill's notorious C company.

On Wednesday 25 September, the UDA leadership issued a statement expelling the West Belfast commander, who they denounced as an 'agent provocateur' intent on exploiting the rift between the UDA and LVF to pursue his own power agenda.

Adair's loyalist rising star was founded on ignominy, built on ignominy and ended much the same. An early photograph of Adair as a teenager at a neo Nazi rally exposed the soon to be UDA leader as a beer swilling racist in the companion of other glue sniffing thugs.

Since the late 1980s, Adair's name has been linked to dozens of sectarian killings of Catholics. At the height of his killing sprees, Adair's apparent immunity from arrest or prosecution led many to believe, even within his own organisation, that he was acting as a British or Special Branch agent.

In more recent years, within northern nationalist communities Adair will be remembered as a key figure fuelling sectarian violence at interface areas throughout the city, stoking anti-Catholic hatred within his own community to swell his own power base with youthful recruits.

The UDA and its new political wing, the Ulster Political Research Group, also expelled Adair's close associate John White. Curiously, White has always denied being a member of the UDA.

As a sectarian killer, White had been jailed in the mid-1970s for the brutal killing of a nationalist politician and his Protestant friend, Irene Andrews. As well as being shot, Paddy Wilson was stabbed 32 times and his companion 19 times in what the trial judge called "a frenzied attack, a psychotic outburst". At the time, White had told the court that "any Roman Catholic would have done".

The fear is that in an attempt to shore up loyalist unity and distract the rank and file from further internecine feuding, loyalists paramilitaries will escalate sectarian violence and any Catholic will do.

Surviving Adair

BY JIM GIBNEY


So, after 30 years, Johnny Adair is persona non grata to the UDA. What, you may be wondering, has brought about this dramatic outcome, perhaps one of the biggest developments in loyalism since the UVF and UDA ceasefires in late 1994?

Was he expelled because he was leading a peace faction inside the UDA? Every time he has been interviewed by the media, in gaol and since he was recently released, the words 'peace' and 'man of peace' have tripped lightly off his lips.

Was he expelled because of his ambitions to channel his energy in a political direction and join other loyalists like David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson in the northern Assembly after next year's Assembly elections?

Was he expelled because the UDA's 'Inner Council' wants the UDA back on the peace rails and Adair is opposing this? Or perhaps the same 'Council' wants to rein in the loyalist killer gang in Adair's Lower Shankill base and he has to be isolated to make this happen.

Is the UDA leadership trying to stop the attacks on nationalist areas in north Belfast and Short Strand and the bombing campaign against Catholics along the north Antrim coastline by loyalists who support Adair, and Adair's expulsion is needed to publicly signal their disapproval?

Is he a pariah because he is a leading UDA man and the UDA is building a drugs empire that is destroying the lives of working class loyalist teenagers?

Was he expelled because the PSNI's Special Branch, which runs the UDA, thinks he is too dangerous even for them to handle?

Or was he expelled because his associates could no longer bear his fumbling television appearances, with his bulging muscles, tattoo covered arms, dangling ear rings, and reversed baseball cap - in other words, because he is a public embarrassment for loyalism?

If you answered 'No' to all of the above then pat yourself on the back.

Adair's expulsion doesn't signal a 'road to Damascus' conversion by the sectarian leadership and membership of the UDA.

He was ousted because he has been plotting and scheming to take over as 'Supreme Commander' of the UDA. In order for this to happen, he had either to 'persuade', 'cajole' or 'intimidate', Adair-style, the six brigadiers on the UDA's 'Inner Council'. They were having none of that.

He was thrown out because he was establishing links with the Loyalist Volunteer Force, LVF, set up by the notorious Catholic killer, Billy Wright.

He was thrown out because senior UDA men, one a 'brigadier' in East Belfast, Jim Grey, and Bobby Mahood from north Belfast, were recently shot by loyalists. In both shootings, there is a paper trial to Adair's stronghold in the Lower Shankill.

So there is no noble reason for jettisoning Adair. Baser motives are at work, like 'survival'.

Coming as I do from a republican tradition of militarism, which has had its fair share of feuds and personalities whose ego drives them to think they are indispensable to the struggle for freedom and damage it in the process, I can understand why Adair has been removed from his position.

He is a threat to the status quo and the status quo has no intention of rolling over in the face of Adair. Being a member of the UDA's 'Inner Council' brings with it a very comfortable lifestyle.

But of course that is not the whole story. And it would be wrong to dismiss the UDA as nothing more than a mafia type organisation, although it is that as well. In time it might well end up exclusively a criminal group. But it is not that at this moment.

It is important to realise, and this is not a conspiracy theory gone mad, that the UDA, since it was set up in the early '70s, is a puppet of the Crown forces, particularly the RUC/PSNI Special Branch and MI6. It serves their political interests.

There is an abundance of documentary evidence in the public domain to support this view. The most pertinent example is the killing of Pat Finucane. Most of the loyalists involved in this killing were agents of the RUC Special Branch.

It is also important to realise that the political interests of the Special Branch and MI6 doesn't always neatly fit into the British government's interests.

How else can you explain the contradiction between the efforts that John Reid, the British Secretary of State, is putting into pushing the UDA in a political direction while they are involved in widespread sectarian violence which has left many people dead?

How else can you explain the fact that loyalists can kill Catholics with impunity, can wage a three-year-long pogrom using bombs and guns against them and no one is arrested and no houses are raided looking for the pipe bomb factories which are mass producing these lethal devices?

How else can you explain the freedom given by the PSNI to the UDA as their drug empire steadily grows.

The British government need the UDA for a whole series of reasons but perhaps Johnny Adair has outlived his usefulness to them.

A UDA controlled by Adair would be an altogether different animal than the one we have at the moment. So perhaps the military mandarins inside British intelligence circles have called it a day for Adair.