SAOIRSE32

Sunday Life

**Carrying on the Sunday Life tradition of ‘All-Shoukri-All-the-Time’…

By Stephen Breen and Alan Murray
25 June 2006

The UDA last night teetered on the brink of all-out civil war.

Jailed north Belfast brigadier Andre Shoukri was switched to a secure unit at Maghaberry prison amid growing fears for his safety - as the feud with south Belfast UDA boss Jackie McDonald threatened to spiral out of control. (Click photo to view)

And senior loyalists predicted Eleventh night bonfires could descend into vicious hand-to-hand fighting between drink-fuelled UDA rivals.

One veteran loyalist told Sunday Life: “It wouldn’t take too much to spark a fist-fight - to say the very least.”

Meanwhile, exiled Shankill terror-boss Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair crowed from his Scottish bolt-hole: “I always said I would have the last laugh.

“The people who conspired against me and tried to kill my family are now either dead or in jail - the UDA is finished.”

UDA on the Brink of all-out war…

The bitterness below the surface between north Belfast and the other Belfast brigades didn’t take long to surface last week.

After five senior figures from north Belfast handed over the statement - reproduced here for the first time - rejecting the previous day’s call from the ‘inner council’ to dismiss and replace three figures including the Shoukris, the barbed comments weren’t long in coming.

And it was Jackie McDonald whose name was most freely bandied about.

Said one of the north Belfast leadership: “The inner council statement, in reality, comes from just four people. We are confident in our own position and always have been throughout this process.

“This has all been brought on by the lies of three people in north Belfast - three puppets brought up by Jackie McDonald. There is no evidence. We proved that all that was said were lies.

“We are a bit at fault, because we allowed these three to sit in here and do their own illegal business, and didn’t stop them.

“But the inner council statement doesn’t change one thing.

“There’s not going to be any more meetings of the brigade. The membership has confirmed their support for the leadership and there will be no changes.”

Added another: “As far as (Tuesday’s) statement goes, we don’t recognise the statement or the authority of it. There is no aggression from the north Belfast UDA, but we will not have puppets interfering in our area. The rest of the association should mind their own business and stay out of our affairs.

“We say to the other UDA brigades: ‘Look at yourselves before pointing your fingers at anyone else.’ We are 100pc united, we’re not going to tolerate any interference.”

Another of the five - one of those the inner council wants removed as brigadier - claimed: “I offered to step down, but not one man in the room said I should go.

“There is crime in every UDA brigade area. What about the east Belfast brigadier?

“His boys wrecked a pub because the landlord wouldn’t let them sell their own booze in it and one of his men was involved in the threat that closed the Cregagh youth club.

“Is that not crime?”

Statement by north Belfast UDA brigade staff

IN the past weeks and months, some have attempted to divide Ulster loyalism by making a series of allegations about drug-dealing and criminality against their fellow loyalists, in particular against the brigade staff in north Belfast UDA.

In an attempt to address these spurious allegations, a series of meetings took place with the inner council. At these meetings, independent witnesses (churchmen and community workers) attested to efforts to tackle drug-dealing and crime by north Belfast UDA. This testimony was supported by PSNI statistics.

Indeed, it was accepted by the inner council that one of those who made the original claims was a pathological liar.

This process should have resolved the matter. Unfortunately, some have chosen to continue with their lies.

They have deliberately tried to smear certain individuals through the media to cause discord and unrest in north Belfast. This vendetta was extended to certain inner council members, providing misinformation to Government officials in Ulster and the Republic of Ireland in an attempt to undermine our work to maintain calm in the most volatile part of Belfast. Throughout this process, north Belfast UDA has consulted widely with its membership.

It is their choice that the present leadership remain with their full support and confidence. This decision should be fully respected and accepted.

Thus, no interference in the affairs of north Belfast brigade will be allowed.

The motto of our organisation is Quis Separabit - None Shall Divide Us.

Our full co-operation and media silence throughout this process shows north Belfast UDA remains committed to that standard.

We would urge the rank-and-file of other brigades to ask: did their leadership show the same commitment?

Regardless of the decisions and actions of others, north Belfast UDA will not be swayed from its support of the peace process, maintaining calm at interfaces, the process of dialogue around parades, tackling drug-dealing and crime and working for the regeneration of our much-neglected communities - five important tasks that north Belfast UDA look forward to with a renewed sense of strength, positivity and purpose.

Quis Separabit

Why ‘day of reckoning’ may bolster the peace process

UNLIKE the IRA or even their loyalist rivals in the UVF, the UDA was never run on the lines of a centralised military command structure.

Throughout its 34-year history, the UDA has always been a loose confederation of disparate loyalist military units rather than a conventional secret, underground ‘army’.

Autonomy and independence were consistently valued by the various so-called ‘brigades’ who often acted on their own - sometimes even without the knowledge of the UDA’s nominal central body, the ‘inner council’.

So, when Johnny Adair decided to launch an assault on the UVF in the greater Shankill six years ago, only his closest allies in just one company of the west Belfast brigade were aware of his plans.

Adair took UDA ‘federalism’ to its extreme end and acted totally independently from the other UDA ‘brigades’ and two of his other ‘companies’ in the west of the city.

Two of Adair’s usurpers, the men whom ‘Mad Dog’ believes betrayed him in the next feud three years later - the Shoukri brothers - were pinning their hopes of survival last week on the UDA’s long history of federalism. In response to their expulsion from the main organisation, the Shoukris and their supporters in the UDA’s north Belfast ‘brigade’ pointed out, in secret meetings with their rivals, that each area is entitled to act on its own as long as they are not breaching the terror group’s ceasefire.

What this means is that the Shoukris and their cohorts - including Alan McClean - can continue in their lucrative criminal activities, even while the rest of the UDA tries to eschew criminality and move into an new mode.

The UDA’s leadership, however, the one that defeated Adair’s ‘C’ company and exiled Mad Dog’s team to greater Manchester, has had enough of federalism.

Led by Jackie McDonald, the UDA’s south Belfast ‘brigadier’, the organisation, barring north Belfast, appears more united than it has been for decades.

All of the other key players on the UDA’s inner council, once a basin of scorpions where rivals used to sting and stab each other in the back the second they were out of the room, now back McDonald.

Shorn of Adair and realising that paramilitarism is a thing of the past, the McDonald-led UDA can no longer afford to allow individual units do what they want.

The penalties for continuing to operate as UDA Crime Inc. are potentially massive. The prize for winding the organisation up is millions of pounds being injected into Protestant working-class areas and hundreds of jobs created for the UDA’s new unemployed army.

There are two bizarre ironies about the current stand-off between McDonald and his UDA mainstream against the north Belfast rebels.

The first is that, if the bullets start flying, the larger faction will be engaged in a ‘war for the peace process’, in yet another Orwellian twist to Ulster history, they will be shooting their rivals in order to bring to an end to paramilitarism.

The second irony is that, for the first time since the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike, the UDA has never been so united - only this time in the conviction that the organisation set up to defend Protestant communities should finally go out of business.

Henry McDonald
- Henry McDonald is co-author of UDA - Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror (Penguin Books, £7.99)

Shoukri is furious after prison move

Caged terror boss Andre Shoukri has been moved to a secure wing at Maghaberry Prison.

A senior source at the jail told Sunday Life that the north Belfast UDA leader was re-located amid growing fears for his safety.

He was also joined by close pal John ‘Bonzer’ Boreland.

Shoukri, who is on remand on blackmail charges, had been sharing the same landing as prisoners loyal to the mainstream UDA.

Although the UDA’s ‘inner council’ has not issued any threats against the north Belfast leadership, jail bosses moved Shoukri last Friday night.

The source said Shoukri pleaded with prison officers not to move him.

Said the source: “It took a lot of prison officers to move Shoukri and he didn’t like it one bit. Up until now, he thought he was the top man in the prison.

“When he was being moved he was shouting that his life had been turned upside down and he was telling the officers he was not in danger.

“He was in a right mess because he thought it was the last thing that would happen to him.

“The prison moved Shoukri for his own good because it could just take one prisoner loyal to his former comrades to try and kill him.

“The same thing happened to Adair when he was moved and Shoukri is furious this has happened. He has demanded a meeting with the governor because he can’t stand being on his own.”

The source also told how Shoukri “went ballistic” after his expulsion from the UDA.

Added the source: “He went and was shouting about all sorts of things. Nobody went near him.

“He had spent the days before the expulsions telling inmates that he would be a millionaire by the time he was released.

“But when news of the expulsions came in and Shoukri was moved, some of the prisoners turned on him and started laughing in his face.

“It will be interesting to see what sort of life he leads once he is released from prison and if in fact he does have millions stashed away somewhere.”

Fears Eleventh night will fan the flames

In spite of an assurance from the inner council that it has no intention of spilling blood over the Shoukris and Alan McClean, there were fears last night that the two factions could clash over the Twelfth.

It could kick off at Eleventh night bonfires and spill over into the next day’s parades.

While each faction insists they don’t plan any incursions into the other’s territory, the Eleventh night brings revellers from different parts of the city into other areas to meet up with friends.

Most years see at least one serious incident involving rival paramilitary groups or figures from different elements of the same organisation.

While, in Belfast, supporters of rival UDA brigades are separated behind district lodges from across the city, the danger of confrontation arises when the demonstration reaches its destination at Barnett’s Demesne and Orangemen and bandsmen have three hours to kill before the return leg.

Said one senior loyalist source: “That’s the danger time - it mightn’t take too much for some words from someone in south Belfast or north Belfast to spark a fight, to say the least.

“Everyone in the organisation knows what bands are UDA-associated from each area and, unless there is a clear commitment from all to ensure that nothing happens at the Belfast field, then there could be chaos.”

Johnny’ll come marching home soon: ‘Mad Dog’ Adair

Exiled terror boss Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair last night taunted his bitter enemies in the UDA by declaring: “You’re finished.”

And Adair, now living in Scotland, claims his return to Ulster will now come quicker because of the inner council’s decision to expel the Shoukris.

The Shankill loyalist, who has always vowed to return, claimed the UDA was in “disarray”.

He also promised to confront the man who he claims were responsible for exiling him and his family when he returns.

Said Adair: “I always said I would come home some day but I now expect this to be sooner rather than later because of the way things are in the UDA at the moment.

“The people who conspired against me and tried to kill my family are now either dead or in jail. I always said I would have the last laugh.

“These people were big enough to take me on because they had supporters around them but they are all falling by the wayside.”

The Shankill loyalist hit out at the UDA’s inner council.

Added Adair: “Why was the UDA leadership afraid to take on people who only joined the organisation after the ceasefire?

“They took action against me because they had a lot of people around them but now they are all becoming increasingly isolated.

“During my time the UDA fought a war against republicans but now it’s just a laughing stock.”