North’s peace model likely to run out of steam in other war zones

CONFESSION is good for the soul so, hands up, I was wrong last week. Like everyone else, I expected Barack Obama to win New Hampshire.

At the same time, I argued Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be written off. Hopefully, we have all learned a salutary lesson about the value of opinion polls.

According to John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN, it seems clear that the Republicans will make foreign policy a key issue in the US election regardless of who wins the Democratic primary. It’s an area where the Democrats are weak, Obama more so than Clinton.

Interestingly, Hillary has been using her visits to Ireland as a shorthand for how things would be done differently should she become president, although the influential Boston Globe has called into question some of her more extravagant claims about the extent of her — rather than her husband’s — input. Still, she is far from being the only person hailing the Irish peace process as some sort of model for the rest of the world’s more war-torn regions.

Last week, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, was at it. In fairness, what do you say when a notorious bigot and a one-time member of western Europe’s most ruthless terrorist organisations turn up on your doorstep looking for handouts?

Since diplomacy prevents you from calling Paisley and McGuinness a freak show, and knowing how susceptible the Irish are to flattery, you call them an “inspiration” instead — and keep your cheque book firmly closed.

Feelgood rhetoric is harmless enough, but when the Department of Foreign Affairs starts devoting €25 million a year to a conflict resolution unit to expound on the so-called lessons of the Northern process, things become a little more serious.

But to what extent is the North really a model? And are we sure we have the right to tell the rest of the planet how to do things?

Take one obvious case. Do we really think the answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict is a devolved powersharing administration for the West Bank and Gaza comprising Jewish settlers, Hamas and the PLO under the overall supervision of Israel, but with cooperative relations across the River Jordan? Perhaps that’s applying the ‘model’ a bit too literally.

Maybe there are more general principles to be derived. But how comfortable would nationalists be about promoting what is essentially an internal settlement to their Tamil, Kosovan, Basque and Kurdish counterparts? Who fancies a trip to Pristina to tell the Kosovars they have to stay part of Serbia and take comfort from a few cross-border bodies with Albania looking at tourism and food safety issues? It seems that rather than there being a model to be applied universally, what marks out the world’s more notorious hotspots are their dissimilarities.

In South Africa, the answer was simple: keep the borders as they are and give everyone the vote. In the Middle East, most people advocate a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine living side by side, Jerusalem cut in two and some symbolic gesture made on the question of refugees. In Serbia, it’s the partition and independence of Kosovo. Yet independence for Tamil Eelam, Turkish Cyprus, the Basque Country and Kurdistan are all considered complete no-nos.

And precisely what lesson the poor people of Congo, where millions upon millions have died, are supposed to learn from our low-level civil strife — I mean war — is anyone’s guess.

By now you will have gathered that I detect a certain amount of vanity on our part: we’ve sorted out our problems and now everyone else should do it the same way. I’m just not convinced that armies of Irish conflict resolution experts have anything profound to tell the world’s disputatious tribes except peace is a lovely state to be in.

Our politicians would take serious exception to that. The great lesson from Northern Ireland, they would say, is that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. Even the most seemingly hopeless situations can be resolved if only people would get around the table and talk to each other.

Unfortunately, this is another high-minded and cosy fallacy which bears little scrutiny. It’s not that talking isn’t a good thing, but there has to be a context.

The peace process didn’t begin with the entry of Sinn Féin to the Northern talks in 1997. It didn’t even begin with Hume-Adams or the contacts between Fr Alec Reid, the Irish Government and the IRA.

What is now becoming very apparent is just what a seedy and sordid process the North underwent long before anyone started negotiating. The popular view might be that collusion is wrong and talks are right, but can the two be separated out quite so neatly? All the paramilitary organisations in the North were thoroughly infiltrated by British intelligence before talks became possible. When the British government engaged in dialogue, it did so knowing a lot more about the war-weariness and the scale of political ambition of the republican movement than many of us actually realised at the time. Indeed, if the IRA hadn’t been so chock-full of informers, and so ground down militarily by the SAS, among others, would they have ever opted for a ceasefire in the first place?

Some people might like to believe that tranquility descended on the North because the likes of Adams, McGuinness, Paisley and Robinson all had some kind of spiritual conversion to the cause of peace and love, but such people also tend to believe in leprechauns.

IN FACT, a resolution became possible despite the best efforts over many decades of the DUP and Sinn Féin. Rather, what set Northern Ireland apart from so many other conflict zones is that there was a consistently expressed majority on both sides in favour of a moderate accommodation.

In all the years between 1968 and 1998, the extremists — the DUP and Sinn Féin — never won a significant election. Furthermore, Northern moderates were buttressed by two governments which, barring the Arms Crisis aberration, were equally consistently in favour of stabilisation and opposed to violence.

Matters were further helped by the fact that the IRA was under a single integrated political and military command which is not the case, for example, with ETA. What’s more, in the North, there was no open-ended dialogue, talk for the sake of talk. Yes, all the issues were technically on the table, but the parameters of discussion were pretty clear to everyone and the involvement of paramilitaries was strictly conditional upon them ending their violence. Hamas, to take another example, rejects any such preconditions.

So, yes, it is good that Northern Ireland has settled down to discuss its grudges peaceably, but it’s very difficult to extrapolate from that particular case some wider analogy for world peace. Putting aside one’s scruples about difficult people who are still applying violence, reaching out to them, engaging them in discussion and imagining that somehow all difficulties will disappear is wishful thinking. That’s the real lesson from Northern Ireland.