FAREWELL TO ARMS 3 : The killers still in our our midst.

(From Irish Independent)

South Armagh bore witness to some of the most brutal killings of the Troubles. Willie Dillon visits a community surrounded by dark secrets and raw tragedy

On a quiet country road in South Armagh, William Frazer's car slows to a halt beside a bare black cross partly obscured by grass and nettles. In any other place, this simple memorial might mark the site of an old traffic fatality. But not here.

Ten Protestant men going home from work in a minibus were lined up and shot dead at this spot in January 1976. An eleventh man survived. The Kingsmill massacre was one of the worst atrocities of all the Troubles.

"The bus was parked just there," says Mr Frazer, pointing to the grass margin. "And the men who did it stood here, maybe not five feet away. And they fired something like two hundred rounds into them. Some of those who died were on their knees praying. The killers were laughing and cheering as they walked away."

He considers this for a moment. "Laughing and cheering, after doing that. If you took ten dogs out and shot them, you wouldn't be over the moon about it, would you?" It's obviously a rhetorical question. "These were ten human beings."

For William Frazer and many other South Armagh protestants, the past hasn't gone away, you know. It lives on in the memory of loved ones murdered by the IRA. Many of the killers were never brought to justice, though their identities were generally known in their neighbourhoods. Worse, some are still walking around those same localities today.