Sir, - Your Editorial "Full circle in Derry" (August 16th) rightly condemns the street violence which followed Saturday's Apprentice Boys parade. However, when it comes to the bloody scenes on the Ormeau Road, Belfast, you ask us to "pity the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which has to enforce its [the Parade Commission's] decisions and then face the fury alternately of loyalists and nationalists."
There are many emotions which the behaviour of the RUC on Saturday morning might provoke, but I have to say that I was unaware that pity would be one of them. Your own journalist, Suzanne Breen, was - presumably unlike your leader writer - present on the Ormeau Road. She reported that "some people who were not resisting police were also hit and kicked by RUC officers" and witnessed that "when the protesters attempted to link arms and hold their ground, they were struck with batons indiscriminately".
Having seen the cracked skulls, bruised bodies and bloodied faces, having watched unconscious women being stretchered into ambulances, I have to say that, despite your recommendation, my pity is at present otherwise employed.
The continued insistence of your leader writers on portraying the RUC as some sort of impartial force struggling to hold the ring while mindless sectarian forces whirl around its blameless head is as perplexing as it is preposterous. My own experience of the RUC is by no means atypical. Burned out of home in Dover Street in August 1969 by a loyalist mob, I was shepherded along with my young brothers and sisters across the Falls road by my parents, who were attempting to reach the relative quiet of the city centre. We were attacked with bricks and bottles by the RUC who were deployed across the road to prevent just such an escape. While our homes burned, RUC armoured cars were firing high calibre machine guns from their rotating turrets into streets and flats, taking a grievous toll. Had that been a oneoff, perhaps today I might be smiling at my local bobby. Sadly, it was not.
Like the vast majority of my peers, I was not drawn into violent reaction as so many were. Nevertheless, in the years since, first as a boy, then as a young man and later as a father, my experience of the RUC has been utterly and unrelievedly negative. It has ranged from serious physical abuse through insults and threats to the kind of daily sectarian harassment and humiliation which those of my generation and generations since have come to view as a part of life in West Belfast.
The British Government itself has finally - in the form of the Patten Commission - acknowledged that the RUC is part of the problem. The debate now raging is centred not on whether the RUC needs to change, but to what extent it will be changed. Meanwhile, your trite contention that we should sympathise with the RUC for the continued enthusiasm with which it brutalises my community is no doubt being typeset for inclusion in the next glossy edition of the Police Authority's annual report. - Yours, etc.,
Robin Livingstone, Andersonstown, Belfast.