Editorial A sunless Sicily

The feud between the two largest loyalist paramilitary organizations continues to reach levels of vindictiveness which shock all decent people. It has already claimed three lives. But in the last murder the killers were not content only to kill. A few days later they went to the home where the young man was slain in front of his girlfriend and burned it down.

Actions such as these provoke questions as to the state of the working-class Protestant community in West Belfast where the violence is centered. How is it that a traditionally law-abiding community, proud of its history of hard work and social stability, can so consume itself in such wanton violence?

Years ago, the British government launched a misguided policy called criminalization that was aimed at depriving the IRA and other organizations of any claim that their violence was motivated by political idealism. In the case of the IRA, that policy was a disastrous failure. But in the wake of the latest Protestant violence, it seems that the UDA and the UVF are intent on adopting that policy and criminalizing themselves.

Though the UDA and UVF have genuine disagreements about their respective attitudes to the peace process, the current feud between them has little to do with ideology. It is part of a power struggle being driven by the ego and greed of Johnny Adair, the UDA boss whose provocative behavior has resulted in him being recently reincarcerated in the Maze Prison. In July, Adair was provoking trouble in Drumcree, and threatening to the end the UDA cease-fire — and doing so in full view of the TV cameras. More recently, he was parading in public again with armed men in Belfast.

Behind the scenes he has been turning the section of the UDA he controls into a purely criminal organization whose main activity is drug running and extortion. In the meantime, he has been attempting to use his loyalist credentials as a cover. Fortunately, only a few have been conned.

Adair is merely a symptom, however, of a deeper malaise that afflicts the North. Many people have been brutalized by the years of relentless violence. Powerful paramilitary organizations have taken control of whole areas and are not likely to relinquish that control, whatever the political outcome of the current peace process. Adair’s UDA is not the first paramilitary group to go into "ordinary crime" — the Official IRA went that way in the late 1970s, as did the Irish People’s Liberation Organization (a splinter from the Irish National Liberation Army) in the late 1980s. Paramilitary bosses get used to the easy money. They will kill to keep it flowing. If they have their way, areas of the North could be converted into a kind of sunless Sicily.

Social and community workers have been ringing alarm bells for years now, warning of these developments. It is time the politicians take heed.

In the long term, the only answer is an effective, non-sectarian, and representative police force that is not bound by political considerations in upholding law and order and challenging the rule of the petty mafiosi wherever they appear.