My decision not to publicise the campaign of threats, violence and intimidation my family and I have endured these past 18 months was based on a hope that those behind it might just tire of it all and give up. I should have known better. If anything, they were spurred on by what they imagined was a cowed silence. They should have known better, writes David Adams.
What began with threats and spurious allegations painted on walls in the area where we live, soon progressed to regular paint and missile attacks on our home and family car.
When that didn't work, our chimney was blocked with a large rug, risking us being burned to death in our beds or succumbing to coal fumes. Our beloved family pet, Oscar, a six-year-old beagle, was taken and, I have been told, beaten to death with baseball bats.
Finally, in the latest and most gruesome incident, while our car sat outside my wife's workplace, a side window was smashed and a severed pig's head left on the driver's seat for her to find.
Sandwiched in between, along with scores of other comparatively "minor" incidents, have been a threat to break my wife's arms and legs for speaking out against the campaign; attacks on cars owned by family members and friends who have called to visit; offensive graffiti painted at the home of my 84-year-old mother; and, in a pathetic attempt at character assassination, a campaign of letter-writing to journalists and politicians coupled with all sorts of allegations carried in a monthly loyalist "magazine".
My "crime", in part, has been to continue giving my wholehearted support to the peace process, the Belfast Agreement and, following the logic of that, my joining of the local District Policing Partnership. But, more than anything else, what has really galled has been my determination to continue writing and commenting on the situation in Northern Ireland and calling things exactly as I see them.
In short, the torturers of my family cannot abide my obstinate refusal to compromise in the slightest on one of the most basic of human rights - freedom of thought and expression.
Who is pursuing this campaign?
A local unit of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) that is made up, largely, of people well known to me and my family. That familiarity didn't matter in the slightest, though, after I was branded ideologically unsound and therefore, by definition, an "enemy of the people".
In the monochrome world these people inhabit, those whom they even suspect might stray beyond a narrow orthodoxy of their choosing (never mind people like me who regularly do) are deemed the enemy, and must be dealt with accordingly.
Despite being perfect strangers to the terminology, they recognise instantly, and are drawn inexorably towards, the untrammelled power a localised totalitarianism regime gives to individuals who, in the ordinary run of things, would be clinging perilously close to the lowest rung of any social ladder.
The police have told us that the threat to my person is "substantial" and that these people are determined to drive us from our home.
Unbelievable as it may seem, in the context of "families under threat", we are more fortunate than most. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other families right across Northern Ireland - in virtually every community - are living their lives in similar (and often worse) circumstances than we are, but in the complete absence of anything even approaching the protective security measures I have in place.
Unlike me, they have no media profile or platform that draws interest and attention to their plight or can provide a medium to make the wider public aware. They are the anonymous and unprotected, and manage to grab a few seconds on the radar screen of public awareness after something particularly horrendous has happened to them or a family member.
We talk all the time of instituting democracy in Northern Ireland and of creating a society solidly founded on a culture of respect for, and the determined upholding of, basic human rights. But when we do, and I include myself in this, we are generally thinking no further than reinstatement of the political architecture and continued institutional reform in areas such as policing. Vital issues that have to be addressed.
But democracy and human rights must have relevance to, and a meaningful impact on, the everyday life of citizens if they are to amount to anything more than just a vague, conceptual exercise in wishful thinking and window dressing. They must be seen to be driven from the bottom up, as well as from the top down.
A good friend remarked recently: "Democracy and human rights, to me, are non-existent if I can't feel their presence, and feel protected by them, every time I open my front door - and I don't." From behind my heavily reinforced front door, I couldn't agree more.
David Adams was a senior figure in the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party, then the political wing of the UDA, and played a part in negotiating the loyalist ceasefire of 1994.