Belfast: Basra or Mosul?

Who amongst us doesn't like to ponder a comparison of the IRA with other terrorist groups? Dean Godson, biographer of David Trimble and previous advocate of the right comparator being Hezbollah or al Qaeda has a new one in the Times of London today: the domestic Islamist fringe in England. He refers in particular to the government's efforts to get Sinn Fein to buy into the Police Service of Northern Ireland:

Terrorist convictions will cease to be a bar to serving on local policing committees as non-elected representatives ... Sinn Fein/IRA are pressing for the scrubbing of paramilitary criminal records so that republicans can serve in the regular force and part-time reserve: the Government says it has "no plans" to do this, scarcely a reassuring form of words. This is contrary to the spirit and letter of Patten [1990s police reform report]. Then there is the negotiation to expand funding of some of the "restorative justice" programmes — community schemes for bringing criminals face to face with their victims — that are effectively run by paramilitaries ... Only in the bizarre, Kafkaesque world of the Ulster (sic) peace process could such a settlement be deemed a "prize" ...

At his press conference of July 25 Mr Blair sought to contrast the Provisionals’ campaign favourably with that of Islamist radicals. He complains that one of the problems with al-Qaeda is that it has few concrete demands: its objectives are so airy-fairy. By contrast, republicans have clear goals that the Government can propitiate. If radical Muslims shave down their aspirations and simply ask, say, for a substantial degree of autonomy in their "own" neighbourhoods based on Sharia — well, who knows what doors may open?

Leaving aside the validity of this analogy, he's picked the wrong time to be selling it. For the big story in Northern Ireland policing this summer has been the carte orange granted to Loyalist extremists in the pursuit of their "internal" feuds. Today's Irish Times (subs. req'd) nicely collects together the body count so far, and the complete lack of government response:

The Northern Ireland Office has rejected a claim by SDLP leader Mark Durkan that Northern Secretary Peter Hain is adopting an indifferent attitude to recent [Ulster Volunteer Force] UVF killings ... Since July 1st four Protestant men were murdered in Belfast in the reignited UVF-LVF [Loyalist Volunteer Force] feud. The UVF was blamed for all of these killings. The funeral of the fourth person to be killed in the feud, 42-year-old Michael Green, took place yesterday. His family insisted he had no involvement with the LVF. The UVF has stated that it will continue attacks on people allegedly associated with the LVF and will not end the killing until the LVF is "wiped out" or disbanded.

Farcically, despite this explicit threat, the UVF is still considered to be on ceasefire. Now that's Kafkaesque! And the apparent compromises here seem messier than anything the Shinners want -- the latter at least seem to understand the need for some kind of sequencing in which one's criminal record is cleansed before working for the police. But as reported by Slugger O'Toole, it appears that the police aren't moving against the UVF and LVF goons because so many of them are police informers.

Hence our title. If anything, the UK government seems to have an Iraq-style division of Northern Ireland's militias into good ones and bad ones. The "good militias," the Kurds, run an orderly operation and stay out of the news. The "bad militias," the Shiites are a tad hot-headed and are best left to sort themselves out before any awkward official intervention. Not that we're predicting that any Sinn Fein tourists will be found observing the peace process in Kurdistan anytime soon.