Poor Gerry Adams. All that work for peace and now snubbed by

[CptSternn]

March 16, 2005

Poor Gerry Adams. All that work for peace and now snubbed by America
Simon Jenkins
It is now convenient for everyone to regard the IRA as 'criminals'
not terrorists





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 The welcome to Osama is promptly withdrawn and five Muslim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.


simon.jenkins@t...

[AlKilyu]