This article indicates that Peter King is NOT going to meet with Gerry Adams after all. How are you going to celebrate St. Patrick's Day? We are going to have a lovely vegan Irish stew and brown bread, one of Mr. Grainne's favorite meals:
March 16, 2005
Poor Gerry Adams. All that work for peace and now snubbed by America
Simon Jenkins
JUST IMAGINE. The British Prime Minister celebrates Ramadan by inviting Osama bin Laden to Downing Street for a cosy chat about the Middle East peace process. When America protests, Tony Blair points out that al-Qaeda has never attacked Britain and besides he has a large Muslim electorate to keep happy. Then suddenly Mr Blair discovers that al-Qaeda has raided a bank and killed someone in cold blood. The welcome to Osama is promptly withdrawn and five Muslim sisters are invited instead.
No, the parallel with the White House’s treatment of Sinn Fein this week is not exact. But it serves to demonstrate how baffling Britons find America’s attitude to terrorism in Northern Ireland. After being fêted for years at Washington’s St Patrick’s Day bash, Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, finds himself persona non grata. His old friends, Ted Kennedy and Pete King, slam their doors in his face. He is a pariah.
Mr Adams has every reason to feel aggrieved. He has laboured long, if not hard, to bring Irish republicanism into the political fold. His conversion from terrorist to ballot box politician has been hailed by London, Dublin and Washington. The ostensible reason for this week’s snub was no more than a bank raid, of which Mr Adams appears to have known nothing, and a dime-a-dozen killing in the Short Strand enclave of Belfast. What is new? Nor does the Great American Explanation, 9/11, apply here. Mr Adams was welcomed last year and the year before.
When the White House first invited Sinn Fein to its party ten years ago, I suggested to a presidential aide that this would seem odd to many Britons. Mr Adams was manifestly a major force within the Provisional IRA. His organisation had killed some three thousand Britons and tried to wipe out the entire British Cabinet, not once but twice. To put it mildly he was hardly fit to be a bosom pal of a president. Besides, delicate peace negotiations were under way between John Major and the paramilitaries.
I received a long lecture in realpolitik. This word terrorist should not be bandied about, said my friend. All oppressed peoples naturally turn to violence when politics fails them. Britain had mishandled Northern Ireland. Along with Iraq and Palestine, it was one of many troublespots which Bill Clinton would seek to resolve. Inviting Mr Adams to the White House was the strategy of engagement.
In my view Mr Major was a more courageous peacemaker in Northern Ireland than any prime minister (or president) before or since. The last thing he needed in 1994 was for Sinn Fein/IRA to play the American card. A White House aide might call an occasional terrorist bomb “the price of hegemony”. The fact was that for two decades Irish-Americans had financed gunrunning, racketeering and “social work” (such as knee-capping) in Northern Ireland. How would America feel, I replied, if Britain showered favours on anti-American terrorists?
Outsiders have been meddling in Northern Ireland since the start of the present troubles 35 years ago. It got nowhere. Presidents Clinton and Bush have visited the Province and been photographed. Emissaries such as George Mitchell and Richard Haass have come and gone. Nobel prizes have been distributed. The de facto “ceasefire” negotiated by the Major Government has held, but most observers felt that by the early Nineties the lust for violence was waning.
Paramilitary bosses were ageing and their members grown rich on cross-border smuggling, robbery and money laundering. As charted last month in The Times, the IRA is regarded by MI5 as “one of the largest and richest organised gangs in Europe”.
There has been no devolution of power to any Northern Ireland assembly. Local participation in government has been frozen out by London’s direct rulers. Ulster politics has drifted to the extremes. As long as local communities are not allowed democracy and thus the evolution of conventional politics as elsewhere in Europe, there will be no lasting peace, only further polarisation. A sort of equilibrium is sustainable, but only until a new generation of wild men emerges.
As for the Good Friday agreement of 1998, it remains what it always was, a monument to terrorist appeasement. Frantic to please Mr Adams, Mr Blair set free the murderers who planted the Brighton bomb and fired the Downing Street rocket. Criminals who blasted and gunned their way across Britain, killing more civilians than ever in peacetime, are sitting back home with their families.
In talks with Mr Blair in 1997-98, Mr Adams and his colleague, Martin McGuinness, never wavered from the central objective of the IRA throughout its history: to free its members from jail and never surrender weapons. It won more. It manoeuvred Mr Blair into undermining the moderate leadership of David Trimble and thus prevented the Unionists from regaining power in the Province. By playing long, Sinn Fein/IRA proved that terrorism works. The British may not have been driven from Northern Ireland, but Good Friday made the IRA rich and Mr Adams electorally potent. Who now remembers Ulster’s SDLP?
For years British governments played supertough against IRA terrorism, without success. They had used detention without trial and tortured prisoners at Castlereagh barracks. They had “shot to kill” and let Bobby Sands die on hunger strike. By general consent the strategy did not deliver peace. But nobody dreamt that a future prime minister would capitulate so completely to the IRA, and set every Ulster terrorist free.
To this day the IRA maintains its private arsenals. It visits awful punishments on its own people, as graphically seen in the McCartney killing. It thought nothing last week of offering to kill McCartney’s murderers on request, and “warned” the McCartney sisters for dabbling in politics. Such lawlessness daily terrorises Northern Ireland’s urban communities.
Yet Mr Blair does not call this terrorism. He has extended to Sinn Fein/IRA exceptional civil liberties — including freedom from jail and freedom to bear arms. This is in stark contrast to the liberties he is withdrawing from Muslim terrorist suspects.
Robert McCartney’s killers are well-known to the police, as doubtless are the IRA’s revenge gunmen. Known too are the bank robbers, the financiers, the armourers, the “mister bigs” of the IRA. Known too are the drug dealers and protection racketeers of the Loyalist community. Every book on violence in Northern Ireland lists these people. Yet where are Charles Clarke’s house arrests and control orders?
The White House response to the Northern Bank raid and the McCartney killing is extraordinary. American intelligence, fed by MI5, has known for decades that the organisation that Mr Adams represents runs every kind of criminal racket and shoots and beats its own people. What is new? The answer can only be that it is now convenient for everyone to regard the IRA as “criminals” not terrorists — and Muslim extremists as terrorists not criminals. When the IRA were terrorists, the American Establishment treated them as de facto freedom fighters, even when they tried to murder its best friend, Margaret Thatcher. Now they are mere criminals, they are beyond the pale of hospitality.
The truth is that all political violence is putty in the hands of the great god, hypocrisy. Organised terrorism in Northern Ireland is no less grim to its victims for being familiar and, of late, less widespread. British politicians have tried the big stick and are now trying the big carrot. They offer negotiation and appeasement. When the men of violence continue to misbehave, robbing banks and killing people, they are rapped on the knuckles. London cuts their parliamentary allowances and Washington snubs them at parties.
The Muslims at whom Mr Clarke is aiming his new Prevention of Terrorism Act should be so lucky. Like the Irish of old they are about to feel the full force of Britain in repression mode. It will not be nice.
timesonline.co.uk |
