EDITORIAL
The British murder machine WHEN the brutality and arrogance of the British authorities were already undermining the attempts of Irish bourgeois politicians to collaborate in repressing revolutionary nationalists, the imperialist forces demonstrated unmistakably that they are still following a policy of field executions.
Three IRA volunteers - Daniel McCann, Sean Savage and Mairead Farrell — were gunned down on March 6 in Gibraltar, where they had gone on a military mission. Subsequent reports in the British press made it clear that the imperialist services had had them under surveillance for a long time. The operation was described as follows by an eyewitness, Mrs. Celecia, who was quoted in the March 13 Guardian Weekly.
* was watching a couple walking down the road in the direction of the border. when I saw a blond man come up behind them and without any warning, he shot at them. The woman, who was carrying a large shoulder bag fell to the ground immediately. The young man...staggered towards the service station. The man fired at him four or five times more and he collapsed with blood all over the place." Then she said a police car roared up and took the killer away at high speed. This was clearly a "counterinsurgency" assassination, and no police operation. It was exactly the same sort of thing as the incidents of the so-called shoot-to-kill policy which set off an outcry some years ago and led to the Stalker affair when the Northern Irish police tried to cover it up. In those cases, not only were republicans known to the imperialist forces shot out of hand, but a boy with no political connections was assassinated when he happened to walk near an IRA arms dump.
In response to questions raised by left Labour MPs and the Irish government about the shootings, Thatcherite politicians and the English gutter press have been whipping up a lynch-mob feeling against "Irish terrorists," in fact, against all Irish people who refuse to lie down. In so doing, they once again exposed the fact that they have no interest in a negotiated settlement, only in crushing Irish national aspirations. That opens the way for a new broadening of the anti-imperialist movement. But it also shows what the Irish people are up against: an imperialist murder machine forged in genocide. International solidarity with the Irish people also has to be revived and widened.