Ulster Freedom Fighters

The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) was a Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitary group that claimed responsibility for dozens of assassinations believed to have been carried out by members of the Ulster Defense Association (UDA) before it disbanded in 2007.

In Northern Ireland, beginning in the late 1960s, a bloody conflict was waged between the province's Roman Catholics (also called Republicans or Nationalists), who wanted Northern Ireland to become a part of the Republic of Ireland, and its Protestants (also called Loyalists or Unionists), who wanted it to remain part of Great Britain. Armed paramilitary groups sprung up in both communities. One such Loyalist group, the Ulster Defense Association, began a campaign of sectarian assassinations in the spring of 1972, killing Catholics at random in reprisal for attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). By the end of the year, more than 80 people had been killed.

The Northern Irish police and British government were initially reluctant to acknowledge the murders as politically motivated sectarian attacks. They did not want to give the IRA a propaganda victory, and they feared provoking a Protestant backlash that could destroy the delicate peace negotiations then under way. For its part, the UDA could not claim responsibility for the attacks without the organization being declared illegal and having many of its members arrested.

At a meeting in May 1973, UDA leaders decided that a shadow organization called the Ulster Freedom Fighters would be created within the UDA. The UDA could continue its attacks, but the UFF would claim responsibility. The [Page 600]UFF would also streamline the UDA's terrorist operations. The UDA was structured like the British Army; the UFF, in contrast, would be composed of small, hard-to-penetrate cells of four or five individuals. The most reliable members of the Belfast death squads that had committed the previous murders were chosen as UFF commanders. On June 26, 1973, a man claiming to be “Captain Black” of the UFF called a Belfast newspaper and claimed responsibility for the murder of the Catholic politician Paddy Wilson and his companion, marking the first public use of the UFF name.

Mural in Kilcooley, a housing estate situated in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.

The UFF was banned as a terrorist organization in November 1973, while the UDA remained legal until 1992. Despite the banning, the UFF claimed responsibility for or was implicated in hundreds of deaths over the next 25 years. The UFF was also involved in the assassinations and attempted assassinations of several prominent Republican activists, including the murder of the lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989, and the attempted murders of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey in 1981 and Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein (the IRA's political arm) in 1984. The UFF was also implicated in a 1989 scandal that involved members of Northern Ireland's security forces who had passed on secret police intelligence about Republicans to Loyalist paramilitaries for use in planning assassinations.

In January 1998, the UFF and the UDA declared a cease-fire in compliance with the Good Friday Agreement. A series of attacks beginning in 1998 by groups calling themselves the Red Hand Defenders and the Orange Volunteers are believed to have been carried out by former UDA/UFF members. On October 12, 2001, the British government declared that it no longer considered the UDA and the UFF to be honoring the cease-fire, although the group itself had not announced the cease-fire to be at an end. In 2007, shortly after an official statement released by the UDA renouncing violence, the group was ordered to stand down, and along with its parent group, the UFF began disarming in 2009.

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