The common unionist charge was that Westminster and Whitehall continued to classify Northern Ireland, as it had Ireland before partition, as "something more akin to a colonial than a domestic problem". From the first street deployment of troops in 1969 the impression given was of "a peace-keeping operation in which Her Majesty's Forces are not defending their homeland, but holding at bay two sects and factions as in Imperial India, Mandated Palestine or in Cyprus". This played into the republican narrative that "the insurgence in the housing estates and borderland of Ulster" was something akin to the Third World wars of liberation, and that in Britain's first and last colony "decolonisation will be forced upon her as it was in Aden and elsewhere".