Word: belfast
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...stuff of daily life. There are threats and occasionally even executions. It sounds like Al Capone's Chicago or Mafia-dominated Sicily in the days of gangland wars. But instead, all those evils are flourishing in today's Northern Ireland in neighborhoods controlled by extremists. Says Brian Feeney, a Belfast city councilor: "This is real godfather stuff. Everybody pays. If you don't, they threaten to harm your family or workers...
...Belfast the nightmare began in the late 1960s, when the long political conflict involving pro-British Protestants and Catholic nationalists turned violent. The gun battles and bombings of the 1970s reduced whole blocks to rubble, and some neighborhoods became deadly "no-go" zones, where even Ulster police and British troops feared to enter. When at last the violence began to subside in 1982, Britain backed a major face-lift for the blighted city. Crumbling old slums and bomb sites were rebuilt as part of a $1.4 billion housing program for low-income districts...
...authorities have discovered that the same terrorist gangs that turned Belfast into a sectarian battleground have siphoned off millions of dollars from the reconstruction to finance their continuing war. As money for new construction pours into Belfast, paramilitary forces on both sides demand a cut of the profits. This Ulster Mafia exacts its levies from local businesses, and if people do not pay up, a bomb or a shot in the night may follow...
...members of the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force. In the interest of maximizing profits, warring Catholic and Protestant groups that cannot agree on much else have tacitly decided not to encroach on each other's territory. The I.R.A. and I.N.L.A. have the Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast to themselves, while the neighboring Shankill district and East Belfast are Protestant territory...
...Irish Republican Army commandos figured on a turkey shoot. What they got was a bloody shoot-out. Late last week a bulldozer carrying a bomb rammed the gates of a police station in the village of Loughgall, 30 miles from Belfast. Just before the device exploded, wrecking the building, masked terrorists leaped from a blue van and raked the post with gunfire. But the station was empty; tipped off in advance, the police had cleared out. Suddenly a team of the British army's crack Special Air Service sprang from hiding and opened fire...