BY MICK DERRIG

There's a spiritual crisis in the RUC. I tell you, I'm worried about them. They feel let down and betrayed.

Perhaps we should arrange for them to go on a pilgrimage - no, wait a minute. A trip to the Holy Land is what they need! For in Jerusalem they will find their history. It will help them put it into perspective and then - perhaps - move on.

     
History moves on, times change, only the minor functionaries of the colonial state are left to take it personally and get impotently bitter
There they are in ordered rows. In their own little corner that is forever Kipling's Britain - the colonial Brit of sterling tale - the Colonial Policeman. The Palestine Police - fittingly - have their own graveyard- for they never belonged to the place.

The British-run Palestine Police fought a vicious campaign against a vicious Zionist enemy at the end of WWII.

Top of the Palestine Police's most wanted list was Menachim Begin, leader of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The Irgun prosecuted their war against the British with ruthless efficiency. In 1946, Begin's unit bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing over 100 people.

Begin also taught the British a lesson in reprisals. The day that the British hangman did his work on a young Zionist, two British Army sergeants held captive for the purpose were taken and slowly hanged with piano wire in an orange grove.

The only reason Menachim Begin survived into old age was that the British couldn't catch him.

The Palestinian Police also sought simultaneously to control the Palestinian people, who wanted rid of the Brits but who didn't want to become chattels in a sectarian Jewish State (which is, of course, what happened).

The Palestine Police died in a war that was - given the realpolitik that was sweeping Westminster at time about the region - futile.

A central tenet of any colonial police force, especially those locally recruited from a loyal tribe, is that they are totally expendable.

History moves on, times change, only the minor functionaries of the colonial state are left to take it personally and get impotently bitter.

Thirty years after fighting the British and beating them, the young Irgun leader was Prime Minister Begin of Israel. The leader of the right-wing Likud Party, he formed the government of Israel from 1977 until 1983.

As he arrived in London on a state visit he had the obnligatory afternoion tea with the queen - the Palestinian Policemen's queen. Outside Buckingham Palace stood the old comrades of the fallen in Britain's war in Palestine. The old men looked discarded and ignored. They were.

Just to rub it in to these old colonial soldiers - it seemed to them - they gave Begin the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, a prize he shared with Anwar Sadat for the Camp David Agreements. Of course, dishing out the Nobel Prize to the man who had gone through their comrades like a bad curry wasn't any act of vindictiveness to the maemory of the Palestinian Police. The Palestinian Police didn't matter in 1946 - they certainly didn't matter after they had been disbanded - and disbanded they were. They weren't the only ones that the British administration in Palestinian discarded. The Palestine Police used both Jews and Arabs and left them to an uncertain fate when they finally pulled out. Unwanted, unconsidered.

For some time, though, a stint in the Palestinian Police was a career maker. As long as you didn't take it personal and realise that you were there to stiff natives at the behest of the big boys in London.

A young English Palestine Police commander who made a name for himself around Nablus was later to become the top copper in another British colony - the last British colony. RUC Chief Constable Kenneth Newman transformed the Six-County ``force'' from hick B-Specials to hi-tech assassins. The common thread was their relationship to the nationalist community - the natives. Whether it was old Webleys or HMSUs, their role was to make croppie lie down, and stay there. Newman was always reticent about his Palestine days - but his experiences there came out in the way he directed his men to deal with the wogs of the Creggan.

The embodiment of colonial rule and the settler identity is found in the Colonial Police officer. He marks the territory between human and native - because natives are not fully human. You know them by their names, Yids, Wogs, Chinks, and Fenians.

Franz Fanon wrote of the psychological significance to the native of the police station, with its foreign flag reminding the colonised person that they are squatters in their own land. The foreignness of the police is central to constructing - within the mind of the colonised and the coloniser - the status of native and settler.

Basically, no colonial police, no natives, no colony.

The construction of colonial policing is central to the construction of what it means to be British over the last 300 years. As the empire was developing, the British themselves realised that within Britain there needed to be another form of policing that would produce docile, but industrious plebs. Feudalism could afford to kill off peasants in the fields - capital needed labour and lots of it. Not in a seasonal fashion, but everyday in the factory. Controlling them had to become non-lethal.

Thus it is an irony here in Ireland that we refer to the RUC as ``peelers''. For that is exactly what they are not. Peel's reforms in law enforcement in Britain came at the end of a period when the British state realised that they would need to move on from essentially placing British cities under martial law every now and then.

The ``Peterloo'' massacre in Manchester in 1819 was a grisly debâcle in which 11 people were killed and 500 wounded. A peaceful crowd had turned up to hear radical speakers demand change to parliament. Enter stage right the B-Specials on horseback. Locally recruited, part-time cavalry, called the yeomanry, charged into the crowd. The site of the slaughter was St. Peter's Fields and the incident took its name from Waterloo four years earlier.

The British government decided then that there had to be a graduated response from the state. Robert Peel, the British Home Secretary, was decisive. The unarmed copper - The Peeler - was born.

In Ireland, another model of policing was developed. Ireland was a colony. Despite the fiction of the act of Union, it wasn't and never was Britain. Here, the population were natives. Or, of course, settlers. Here, the big house were they live has always been called ``the Barracks'' - a fortified strongpoint constantly on guard against attack, native attack. In the settler worldview, the native people were constantly suspected, always prone to rebellion, never to be trusted.

The relationship between the police and the community is at the core of this difference between Britain and its colonial possessions. In Britain, an unarmed police force enforced the law by consent. In the colonies, the natives were held down by force or by the threat of force.

The existence of a colonial police force announced to the world of its lack of legitimacy among the subject people who they oppressed. Young Newman earned his stripes in a wild colonial war and then honed anti-rebellion strategies in Britain's last colony, the Six Counties.

His time at the police version of the army's Sandhurst - Bramshill - brought home colonial policing to Britain. The black communities of London and Liverpool were made the natives of England's new post-war internal colonies. The new hi-tech colonial policemen played wargames where the Scots and the Welsh were constructed as natives to be crushed and controlled at some future date - perhaps. Better to be ready.

Britain's last great act of decolonisation was, of course, Hong Kong. Chris Patten can recognise a colonial police force when he sees one.

Did the Palestinian Police die in vain?

Yes.

The graveyard is but a short walk from the Wailing Wall.

``Some traditions are not worthy of respect''

By Ned Kelly

The mounting Unionist campaign to `save the RUC' was given voice at a rally in the Ulster Hall in Belfast on Saturday, 18 September. Speakers included bogus human rights activist Vincent McKenna, ex-RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon, Ulster Unionist Assembly member Sir John Gorman and editor of the Daily Telegraph Charles Moore.

Hermon, who presided over the RUC during the height of the shoot-to-kill campaign in 1982 and the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, bullishly warned against backing the changes called for in the Patten Report into policing before the Assembly was functioning completely.

He also stated that the appointment of an overseer to monitor RUC reforms from outside Britain and Ireland was ``unrealistic and unnecessary''.

The ex-RUC boss, who was roundly praised for blocking Orange parades through the nationalist Obins Street in Portadown as an example of the success of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, also attacked the formation of a new Policing Board to replace the old Police Authority. Hermon also attacked the Patten Report for describing the RUC as ``defenders of the state'' as opposed to ``upholders of law and order''.

Catholic Ulster Unionist John Gorman, a former RUC District Inspector, said there was ``much in the report that no reasonable person could disagree with'' but that it was premature. Revealingly, he added that it was not the job of the RUC to respect traditions and that ``some traditions are not worthy of respect''.

It was clear that the rally, organised by the `Friends of the Union', drew heavily on anti-Agreement unionism and the resounding message was that no changes to the culture, ethos or symbols of the RUC will ever be acceptable to those attempting to bring down the Good Friday Agreement.

The central issue of the need to change the culture and ethos of a force that is distinctly anti-nationalist, echoes the willingness of some to pursue an anti-democratic agenda that sees the 150,000 Sinn Féin voters as part of a ``tradition not worthy of respect''.