wfn.org | Can Peace Efforts Overcome Public Sympathy

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11-September-1998 
98299 
 
    Can Peace Efforts Overcome Public Sympathy 
    for Northern Ireland's Terrorists? 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.- Whether terrorism will ever disappear from Northern 
Ireland's political landscape is a question that stymies even experts on 
the British province's best-armed paramilitary organization, the 
Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). 
 
    "You just don't know how it will work out ... whether people will keep 
choosing the gun or whether they'll think it is not worth the cost," said 
J. Bowyer Bell, adjunct professor in international and public affairs at 
Columbia University in New York City and a longtime analyst of the IRA. 
"They may conclude [that violence] is not as effective as a diplomatic 
process that leads to a united Ireland," Bell added, "but no one can tell 
ahead of time." 
 
    The problem of ridding politics of terror means overcoming the 
province's unabashed ambivalence about violence. 
 
     With more than 3,500 people killed in just the last 30 years of 
violence, a sense of perpetual grief  pervades the province.  But remorse 
about the death toll is much harder to find.  And government crackdowns on 
illegal organizations have historically only hardened the resolve of 
hard-liners and increased public sympathy for "the lads" who are enveloped 
by a 200-year-old tradition of fighting for Irish independence. 
 
    Analysts say that stopping terror has more to do with stopping public 
sympathy for terrorists than taking such measures as the recent tougher 
antiterrorism bills passed in London and Dublin in response to the latest 
carnage - the killing or maiming of more than 200 shoppers last month in 
Omagh.  As Bell puts it: "People don't get lynched in Alabama anymore, but 
not because there are laws against it.  The same people are there with the 
same attitudes toward race, [but] society no longer tolerates them lynching 
people. 
 
    "So there's hope," he told the Presbyterian News Service in an 
interview from Dublin.  "That's what the peace process is bet on ... that 
the past does not have to determine the future." 
 
    In fact, the morbidly dramatic Omagh bomb - planted by the Real IRA, a 
tiny, ultraradical splinter group of the IRA - has pushed republican 
paramilitary groups to make their divisions public and even to use threats 
of violence against their own to stop dissent within the ranks.  In a rare 
public statement, the IRA called for the Real IRA to disband and, according 
to a report in both  Dublin's "Irish Times" and the "Belfast Telegraph," 
threatened to shoot some 60 dissident leaders if the group didn't dissolve 
itself and call a full cease-fire.  The Real IRA declared a cease-fire 
Sept. 7. 
 
    Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, made the 
unprecedented statement that violence in Northern Ireland is to be "a thing 
of the past" - as close as he's ever come to saying that the IRA's war with 
Britain is over.  Adams then appointed a highly respected Sinn Fein 
official, Martin McGuinness, to begin disarmament talks. 
 
    Meanwhile, governments in both Britain and the Republic of Ireland have 
responded to the Omagh bombing the same way they have for decades - by 
quickly passing more antiterrorist laws that militant republicans deem too 
tough and loyalist extremists say are too lenient. 
 
    In Dublin, the laws curtail the right to silence, lengthen detentions 
of suspected terrorists and - as do the country's antidrug laws - empower 
the courts to confiscate property used by terrorists, as well as fields 
where weapons are stashed and homes that provide shelter for fugitives.  In 
the north - where even the backers of the legislation call it "draconian" - 
the most heated debate has been about whether a senior police officer's 
word is enough to convict a suspect as a member of a paramilitary group if 
there is enough corroborating evidence. 
 
    The larger question is how such legislation will be enforced.  One 
analyst said,  "They could pass laws [that make a statement] and never 
really draw on them.  Or they could be quite draconian in their actions and 
not just their words."  And, as another analyst pointed out, wide-ranging 
arrests and internment without trial (which has been banned in Britain but 
is still legal in the Irish Republic) only incite radicals. 
 
    "They could be draconian without passing new legislation," said Robert 
White, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University of 
Indianapolis, citing laws put on the books in the 1970s.   "Or they could 
pass new legislation that looks good, but not really implement it because 
they know it [could] backfire." 
 
    Robert Mahoney, former director of the Irish Studies Center at the 
Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Interchurch 
Committee on Northern Ireland, a coalition of U.S. Catholics and 
Presbyterians, agrees that antiterrorism legislation must be designed to 
advance rather than retard the peace process.  "There's been a tremendous 
amount of emergency legislation over the past 30 years and its 
effectiveness is debatable.  It feels very good ... but it doesn't work," 
he told the Presbyterian News Service from Dublin. 
 
    "You have to take the broader view," Mahoney said. "If you have to have 
certain enhanced police powers, that's one part of the solution.  But the 
other part is [to] continue progress - continuing the process of pleasing 
the fringes on both sides of the community in the north." 
 
    Noting that the Omagh blast has dissipated what public support once 
existed for the dissidents, Mahoney said that the best strategy now is 
"continuing to release prisoners, continuing to bring Sinn Fein into the 
process, continuing to encourage loyalist paramilitaries to keep up their 
cease-fires." 
 
     The Continuity IRA - another splinter group that grew out of the 1997 
cease-fire - is the only republican group still adhering to a campaign of 
violence. 
 
    The IRA itself has been on cease-fire for 14 months, having observed 
other cease-fires in 1975 and 1994.  According to the "Belfast Telegraph," 
there's a current core of about 500 terrorists within the IRA, down from 
1,500 in the 1970s. 
 
    The present IRA organization emerged at the height of the Catholic 
civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in 1969. Hard-liners broke away 
from the historical IRA that had fought the war for Irish independence in 
the 1920s and turned a protest movement into a war. 
 
    Internment and counterterrorism measures by the British government 
broke earlier movements in the '20s and '40s, but proved ineffective in the 
1970s. 
 
    "In the south [violence] hasn't been romanticized for years," said 
Mahoney.  "[In the north] there certainly was a strong feeling among the 
more deprived Catholic population that military action was worthwhile, and 
with that you had to overlook the fact that occasionally they miss [and 
harm innocents] and occasionally you get brutality on both sides," he 
added, alluding to the stories of abuse and gangster-style disciplinary 
tactics used by some paramilitary groups against the very civilians they 
are claiming to protect. 
 
    "But the Quinn boys [young brothers who died in a firebombing several 
weeks ago] and the Omagh bombing have neatly ... contained that kind of 
feeling," Mahoney said just days after the Omagh blast. 
 
    "There's real revulsion against what violence can do if unrestrained," 
Mahoney said. "Therefore, it must be restrained ... within pretty well 
defined political parameters." 
 
    The near-universal revulsion over the Quinn murders and Omagh bombing 
means that now is the time to capitalize on the future instead of being 
dragged back into the violence of the past, says American University 
professor of peacemaking and conflict resolution Simona Sharoni of 
Washington, D.C. 
 
    Noting that voters overwhelmingly approved the peace process in May, 
Sharoni says "it is important to focus on ... all the issues that are 
likely to affect the everyday lives of ordinary people right away.  That 
way, they have a stake in the new reality that it is Northern Ireland." 
 
    Sharoni told the Presbyterian News Service that now is the time to 
support punishment, but not vindictiveness, and - just as important - 
progress, such as jobs for the 51,000 or so people who remain unemployed in 
Northern Ireland and who live in the poorer neighborhoods where 
paramilitary groups not only recruit, but find safe houses. 
 
    "The [Omagh bomb] sent a very clear message to [paramilitary groups]," 
she said, citing public outrage and fury.  "Estimates are this is no more 
than 100 dissidents divided into certain groups.  The talk needs to be 
about something good: The public will not tolerate violence, will not 
support violence.  That's a much stronger message than [that] the security 
forces are going to crack down even harder." 
 
    Northern Ireland's voters - republican and loyalist, Catholic and 
Protestant - voted firmly in May for a negotiated settlement that grants 
the province's republicans more authority and gives the Irish Republic more 
influence in government of the six counties.  The agreement maintains the 
province's historical ties to Britain for now - since nearly two-thirds of 
voters are unionist and Protestant - but allows for absorption of the six 
northern counties by the Irish Republic if and when the political balance 
shifts. 
 
    "Who knows if 25 years down the line we'll get into the situation where 
Catholics and Protestants are roughly 50/50?" said Chris Thornton, a U.S. 
writer who is the "Belfast Telegraph's" security correspondent.   "[Are] we 
going to get into a situation where we still have a significant nationalist 
population attached to the idea of a united Ireland ... and a large 
unionist population that opposes the idea?  And the nationalists vote 
Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Republic of 
Ireland? 
 
    "What's to say there won't be a violent unionist movement to oppose 
[unification with the Republic of Ireland]?" noted Thornton. "Or who is to 
say there won't be a resurgence of republican violence to give that last 
push?" 
 
    These are questions Bell asks too.  "The crucial generation is coming 
up," he said. "Will they be converted to the ideas of militant Irish 
nationalists? There's always been a new generation of nationalist gunmen." 
After all, he added, this is "the longest living, still persisting, 
unsuccessful revolutionary movement in the world." 
 
    British Broadcasting commentator Eric Waugh of Belfast is sure that 
there will always be a "hard-line rump of unreconstructed people ready to 
rely on the gun," but he detects something different in the wake of the 
Omagh bombing. 
 
    While the pattern of response to terrorist acts in Northern Ireland has 
usually been horror followed by silence, he said, "one of the striking 
effects of the [Omagh bombing] is that it has united the Irish in a most 
remarkable way.  Not politically, of course, but spiritually.  They're 
committed to peace.  There is mutual [republican and loyalist] outrage at 
the horror of [that] Saturday.  Our best hope is that we're at the 
beginning of something new, something of a more permanent nature than these 
ephemeral modes of remorse in the past. 
 
    "But," said Waugh, "you're brave now ... [to] assume anything.  We can 
just hope." 

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