British

British Army

As of 2006, the British Army includes roughly 107,730 active members and 38,460 Territorial Army members. Its recent years it has fought in the persian Gulf War (1991), in the Balkans under the UN (1992-present) and currently in Kosovo under KFOR, Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraqi war (2003-present) and in Northern Ireland from 1969; making it the longest military operation in the history of the British Army.

The British army in Northern Ireland

The Troubles

The Ulster troubles began in the late sixties and were to last for over 30 years ending with the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. The troubles claimed the lives of more than 3700 people, with 1 in 50 of N.I. population of 1.5 million being injured in violence. The conflict was between the mainly catholic nationalists and the mainly protestant unionists.

Roots

The troubles were the latest phase in an Anglo-Irish conflict that began some four hundred years earlier, with the tudor wars and plantations of the sixteenth century, although there had been resistance of some sort to the English presence ever since the Normans invaded in the twelfth century. Resistence to occupation went through alternating phases of violence and politics, and each stage brought Ireland a little closer to separation from Britain. The Treaty of 1921, a settlement that paved the way for 26 of Ireland's 32 counties to govern themselves and then, in 1949, to declare themselves a republic left the remnant of the island in the north British.

The protestant's ancestors had planted or colonised native lands so as to make Ireland a safer place for Britain the idea being to make invasion of Protestant England by Catholic France or Spain via Ireland that much more difficult. The Protestant's lived in constant fear of retrubution from the substantial minority of Irish catholics whose land they had taken. They viewed the Catholics with a mixture of fear, ignorance, and hatred. The catholics trapped in a state not of their creation were bitter and resentful having been abondoned by the south after 1921, confronted by arrogant, superior-seeming rulers and subjected to interrmittent salvos of pogram-like violence, they knew they could only look to themselves for protection, and trust only their own. Each community feared and distrusted each other.

Anti-Catholism was built into the state ideology and promoted by its leaders. In the one-party state that was N.I., Catholics routinely found themselves the victims of economic and social discrimation. There was little or no room in the new Northern Ireland state for Catholics. The message was reinforced by occasional sectarian violence. Riots, burning, shootings, and bombings-carried out by mostly Protestant mobs-had been a regular feature of political life in the north of Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century, when Irish nationalists first began to agitate for Home Rule and a degree of separation from Britain. The Protestants with the support of British Consertive leaders in London, organised a private army the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) the first Irish paramilitary group, armed with thousands of rifles smuggled into Ulster from Germany, to oppose Home Rule.

Bloody Sunday

In Derry, on 30 January 1972, 26 civil rights protesters were shot by members of 1st Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment led by Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford and his second-in-command Captain Mike Jackson, who had joint responsibility for the operation; during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march in the Bogside area of the city. Thirteen people, six of whom were minors, died immediately, while the death of another person 4� months later has been attributed to the injuries he received on the day. Two protesters were injured when run down by army vehicles. Many witnesses including bystanders and journalists testify that all those shot were unarmed. Five of those wounded were shot in the back.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army's (PIRA) campaign against Northern Ireland being a part of the United Kingdom had begun in the two years prior to Bloody Sunday, but perceptions of the day boosted the status of and recruitment into the organisation. Bloody Sunday remains among the most significant events in the recent troubles of Northern Ireland, arguably because it was carried out by the army and not paramilitaries, and in full public and press view.

Thirteen people were shot and killed, with another man later dying of his wounds. The official army position, backed by the British Home Secretary the next day in the House of Commons, was that the Paratroopers had reacted to the threat of gunmen and nail-bombs from suspected IRA members. However, all eye-witnesses (apart from the soldiers), including marchers, local residents, and British and Irish journalists present, maintain that soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd, or were aiming at fleeing people and those tending the wounded, whereas the soldiers themselves were not fired upon. No British soldier was wounded by gunfire or reported any injuries, nor were any bullets or nail-bombs recovered to back up their claims. In the rage that followed, irate crowds burned down the British embassy in Dublin. Anglo-Irish relations hit one of their lowest ebbs, with Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Patrick Hillery, going specially to the United Nations in New York to demand UN involvement in the Northern Ireland "Troubles".

When it arrived in Northern Ireland, the British Army was welcomed by Roman Catholics as a neutral force there to protect them from Protestant mobs, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the B-Specials. After Bloody Sunday many Catholics turned on the British army, seeing it no longer as their protector but as their enemy. Young nationalists became increasingly attracted to violent republican groups. With the Official IRA and Official Sinn F�in having moved away from mainstream Irish nationalism/republicanism towards Marxism, the Provisional IRA began to win the support of newly radicalised, disaffected young people.