A fine piece by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph yesterday provided a timely reminder that the Northern Ireland so-called ‘peace process’ — the template for Tony Blair’s attempt to resolve the Middle East impasse — exemplifies nothing so much as the moral bankruptcy of any appeasement of terror. It may have ended the bombings — for the time being — but at the price of effectively creating a Mafia-style state. The recent enormous robbery at the Northern Bank in Belfast, which the Northern Ireland chief constable has laid at the door of the IRA, has abruptly forced politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea to acknowledge a reality that until now they have resolutely ignored. As Moore observed:

‘But since the peace process began, the IRA has killed soldiers; it has broken into the Castlereagh headquarters of Special Branch, taking the names of informants; it has been involved in gun-running in Florida and terrorist instruction in Colombia; it has infiltrated the government buildings at Stormont, stealing confidential information and intercepting ministerial conversations. All the while, it has continued to organise crime, north and south of the border - armed robbery, cigarette smuggling, punishment beatings and the exiling of individuals whom it doesn't like. And now it grabs £26.5 million.’

And yet despite — or perhaps because of — this institutionalised culture of paramilitary violence and organised crime, Sinn Fein has not only been treated as a partner in the democratic project but has been allowed to call the shots (literally, in some cases). Thus:

‘Sinn Fein forced the abolition of the name and symbols of the police and the introduction of reforms that emasculated the Special Branch and police intelligence (hence the ease in arranging the bank robbery). It won "equality" legislation, which means that people in sensitive jobs in administration cannot have proper security vetting (hence "Stormontgate"). So now Sinn Fein leads the nationalists and the Paisleyites lead the Unionists. This entrenchment of the sectarian extremes is called peace.’

Moore’s basic point was that while Tony Blair is wrongly lauded for the NI ‘peace process’ which has brought about this slide into institutionalised lawlessness, he is being wrongly pilloried for adopting the opposite approach towards foreign Al Qaeda suspects, who have been jailed without charge (but who are free to leave the UK if they can find a country to take them). But there is surely an additional lesson to be learned from what has happened in Northern Ireland — that the template is fundamentally flawed, and if it has produced a victory of sorts for the merchants of violence across the Irish Sea, how much more of a victory might it grant to the merchants of death among the Palestinians in the Middle East tragedy.

Posted by melanie at January 16, 2005