Will The GFA Survive?

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday May 18, 2003 17:48 by Socialist Alternative thesocialistalternative at yahoo dot co dot uk

At time of writing it remains unclear whether a deal will be cobbled together in the North. No doubt the sight of George Bush taking time off from the bombing of Iraq to support the GFA flattered the national ego, allowing us to maintain the fantasy that the Troubles are a matter of earth-shaking importance. In a week when a thousand Congolese villagers were massacred, this was a debatable point. Anyway, we have to wonder why the peace train has been delayed yet again. Unionists and their hangers-on have an easy answer: Castlereagh, Colombia, and the Northern Ireland Office.

By all accounts, the break-in at Castlereagh was carried out by elements in British intelligence. Certainly, it would have been very generous of the Provos to take files being sought by various investigations by John Stevens, Nuala O’Loan and others. But there seems to be little enthusiasm for discussing the seamy side of the British state, so the IRA have been blamed. The trial of the Colombia Three is a blatant travesty of justice and the men should have been released long ago, as they have no chance of a fair trial. Even if they were training FARC, so what? Everyone else has their own extra-territorial violence, Bertie, Blair and certainly Richard Haass. The Provos definitely weren’t learning how to fight in Colombia; there aren’t many jungles in Anderstown. Finally, there’s the matter of surveillance at the Northern Ireland Office. It was a stupid thing for the IRA to do, no question; but the UUP had made the decision to pull out of the power-sharing government the week before anyway. So they were just looking for an excuse. The truth is, there’s a crisis because David Trimble caved in to the brain-dead wing of his party; the Provos didn’t help matters, but the blame should lie elsewhere.

In fact, for the last five years we’ve seen the same pattern. Unionists were the big winners from the GFA. Nationalists, including the republican movement, recognised the northern state. The armed struggle came to an end. Sinn Fein entered a partionist coalition government at Stormont, with a former ally of Bill Craig, the UDA’s front-man, as First Minister. After the hunger strikes, anyone who believed unionists could achieve such a political victory would have been dismissed as a lunatic. What did they have to give in return? They had to accept Catholics in government. They had to accept policing reform. In other words, they had to accept minimal steps towards democratising the 6-county state. Few people seemed to appreciate the irony of Gerry Adams demanding the full implementation of a report by a British Conservative politician.

Prisoner releases affected both communities equally; no nationalist was delighted to see Michael Stone on the streets. As for continued paramilitary activity: the Provos suspended their war in 1997. They have continued to use violence against working-class Catholics who don’t toe the line. This is a disgrace; but it’s hard to believe that Trimble or Donaldson really care about the victims. If they’d been shot in the leg, or the head for that matter, by the Paras, there would have been no complaints. On the other hand, the UDA have continued to terrorise Catholics continuously for the last five years; dozens of killings and countless threats have been used to drive Catholics out of “loyal� areas. There has been little outrage from leading Unionists about this. The Provos have decommissioned some arms; the loyalists, nothing.

So, both in terms of what the GFA contains, and what has happened since, unionists have had most reason to be content. So why has every crisis been provoked by elements in the UUP? There’s a contradiction at the heart of unionist politics. On the one hand, since the early seventies, the British government has made clear that Stormont will only be restored if power-sharing is in place; there can be no return to the one-party Orange state. On the other hand, the best way for an ambitious young unionist to make a name for himself is, and always has been, to accuse the existing establishment of being soft on the Catholics. So any Orange politician trying to advance his career will begin by striking an extreme pose, only to find that he can’t get a ministerial limo without compromising. Whereupon a new tyke will accuse him of betrayal.

Trimble began by marching hand-in-hand with Paisley in 1995; then he re-invented himself as a moderate. But he never took on the hard-liners directly; he never argued the case for policing reform by criticising the RUC, for example. So most unionists still have the view that the police were angelic from 1920 to 1998, but they had to go in order to satisfy the capricious Green bastards. Trimble talks about the Castlereagh break-in a lot; but he’s never had to courage to criticise what else went on there. Until some unionists have the guts to break out of this vicious circle by abandoning the shibboleths of their ideology, as the republican leadership did years ago, the GFA will always be unstable and crisis-prone. Don’t hold your breath.

The anti-war demos in the north were the most heartening thing to have happened in years. For once an issue that can’t be reduced to the sectarian divide has forced its way onto the agenda. The full spectrum of unionist politicians organised a laughable pro-war demo, attracting a couple of hundred people. Speakers from the SDLP and Sinn Fein were booed at the main protest for agreeing to meet with Bush. The new politically correct PSNI showed that it can be relied upon to clobber anyone who challenges the conservative agenda. Let’s hope that some of those who took part have decided it’s about time people stopped defining themselves in terms of tribal identity. Tellingly, the sort of commentators who get excited about infinitesimal progress at Stormont had nothing to say about this brilliant example of non-sectarian action, which owed nothing to the efforts of the tiresome gang in the NI Assembly. People should listen to Trimble, Durkan, Robertson and Adams a little less and began looking for an alternative path away from sectarian war.