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44 Crime L. & Soc. Change 181 (2005)
'An effective mask for terror': Democracy, death squads and Northern Ireland

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc44 and id is 181 raw text is: Crime, Law & Social Change (2005) 44: 181-203 DOI: 10.1007/s10611-006-9007-7 © Springer 2006 'An effective mask for terror': Democracy, death squads and Northern Ireland BILL ROLSTON Sociology Department, University of Ulster, Jordanstown BT37 OQB, Northern Ireland (e-mail: wj.rolston@ulster.ac.uk) Abstract. Defining terrorism solely as anti-state activity is in the ascendant in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet the existence of death squads - paramilitary groups involved in state-sponsored or state-tolerated terror against political opponents - reveals that the state can also be terrorist. Most commonly, death squads exist in non-democratic states, and most of the literature on death squads focuses on such societies. This article seeks to examine the circumstances in which death squads and democracy can coexist, looking specifically at the case of loyalist paramilitary violence and state collusion in Northern Ireland. Introduction: The murder of a solicitor In 1979, Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane was shot dead by a unit of a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).1 The death had been ominously prefigured three weeks earlier by a statement in the British parliament by Home Office minister Douglas Hogg, shortly after he had met the chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC): 'I have to state it as a fact, but with great regret, that there are in Northern Ireland a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA'.2 As a result of this high-level intervention, the UDA was in effect given a green light not only to kill Finucance but also to justify it on the grounds that he was a member of the insurgent group, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Finucane had indeed successfully defended a number of clients who were high-profile republicans, but he was a lawyer, not a combatant. From the start, his family and human rights activists alleged collusion in his death, that is, collaboration between state security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. In time, investigative journalism, and a number of trials, in- vestigations and inquiries confirmed the substance of these allegations. The murder had been set up by Brian Nelson, intelligence officer of the UDA, as well as a British army agent run by the shadowy counter-terrorist unit the Force Research Unit (FRU). Not only did FRU plant Nelson in the heart of the UDA, but it organised and updated the paramilitary group's files, thus making their targeting more effective. The UDA quartermaster who provided the guns for Finucane's murder, William Stobie, was an RUC Special Branch