Keeping the System on Its Knees

Andrew Kearney, known in his Roman Catholic neighborhood as a street fighter, was cradling his 2-week-old daughter on the sofa when eight masked men burst in after midnight.

Kearney was pulled out of his eighth-floor North Belfast apartment, forced face down in the elevator and shot three times--in the ankle and behind each knee--in what has become a trademark form of “punishment” by Irish Republican Army gun squads.

His crime, a bar brawl with an IRA man, did not warrant capital punishment, but one of the bullets hit an artery, and the 33-year-old Kearney bled to death before help arrived.

“They left him to die in an old stinking lift,” Kearney’s mother, Maureen, said in grief.

Raised on 30 years of strife, many of Kearney’s working-class neighbors describe the killing almost matter-of-factly as “a kneecapping gone wrong.” Death by mistake, they say; if the IRA gunmen had meant to kill Kearney, they would have shot him in the head and saved two bullets.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s predominantly Protestant police force, sees the July 19 shooting as murder, pure and simple. To call this a punishment, they say, is to legitimize another case of vigilante justice in which the IRA acts as jury, judge and executioner.

Either way, the killing illustrates one of the many complexities of turning Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement into peace on the ground. In addition to halting car bombings and other acts of terrorism, Northern Ireland’s political leaders must tackle a culture of violence born of 30 years of conflict, and resolve questions such as how to administer everyday justice.

While Kearney’s killing has been universally condemned, punishment beatings and kneecappings appear to have a large degree of community acceptance in the working-class communities that have borne the brunt of the Catholic versus Protestant conflict surrounding British rule. When residents are faced with “antisocial behavior,” a term that covers a range of crimes from car theft to drug trafficking, they often turn to the IRA or, in Protestant neighborhoods, to the pro-British Ulster Defense Assn. and Ulster Volunteer Force. And the paramilitary groups readily comply.

Most people in Northern Ireland are fed up with political violence, as the universal public outcry against the recent Omagh bombing, which killed 28 and wounded more than 200, has shown. And yet, people still feel powerless and under siege, and crave immediate solutions wherever they can get them, community workers say. They want instant justice, and paramilitary groups deliver more quickly than a bureaucratic legal system.

In the peace agreement reached in April, political parties representing Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups declared their opposition to the use of threat or physical force for any purpose. Political leaders had hoped that this--and the accompanying cease-fires--would bring a halt to beatings and kneecappings, but they have continued at least at the same rate as in previous years.

Glyn Roberts of the British-funded Families Against Intimidation and Terror has recorded 111 beatings and shootings throughout Northern Ireland so far this year, 58 attributed to Catholic paramilitary groups and 53 to Protestant groups. Nineteen people have died in the attacks.

Base 2, an organization that investigates reported threats from paramilitary groups, says the problem actually may be increasing, as the armed groups turn their attentions from fighting each other to community “policing.” Base 2 responded to 393 complaints in 1996 from people who feared they were under threat and to 563 cases last year, of which 446 turned out to be real. The group tries to get the paramilitary groups to lift the threats, or it helps people under threat move out of the area.

Killing Put Sinn Fein on the Defensive

Kearney’s death, two weeks after his final bar brawl, has become a flag in the hands of adversaries in Northern Ireland’s sectarian politics. Outspoken critics of paramilitary justice, together with opponents of the peace agreement, say the killing is reason to keep the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, out of a new power-sharing government until the IRA hands over its weapons and renounces all violence.

“You can’t have a political party in government with a private army,” Roberts said. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask the IRA to end all of the violence, full stop.”

Sinn Fein says the killing illustrates a different problem--the need for a nonpartisan police force in Northern Ireland. Until Catholics have a police force they can trust, Sinn Fein leaders say, average families will continue to seek out street justice against thugs and common criminals in the form of kneecappings and beatings.

“As far as we’re concerned, this shouldn’t be happening, and it is an unacceptable form of discipline,” said Sinn Fein spokesman Jim Gibney. “Whatever Kearney did, it didn’t merit execution, and that’s what happened.” But he added, “Policing is a touchstone issue. The RUC will never be acceptable to the nationalist people, because they are a sectarian police force. They don’t live in our areas--they occupy them. There is no alternative to a properly constituted police service.”

Protestants generally are more inclined than Catholics to see the RUC as theirs, because it is 93% Protestant and has been a bulwark against IRA terrorism. But there also is distrust among their poor and working classes, who may see the police as protectors of the rich.

According to Kearney’s family and news reports, his shooting was not a typical punishment attack. Although Kearney had had run-ins with police and the IRA, he apparently was not accused of “antisocial behavior.” Rather, they say, he had had a bar brawl with a known IRA man two weeks earlier and made the mistake of winning.

“I know why it was done: It was a personal grudge,” his mother said from a living room filled with flowers, photographs of her son and stacks of condolence cards.

Angry as she is, however, Maureen Kearney does not want opponents of the peace process, such as the hard-line Rev. Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party, to use her son’s death for their cause. “I see them rubbing their hands nearly in glee.”

She does not want Sinn Fein to be excluded from the new government, which will be selected from members of the Northern Ireland Assembly that was elected in June. “If they kick Sinn Fein out, we’ll just go back to where we were [in the conflict],” she said.

Kearney grew up during the conflict, but did not take part in it, preferring soccer to politics. He lived and died in the New Lodge area--grim government projects that are home to about 9,000 Catholics, many of whom are third-generation unemployed. Their children have few diversions beyond a soccer ball, and fewer prospects for the future.

For decades, the IRA fought an urban war--a campaign of terrorism, the pro-British unionists would say--from areas such as this. The British army and RUC were the enemy.

Catholics are reluctant to call the police because of a crime, either because they see them as British foot soldiers or because they fear reprisals from the IRA, which does not want the police force patrolling Catholic areas.

The RUC sees itself as a highly professional force that needs to recruit more Catholics but does not require the major overhaul demanded by Sinn Fein. Its officials charge that the paramilitary groups warn people away from the RUC in order to keep control of the neighborhoods. “They want to create a degree of fear within their own community to maintain their own position in that area; to show who is boss,” said Robert Maxwell, commander of the RUC’s subdivision in North Belfast.

Police Allegedly Seek to Recruit Informers

But some residents say the police scare people away themselves by trying to recruit informers against the IRA.

“You know, they’ll say things like, ‘Need help getting a mortgage? We can help you with that if you help us,’ ” one New Lodge resident said. “Well, that doesn’t exactly make you trust them.”

Another excuse to avoid the police is the fear of retaliation from criminals who might be freed for lack of evidence under a legal justice system.

Sometimes residents of these neighborhoods may turn for help to the police and the paramilitary groups, reporting a burglary to the RUC for insurance purposes and seeking “justice” from the IRA. As a result, a criminal occasionally may be “tried” twice, getting a sentence from the law and a beating from the IRA.

But what appears to be the law of the jungle is actually a highly organized system, according to community workers, residents and police. The victim of a robbery or car theft takes his complaint to a local Sinn Fein office or directly to an IRA man. An “investigation” is conducted through family and IRA networks, and the suspect is confronted.

Young rowdies who cause trouble are given warnings, and their parents may be told to keep them in check. In the case of a stolen car radio or other theft, the suspect is pressed to give the goods back. Drug traffickers and other more serious criminals may be ordered into exile. Beatings and kneecappings are “a last resort,” it is said.

“Ninety-five percent of the cases are resolved without a beating,” said a Catholic community worker, who nonetheless decried the attacks.

Varying degrees of punishment are handed out. Beatings may be delivered with anything from a baseball bat to an ax handle studded with nails. A kneecapping may be a shot through the fleshy thigh, a clean hole through the kneecap--easily repaired--or a bullet spinning downward through the knee to splinter the shin.

Shooting is not a science, however, as Kearney’s death clearly demonstrates. And some people are attacked by mistake, as was a 79-year-old grandfather in April. John Browne was shot in both knees in his New Lodge apartment by gunmen who reportedly turned the wrong way coming out of the elevator and, consequently, broke down the wrong door.

The man they had suspected of committing sex crimes escaped unharmed from his apartment.

“These people have no right to appeal, no right to reply. A lot of times they don’t even know the allegations against them. And of course, the people who come to beat them up don’t stop to hear their pleas of innocence,” another community worker said.

In Kearney’s case, a freckled young neighbor said she believed he was guilty because he was shot. “He must have been taking drugs,” she said. “They wouldn’t have done him for nothing.”

A suspect may, in fact, be guilty of a crime, but the legal punishment would not be a broken leg. And in some cases, people apparently are executed intentionally, although there is no capital punishment in Britain, to which Northern Ireland belongs.

Sean McNally admits that he had been joy-riding--stealing cars to ride around town--and filching car radios when gunmen nabbed him outside his house about 14 months ago.

“They came from behind and said, ‘We want to have a word with you.’ They took me behind the wall, put me down and took me leg off,” McNally said.

Shotgunning Proved to Be Deterrent

His attackers used a shotgun, shattering his right knee and hitting an artery. A neighbor saved his life with a tourniquet, but McNally lost his leg.

McNally insists that he received no warnings from the IRA before he was shot, although he says he probably would not have stopped what he was doing even if they had threatened him first. “They stopped me, because I can’t drive no more,” McNally said.

Community workers argue that punishment beatings are not only brutal, but they do not deter criminals. Many young toughs view the IRA as the establishment--an authority to rebel against--and have little fear. Some wear their punishment beatings like badges of courage; they may even have been kneecapped more than once, and they continue to steal or deal drugs.

Still, many people in Catholic and Protestant communities continue to seek out this street justice.

“This isn’t about justice, it is about revenge,” said Billy Hutchinson, elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly from the Progressive Unionist Party. Hutchinson is a former paramilitary member who served 15 years in prison for killing two Catholics. He maintains close contact with the armed groups.

“We’re brutalizing our society. The question is how to get out,” he says. “It’s not just the responsibility of the paramilitaries. The communities also are responsible for punishment beatings, because they go and ask for them to be carried out.”

Liam Maskey, who runs a Catholic youth and development project in North Belfast, agreed, saying, “Everyone is morally opposed to punishment beatings until their own car is stolen. People have to be educated to fight for a proper police force and judicial system.”

And after decades of conflict, punishment beatings and kneecappings are taken as a fact of life even by many victims. Kearney’s mother, a religious woman who sings in a church choir, speaks with pride of the fact that whoever ordered her son’s shooting felt eight men would be required to take him out.

She said she’d like to see his killers arrested, but just as important, she wants them disavowed by the IRA, which she still holds in high regard.

“I don’t want the IRA to give them status,” she says. “They don’t deserve it.”

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London Bureau Chief Miller was recently on assignment in Belfast.