Northern Ireland: responding to the London killings

• Why the ceasefire broke down
• Getting the peace process back on track
• Peace People say "Don't lay blame"

But opposing violence is one thing; working for nonviolent change is quite another. It is the task of those who oppose violence to work all the harder to promote nonviolent and effective means of political change.

In the case of Northern Ireland, many achievements have been made over the last 25 years in creating inclusive institutions and non-sectarian thinking on both sides of the Irish Sea. These have nevertheless fallen short of the political solution which in the end must be reached. We believe the best chance for peace in Northern Ireland still lies with the process of bilateral and third party negotiations begun nearly two years ago and given its most recent impetus by the Mitchell Commission.

Blame for the resumption of the bombing and killing can be equally placed on the IRA, for their impatience, and on the British government, for their intransigence. Some of the blame must also fall on the peace movement, for our complacency throughout the cease-fire period. Rather than more "laying of blame", however, what is needed now is a redoubling of our efforts to stop the violence and to get the parties to the negotiating table.

Below, ROB FAIRMICHAEL in Belfast and MIL RAI in London discuss the impact of the recent bombings and possible ways forward for the peace movement.

Why the ceasefire broke down

<195>The British peace movement has done precious little to advance the cause of peace in Ireland. During the months of the ceasefire, a few meetings were held, a few vigils. We must now all ask ourselves what more we could have done to help consolidate the ceasefires, what more we can do now to try to recover some opening for peace.

The first priority for the peace movement now must be to understand how the ceasefire came to break down, and to understand what is now standing in the way of real all-party negotiations leading to a comprehensive political settlement. Only with such understanding can action be appropriate and well-directed.

There is general agreement that it was the response of the British Government to the Mitchell Report on "decommissioning" that finally triggered the decision to resume the bombing. But that response and that report had been preceded by over a year of stalling by the government.

First the government demanded that the IRA use the word "permanent" in describing its ceasefire. Then, after it gave way on that issue (making a "working assumption" that the ceasefire was permanent), the Government erected another road-block by demanding that the IRA (and the loyalist paramilitaries) surrender their weapons in advance of any all-party talks. The government uses a euphemism for surrender <197> "decommissioning".

Last November, the British and Irish governments (who disagreed over the decommissioning demand) tried to resolve the impasse by setting up an independent international body to give an objective view. Senator George Mitchell and his colleagues reported in January that no decommissioning would take place before talks, but that the parties could build trust in advance of talks by agreeing on six basic principles, and by accepting that decommissioning would start to take place once talks had got underway.

The British government ignored these and other major recommendations of the Mitchell report, and announced instead that elections should be held in Northern Ireland. These elections have been opposed by the Dublin government, and by nationalists and republicans in Northern Ireland. These opponents have been criticised for opposing a recommendation of the Mitchell Report, and for being anti-democratic.

>>> The elections ruse

Firstly, elections of the kind proposed were not recommended by the Mitchell Report, which says that elections could be useful if they were broadly acceptable; if they had an appropriate mandate; and if they were within the three-strand structure, that is they included the Dublin government. It is quite clear that John Major's proposals are not broadly acceptable; and that they would not include the Dublin government in the new elected body. There are also questions about the mandate of this new body.

Secondly, it is quite inappropriate to criticise John Bruton, John Hume or Gerry Adams as anti-democratic for their opposition to these elections, which would be to a new body within the six counties of Northern Ireland.

If nationalists suggested that the only way forward was to have new elections to a new elected body covering all 32 counties of Ireland, north and south, one would suspect that unionists would refuse to have anything to do with it. This doesn't mean that they are necessarily anti-democratic; just that this proposal violates one of their deeply-held principles. The same applies to the Major proposal.

According to Eamonn McCann, the former civil rights activist, the republican leadership would have had great difficulty in persuading the grassroots to accept the Mitchell Report, but that it is possible they could have succeeded <197> if they had been given the opportunity. McCann suggests that the problem was that they were not even given the opportunity to try to sell the Mitchell Report to their supporters, because as soon as it came out, John Major buried it under a heap of briefings about his elections proposal. That was apparently when elements in the IRA moved back towards a war footing.

>>> Prospects for peace

We are now swinging wildly between war and peace. The short-term prospects are very grim. However, whatever the probabilities and possibilities, those who are committed to a lasting peace in Ireland will try to add their voices to the cry for all-party negotiations as soon as possible.

This is the only way forward, as the Irish government has repeatedly pointed out. It is to our shame here in Britain that there has been no loud call for immediate negotiations with all parties to the conflict. It is to the shame of the peace movement also, I believe.

The IRA bombing cannot be justified, but we must realise that if we were in talks now, if we had been in talks on Friday 10 February, there would have been no bombing. Back in early 1994, Negotiate Now held a (banned) demonstration in Trafalgar Square in London calling for all-party talks. We continue to make that call. One of our slogans over the past two years has been, "Not talking costs lives". The government and the unionists have refused to talk. This has cost lives.

Getting the peace process back on track

<*> There was a sense of disbelief across Northern Ireland when the IRA announced the end of their 17-month ceasefire with the bombing in London on 10 February. Certainly the "peace process" had been struggling, but no one here expected that we might revert to the bombings, shootings, and tit-for-tat killings which characterised Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1994.

Risks have been taken for peace by all sides during the last 17 months, not least by members of Sinn Fein, who, over the London bombings, lost out to IRA hardliners. I myself heard one working class Protestant woman saying it was the first time she had felt sorry for Gerry Adams! Since the IRA announced their cease-fire in 1994 -- which was soon followed by a cease-fire from the loyalist paramilitaries--little progess has been made towards a comprehensive peace settlement for Northern Ireland.

Since the bombings, however, there has been an upsurge of peace activity here. Significant demonstrations have been organised by Women Together and by the trade unions in Belfast and elsewhere. Such manifestations of popular opinion have sometimes had an effect in the past, and there is a sense that the moment must be seized before it is too late. Peace groups which had begun to re-orient themselves to a new situation are now wondering whether their new directions may have to be abandoned.

Getting the peace process back on track must be the top priority for all who believe there is a way out of the vicious cycle of violence that has brought so much suffering to the people of Northern Ireland.

Peace People say "Don't lay blame"

"Our deep-rooted conflict will not be resolved by governments elsewhere, no matter how well disposed. It will not be resolved by all-party talks or elections based on an ethnic spectrum which time after time give us a restatement of the problem. It will only be resolved when enough citizens take the trouble to play their part in creating a new Northern Irish democracy from the ground up, when the common name of Northern Irish citizen beomes more important than Northern Irish unionist or Northern Irish nationalist.

"If the grief of [these recent] deaths and injuries, like the thousands before them, are to be redeemed for something valuable, then we need a great deal more peace work, not more laying of blame."

from a statement issued by the Peace People after the Docklands bomb