Trusting the enemy

The Good Friday agreement – Northern Ireland’s road map to peace – sprang out of the savvy political friendship of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It seemed in the period of glad-handing optimism of 1998 that the agreement – signed by all sides – might be the one to finally bring an end to the thirty-year conflict.

But as everyone acquainted with the Northern Ireland quagmire could have predicted, change in the province was never going to come overnight. Politics at Stormont are a world away from London or Washington, and the last week has seen a period in which the collapse of the process is as much a possibility as the delayed placing of one more laborious step towards the goal of peace.

The politics of ambiguity

The Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended in October 2002. The British government was forced to reintroduce Direct Rule – a policy which it has always tried to avoid. Fresh elections to Stormont have been scheduled and rescheduled. Now the new date set (29 May) has also been cancelled. Electioneering started at the weekend, party political broadcasts went hopefully out on television. There has been electioneering and no election. On Sunday 27 April an election looked possible, by Wednesday it looked fanciful, by Thursday it was cancelled. Welcome to the world of Northern Ireland politics.

The latest crisis began on 27 April when Gerry Adams delivered an ‘interpretation’ of an IRA statement on the all important matter of decommissioning. The three-point statement had had one striking phrase. It was worded thus: “The IRA has clearly stated its willingness to proceed with the implementation of a process to put arms beyond use at the earliest opportunity. Obviously this is not about putting some arms beyond use. It is about all arms.” Yet the ‘obviously’ was no such thing.

“On the basis of what we have heard, there is no basis for lifting suspension,” stated David Trimble (the Ulster Unionist who was, until suspension, first minister). As both he and Blair saw it, Adams’s statement answered only two of the three questions that Blair put to the IRA last week. The Adams statement was unclear on issues of future training, procurement of weapons and, most presciently, the continuing ‘punishment attacks’. Essentially – will the war be completely over? That is the single most important question to the governments of Britain and Ireland, and it is the question which Gerry Adams has always studiously avoided.

Adams’s slip away from the question was the issue until Wednesday 30 April. That day, highly sensitive phone conversations were leaked, possibly by someone inside the British intelligence service (MI5). In one conversation, the Northern Ireland secretary at the time of the 1998 agreement (Mo Mowlam) shared teasing confidences with Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein (one of the most famous IRA terrorists, who became minister of education in the Northern Ireland executive); in another, a chief adviser of Tony Blair mocked Unionist MPs as ‘asses’ in conversation with McGuinness. In the light of these revelations, Unionists feel once again battered by the British government and the peace process as a whole.

If either side in the agreement loses trust completely in all the other sides then the agreement cannot be sustained, and the prospect of self-governance in Northern Ireland evaporates.

For the British government and Protestant Unionists on the ground in Northern Ireland the biggest problem of trust is, of course, with Sinn Fein. Even if Gerry Adams does announce the complete end of armed conflict another problem still looms. For it cannot any longer be said with certainty that Gerry Adams speaks for, or carries with him, the IRA.

The IRA’s former chief-of-staff has lost a good many of his supporters along the way to winning the trust of powerful statesmen, and the possibility of a return to violence by the IRA is very real.

Hard-core Republicans have not all gone along with Sinn Fein, and they are not all happy with the Adams path away from a policy of armed struggle until the last Brit has left. It must further be remembered that Sinn Fein / IRA are not a normal political party which, when it fractures, mercurises into different political groups. Sinn Fein / IRA dissent is not known for being political – it is known for being military.

In Loyalist minds there are many worrying precedents of Republican splintering. In late 1969 a split within the IRA created the ‘Provisional IRA’. More recently the ‘Real IRA’ (as well as the now-defunct ‘Continuity IRA’) were formed immediately after Adams signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. It was felt then, as now, by many in the Sinn Fein / IRA movement that the leadership had sold them out. With this belief the Real IRA organised – and killed.

This body was responsible, among other acts, for a bombing campaign on mainland Britain in 2001 – a campaign which included the bombing of the BBC and a car-bomb timed to go off in a busy suburban street at closing time as the crowds poured out of the pubs. It was also the ‘Real IRA’ who were responsible for the slaughter in cold-blood of twenty-eight shoppers on the streets of Omagh in August 1998, only months after the peace accord had been signed.

People, then, have a right to be concerned about who precisely Gerry Adams is speaking for.

A far horizon

In the next elections to Stormont – now scheduled for the autumn of 2003 – it is possible that Sinn Fein may become the majority party among Republicans. The perception that their rivals, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, are weak could increase Sinn Fein’s share of the Republican vote in the same way as the perception of weakness among Trimble’s party could increase the share of the Unionist vote for Ian Paisley’s hardline Democratic Unionists. When the elections do take place, the possibility lies in wait that a new Stormont Assembly may be dominated by the extreme elements of Northern Ireland politics.

The watchwords of ‘trust’ and ‘reconciliation’ which punctuated the Blair-Clinton era are sounding stretched now. ‘Reconciliation’ is a world away – and ‘trust’, after another long week in Northern Irish politics, seems even farther off. Paisley, the ardent Loyalist, attacked Trimble and said, “Unless we destroy the agreement, we will be destroyed for ever.” A man he would not trust – Pat Doherty, the vice-president of Sinn Fein – asked, “Why is this game being played out in the way that it is being played out?” adding with no apparent sense of irony, “It is to protect David Trimble, who has an inability to accept equality, to accept human rights.” Insult is heaped on insult.

An IRA terrorist who in the early part of his career was a supporter of Libyan and Palestinian terrorism (a thing which seemed not to bother a lot of the IRA’s ‘Irish’-American funders) contributed an article to the left-wing Guardian newspaper in Britain. In it he blamed the British government and Unionists for the breakdown of Stormont and claimed that the IRA could no longer trust them, having bent over backwards to accommodate their demands and being given in return only more demands.

In a country with such bitterly held long-term memories, short-term memory-loss of this kind is surprisingly common.

The reason the executive in Northern Ireland was suspended was because in October 2002 it transpired that the IRA were running a spy-ring within the Assembly. Sinn Fein offices were raided and among documents found in the subsequent search were the personal details of various judges, police, prison officers and military personnel. It constituted a hit-list of British and Loyalist targets in Northern Ireland, and mainland Britain. The IRA appeared to be still up to their old, bloody, tricks.

There is terrible pressure here – on all sides. Everyone wants elections, but nobody wants to sit down with all the people who will be elected. Five years ago the people of Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly for peace – but they don’t know how to trust the people who say they will give it to them. In the wait for the autumn elections the people of Northern Ireland will have plenty of time to ruminate that October 2002, and indeed April 2003, may have showed them nothing more than what can happen when you make a leap and try to trust your enemy.