2. PRACTICAL EXAMPLES

Explaining violence, framing conflicts

Much reporting in and from Indonesia still bears the imprint of the 'New Order' orthodoxy of the Suharto years, part of which was the official ideology of 'panca silah', or unity-in-diversity. One consequence was for reports of violence to be suppressed. It meant that unpalatable facts about conflicts between Indonesia's peoples were never faced. Typical are remarks by President Abdurrahman Wahid, shortly after taking office in 1999 and quoted in the Jakarta Post in one of its reports on the violence in Maluku province and its capital, Ambon.

"Abdurrahman reiterated his belief that ordinary people in Maluku do not harbour hatred against each other despite their different faiths and ethnic backgrounds. He claimed they were merely victims of the work of irresponsible parties wishing to disrupt the country's security and peace."

This is the classic New Order explanation for violence - 'provokasi' or provocation. Indonesian journalists are working through an impressive array of civic society organisations and activities to try to fashion a responsible, truthful way of framing conflicts now the New Order restrictions on their work have largely gone. Many realise the patronising aspect of the 'provokasi' theory, namely that Indonesia's people have a sheeplike preparedness to follow the promptings of ill intentioned, shadowy figures behind the scenes.

Indonesia's horizontal and vertical conflicts are invariably tangled up with power plays involving elements in Jakarta politics, and it would be naive not to see their influence. The important point is not that this analysis is wrong, but that to attribute the violence wholly to 'provokasi' would be to offer an incomplete explanation. It begs the important question - what has brought these people to a condition in which they are prepared to be provoked?

Wahid was responding to journalists' tendency to seek reasons for the violence in Maluku's "different faiths and ethnic backgrounds." This is the 'tinderbox' theory familiar from so many analyses of conflict in present and former Yugoslavia - that deep and instinctive antagonisms between, in this case, Muslims and Christians are forever smouldering and ready to ignite into violence. Once violence begins, a cycle of vengeance develops which is sufficient to explain further violence. A piece on the website of Time Asia, again from January 2000, appeared with the standfirst: "Religious differences have turned the Moluccas into a battlefield, filled with hate and the prospect of more violence."

Reporter Jason Tedjasukmana remarked: "Neither side in Ambon says it wants a fight, and yet the violence seems unstoppable. How far back does one have to go to affix blame, or untangle the emotions... The widespread destruction and torching of mosques and churches occurs without explanation."

Conflict or Meta-conflict?

The same edition of Jakarta Post as carried the comments by President Wahid also heard from Maluku military commander Brigadier-General Max Tamaela, who "told reporters on Sunday that the fighting in Central Maluku had nothing to do with religious issues, saying the warring villages were of the same religion."

One reporter who penetrated discourses of the meta-conflict, such as religious antinomies and the cycle of revenge, to discern the outlines of the underlying conflict, was Gerry van Klinken in the fourth-quarter, 1999 edition of Inside Indonesia.

He noted that, in Ambon as elsewhere, "people often identify with a particular religious community for quite worldly reasons... Joining the Protestant or Muslim community means being part of a network that not only worships God in a certain way but does practical things for its members - provides access to friends in powerful places, for example, or protection when things get tough.

"These networks extend up the social ladder to influential circles in Jakarta. And they extend downward to street level, where gangs of young men provide the protective muscle that an inefficient police force cannot provide."

The New Order entrenched the expectation among people that spoils of economic success would be shared according to who you knew, not what you knew. Provincial people were "dependent on their patrons in Jakarta to get senior appointments in the public service, as well as business opportunities in the form of untendered government contracts."

And, of course, two enormous upheavals had just sent anxiety cascading down through these networks, from Jakarta high politics to the streets of Ambon. One was the drawn-out disintegration of the Suharto presidency - the other, the economic meltdown which slashed incomes and employment opportunities across Indonesia in 1998, leading up to the upsurge of violence in Maluku province. In time of scarcity and uncertainty, mechanisms people had relied on to 'see them all right' were suddenly threatened. A habit of scapegoating supervened. Whatever opportunities or benefits were not coming my way were being corruptly diverted to someone from the other section of the community - each now had a reason to construct the existing social and economic paradigm as a threat by 'them' against 'us'.

The point, as van Klinken observes, is that this makes the conflict transparent. "In every other type of collective violence, people seem to be driven by motives we can understand - to get a better deal for themselves, or to protect their interests. Why should religious strife be any different?" If there are reasons for the violence which we can understand, the violent parties can be reasoned with.

Defects in the structure and culture of the conflict can be balanced, neutralised and removed by devising complex, interlocking solutions which work simultaneously on different levels. Then the conflict can be transformed into a non-violent phase.

Media responsibility

The question of media responsibility in driving the cycle of events which saw Maluku plunged into violence preoccupied Indonesian journalists to the extent that it became a story in itself. In February 2000, the Jakarta Post examined claims that reporting, particularly in the Islamic press, had itself exerted a provoking effect. One paper had baldly declared: "The war in Maluku is not one of social or economic groups, it is clearly among Christians and Muslims, and what is happening is a genocide against Muslims."

The Post piece was headlined, "Islamic media defy taboos on sensitive reporting." After the New Order, restrictions on the written press were lifted, with journalists now free to report violent incidents which might previously have been suppressed. The paper had spoken to Didik Supriyanto, an official of the Independent Journalists' Association, previously an underground organisation, about the vexed question of how, precisely, such coverage might influence people on the ground.

"In response to the view among the media and some observers that readers are not necessarily influenced by what they read, Didik said: 'That's true but constant coverage, particularly by the mass media, which is hardly balanced with the other side, could by and by give suggestions to readers.'"

Coverage from around this time contains a number of interesting indications that a different mechanism - the positive feedback loop discussed above - may also be operating. Indonesia's transition from authoritarian rule had seen the emergence in Jakarta of a new creature - the spin-doctor, using persuasion, rather than coercion, to get journalists to write 'good news' stories about the deeds of his or her political patron. In a culture where peaceful co-existence is genuinely highly valued, any suggestion that a politician was taking effective action to end violent conflict would be just such a story.

So what incentive does the coverage send around the feedback loop? If the violence is seen as the result of 'provokasi', then a 'good news' story awaits the politician who will be seen taking action calculated to root out and remove the provocateurs. London's Guardian newspaper quoted President Wahid, on January 20, 2000, from an interview he gave to reporters in Jakarta. Under the headline, "Indonesia pledges 'harsh action' against rioters," reporter John Aglionby said the President had promised "a massive crackdown to prevent widespread violence and social unrest from causing the country to break apart."

Once again, Wahid offered the 'provokasi' theory as an explanation for the violence: "In an interview, he claimed that a small group of religious fanatics and military officers were responsible," Aglionby reported. The Jakarta Post said he was sending Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri "to go there and take action against perpetrators of the violence."

There is also a hint that reporting of the kind van Klinken provided might add a further incentive to a different response. If people have been brought to the point where they are prepared to be provoked, he suggests the causes may be to do with economic injustice. Corruption made opportunity and security contingent on patronage from particular networks, which happened to

be based on religion. President Wahid's interview also indicated an willingness to address these underlying conditions. The Guardian piece quoted him as saying: "We tried to make the rule of law supreme in this country. They [the 'small group of religious fanatics and military officers'] did not like it because in the past they were used to doing whatever they liked."

Practical reporting decisions

Shortly after these reports appeared, the British Council organised a one-day conference in Jakarta for national media editors and owners, to discuss issues in the coverage of Indonesia's conflicts. One announced that his newspaper had been calling for an independent judiciary so that all Indonesians could be equal before the courts, and the rule of law could, as Wahid said, be made supreme.

Calling for things is something editors and owners can do in leader and comment pages, but the question is, what practical reporting decisions by their journalists might strengthen the case? One strong strand in coverage of events in Ambon was to examine the role of the army and whether it was behaving in a way which placed it above the law.

But reporters on the ground can also look beyond entrenched positions, which define and delineate the meta-conflict, to enquire into the lived experience of people in the conflict arena. What are the everyday fears and frustrations caused by corruption, where the neutral state, guaranteeing basic rights to citizens regardless of their religion or ethnic identity, is overpowered by corrupt networks of the kind van Klinken describes?

If these factors are identified as explaining the violence, then a 'good news' story could occur whenever action is taken to address them. Moves towards strengthening the independence of the judiciary might be one; as might the establishment of equal opportunities mechanisms. This is also a framework of understanding in which we could appreciate the importance of grassroots initiatives which are, at the moment, greatly under-reported.

Examples could include the young men from the Christian community providing security outside mosques, and young Muslims standing guard outside church services in gestures of cross community solidarity designed to uphold the same inalienable rights - in this case, freedom of worship - for all, regardless of their religious identity.

The situation throughout Maluku province was, and continues to be extremely difficult for journalists as for many others, particularly for a reporter from, say, the Muslim community who tries to report on the lived experience of those in a Christian area, and vice versa. Some efforts are being made by civic society groups, led by the ngo LSPP, the Independent Journalists'

Association, and the British Council, to help. But no-one should underestimate the difficulties and dangers. The discussions in Jakarta were part of an ongoing dialogue between members of Conflict and Peace Forums and Indonesian journalists about ideas for responsible coverage of conflicts.

Britain and Ireland

Another context where, for many years, mainstream reporting routinely explained violence as caused by 'deep hatreds' or 'revenge' was the Britain/Ireland conflict. 'IRA violence' was always seen as 'the problem.' If only this 'paramilitary gang' could be defeated militarily, and the 'men of violence' caught and imprisoned, the problem would go away. This became known in nationalist and republican circles as the 'securocratic mentality'. It was, and to a large extent remains, the standard analysis of most coverage of 'the troubles' by London-based news organisations.

So why did men from Catholic communities in Northern Ireland take up arms? Many may indeed have been 'evil' - but was this a sufficient explanation? Assigned to the province by Sky News in 1998, I met Eilish McCabe, in the border village of Aughnacloy, in County Tyrone. Her brother, Aidan McAnespie, had been killed by a British soldier's bullet from the checkpoint which straddles the main road out of the village into the Irish republic. The Army said it was an accident which took place while the soldier was cleaning his gun.

The 'accident' occurred as Mr McAnespie walked up the road towards the checkpoint, a hundred metres or so away, and the rifle would have to have been pointing out of the sniper's aperture at the time it was being cleaned for the Army version to have been correct. But Ms McCabe had long since passed the point, she said, of seeking justice for his killer. At a belated inquest, the only witness, another British soldier, had gone AWOL and so could not give evidence. She wanted "the truth," so the family could move on from his death.

While in Aughnacloy, I also spoke to Michael Muldoon, a local Catholic, who told me he'd endured twenty years of "harassment" by soldiers from the checkpoint, dating from the time he'd got his driving licence and started to pass through it on the way to work - the same treatment as that endured by Aidan McAnespie before his death. Mr Muldoon had gone to court to try to get a legal definition of a 'body search', to which, he said, the troops had subjected him on occasions too numerous to mention, the latest just weeks before our interview.

The court case had brought him no closer to a legal definition of his rights or, therefore, of any statutory restraints on what he said was sometimes extremely rough treatment, but it had yielded one nugget of information along the way. Some time in his youth, he'd been handed a 'P1' security assessment as a terrorist suspect in secret records compiled and maintained by the Royal

Ulster Constabulary, a force composed of at least 90% Protestants. There was no way of hearing any of the allegations against him, which had led to this assessment, or of having them tested in any tribunal providing for his accusers to be cross-examined, or the evidence challenged, by his representatives - fundamental and internationally recognised principles of jurisprudence.

According to Eilish McCabe, Mr Muldoon's frustration was part of a pattern in which normal routes of redress for citizens with a grievance were denied to Catholics. A senior clergyman, Monsignor Denis Faul, had taken up as many as fifteen hundred cases over fifteen years with army commanders, initiated by locals who believed themselves to have been mistreated. "He's never even got a response" in the overwhelming majority of them, she said. "That's very, very, very frustrating for some young people." Mr Muldoon went further - the checkpoint was "a recruiting sergeant for the IRA."

The point of reporting on such stories is to shed some light on one factor perpetuating the conflict and the conditions for violence - the sense of injustice in Catholic communities at a security order perceived as arbitrary, discriminatory and impossible to hold to account by legal or political means.

Taking that perception seriously therefore appears as key to explaining the violence and understanding what helped to reproduce and sustain it over so many years. Addressing and overcoming what these people saw as institutionalised discrimination is exposed as a precondition for ending the violence - not something 'the securocratic mentality' understands.

By the time of this report, of course, these connections already figured in the official agenda for the conflict. It appeared on Sky News as people prepared to vote on the Good Friday Agreement, which provided for the handover of paramilitary weapons but also the reform of policing in Northern Ireland, to address precisely the concerns presented by Eilish McCabe and Michael Muldoon.

From 'apportioning blame' to conflict analysis in South Africa

Another arena where many journalists have examined the effects of their reporting on framing conflict, and on the perceived options for transforming it, is post-Apartheid South Africa. One fascinating example, from the build-up to the country's first all-race election in 1994, became the subject of an important study by Lesley Fordred, an anthropologist from the University of Cape Town. Once again the central issue is the nature of the explanation provided for violence. Late one Friday night, Fordred writes, "thirteen children and one adult were massacred by unknown rifle-bearers in a deserted mud hut outside a village called Mahehle, about 200 km south west of Pietermaritzburg in kwaZulu/Natal, South Africa."

This territory abutted the heartland of an ongoing violent conflict between supporters of the rival African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party. After this incident, Fordred comments, "once again, it seemed the ANC-IFP conflict in Natal was going to drag democracy out of reach." Indeed, the area's main newspaper, the Natal Witness, ran a piece in its edition of the following Monday morning, headlined: "Massacre blamed on 'fear of election'" - an explanation sourced to two local ANC party officials.

The direct connection between the massacre and the election was explained in this piece thus: "In the incident, four gunmen opened fire on a group of mainly teenagers preparing for an African National Congress voter education workshop in rural Mahehle."

Both main party leaders commented on the incident. "ANC leader Nelson Mandela yesterday blamed IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi for the deaths and said Buthelezi is fanning violence with his opposition to the election... Buthelezi yesterday condemned Saturday's massacre, saying such violence could further polarize South African society. 'We are never going to have peace and prosperity in South Africa by eliminating each other through such terrible acts of violence', he said."

As Fordred observes: " 'Balance' is attained through the identification of 'both sides' of the conflict, and sourcing of comments from each of them. Selections from their various spokespersons' comments attempt to define positions on the attack, rather than by searching for common ground: the fact that both the ANC and IFP condemned the massacre is completely ignored...

"Probing questions are not asked; names of the dead are not given; a reporter did not visit the scene; there is a heavy reliance on police information and on comments obtained by telephone and fax - a work routine that precludes the insights of villagers. And finally, the narrative itself - the construction of the sequence of events, and the suggestion of motivation - is taken directly from politicians in Pretoria."

Fordred goes on to describe how she accompanied the paper's assistant editor, Khaba Mkhize, as he went to Mahehle to file a follow-up report. Several different nuances emerge. His piece begins with suggestions that the killing of unarmed children was a tragic mistake. In a fraught situation, the presence of unknown people in a deserted hut on the edge of a village conveyed the impression of menace: "The unseen occupants of the hut were apparently braaiing mealies on a fire. This caused some people to panic, believing that an attack was being planned" and having no way of knowing those inside were unarmed. A line which emerged only by the reporter inspecting the scene and talking face-to-face with locals.

A detective investigating the killings told Mhkize: "'It appears the attackers were not aware of who was occupying the house. Judging by the long-range shots that hit the mud walls, it is safe to deduce that they later stormed the house because there was no return of fire." The piece also heard from a local farmer, Ephraim Nxsane, who lost two grandsons in the attack. He attributed the group's decision to camp out on a summer's night to "youthful excitement" at the imminent electioneering and the prospect of connecting themselves - albeit distantly - with the legendary figure of Nelson Mandela. Mhkize's piece does not attempt to fix blame, but is carefully even-handed in relating another observation made at the scene - that holes in the hut's mud walls were made in some cases by G3 and in others by AK47 bullets &endash; weapons of choice for the IFP and ANC respectively.

The effect of this is to begin to move the narrative away from an episode in an ongoing tug-of-war, or series of blows exchanged by two parties, with one fingered as 'guilty' of this particular atrocity. Instead it directs us to consider how the conflict itself, with its attendant fears and resentments, is causing tragic errors of judgement, and consequences - the killing of unarmed children as young as 12 - that nobody intends or wants. Here, Mkhize creates a space for the insights of conflict transformation and analysis to be brought to bear.

Professor Johan Galtung calls this the "exculpatory nature-structure-culture" approach to bringing about "3 'R's - Reconstruction, Reconciliation, Resolution" of conflicts after violence - in this case, after the end of Apartheid:

"A structure-oriented perspective converts the relationship from inter personal, or inter-state/nation [here, inter-group] to a relation between two positions in a deficient structure. If the parties can agree that the structure was/is deficient and that their behaviour was an enactment of structural positions rather than anything more personal, then turning together against the common problem, the structural violence, should be possible."

Apart from a powerful argument in favour of journalists going to the scene of stories to find things out, rather than pulling them together back at base, this, then, stands as one reporter's contribution to a logic which eventually led South Africa to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an experiment in moving on from the structural violence of Apartheid. Fordred records Mkhize's keen sense of power - and the attendant responsibility - in making these reporting decisions: "Our journalistic mistakes are not visible," he tells her, "like the doctor's mistake that gets buried... But in actual fact our mistakes start wars and civil wars."

Extensive media coverage of the massacre victims' funeral was another occasion to focus on the common problem of structural violence. Several months later, according to Fordred, "The accused [three IFP officials and one IFP member] were acquitted for lack of evidence - too few witnesses had been willing to come forward. Several journalists I spoke to believed political horsetrading between the ANC and IFP to have been behind the acquittal."

But this was after the historic election had passed off without major outbreaks of violence and the two parties had embarked on creating a new relationship as rivals in normal, democratic political exchange. An illustration, perhaps, of both the benefits and the drawbacks of a structure-oriented perspective and one which mimics some of the ambivalence in South Africa towards the TRC process itself. (One reason why many of its proponents, including Professor Galtung, invariably advocate applying it in conjunction with other approaches, not in isolation.)

Worthy/unworthy victimhood

In Khaba Mkhize's report, the problem is the conflict, not the evil or irrational behaviour of one 'side'. The effect is to make it make sense to focus on structural or cultural factors which perpetuate the conflict and the conditions for violence. Because 'blame' cannot therefore be pinned on one, demonised party, suddenly it makes sense to balance and neutralise those factors if the conflict is to be transformed into a non-violent phase. But for this, it is necessary to apply an equal esteem to the suffering and testimony of all parties, and to take their fears, resentments and grievances equally seriously.

Western readers, listeners and viewers grew accustomed to blood curdling accounts of 'black-on-black' violence from South Africa's troubled townships during the decay of Apartheid. In one frighteningly familiar image, gangs of young ANC supporters - 'Comrades' - would triumphantly dance and parade for the cameras after some flaring of communal strife. Fordred quotes Mkhize extending a compassionate understanding to these, the demonised figures of so many frontline reports: "For every Comrade that exists in South Africa," he says, "there's not a single one that's not a concern of a parent."

Coverage of Northern Ireland by London-based media has long been criticised for a lop-sided approach to reporting on the suffering of different sections of the community - a 'hierarchy of death'. In Aughnacloy, Eilish McCabe told me that the sense of grievance of those in nationalist communities bereaved by 'the troubles' was exacerbated by the fact that "the media doesn't want toknow. No-one wants to know." Roy Greenslade, former Mirror editor and later media columnist for the Guardian, is a frequent exponent of this critique.

One piece in 1998, shortly after the beginning of the stand-off at Drumcree, where Orange marchers refused police requests to move from a field outside the local church, detailed a "catalogue of intimidation, arson, hijacking, house-burning, bombing, blockading, terror and mayhem." None of these incidents was considered important enough to make the pages of London newspapers, though they were extensively reported in the Irish News, Newsletter, Derry Journal and the Irish Times. If just one had happened "in any six counties of England, Wales or Scotland," Greenslade writes, it would have been headline material.

The only individual attack which did receive widespread British coverage was the slightly later killing of three children from a single family, on a housing estate not far from Drumcree, at Ballymoney. In one 24-hour span of the week leading up to this tragedy, Greenslade counted 191 attacks on police and troops, 412 petrol bombings, 73 houses damaged, 93 other buildings attacked and 136 vehicle hijackings. He comments: "This widespread, premeditated orgy of violence and sectarian intimidation was the reason the people of Northern Ireland were not surprised by the petrol bomb deaths of the Quinn children in Ballymoney. They knew something ghastly would happen because, quite apart from their own experience, they were reading every day.

"The British people did not. Their newspapers (especially the mass market tabloids) ignore most of the horrors perpetrated by the men who roam the streets waving Union flags and unleash savagery on their fellow citizens in the name of the Queen." The common factor, of course, in all this unreported violence was that it was committed by Loyalist mobs - not Republicans.

In other pieces in the same series, Greenslade connects this disparity with the framework of understanding within which political developments are reported. He remarks on the difference in rhetoric among London newspapers when Sinn Fein MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were received for the first time at 10 Downing Street; compared with the occasion when the same welcome was extended to (unelected) fringe Loyalist leaders, who included actual former paramilitary prisoners. In the former case it was bellicose and hysterical ("the darkest day in the history of British democracy" - Daily Telegraph); in the latter, comparatively anodyne in its restraint.

Consequences

An effect of the 'securocratic mentality' underpinning most London based coverage of the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement has been to focus on 'IRA decommissioning' as the issue which could 'make or break' the prospects for peace. Another tug-of-war in which any inch gained (weapon extracted) by one side can only be the same inch lost (weapon yielded) by the other. One particularly delicate phase of this dispute, in 1999, coincided with the date of the next scheduled Drumcree march. Fraught discussions over the Orange Parade, according to the Times, "completely overshadowed negotiations to save the Good Friday Agreement half a mile away at Stormont Castle buildings, where neither the Unionists nor Sinn Fein offered any hint of compromise."

Of a front-page lead article running to fifteen paragraphs, just one, the thirteenth, mentioned the "widespread, premeditated orgy of violence and sectarian intimidation" catalogued by Roy Greenslade:

"Last year there were nightly confrontations with the security forces at Drumcree. The riots spread throughout the province and the mayhem subsided only when three young brothers were burnt alive in a loyalist arson attack on their Ballymoney home."

An expanded consideration of this, the threat posed by Loyalists to the safety of residents in their homes, may have helped to shift the focus from the need for 'IRA decommissioning' to the urgency of a general overhaul of security arrangements in the province, to neutralise the structural and cultural factors helping to perpetuate the conditions for violence. Again, this would include reform of the security apparatus itself. In Portadown, home of the Orange Lodge involved in the standoff at Drumcree, a young Catholic man, Robert Hamill, was kicked to death by a Loyalist mob in April 1997, a year before the killing of the Quinn children. This took place in full view of RUC officers in a Landrover and 200 metres from an RUC station, yet none of the officers present made any attempt to stop the attack or arrest the perpetrators.

According to a letter in The Journalist, the monthly magazine sent to members of the British National Union of Journalists, this case had been "virtually ignored by the British press, although it concerns an illustration of police bigotry even worse than the case of Stephen Lawrence."

(Stephen Lawrence was a black teenager murdered by a racist gang in South London. The 1998 public inquiry into the bungled investigation of the killing diagnosed 'institutional racism' in the Metropolitan Police and their failure adequately to protect members of London's ethnic minority communities. By this stage, after years of general indifference from the mainstream media, the case was attracting blanket media coverage.)

The connection is between the comparative lack of esteem for the suffering, fears and grievances of Catholics, and the 'securocratic mentality' which frames the conflict as being confined to the issue of 'IRA decommissioning.' Sure enough, the same edition of the Times with the front-page report discussed here carried an opinion piece inside by star columnist Michael Gove. This opened with a beguiling Proustian flourish - musings arising from the contemplation of an everyday item, not a dipping biscuit in Gove's case but a Labour Party coffee-mug from the 1997 General Election campaign, bearing the legend, "tough on crime."

On the decommissioning issue, Gove demanded: "Why, in the first instance, should we believe Sinn Fein? If republicans are happy to kill to achieve their aims, then why should they exhibit any moral scruple about lying?" The piece ended with an epitaph for the Northern Ireland peace process itself: "It is because we have gone too far that we must stop now. The Prime Minister tells us that there is no alternative. That, I'm afraid, is the greatest fiction of all. There is always an alternative to appeasing those who use violence. The alternative is etched on my Labour Party mug."

The comment is a logical counterpart of the news reporting - Gove's prescription of a security 'crackdown' would be easier to apply if the category, "those who use violence" was confined to those he called "Gerry's private army" - the IRA. Over time, regular readers of the Times, or other London newspapers observing a 'hierarchy of death' in deciding whether violence is newsworthy, might indeed have gleaned this general, dripfed impression. Dividing people into worthy and unworthy victims makes a violent solution - being 'tough on crime' - seem to make sense.

Beyond 'victim journalism' and 'how do you feel?'

A common feature of 'victim journalism' is the use of some variant on the question 'how do you feel?' as a cue for hearing from members of the public affected by violence. The enduring unexamined dominance of this newsgathering strategy was suggested by a memo, from the then editor of Granada's World In Action programme, which fell into the hands of Private Eye. The note, to journalists working on an episode set in Northern Ireland, titled, The Price of Peace, advised: "Hundreds of psychos will be out of prison and back on the streets if people vote Yes in the referendum. This [programme] is relatively easy to do - I have seen shorter versions on the news. What you do is to focus on four or five particularly vicious killers and remind people of their crimes. Talk to the relatives of their dead victims, or even some living victims minus various limbs, eyes, etc".

Shortly after Michael Gove's piece appeared in the Times, the Mirror ran a two-day mini-series of special reports by Belfast features editor Jilly Beattie. These tracked the personal transition of an IRA man - from hatred of the British, to his own realisation that all parties to the Britain/Ireland conflict share a common enemy in a deficient structure and culture which perpetuates cycles of violence. Vincent McKenna grew up alongside Eilish McCabe and Michael Muldoon, in the very same border village of Aughnacloy, County Tyrone.

Beattie describes his violent childhood, how frequent beatings by his parents were offset by the kindness and brotherhood extended to him by neighbouring children and their families - police or army families in many cases. The trigger for his paramilitary career came when his uncle, a well-known IRA commander, died in prison: "I was sick of being bullied, sick of being frightened... We were told Uncle Sean had been tortured and died of a heart attack. He was only 41. In that moment I promised to wage war on the British state - the bully of the Irish people."

Mr McKenna recalled how he would gather intelligence on his old Aughnacloy neighbours for his new friends in the IRA, but that, when it came to actually killing them, he would invariably lose his nerve, contriving 'accidents' to make the planned operations go wrong then feigning outrage that an 'unknown' hand had sabotaged them.

(This suggests that a complete report on the 'harassment' of Catholics in Aughnacloy would require some further explanation. These 'near misses' no doubt added to the fears and resentments of local police and army personnel in their dealings with those, like Michael Muldoon, labelled 'terrorist suspects'. Fears and resentments which created conditions for violence against Catholics.)

Later, after first lapsing into alcoholism and then rediscovering religion - in a Presbyterian church, not the Catholicism of his upbringing - Mr McKenna had gone to university, studied politics and child psychology - "I wanted to understand how my childhood had turned me into the person I was." He then founded the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau, which helps victims of violence. He told Beattie he would make sure his children went to an integrated (non-sectarian) school.

It is clear from Beattie's account that the interviewing technique for this piece took a significant step beyond the hackneyed 'how do you feel?' line of questioning. Although Mr McKenna recounts his emotions and impressions at various stages of his personal journey, the point of interviewing him was to get him to share the inner work he had already done in examining and processing his feelings, drawing conclusions from them and facing the implications for the wider political situation in Northern Ireland. At the end, he declares: "I suppose part of the reason I work so hard to help people who have suffered terror is that it acts as a salve to the damage I have done to myself. It's my way of asking forgiveness, of trying to do right after years spent doing wrong."

This connects with one of the key insights of conflict transformation, according to Professor Galtung. Victims of violence can seek restitution through punishment of the perpetrator or to 'get even' by revenge. Or, like Eilish McCabe, they can hope to be released from the trauma of suffering and loss by being told the truth - a step towards accepting reconciliation as the outcome. In implicit exchange for this:

"The perpetrator may seek release from his guilt: from the Third Party through submission, penitence or punishment; from the victim through apology and forgiveness; and from himself by hard inner work. Reconciliation has essentially to take place between perpetrator and victim. But that also means either of them can withhold reconciliation, putting the trauma/guilt into the world trauma/guilt bank and using them as weapons."

Is this account of Vincent McKenna's life telling us anything of wider importance? After all, he does not, himself, have any say in the halls of negotiation referred to in the Times report, to "save the Good Friday Agreement." This is the logic inherent in so much reporting of conflicts - concentrated, as it is, on official information sources and their agenda. At one stage, the Ulster Unionists were publicly havering over whether to join the phase of talks at Stormont which led to the Accord in the first place.

Their parliamentary ranks were, according to reports, evenly divided - a convenient shorthand, it was generally assumed, for opinion among the Unionist population of Northern Ireland as a whole. Then a poll commissioned by one Belfast newspaper suggested that 86% of Unionist supporters wanted their party to participate. Shortly afterwards, David Trimble duly led his colleagues into the talks.

For a conflict genuinely to be transformed, and cycles of violence interrupted, peace must be made by and between people who will have to live with the eventual settlement, honestly looking in on their own lives, connecting with and processing their feelings, and drawing conclusions from them. For the reporter to detect these important stirrings, the questioning needs to take them through this entire process. The rarity of such questioning might be connected to the fact that the poll findings took many by surprise.

In another context, the Economist's Palestine correspondent, Graham Usher, recounts a meeting with a Palestinian fisherman who lost his home in 1948, in what Arabs call 'al-Nakba' - 'the Catastrophe' - as Jews set up the State of Israel. He settled in the Gaza Strip, earmarked, at the time of this piece in 1994, as the first area, with Jericho, to be handed over to the new Palestinian Authority (PA).

This man, Abu Musa, tells Usher: "I feel like a man who has lost a million dollars and been given ten. But you see, I lost the million dollars a long time ago. So I will keep the ten. We cannot go on the way we are. I accept, I accept, I accept. After so much bloodshed, I accept. But, please, don't ask me how I feel." From a single news report, we cannot expect comprehensive solutions. This one perhaps tells us as much about what many - including Usher - perceive as imbalances written into the Oslo accords, which set up the PA, as it does about the process of people making peace. But it does suggest, as with the piece on Vincent McKenna, what clues can emerge if people are treated as thinking human beings capable of processing their experiences, instead of "victims minus various limbs, eyes, etc" or ciphers for accumulated hatred and bitterness.

Once the Good Friday Agreement had been approved by an overwhelming majority in separate votes both north and south of the Irish border, some London newspapers had the good grace to accept that, as the Guardian put it in an editorial, politicians had been led by the people in coming so far along the road to a resolution. The implication being that many journalists, too, had been left looking slightly out of touch. The episode perhaps reminded them of what may be missed if a broad swath of stakeholders in a conflict are routinely swept up into an 'aggregate' - factoring them in to any analysis of that conflict as representatives of one fixed viewpoint or identity.

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