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LONDON — The slow-motion collapse of the Northern Ireland "peace process" has sped up dramatically in the last week. On Friday police raided the offices of Sinn Fein in the Stormont parliament in Belfast; the same day it was revealed that a Sinn Fein spy had been planted in the Northern Ireland Office headed by British Secretary of State John Reid; and over the weekend two Sinn Fein officials were among five people charged with possession of confidential official documents that included private messages between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish premier Bertie Ahern.
Ominously the documents taken from Sinn Fein were found to include the personal details (home addresses, etc.) of senior policemen, prison officers, local politicians, "loyalists," Tory politicians in Britain, and so on. The sinister implications of this were immediately plain. These details would be the raw materials for planning assassinations if the current limited IRA ceasefire were to be abandoned. And that looks not just a real possibility — but something that Sinn Fein-IRA has planned on all along. In effect the underlying contradiction of the Good Friday Agreement is finally destroying it. It was supposed to end terrorism by bringing the terrorists into the democratic process. But the IRA held onto its weapons (despite some minor cosmetic "decommissioning"), implicitly threatening a return to terror, in case democracy failed to deliver what it demanded. Tony Blair railed against this verbally. There can be, he said, "no fudge between terrorism and democracy." He has more than lived up to these brave words in his principled support of the U.S. over Iraq and in his firm rejection of the appeasement of Saddam Hussein by the U.N., Germany, and most Arab governments. In Northern Ireland, however, he has manufactured more fudge than a molasses factory. Blair has consistently appeased the IRA by delivering a stream of concessions to them — the release of several hundred convicted IRA murderers, the "reform" of the police to reduce their numbers and to weaken their intelligence gathering, the appointment of senior Sinn Fein-IRA leaders to high government office — while turning a blind eye to the mounting evidence that the IRA was continuing to use terrorist methods to strengthen its political position. Even in its early optimistic stage, the IRA ceasefire meant only that they ceased to murder British soldiers and Protestants. They continued to murder, maim, exile, and intimidate Catholics opposed to their brutal mafia rule of Catholic working-class areas. Their "punishment beatings" were medieval in their cruelty and directed against anyone who personally offended a local IRA thug as well as against "dissident" Catholics. They continue unabated today. In the last year, however, the IRA has also been detected in actions which plainly foreshadow its return to a full campaign of terrorism: 1. While "decommissioning" a few old arms dumps, they have been seeking to buy and import the most modern weapons on the international arms market. 2. The IRA burglarized the special-branch headquarters and stole confidential details of police informers and Northern Irish politicians. (It will be interesting to see if these are the same details found in the Sinn Fein files raided last Friday.) Three IRA men were arrested (and finally went on trial last week) for assisting the anti-American FARC terrorists in Colombia to make the latest kind of bombs for urban warfare. It was such actions that recently prompted David Trimble, first minister and leader of the official unionists, to threaten withdrawal from the power-sharing NI executive if Sinn Fein-IRA did not disband its military wing. That would have been silently welcomed by "the Shinners" until last week because they have long wanted the Unionists to get the blame for the breakdown of the peace process. But the revelations of Sinn Fein-IRA's perfidy-and Sinn Fein is what emerges from the cloakroom when the IRA has parked its guns there — have made Trimble's threat seem entirely justified. But will Blair and Ahern now finally insist that democracy and terrorism cannot be fudged? Any such firm stand is unlikely because both London and Dublin have devised no alternative to the faltering peace process. As the Irish columnist Kevin Myers points out, they have to continue appeasing the terrorists because there is "no Plan B." Frightened of the IRA resuming its bombing campaign (especially in London), and equally frightened of taking firm measures to halt terrorism, such as internment, the two governments pretend not to notice what Sinn Fein-IRA does — and when compelled to notice, simply gives the terrorists the latest in an endless succession of last chances. Unless Dublin and London summon up the courage to repress and punish terrorist murders on all sides, then the breakdown of the peace process will result merely in Northern Ireland being governed against the wishes of its people by the Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, in silent consultation with Sinn Fein-IRA. That is where appeasement inevitably leads. Is it any wonder that, according to the seized documents, the code name given by Sinn Fein-IRA to Blair is "the Naïve Idiot?" |
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