Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis
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found out the tracer bullets came from the B-Specials, a police auxiliary that was disbanded in 1970, firing randomly.14 Yet he admits, “I don’t think the people on the Falls had anticipated such a high level of reaction. Like Bombay Street, and all that, they hadn’t anticipated that, they hadn’t realized the kind of tensions that was stewing within the loyalist community.”
The full-scale fighting ended when the British Army was deployed into the streets. Nationalists initially welcomed them as protectors, but this was not to last. Hugh says that, on the loyalist side of the barricades, “I think when the army came in, they seen the damage that was done in the nationalist areas and seen us as the aggressors. And were fairly hostile towards the loyalist community in the early stages…. [T]here was [a] level of hostility, that the soldiers wanted to teach the Protestant community a lesson. Not only was the first policeman shot [by loyalists], but there was two loyalist casualties shot dead. Those were the early impacts.” Meanwhile, for Kevin, who joined PIRA, the horror of those few days was clear evidence that civil rights reforms were insufficient: “When you see agents of the law breaking the law, actually cutting people down, murdering people, there’s no way the state can be reformed. So … there was a stampede to the IRA.” Later events, such as internment in 1971 and Bloody Sunday in 1972, led to further recruitment to the new republican paramilitary group, PIRA.
Entire streets where nationalists once lived were burned down; in Bombay Street, forty-four houses inhabited by Catholics were destroyed. The mixed area between the districts of the lower Falls and lower Shankill was replaced by a barricade. In September 1969, the state built the first “peace line,” a wall between the Falls and Shankill areas, replacing barricades set up by residents. In the following months, people living as minority members of districts fled to the safety of communities homogeneous to themselves. In 1970, disturbances rocked upper Springfield, and there were shifts of population in the newer, more westerly estates. Another wave of violence followed the reintroduction of internment in August 1971, and the few remaining mixed areas were subsumed into homogeneous communities. Outbreaks of intimidation continued sporadically in certain areas, such as Lenadoon.
Population movement in the city during the 1970s was the largest in Europe since World War II (that is, until Yugoslavia fragmented). While hatred was a component of these conflicts, it must be remembered that many people were simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violence and that, as perpetrators, people were also motivated by fear and a desire for the safety of communally homogeneous zones.
The Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission (NICRC), a short-lived state agency, conducted research into population movement in the 1969–1973 period, and found state records for the movement of 8,000 families.15 Furthermore, the commission concluded that in total about 15,000 families were displaced in greater Belfast, by studying additional data from informal relief organizations (NICRC 1974: App. K). The commission estimated that 8 percent of Belfast’s population had been displaced. Although figures vary somewhat, rough estimates show that, in the first wave of displacements in 1969, the communal breakdown among the displaced was approximately 80 percent nationalist, 20 percent loyalist (Poole 1971; NICRC 1974: 59); and, in the second wave in 1971–1972, 60 percent nationalist, 40 percent loyalist (NICRC 1974: 59).
In the context of the street-by-street communities, expulsion came as a crushing betrayal, at once severing bonds and calling into question their prior sincerity. One research participant, “Cheryl,” had been displaced to a newer loyalist estate on the edges of the Shankill. She kept a photo of her family home in Ardoyne, taken as they fled in the second wave of displacements in 1971; the photo showed mostly smoke and flame, giving little sense of the house itself. Her loss was not of a house but of an entire way of life and childhood friends and neighbors. “We would have been put into a back bedroom,” she explains, describing the actions taken during violent episodes, “with mattresses and beds against the windows. Because friends of ours that we’d grew up with were stoning the windows and there was shooting up the street. Stuff like that, you know. So you’re talking five children lying in a room, you know, screaming, with their mother and their father downstairs, trying to make sure nobody’s going to get in any of the doors, you know. I mean we weren’t the only family that experienced it. Everybody in that area [did].”
Like many others who fled, her father set the fire that destroyed their home as they left. Such an action is unsympathetic on its face, but the NICRC assessed the practice in a more sensitive fashion: “To give up a home where one has lived for years, and which is in itself a symbol of security, for the insecurity of squatting, which many did, is an act of desperation: to damage one’s home on leaving, or allow others to do so, is an act of despair” (NICRC 1971: 1).
Direct assaults, like the burning of Bombay Street in 1969 or Cheryl’s situation, may have been the most violent means to convince people to flee, but they were hardly the only means. While not burnt out, a few days after the riots in August 1969, “James” was intimidated into leaving his home in an area where he and his wife were part of a Catholic minority. While Cheryl doubted her prior bonds of friendship, in hindsight James was certain he had been naïve to live in a predominantly loyalist area. “There’s a lot of people moved out and I remember friends of mine went out to get a lorry and I sat out, shitting myself, the next day, I think it was the 16th, 17th of August, and I heard the kids in the street shouting, ‘The Fenians are coming, the Fenians are coming,’ and it was all my mates on the back of this lorry, to get me. So it was just, into the house, fuck the furniture out, and very quickly away. Just threw it into the back of this lorry. The house was burned that night.”
Variation in the style of intimidation does not, however, correlate with varying senses of grievance and betrayal. It did not matter how evacuation came about:
The crunch itself, when it does come, has no stereotype. There have been cases where individual families of minority groups have been directly intimidated by marauding mobs; … there has been community pressure of a more subtle nature in many estates; some of the most volatile estates have experienced no pressure against individuals at all…. It is important to observe that the effects of general violence can be every bit as intimidating as the gunmen standing at the door. (NICRC 1974: 71)
Those who remained were subject to sanctions for nonconformity, such as tarring and feathering or punishment beatings or shootings. The ugly side of solidarity was never far from the surface. Sadly, the NICRC report’s conclusion still sometimes rings true today: “This is pressure against any non-conformist in the area—the man who criticizes the IRA, or the family which refuses to pay its UDA dues, even the drug addict or the sexually promiscuous. In a desperate search for security, anyone who is not completely conformist is at risk” (72).
Ultimately, memories of prior communities and their imperiled state in the 1970s had ramifications for how people voiced their grievances. The street became not just the place for child’s play, social life, and riots, but also for protest. Although the civil rights movement had marched, organized responses to the violence opened up the streets as a venue for other forms of political protest (as opposed to communal, territorial rioting), and the material conditions that created solidarity—that is, poor housing—became reasons for protests.
Politics on “Our” Streets
Under street-lamps by all the city’s walls, writing gleams: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF…. The city keeps its walls like a diary. In this staccato shorthand, the walls tell of histories and hatreds, shriveled and bleached with age. Qui a terre a guerre, the walls say.
—Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street, 212
Despite his grief at the violence and loss of life, Patrick’s radical PD past still shapes his memory of the period between 1969 and Operation Motorman in 1972 as a time that also contained promise and possibility.16 Before Motorman, he says, everyone was talking, even the defense associations and paramilitary groups. Behind the barricades, Patrick says, a revolution appeared within reach, as grassroots activism emerged on a wide scale. Defensiveness created greater cohesion, as residents stayed out at all hours, minding barricades, watching for assaults, and, more important, talking deep into the morning hours. People wrote and distributed newsletters and pamphlets and formed new organizations. People’s