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Terrorists to be paraded as heroes!

15/08/08

It’s official. Members of one of the most notorious regiments in the British army are to be feted in towns across the Six Counties on their return from fighting Britain’s barbaric war in the Middle East.

Ballymena was this week the first town to be given the dubious honour of hosting a homecoming parade for the Royal Irish Regiment (formerly the Ulster Defence Regiment) with a unanimous vote in favour at council and no objections from nationalist representatives.

Posted to Afghanistan earlier this year as part of the multi-billion pound British-US war effort against one of the poorest populations in the world, unionism’s thugs in uniform will now return to a heroes’ welcome.

Republicans have cause for and will protest on two fronts having heard this news.

Firstly, Britain has no right to parade its soldiers through towns and cities in Ireland. The fact that these soldiers are locally recruited mercenaries in no way lessens the fact that the proposed ‘homecoming parades’ are an exercise in occupation.

The inevitable uncritical and in many cases glowing reportage of them will be an exercise in normalising that occupation.

The RIR, and their predecessors in the UDR, were notorious for terrorising the nationalist communities they were sent out to patrol and have been involved in countless acts of collusion with unofficial unionist death squads. Official receptions for the paid bigots of the regiment would be a slap in the face for all those nationalists who suffered at their hands.

What has come to pass for ‘normality’ in 2008 has seen the Orange Order escalate their marching season whilst their state sanctioned counterparts and public supporters in the RIR will be parading Irish streets glorifying the occupation and the ongoing oil wars.

Secondly, what deeds will these ‘homecoming parades’ be celebrating?

Would it be the bombing to death of 48 civilians, most of them women and children, at a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on July 6?

Or how about the woman who lost eight members of her family, including six children, when a 500lb bomb was dropped on her dilapidated home?

In an article for the New Statesman last month the Australian journalist John Pilger recounted how he interviewed an Afghan headmaster “whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people – his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband”. Another family decimated at the hands of these ‘heroes’.

The Royal Irish Regiment is an integral part of the military coalition that carried out the three above acts of mass murder. In Ireland the evolution of the B specials to the UDR and finally the RIR has been characterised by 40 years of intimidation, violence and murder.

The Anglo–American led military coalition is now dropping record amounts of explosives on Afghanistan. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007.

Very few bother to count the civilian casualties caused by these massive bombs and certainly not the media of the countries doing the bombing.

Therefore, all the flag-waving in the world, in Ballymena or any other town, with the support of politicians or not will not be able to change the fact that the RIR has been involved in two shameful, brutal occupations.

Their parading on Irish streets should be met with the full force of the Irish People’s disgust.

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