Hatred of troops grows

HATRED for the British Army is welling up among Catholic workers of N Ireland after the brutal military clamp-down in Belfast's Falls Road slum area.

Some of the women who broke through into the curfew area around the Falls Road to hand over food supplies and newspapers to friends and relatives forced to stay • indoors.

Catholics

defenceless' BELFAST Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt saw Tory Home Secretary Reginald Maudling yesterday and told him 'many Catholics teel they are now completely disarmed and defenceless in the event of attack from extreme Protestant organizations'.

After a six-hour gunbattle in the Falls on Friday night, soldiers sealed off the area and Took away hundreds of small arms, ammunition and explosives, disarming the Catholics in the face of the highly-organized and well-armed Ulster Volunteer Force, many of whom are Paisleyite ex-B Specials.

Arrested and detained nearly 300 people. • Smashed up furniture, walls and floors in the course of arms searches. • Imposed a 36-hour curfew. • Gave rise to widespread charges of looting and brutality.

In two 'relief marches' on Sunday, women and children from surrounding areas marched 3,000-strong into the beleagured Fait in five to bfing loud, nurspapers and support to the people there.

They defied a government ban on processions to march into the Falls and shouted abuse at the British troops. The troops dared not intervene to stop them.

DAMAGE

In the aftermath of the military invasion, housewives and workers took reporters round their homes to demonstrate the extent of the damage done by the troops.

In many of the houses gas pipes were ripped out, walls smashed by rifle butts, beds upturned and broken and floorboards torn up.

Women and children who returned to the Falls on Sunday after being evacuated found that many of their menfolk had been arrested.

While the army clamps down on the Catholics of Belfast, the Orange Order is allowed to continue its provocative preparations for the July 12 marches.

No action is contemplated against the pro-Paisley • Ulster Volunteer Force, which is armed to the teeth only a few hundred yards from the Falls.

The Socialist Labour League, through the Workers Press and Newsletter Predecesos 'The has consistently warned against the troops' role and demanded their instant withdrawal.

On August 16, just after the

troops were sent in, "The Newsletter' stated:

It is necessary to organize the maximum mobilization to force Wilson to withdraw the troops immediately.' On August 19 we warned:

"The British troops are there to carry out a policy of repression. That is why the campaign of the Socialist Labour League and "The Newsletter" to demand the withdrawal of these troops is now decisive.' Since thát time, as is well known, the Socialist Labour League and the Young Socialists have campaigned ceaselessly for the withdrawal of troops.

No other political tendency can match this principled Trotskyist stand.

When the troops were sent in during August, their presence was welcomed by the revisionists of the International Socialism group.

Their paper Socialist Worker' (August 21, 1969) announced that The deployment of British troops in Ulster provides some sort of security against the lawlessness of the RUC and the B Specials'.

The intervention, according to these unprincipled revisionists, provided a temporary breathing space in which the defences of the Catholic community can be strengthened'.

The cowardly and treacherous opportunism of the 'state capitalists' has now rebounded full in their faces.

The British troops openly continuing the work of the B Specials, aided by the illusions sown by revisionism.

If the Catholics of the Falls Road now face repression under very unfavourable circumstances, those who welcomed the British troops last year and betrayed Marxist principles on this fundamental question bear a full measure of responsibility. informed by the Army's service, but were for trainBernadette Devlin