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Editorial Another Drumcree victim

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The murder of Northern Ireland human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson has cast a pall over this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic. The booby-trap car bomb that killed her Monday deprived a young family of a mother. But it is also robbed those in North Armagh who have been fighting for justice of a valiant defender in their quest for equality of treatment before the law.

For years, Nelson stood with the harassed and intimidated people of Garvaghy Road as they protested their opposition to the Orange marches that year after year were forced upon them. In her last interview, published in the Irish News of Belfast on the very day of her cowardly murder, she addressed the issue of Drumcree in her usual forthright manner. She pointed out that although thousands of Orange protesters continued to flout the law by remaining on the hill near Drumcree church, there had been very few arrests.

"The law has been openly flouted," she said. "We do not have ‘two sides equally intransigent,’ as is often said. We have a nationalist community trapped, living in a village on the edge of a town. It is not about conflicting rights here, it is about the rule of law."

At the time of her death, she was representing the family of Robert Hamill, a young Catholic kicked to death by a mob of loyalist bigots while the police allegedly failed to intervene. She had also been the lawyer for prominent republican Colin Duffy, and successfully represented him against serious charges involving the murder of policemen and other local members of the security forces.

Undoubtedly, her opinions and activities made her many enemies in an area — North Armagh — where enemies are easily made. In 1997, her complaints about police harassment were the subject of a UN-sponsored investigation that found substance to the allegations that certain officers had attempted to intimidate lawyers representing republican suspects.

Her case — and her fate — bear a sinister resemblance to that of another human rights lawyer, Patrick Finucane, who fell victim to the assassin’s bullet just over 10 years earlier. Finucane’s brutal murder was accompanied by allegations of collusion between the intelligence services and the loyalist death squads. Even though an official investigation, headed by a police officer from outside the Royal Ulster Constabulary, found there was not sufficient evidence to justify the allegations, a large doubt remains, and many questions have gone unanswered.

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This must not be allowed to happen in the case of Rosemary Nelson. Already, the chief constable of the RUC, Ronnie Flanagan, has appointed a high-ranking English officer from Kent to head the investigation into her murder and has requested the participation of the FBI to ensure that the inquiry will have an international dimension.

There have been too many murky murders in the North Armagh area over the years, raising questions of the complicity of members of the locally recruited security forces. Rosemary Nelson’s must not become another one. The search for answers must be pursued objectively and fearlessly.

Nationalists’ fears are real and not the product of paranoia. The British government has to show that the days are long past when sectarian killers can rely on the tolerance — or even assistance (however low level it might be) — of sympathetic members of the security forces. If the Good Friday peace agreement is to mean anything, it must mean that nationalists can trust the law to be administered fairly on their behalf. Without that guarantee, upon which all else rests, the agreement is little more than wishful thinking and will be dismissed as a public relations experiment that foundered on the rock of Northern Ireland’s ugly sectarian realities.

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