The Long Spoons of Ulster
Mini Teaser: Disturbing indications that the habits of veteran terrorists die hard in Northern Ireland.
The epochal September 11 attacks have increased the sensitivity and hostility of most governments worldwide to terrorism. Nevertheless, there remains a practical distinction between "new" terrorist outfits like Al-Qaeda, which have no negotiable political objective, and "old" terrorist groups motivated by nationalist or irredentist agendas that may be subject to negotiation. If anything, September 11 has made the leaders of some countries afflicted with "old" terrorist problems want to settle matters quickly, before such groups establish links with or try to imitate the methods of new terrorists like Osama bin Laden. Varieties of such activity have occurred from Sri Lanka to the Andes in the hopes that negotiated solutions are in fact possible. With the FARC in Colombia and the PLO in Palestine, protracted but futile efforts at patient negotiation suggest that in these cases they may not be. With the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and ETA in Spain, it is too soon to say. But it is at least plausible that these and other problems may be amenable to negotiated solutions. Governments thus need to exercise a hard-nosed realism: to appreciate and preserve distinctions among terrorist groups, and to remain open to negotiating with those that may be politically tamed.
The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) has appeared to be one such group. When the Belfast Agreement was approved by 71 percent of Northern Irish voters in May 1998, moderate Ulster unionism and Irish nationalism held sway. The greatest political challenges to ending the "troubles" appeared to have been overcome. Deaths from political violence dwindled from close to one hundred per year before the autumn 1994 ceasefires to about twenty per year in the subsequent five-year period. The Republic of Ireland discarded its constitutional claim on Northern Irish territory. After more than 25 years of violent opposition to a "partitionist" solution to the Northern Irish conflict, once militant republicans in Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, accepted a devolved government founded on the legitimacy of partition--at least as an interim arrangement.
At the same time, Protestant unionists further enshrined the consent principle (dubbed the "unionist veto" by republicans) whereby Northern Ireland must remain part of the United Kingdom until its majority says otherwise. The "soft" constitutional nationalists that opposed violence, being the majority of the province's Catholics, won sub-sovereign cross-border administrative bodies in specified substantive areas to be jointly run by officials from Dublin and Belfast. Between 1994 and 2001, the province was significantly demilitarized; the British troop presence dropped from over 17,000 to 14,000 and numerous watchtowers and army posts were dismantled. The belief prevailed that the hard work had been done, and that even the most fraught issues left to be faced--the disarmament of terrorist groups, or "decommissioning", further demilitarization, police reform and others--would in time be solved.
It hasn't turned out to be such a smooth ride. While police reform is under way, little decommissioning has occurred. Increasing numbers of unionists resent governing with a political party that sports a "private army", while acquiescing to the evisceration of a police force that suffered over 300 fatalities in resisting that army. At the same time, nationalists have warmed to a Sinn Fein whose paramilitary arm no longer demonizes the Catholic community by killing policemen and soldiers, but still dominates Northern Irish politics by dint of holding on to nearly one hundred tons of weaponry. These trends were starkly confirmed on June 7, 2001, when Northern Irish voters chose their 18 Westminster members of Parliament. The Rev. Ian Paisley's anti-Agreement Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) increased its number of MPs from two to five at the expense of the larger Ulster Unionist Party (UUP); Sinn Fein (which stands for Westminster elections but does not participate in national government in Britain) vaulted from two to four at the expense of the soft nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Local council elections followed a similar pattern. This suggests that the sides are drawing further apart, not closer together.
Nevertheless, the republican and unionist positions are not as irreconcilable as these results might indicate. Paisley's DUP and Sinn Fein are thinking and behaving differently than they have before. The DUP manifesto is not focused on undermining the Belfast Agreement but rather on "holding Tony Blair to his pledges." Its key principles are drafted carefully so as to enshrine meaningful decommissioning as the only indispensable requirement of Sinn Fein's participating fully in devolved government. As for Sinn Fein, partition and devolution will never be satisfactory to republicans; yet a week before the Westminster election Martin McGuinness triumphantly told London's Daily Telegraph: "There's almost an inevitability that within the next five years . . . the First Minister will be a Sinn Fein minister." Devolution compensates republicans psychologically for decades of perceived exclusion. For practical purposes, too--given that they do not actively engage in British national politics--republicans need devolved government in Northern Ireland as a way to demonstrate their competence as a legitimate party, the better to become a major political force in the Republic of Ireland en route (presumptively) to a united Ireland. Republicans therefore seem willing to govern with unionists for some undefined but not fatally short period.
Dramatic developments in late October 2001, as well as the chilling effect of September 11, reflected these attitudes. David Trimble resigned as First Minister of the devolved assembly on July 1 over the decommissioning impasse, and on October 18 finally withdrew the Ulster Unionist Party's ministers from the assembly's governing executive. This put pressure on the IRA to disarm in order to forestall the collapse of the assembly and save the Agreement. After the arrests in Colombia of three IRA men for training the anti-American Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in August and then the September 11 attacks, Washington privately made it clear to Sinn Fein that republicans would receive no diplomatic support from the United States unless the IRA disarmed. This combination of internal crisis and diplomatic pressure produced the IRA's first disarmament gesture of October 23.
As gestures go, however, it was minimal: It involved no more than two arms dumps out of dozens, and was verified not by the British government or unionists but by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD). Chaired by Canadian General John de Chastelain, the IICD has no enforcement power and has functioned as little more than a liaison. Neither the nature and quantity of arms nor the method by which they were rendered unusable was made public. When asked by unionist assembly member Pauline Armitage whether he could not disclose this information "because it is so paltry that it would be embarrassing", Gen. de Chastelain replied: "I would never argue against a woman's intuition."
Nevertheless, most unionists re-joined the executive. Trimble was narrowly re-installed as First Minister, but support in his own party was so weak that he had to ask members of small non-aligned parties to designate themselves unionists for a day to secure this result. In any event, the assembly has been functioning ever since. Decommissioning is likely to remain the source of repeated crises, however; it is the one issue with the potential to destroy the Belfast Agreement. The question is, will it?
The Decommissioning Problem
In deference to republican sensitivities, the Belfast Agreement does not strictly require IRA decommissioning, but merely establishes it as an objective of the peace process "in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement." In the run-up to the Agreement, however, Trimble needed London's affirmation that Sinn Fein would not be allowed to participate in the executive unless the IRA had first substantially disarmed. On Good Friday, April 10, 1998, the day before the Agreement was signed, Trimble received a letter from Tony Blair stating that "the effect of the decommissioning section of the agreement, with decommissioning schemes coming into effect in June [1998], is that the process of decommissioning should begin straight away." It clearly implied that absent meaningful decommissioning after six months, the British government would "support changes" to provisions of the Belfast Agreement "preventing" uncooperative parties from holding office in the devolved assembly's governing executive.
The letter finessed the timing issue, but its obvious intent was to reassure Trimble that the British government would honor his wish to deny Sinn Fein executive participation absent decommissioning. Unionists have argued ever since that insofar as such reassurance is an integral part of the quid pro quo, it is effectively part of the Agreement. Thus, they contended, the UUP council's allowing Sinn Fein into government prior to IRA disarmament in December 1999 signified the re-negotiation of the "no guns, no government" condition and justified the imposition of a shorter deadline set by the UUP. When the IRA missed that deadline and Westminster suspended the devolved assembly in February 2000 as a consequence, Sinn Fein countered that the Agreement also specified that decommissioning must begin only "in the context of . . . overall implementation." This "context" is republican code for loyalist disarmament, the literal or de facto disbandment of the 88 percent Protestant police force (formerly known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary, but last November renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland as a concession to nationalists) and a comprehensive British military withdrawal.
When the peace process began in 1994, the republican argument was that because the IRA had not been defeated militarily it was not obliged to relinquish any arms. As it became clear that unionists and the British government would insist on some form of decommissioning, Sinn Fein changed its position, maintaining that the Agreement requires only that the party use its influence to attain IRA decommissioning. When the assembly was suspended on February 2000 after less than three months over the IRA's refusal to decommission, Sinn Fein argued that with devolution delayed by the decommissioning impasse, republicans had not had enough time to establish the "trust" in devolved institutions that the Agreement's original timetable would have allowed.
Such arguments sum to a "constructive ambiguity" without which an agreement might have been impossible. It has permitted unionists and republicans alike to construe the agreement as they wished, but the IRA's unwillingness to decommission and unionists' insistence that it do so has continually plunged the assembly into crisis. The IRA's agreement in May 2000 to allow international inspectors (former African National Congress secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa and former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari) to visit arms dumps convinced the UUP to re-enter government with Sinn Fein after a three-and-a-half month suspension on June 1, 2000. At that time, a new one-year deadline was established. The IRA retained control of the inspection process, however, choosing when and where inspections could be held and concealing the location of the two dumps. All the while, security forces were under tacit but unmistakable pressure to relax anti-terrorist enforcement efforts. In the event, the IRA allowed only three inspections. Nevertheless, Sinn Fein governed with unionists for 13 months until Trimble's July 2001 resignation.
In political terms, the unionists' insistence on decommissioning has not served them well. It has decreased their leverage over other issues of serious concern (in particular, police reform) and has afforded Sinn Fein a greater degree of control over the agenda than it might otherwise have had. But the unionist community is the operative majority in Northern Ireland, and for better or worse, it has defined IRA decommissioning as a moral imperative. Sinn Fein, for its part, has consistently argued that the key ingredient of the peace process is not a formal hand-over of weapons but rather the integrity of the IRA ceasefire. At the same time, it has cleverly exploited the unionists' immovable preoccupation with decommissioning to control the political process, understanding that because the IRA possesses the weapons it can strongly affect unionist behavior by showing flexibility or rigidity on decommissioning as need be.
Blair's Weakness
Sinn Fein's capacity to manipulate might have been tempered by resolute British government support for the unionist position, but Tony Blair has been feckless. The IRA's threat of violence, as Lionel Shriver rightly observed, "makes the British government dance." While paying lip service to the objective of decommissioning, Downing Street has tried to get republicans to disarm with concessions on police reform and demilitarization--rather than, say, threats that the cross-border bodies would cease to operate or that police reforms would be held in abeyance unless weapons were handed over. As a result, more often than not unionists have appeared to be spoilers, while Sinn Fein and the IRA looked like the Agreement's saviors. In casting any prospective collapse of the Agreement as an unalloyed catastrophe and refusing to entertain any "Plan B", Blair implicitly blackmailed unionists with the specter of renewed IRA terrorism. By so doing, he also intensified the unionist suspicion that he would never keep his pre-Agreement pledge to enforce decommissioning, thus making them feel as though the burden for achieving decommissioning falls entirely on them--which helps to account for unionists' preoccupation with it and which, as noted above, actually helps the IRA. Recent unionist electoral choices can be interpreted as a protest vote over a British government policy that piggybacks onto the IRA threat. Recent instability in the loyalist ceasefire and heightened dissident loyalist violence appear similarly sourced.
The IRA's adventures in Colombia and the September 11 events bailed Blair out by increasing U.S. intolerance of the IRA's refusal to disarm. Even so, Blair's soft approach has left London with little room to maneuver. Now that the IRA has forfeited a delicate sufficiency of weapons, the British government will be accused by republicans of "moving the goalposts" unless it delivers on its promises of accelerated police reform and demilitarization. Unionists expect these processes to involve an equitable give-and-take on weapons. But the IRA regards its October 23 disarmament token as leverage for getting major government and unionist concessions on matters that have nothing to do with the implementation of the Belfast Agreement. For example, General de Chastelain revealed on April 9 that another disarmament gesture had been made; once again, its nature and extent were left unspecified. Both prior and subsequent to this event, it appeared that the Labour Party would submit to Parliament draft legislation to give about 200 IRA fugitives some form of amnesty, this almost certainly on the strength of the IRA's pledge to forfeit that additional soupçon of weaponry. But amnesty is not mentioned in the Agreement.
Each side has tools to press its points. Unionists retain the power to withdraw from the executive and collapse the devolved assembly, and may do so should more substantial decommissioning not be forthcoming. Conversely, the IRA has not forsworn the use of violence, and terrorism presumably remains its fallback position should non-violent efforts prove inadequate to its purposes. Yet, as republicans have made the disarmament gestures that unionists have cast as their Holy Grail, the onus will stay on unionists to acquiesce to more concessions. That is perhaps why, in early December 2001, the UUP's ruling council voted 409 to 320 not to impose a deadline for additional decommissioning.
As ever, too, Blair's government is trying to marginalize the issue, having pressed the House of Commons before Christmas to extend the IICD's toothless mandate for five years rather than press the IRA for more product. The British government is probably also rewarding the IRA for its gestures by exerting quiet pressure on the security forces in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to relax anti-terrorist enforcement measures, such as searches for arms caches and attempts to recruit informants. On balance, then, the combination of cynical republican audacity, unionist shortsightedness and British appeasement have ensured that Sinn Fein and the IRA are credited with visionary statesmanship--even while the IRA remains one of the best armed terrorist groups in the world. Not even Yasir Arafat has been able to achieve such a feat.
Blair's Challenge
Notwithstanding Washington's role in convincing the IRA to make its move on October 23, further effective pressure on the IRA is not likely to come from outside actors. As long as the assembly is maintained and the IRA ceasefire holds, the Bush Administration will be inclined to regard the Provisional IRA as sufficiently quiet. Conversely, having technically met the primary unionist demand, and having distinguished itself from terrorists like bin Laden, the IRA can afford to resist further political compromise. Before Bill Clinton left office, he tried hard to get the IRA to move on decommissioning and discovered that he lacked sufficient clout. While American sponsorship of the peace process--in particular, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell's able chairmanship of the political negotiations--helped produce a formal agreement, prior to September 11 American diplomatic support had only marginal value in the current implementation phase of the peace process. Furthermore, a hands-off diplomatic philosophy fits discretionary situations like Northern Ireland's quite well. Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department and the administration's point man for Northern Ireland, has noted that Northern Irish political leaders should get primary credit for the success of the peace process; he does not believe that intensive mediation by Washington will help at this stage. While outside intervention may still occur to some effect in crises, for increasing political stability it is indeed the local players that really matter. So what, then, will these local players--not least Prime Minister Blair--do?
After October 23, the IRA will be even less apt to respond to additional unionist ultimatums. That is because the SDLP, the only Northern Irish party with enough electoral leverage over republicans to make a lasting and material difference, is now close enough to the Sinn Fein view that it supplies ample political ballast. The now-retired SDLP party leader, John Hume, is generally credited with having drawn Sinn Fein toward a peace process and certifying Gerry Adams as a legitimate interlocutor through the Hume-Adams talks in 1993. But since then, save for perfunctory denunciations of political violence, there has been little daylight between Sinn Fein and the SDLP. Indeed, the SDLP hemorrhaged in the June election because it attempted to "out-green" Sinn Fein by refusing to meet unionists halfway on police reform or to support moderate unionists on decommissioning. This strategy backfired: marginal voters attributed nationalist gains to Sinn Fein assertiveness and thus saw no reason to take a poor man's version of hard-line nationalism when they could get the real thing.
Unionists see the capitulation of soft nationalists to Sinn Fein's agenda as having dimmed hopes for a political middle ground, but there may be a way back. The SDLP's decline may push the party back to its fundamentals, and it may again become a moderating influence that can build political bridges between nationalism and unionism. Given its stodgy image among young Catholics, this would be a difficult task, but one worth the effort. A politically re-oriented and re-invigorated SDLP--more assertive about mediation and less aligned with Sinn Fein--would dilute unionist fears of a "pan-nationalist front." That would encourage unionist moderation and nudge Sinn Fein toward the center rather than the rebellious political periphery to which it is naturally drawn. If such moderation does not occur, hard-line unionists could create enormous trouble. Although the events of October 23 wrong-footed Paisley--he did not expect physical decommissioning ever to occur, and therefore has been uncharacteristically silent--he is not above sabotaging the Agreement, and he may have the political muscle to do so. If the British government makes further concessions to republicans, he could engineer the decisive defeat of pro-Agreement unionists in the June 2003 assembly elections.
This is the backdrop against which one must see the joint attempt by London and Dublin on August 1 to entice the IRA into a decommissioning move with a package of proposed concessions on police reform, fugitive amnesty and demilitarization. It was an effort met with republican temporizing and unionist outrage. Had Blair clearly underscored that, without decommissioning, nationalists would lose the benefits of devolution--in particular, functioning cross-border bodies and drastic police reform--he would have demonstrated greater even-handedness and might have prompted further compromises from the nationalists. Since Blair has little left to offer republicans without violating the consent principle altogether, threats rather than additional promises are more likely to produce serious disarmament gestures. But Blair demurs, and so affords republicans maximum political room to maneuver.
What Co-existence Requires
Even the thoroughgoing disarmament of paramilitaries would not ensure peace and harmony in Ulster. Decommissioning is not a panacea. Serious ructions are inevitable in a circumstance in which the two main political camps seek irreconcilable sovereign ends and harbor grudges rooted in generations of communal violence. By the same token, incremental changes in the status quo stand a far better chance of keeping the fundamental disagreement between Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists tolerably civilized than either side's insistence on the other's surrender. From either side's deepest credal beliefs, justice would require confrontation. The trick, then, is to so busy both sides with process issues that they have not the opportunity to dwell and act on those beliefs. Put differently, for two sides fated to sup at the same table, everyone needs long spoons.
From a practical unionist perspective, the IRA's manipulative foot-dragging on the inspections, burgeoning evidence of its conditional intent to take up arms again, and the continuation of brutal self-policing have necessitated disarmament. Decommissioning is not an operational security requirement; the IRA is sufficiently resourceful to purchase new weapons and construct bombs out of fertilizer. Most unionists understand that it is unrealistic to expect the IRA to emasculate itself by relinquishing all, or even most, of its weapons. But symbolic gestures can still further unionist-nationalist coexistence. The IRA has already made two such gestures and, as far as unionists are concerned, has been rewarded by its return to devolved government and an amnesty for its fugitive terrorists that the Belfast Agreement does not require. Unionists are likely to angle for at least two more things from Sinn Fein in the coming period before the 2003 elections.
First, they will demand that the IRA renounce terrorism permanently and irrevocably, which amounts to an unequivocal declaration that the war is over. Trimble and others have tried throughout the seven-year peace process to extract this concession, without success. They will keep trying, however, because they regard such a renunciation as a critical symbolic watershed. Republicans, it is true, have accepted devolution and the consent principle, and have made a couple of disarmament gestures. But ongoing IRA arms procurement and vigilantism, and the arrest of the three Provisional IRA men for training members of the FARC, justifies unionists' inference that if republicans do not continue to get what they want out of the peace process, they will simply fall back to violence. The IRA's reluctance to renounce the armed option--which they could easily do with crossed fingers, Arafat-style--suggests that honor, after a fashion, does matter to these terrorists. A pledge would create some political barrier to IRA backsliding and would help build unionist confidence.
Second, unionists will demand a cessation of the IRA's "self-policing" of Catholic areas. While the IRA has always argued that the Royal Ulster Constabulary's inability to win the confidence of the Catholic community has necessitated such action, unionists read ongoing kneecappings of juvenile Catholic car thieves as evidence that the IRA intends to remain in business as a private army. Indeed, the number of "vigilante" incidents in which IRA or loyalist paramilitaries administer "justice" to thieves or drug dealers actually rose by 40 percent from 2000 to 2001. Paramilitaries regard their own neighborhoods as their last redoubts and are not disposed to give up local tyranny. Yet the IRA has some incentive to end its intramural coercive practices, since doing so would create more space for compromise on police reform and demilitarization.
Neither of these aims seems absolutely fanciful. The IRA did declare the 1994 ceasefire and it did enter a non-violent political process. It did so on account of the military futility of its armed campaign and Sinn Fein's inability to garner more than about 10 percent of the vote while the IRA engaged in violence. It stands to reason, therefore, that further IRA concessions may be won if its military and political prospects remain constrained.
Other pressures also work to aid the unionist agenda. A return to violence would threaten Sinn Fein's electoral gains and damage its political credibility sufficiently to lose Dublin's sympathy, London's receptivity and Washington's good offices, all of which have been essential to legitimizing Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, September 11 has increased Tony Blair's and the unionists' leverage against the IRA. Clearly, political pressures from both the British Conservative Party and the United States make it easier for Blair to be tough on terrorists of any variety. Given Washington's new hypersensitivity to terrorism, its relative lack of interest in a strategically unimportant conflict, and its need to focus counterterrorism efforts principally on radical Muslim groups, the Bush Administration will expect Blair to keep his house in good counterterrorist order.
Further, the terrorist attacks on U.S. territory will probably discourage the IRA from returning to violence in deference to new sensitivities among Irish-American supporters (who are disproportionately represented in New York's fire and police departments, which lost hundreds in the World Trade Center) as well as the U.S. government. Such considerations could well limit the degree and frequency of Real IRA and dissident loyalist operations--at least for a while.
But whether even all this will produce an IRA renunciation of terrorism and a clear declaration that the war is over remains to be seen. Most likely not. On St. Patrick's Day 2002, the Police Service of Northern Ireland's Special Branch headquarters in East Belfast was broken into and sensitive intelligence files were stolen, including those concerning informants against the IRA. Security forces are confident that the Provisional IRA was involved. Then, in April, police uncovered a "hit list" of senior British and Northern Irish officials in West Belfast. Also in that month, Russian security services informed British military intelligence that the Provisionals had purchased at least twenty sophisticated an-94 armor-piercing assault rifles from Russian sources in the autumn of 2001. These developments strongly suggest that the IRA's non-violent path remains merely tactical rather than strategic. The last revelation further demonstrates the intentional operational emptiness of the decommissioning gestures: as the IRA puts old weapons "beyond use", they are simply replaced with newer and more effective ones.
Indeed, the appearance of reasonableness that the IRA has enjoyed in the British-Irish context--facilitated by Blair's see-no-evil approach--has emboldened it to undertake provocative relationships elsewhere that directly contravene American policies. Re-inforcing this Cold War habit was the replacement of a republican-friendly Bill Clinton by an uninterested George W. Bush and the September 11 attacks. First, in August 2001, three IRA men were arrested in Colombia. Then, in December, Adams went on an official four-day visit to Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro and criticized U.S. Cuba policy. In April 2002, a report to Congress by the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism substantiated suspicions that up to 15 Provisional IRA men had joined Iranian, Cuban and possibly Basque terrorists in Colombia between 1998 and 2001, and trained the FARC in urban terror techniques, including the use of secondary explosives and homemade mortars--both IRA innovations. Credible inferences arose in early and mid-2002 that the IRA had trained Palestinian snipers and taught Palestinian terrorists how to make booby-trap bombs that have since been used against Israeli soldiers. Finally, Gerry Adams in April refused to testify before a Congressional committee about the three alleged IRA men arrested in Colombia on the grounds that he might prejudice their trial--a position that managed to both intimate IRA involvement and deprecate U.S. security worries. What emerges is a picture of a republican leadership considerably less able to rally the international forces that served it so well in the 1990s, and more concerned about re-establishing its revolutionary credentials with its hard-line constituency at home.
The Belfast Agreement as History
IN A TIME when terrorism of any kind is seen as an existential threat the Belfast Agreement absent terrorist disarmament would have functioned as especially bad precedent. In some respects, it already has. On the strength of the Agreement, the Basque separatists of Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) overtly modeled its 1998-99 flirtation with a ceasefire and peace process on the IRA's strategy. ETA hoped to get a mass prisoner release without disarmament. Yet Jose Maria Aznar's government would not consider prematurely setting ETA prisoners free or otherwise forego disarmament. ETA's unrealistic expectations, based on a decommissioning-free version of the Belfast Agreement, stopped negotiations with Spain at the door and sent ETA back to unbridled terror. More broadly, negotiated resolutions of the Israeli-Palestinian and Kashmir conflicts that do not involve the arrest and disarmament of terrorists are scarcely imaginable.
So it is plainly counterproductive that the Belfast Agreement has established the precedent that politically motivated terrorists (i.e., most of them) can get out of jail free when their friends end violence; this dispensation may be counted upon to increase the incentives of all political malcontents to kill for political advantage. Other requirements of the Agreement--punitive police reform, super-majorities and the institutional entrenchment of sectarian polarities, to name three-also provide political ammunition to minority-backed insurgencies.
The IRA's gesture of October 23, however, furnished some offsetting precedent. Indeed, within less than a week ETA stated that it was willing to lay down its arms provided Madrid holds a regional referendum on independence. Although Aznar refused, ETA's offer signaled a degree of flexibility that had not been in evidence since it ended its ceasefire in December 1999. Given that Sinn Fein is its principal source of diplomatic support, it seems likely that ETA, too, felt cornered by the combination of September 11 and October 23. Furthermore, the fact that American threats of diplomatic abandonment produced--or, at minimum, hastened--the IRA's accommodation on decommissioning means that ultimately the IRA itself blinked out of weakness. For comparable reasons, the NATO- and EU-brokered dispensation in Macedonia, in which more substantial rebel disarmament proceeded concurrently with political reform, is also salutary.
As in Macedonia, prospects in Northern Ireland have recently turned from completely bleak to marginally better. During the summer, civil breakdown accompanied a near collapse of the political situation. The April-September Protestant "marching season" was especially acrimonious in 2001, and sectarian riots in North Belfast and loyalist petrol bomb attacks throughout the province became almost daily occurrences. On August 1, the dissident Real IRA set off a car bomb in a residential area of west London, which appeared to indicate more lethal intent than had recent operations. But Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA's ambitious all-Ireland political agenda has blunted Real IRA accusations that the republican movement is settling for a partitionist solution. The statesmanlike character of the decommissioning gesture, too, has elevated the political stature of Irish republicanism. Thus, the Real IRA's incentive to increase terrorist activity is now relatively low. Prisoner release and five years of comparative cal m have also made more IRA men reluctant to risk jail and the security forces less inclined to alienate the nationalist community. Even if the IRA were to return to violence, it would find world opinion less susceptible to manipulation than heretofore. Post-September 11, the IRA would also garner less support from fish America, its traditional source of strength.
The peace process is still vulnerable to serious risks, as must be the case whenever irreconcilable principles clash. The IRA's disarmament gestures, though negligible in terms of actual hardware, symbolized surrender to many hard-line Irish republicans and is likely to produce some defections from the Provisional IRA to the Real IRA, which opposes the peace process. Conversely, an apparent condition of the first disarmament move, approved by the House of Commons on December 18, was that Sinn Fein MPs would get access to Parliament facilities and entitlement to £107,000 each per annum in expenses, despite their refusal to take the oath of office or participate in government. Understandably, this and other concessions have humiliated unionists and may generate sufficient anger to deprive Trimble of his current precarious control of the UUP.
Loyalists continue to pose a threat to political stability as well. Unlike Sinn Fein and the IRA, die-hard loyalists have no real political power to lose from intransigence. They have little incentive to relinquish their primary source of influence: weapons. Gerry Adams, in a rare moment of consistency, has said that Sinn Fein will not press for loyalist decommissioning, requiring instead only an intact loyalist ceasefire. But loyalist violence is on the rise, as indicated by Northern Ireland Secretary of State John Reid's declaration in October that the government no longer recognized the ceasefire of the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), one of the two main loyalist groups, and the European Union's and U.S. State Department's subsequent addition of the UDA and three smaller loyalist groups to their respective lists of terrorist organizations subject to asset freezes. Further unionist concessions and Catholic social ascendancy are likely to fuel loyalist violence, which could in turn produce community pressu re on the Provisional IRA as well as the Real IRA to retaliate. And London's or Dublin's inclination to capitulate to extra-Agreement demands, republican retaliation for loyalist violence, or republican refusal to take other steps toward demilitarization could impel unionists to precipitate another make-or-break moment for the Agreement. All sides remain at the table, but their spoons get longer each day.
YET DESPITE London's diplomatic weakness, unionism's political maladroitness and the IRA's artful dilatoriness, minimal decommissioning has for now rescued the devolved assembly. For peace to take deeper root, however, unionists need either substantial additional decommissioning, or the IRA's permanent renunciation of violence and a significant reduction in terrorist self-policing.
If London thinks outside the small box that is Northern Ireland, it will see that helping unionists, rather than further appeasement of republicans, is in the British national interest. Though it is no longer an imperial power, Britain still, as Lord Hurd has put it, "punches above its weight" in international affairs. One reason is its "special relationship" with the United States, but another is its capacity--unlike other European powers--to deliver effective military force when asked. Britain's combat readiness turns in significant part on its steady blooding in Northern Ireland, where it has lost over 750 soldiers since 1969. But military morale and the willingness of British soldiers to fight depend on the British government's defense of their past sacrifices. September 11 affords London the political leverage to vindicate its countrymen's losses in Northern Ireland by getting tougher with Sinn Fein and the IRA, which would also enhance its credibility as a foe of transnational terrorism. Past timidity notwithstanding, London can still make the Belfast Agreement acceptable history and better precedent as well as expedient conflict resolution.
Jonathan Stevenson is editor of Strategic Survey, research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and author of "We Wrecked the Place": Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
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