Negotiating With Terrorists?

This week, I had the privilege of addressing an audience of Spanish business school students. The event took place in Madrid on Thursday, just one day after the Basque terrorist organisation ETA had declared a permanent ceasefire. I wasn’t entirely surprised, therefore, when one of the students asked, ‘Should governments negotiate with terrorists?’ My response was as straightforward as an academic can ever hope to be: ‘It depends’, I said. The case for negotiations is that they may help to lock terrorists into the democratic process and facilitate an end to their campaigns. The argument against is that they give terrorists legitimacy, and that – in doing so – governments set a bad example by showing that it is possible to bomb one’s way to the negotiating table. Both positions have some merit. What they both fail to account for, however, is that sometimes terrorist groups change, and that negotiations can mean different things at different stages in their evolution. Just consider the IRA. Until the early 1980s, the IRA was a highly dogmatic, ruthless organisation. When it sat down for its first round of ‘negotiations’ with the British government, in July 1972, it believed it had the British on its knees: all it did was read out a list of demands, saying that if these couldn’t be met they would resume the fighting. Two weeks later, the IRA's Belfast Brigade planted 22 bombs in the city center of Belfast, launching them near simultaneously in the early afternoon of what became known as ‘Bloody Friday’. By the late 1980s, the group’s outlook had changed completely. The group had lost a great deal of its early military momentum, and not only had a certain amount of strategic realism set in, Northern Ireland Catholics had made it clear at the ballot box that they didn't approve of the violence. As the IRA’s former Belfast Brigade Commander, Brendan Hughes, put it: ‘We eventually came to the conclusion that the British military regime could not be defeated, and there had to be negotiations’. The lesson is a simple one. When terrorists believe they are ‘winning the war’, negotiations are pointless. When they begin to look for alternatives to the ‘armed struggle’, though, the offer of a seat at the negotiating table can help facilitate a transformation from violence toward exclusively peaceful means. Negotiations then serve to encourage the ‘politicos’ and sideline the hawks who want to give it ‘one last push’. ETA’s current situation may not be altogether different from that of the IRA. Careful not to alienate its wider constituency, ETA had – for some time – scaled down its range of targets and taken additional precautions to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, in the three years prior to the ceasefire announcement, ETA had not killed a single person. Its whole campaign consisted of sporadic attacks on commercial targets with very limited – if any – damage or disruption. Although it continued to exist, in the eyes of many Spaniards, ETA was ‘dying a slow death’. The Northern Ireland peace process, which – I am sure – has been looked at closely by Spanish officials, shows how the transformation away from terrorism can be made to work. Yet it also offers a couple of warnings. First, governments should be flexible, but they should never grant any privileges. Whenever it was felt that the British and Irish governments had made too many concessions in their dealings with the IRA, the public’s support for negotiations ebbed away and those who had been opposed to the idea of engaging the terrorists gained ground. Second, violence must never be allowed to contaminate the political process. The terrorists should be told in the clearest possible terms that any attempts to use violence – or the threat thereof – as a bargaining chip will lead to their exclusion. Ultimately, of course, the aim is to ensure that such threats become impossible by agreeing the terms under which the terrorist group will disband altogether. In other words, negotiations with terrorists can make sense, but only if the terrorists are willing to engage on democracy’s terms. Also, as anyone involved in the Northern Ireland peace process will confirm, negotiating with terrorists isn’t easy: it is a skill which requires firmness, flexibility, and – most important of all – a great deal of patience.