In the Six County bear pit

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THE REPUBLICAN paper An Phoblacht said it well: "Sectarian murder has been the The headline in the Irish Times came close Daniel Rouse was a 51 year old Catholic with three children who was beaten to death last Friday night. It seems to have been Hours after the Darkley killings, a Catholic taxi driver was shot and seriously wounded outside his home in the Catholic Kilwickie estate. The day after Daniel Rouse was killed, a Catholic was seriously wounded by shots from a car as he walked along a Catholic street in mainly-Protestant Portadown, Co. Armagh. The stolen car was later found burned out in the Loyalist CorcYet it would be wrong to use such facts to dull our awareness of the significance of the massacre last Sunday in South Armagh.

South Armagh is Catholic territory, with pockets of Protestants; it is to the Protestants in the Six Counties what Antrim and Down are to the Catholics. Some of the most terrible events of the last 15 years have occurred in South Armagh.

On September 1 1975, for example, five Orangemen were killOn January 4 1976 five Catholics died in two separate incidents at Whitecross in South Armagh and at Ballydougan, near Lurgan. Within 24 hours, ten Protestant workers, travelling home from work, were murdered at Kingsmill. Shortly afterwards Protestant members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (a section of the British Army) killed three Catholic members of the Miami Show Band on the highway. (Some of them accidentalIRA killings of part-time members of the UDR and RUC in the Border region have been going on for over a decade - killings seen as sectarian by the Protestant community. A number of individual Catholics and individual Protestants with no UDR or The horror at Darkley could mean a new escalation of sectarian The polarisation between the communities was, of course, already drum-tight. Nevertheless, things can get a great deal On another page we carry what information we have been able to glean about the current state of affairs in the Irish National Liberation Army, which, officially or unofficially, carThe mentality of the sectarian killers is expressed with chilling clarity in the statement they issued the day after. The deed, the statement said, was done "in retaliation for the murderous sectarian campaign [sic) carried out over the past two years by the Protestant Action Force, who are operating under the protective umbrella of the UDR and recruiting moral support from the two main Unionist parties, which, by their silence, have condoned attacks [on seven men]. By this token retaliation - in which we could easily have taken the lives of at least 20 more innocent Protestants (sic] we serve notice on the sectarian PAF-UDR to call an immediate halt to their vicious indiscriminate campaign against innocent Catholics, or we will make the Darkley killings This is the authentic voice of the self-aware but unashamed politics of community against community. It comes from people calling themselves the 'left' wing of the 'Republican movement'!

Where does it come from really? From the Northern Ireland bearpit. To point to the conditions that give rise to incidents like Darkley is not to excuse the killers or to pretend that they are not her seves resco-sible for their actions. But it should help us if Protestant workers can countenance sectarian killings, and if Catholics subscribing to the great ideals of Republicanism and even socialism can carry out or tolerate Darkleys, it is grim testimony to what the sectarian bearpit Britain set up in Northern Catholics and Protestants alike are locked into permanent conflict within a political unit which broke down a decade and a half ago and which has been sustained since then only through BritThe Catholics are locked into a unit which they know to have been imposed by British power, and within which they have been treated as aliens and second class citizens. The Protestants feel hreatened, insecure, bitter in their desire to win back their Far from ensuring peace, British rule is preparing bloody sectarian civil war of Lebanon proportions. Either the fundamental social/political framework will be changed, or at some point there will be a massive explosion of civil war proportions.

The lesson of Darkley for the British labour movement is that we must commit ourselves to undo the work that Britain has The Six County entity must be scrapped and abolished. Britain must withdraw from Ireland. The labour movement must fight for British withdrawal, and at the same time attempt to help the workers in the Six Counties and throughout Ireland to overcome the sectarian animosities and agree to a rational and democratic This can only be the full exercise of self-determination by the Irish people as a whole in relation to Britain, and as much autonomy as is possible within that for the distinct Protestant community: a united, independent Ireland with some form of federal against the High Court fines and in defence of mass picketing have been thin on the ground since the dispute hit the headlines.

Conspicuous silences have come from miners' leader Arthur Scargill - whose own standing in the NUM was based ont helped nim ass pinkners 'Bells did not toll for Daniel Rouse"

strikes in 1972 and 1974 and Labour's 'dream' leader Neil Kinnock, who eventually a 'retaliation' for the Darkiey Killings. emerged from the. closet on Monday to denounce the Tory laws but stay silent on support for the NGA.

Meanwhile Kinnock's 'dream' deputy Roy Hattersley and his little-known employment rain estate. spokesperson John Smith were Where is the outcry?

making statements which headed in rather a different direction. Smith urged new talks to wind up the Stockport dispute, but declared that Tory laws will have 'ultimately to be accepted by those affected by them' ed at Tullyvallen, near Newtownhamilton.

Hattersley, too, stressed this capitulationist message.

The general principle on which 1 stand, and on whic the Labour Party stands, is that the law must be respected.

Those of us who believe the law to be wrong have to change it ly blew themselves up at the same time). rather than break it. Industrial disputes have to be conducted without violence, and within the law?

RUC connections have also been killed. As a counterweight to this, Eric Heffer, newly appointed to Kinnock's Shadow Cabinet, tit-for-tat slaughter.

made a prepared statement to worse.

ried out the Darkley massacre. the press, stating that:

'I believe that now is the time for all Party members to spring to the defence of the trades unions, and to give every practical support we carin the inside Parliament and labour movement as a whole.' Labour NEC member Dennis Skinner MP added a statement focussing on the evasive role played so far by the TUC leaders.

"The government has for the first time in just under 5 years hegun to show signs of crumbling at the edges. This is not the time for the TUC General Council to give it any opportunity to score further victories over the working class.

But of course this was precisely the trajectory of the TUC eaders, headed once agam by that mostinfluential of nobodies, Len Murray, who has never hald any elected union office, and is now spearheading efforts to reach a deal with Tory union-buster Tom King.

Backing Murray's bootlicking campaign are CPSA leader Alastair Graham and of course right wing veterans Terry Duffy and Bill Sirs, both of whom have in effect told the NGA to pay the fines, by telling them to get 'within the law' if they want TUC support.

Surprisingly forthright in its support of the NGA, however, has been the NALGO Executive, which urged all its members and branches to support NGA picket lines and give financial support to the NGA.

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weapon of the Loyalists seeking to maintain supremacy in the North, not the weapon of those who justifiably fight to free their people from foreign oppression"