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Irreversible
peace in Northern Ireland?
By JONATHAN
POWER
December 12th, 2000
LONDON - President Bill Clinton who has just
arrived in Northern Ireland likes to think the Good
Friday peace agreement of 1998 was one of his great
accomplishments. Apart from the fact that he was but one
pivotal actor among many, the truth is it is far too
early to boast. The silencing of the guns and the
creation of an Assembly in which sit militant Catholic
Republicans who wish the north to be joined with
independent Eire to the south, and equally passionate
Protestants who want to ensure that the north is forever
wedded to the United Kingdom, is an undoubted
accomplishment.
But it has all been done on a fudge. At bottom the
positions of both sides are irreconcilable and the
stresses and strains that have made ribbons of previous
understandings can re-surface at any moment. Clinton can
use his charisma to push things along an inch or two, but
after he has gone home the fudges will remain in place,
precarious, vulnerable and with a projected life-span,
depending on who you talk to, from two months to a few
years.
What the peace negotiators of Northern Ireland have
taught the world with its plethora of ethnic conflicts is
the power of ambiguity. But can ambiguity live for ever?
It has certainly brought six and half years of much
diminished violence since the cease-fire of the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) in August, 1994. It greatly
facilitated the negotiations that led to the creation of
the Northern Ireland Assembly, its power-sharing
executive and devolved government. It has allowed such
obstacles as the refusal of the IRA to destroy their
weapons caches to be finessed with words - they have been
put "beyond use".
But this art of the fudge has merely deferred many of
the difficult questions to a later day. It is a wasting
asset. At some point the electorate, or at least the
activists, will push for clarity. One date already looms:
by June 2001 the IRA is committed to decommissioning all
its arms. Right now it is being pressed to allow more
access to its arms caches, but is demanding in return a
faster withdrawal of British troops and a speedy
implementation of police reforms recommended by a
government-appointed commission. If a fudge is tried
again will the rank and file of the main Protestant
party, the Ulster Unionists, finally turn against its
Nobel Prize-winning leader and First Minister, David
Trimble?
Historians recall that the whole sorry mess of
Northern Ireland is rooted in a fudge - when in 1921 the
Irish prime minister, Eamonn de Valera, went along with
the creation of Northern Ireland , convincing himself and
the Irish electorate that the border would be temporary,
even though he well knew that Unionists had been
overwhelmingly victorious in elections to a new devolved
parliament in the north-eastern six counties seven months
earlier.
Yet this has been the way peace has been made for the
last seven years, with the parties both lying to each
other and to themselves. It brings a near quietening of
the guns, which a vast majority of both sides want more
than anything else. Perhaps that is enough of an
incentive to keep the ambiguity alive. It is what one
observer called "a working misunderstanding". It has
successfully created a non-violent political environment
that enables each side to believe it can fulfil its
political agenda by peaceful means, even though we
outsiders can see that the agendas are in fact
irreconcilable.
Down the road another great fudge looms, the
development of de facto joint authority over Northern
Ireland by both London and Dublin, which already the
British government of Tony Blair is inching towards. If
one day the Unionists can swallow this, then it would
give the IRA and their political party, Sinn Fein, if not
the unity with the southern republic to which they
aspire, a great deal of what they are after. And in a
united Europe, where borders by the day are becoming
softer, it could in time be as sufficient as to make no
difference to all but the most fanatical.
This is to be optimistic. Perhaps the Good Friday
Agreement is too flawed, built on too many compromises
and ambiguities. Perhaps, as many doubting Unionists
argue, the agreement has made the peace process hostage
to the IRA's whims about disarmament - and thus every
time Sinn Fein/IRA don't get their way they will subtly
or not so subtly raise once more the prospect of starting
up a bombing campaign.
But as Jonathan Stevenson has argued in an interesting
article in Survival the sting could be taken out
of that tail by the Unionists dropping the
decommissioning requirement and merely insisting that
none of the Sinn Fein representatives on the Northern
Ireland executive be convicted of terrorist offences. The
hard fact remains that arms dumps or no arms dumps IRA
has made, and can make again, some of its most
devastating bombs out of fertiliser.
On balance, the optimists are winning the argument and
their counsel holds sway, for now. This is why Mr
Clinton's visit can only be a useful one. But like many
other accomplishments he lays claim to sponsorship of, we
will not know if they are true successes until a lot more
water has passed under the bridge.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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