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As
Ireland’s various pundits and analysts this week
furiously scratch their heads and wonder how the Northern
peace process can be rescued from the cul de sac in
which it now finds itself, it might be worth their
while to reflect a little on one sobering truth about
the current position.
The
difficulties now facing the peace process derive directly
from the historical need of the Adams’ leadership
to lie to their base about their long-term intentions
in relation the IRA’s weapons, which is that
all the organisation’s guns and war material,
save a little left to guard that leadership, will
and must be decommissioned by them if the peace process
is to succeed.
That
lie is the pinnacle falsehood, perched atop a pyramid
of untruths and deceptions, the most fundamental of
which is that the success of the peace process, of
the Good Friday Agreement, will be measured not by
the extent to which it attains the Republic, as the
IRA’s base was constantly assured was the goal,
but rather its efficiency as the instrument by which
that leadership attains power and respectability.
The
constitutional status of Northern Ireland will remain
unchanged in the pursuit of that ambition, as much
a prisoner of the principle of Unionist consent as
it was in December 1969 when the Provisionals were
born, while both the IRA and its weapons of war face
oblivion, the former transmuted into an Old Comrades
Association, the latter consigned to an eternity in
a bath of frozen concrete. None of this was in the
script supplied to the IRA and Sinn Fein rank and
file.
To
appreciate why all this is so, let us examine the
present dilemma in the peace process. Leaving aside
the question of Gerry Adams’ ‘war is over’
speech and P O’Neill’s subsequent endorsement
of it, the peace process is in a logjam because the
decommissioning supremo, General John de Chastelain,
was unable to specify the amount, nature and significance
of the third tranche of IRA weapons decommissioned
as part of a choreographed process embracing Unionist
guarantees about the future of the Agreement and fresh
Assembly elections.
Having
created expectations of a ‘transparent’
act of decommissioning, one in which sufficient detail
would be given to convince his most doubting supporters,
the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble felt obliged
to call a halt to the sequence. To do otherwise was
to invite disaster in the new elections. He had, he
said, been promised transparency by Martin McGuinness
(inadvertently revealed by a confused and exhausted
General de Chastelain at his press conference last
week as his IRA interlocutor) but had been betrayed.
Hopes in London, Dublin and Washington that the ‘deal’
he had brokered with Gerry Adams would resuscitate
the Good Friday Agreement appeared to be shattered.
As
yet, we do not know any or enough of the detail of
the talks between Trimble and Adams/McGuinness to
make a judgement on the Unionist leader’s claims,
but General de Chastelain has been forced to explain
why expectations of a transparent act of decommissioning
were so violently dashed.
According
to the General, the decommissioning procedures gave
him no choice. His exact words at his Hillsborough
Castle press conference were: "I'd like to make
a few off-the-cuff comments and remind you that the
remit under which we carry out our mandate is legislated
by the scheme and regulations provided by the British
and Irish governments and these do allow for confidentiality
if a paramilitary group wishes to exercise that right.”
He went on to explain that while the LVF had not exercised
that right in its one decommissioning act, the IRA
had insisted on confidentiality in its first two acts
of disarming: “....and they have exercised that
right this time and therefore I cannot go into some
of the detail that any of you might wish".
It
was this exercise of the right to confidentiality
which, according to General de Chastelain, tied his
hands and pitched the peace process into crisis.
Except
the General, quite simply, is not telling the truth.
There is nothing in “the scheme and regulations”
governing the decommissioning process that give any
party such as the IRA a right to insist on secrecy.
And the truth, as we might expect, is much more complicated.
There
are two schemes and sets of decommissioning regulations
published by the British and Irish governments. The
first became public on June 29th, 1998. Paragraph
26 of that document deals with confidentiality. It
reads:
“The
Commission shall ensure that all information received
by it in relation to the decommissioning process
is kept confidential and that any records maintained
by the Commission are kept secure. Disclosure of
information received by the Commission may occur
where disclosure is necessary:
- for
reasons of public safety;
-
to confirm the legitimate participation in the
decommissioning process by those eligible to do
so;
-
to fulfil the Commission's duty to report to the
two governments.”
There
is nothing in that paragraph which bestows a right
of confidentiality upon the IRA interlocutor or anyone
else. To the contrary, the Commission, and General
de Chastelain, have the right to reveal information,
such as the quantities and significance of a decommissioning
act, in three sets of circumstances, each one of which,
it could be argued, applied last week.
The
second scheme and regulations were published in August
2002, in the wake of the Weston Park conference which,
inter alia, agreed to allow the IRA to self-destruct
its weapons by “putting them beyond use”,
i.e. by immersing them in concrete. If anything this
document widened General de Chastelain’s powers
of disclosure. Paragraph 5 allowed him to say anything
he wanted about decommisioning. It reads:
"The
Commission may provide to a person who seeks it,
such information in relation to the making of arms
permanently inaccessible or permanently unusable
in accordance with this scheme as it considers appropriate".
So,
not only is there nothing in the rules which gives
the IRA or anybody else the right to impose secrecy
on the process, it seems de Chastelain has a discretionary
right to publish or communicate anything to anybody
about a decommissioning event.
So
why did he claim that he was bound by confidentiality?
The answer, now emerging from the international decommissioning
body, is that General de Chastelain made a private
agreement with P O’Neill, the effect of which
was to apply the confidentiality clause of the 1998
scheme, that is paragraph 26, to his dealings with
the IRA.
He
needn’t have done so. There was no legal requirement
on him to do so. It was an entirely discretionary
act by him. He could have told P O’Neill’s
human manifestation, Brian Keenan, or his successor,
Martin McGuinness, to get stuffed, that the decommissioning
process needed credibility and transparency if it
was to succeed and that he needed to publish a full
list of every weapon, every bullet and ounce encased
in concrete in order to persuade Unionists that the
IRA was really ending its war. If the IRA didn’t
like it they could lump it and Gerry Adams would have
to do without his Stormont Executive.
So
why didn’t the General do just that? His decision
seems to have been shaped by the outcome of a balancing
act between conflicting needs, on one scale weighed
the sensitivities of the Unionists, on the other the
doubts and anxieties of the Provo leadership about
their base. The argument that Adams and McGuinness
might be consumed by their own angry supporters once
the scales fell off their eyes and they realised the
full magnitude of their leadership’s lies and
betrayal, seems to have won the day. That it did is
eloquent testimony to the scale of that betrayal and
to the willingness of the British and Irish governments
to pay any political price to defang the IRA.
The
proof of all this can be seen in the benefits to the
Adams leadership that flowed from de Chastelain’s
self-enforced refusal to specify what happened in
each decommissioning event. After the first decommissioning
act in October 2001, IRA members and Provo supporters
were told variously that either the press was lying,
that nothing had been given up, or that the dumps
surrendered had been compromised long before and were
no loss.
After
the second act of decommissioning, IRA supporters
were told that de Chastelain had been fooled, that
he decommissioned dummy weapons painstakingly manufactured
by the IRA’s Engineering Department. A variant
of this story, peddled in rural areas, was that de
Chastelain had been caught by the IRA committing an
act of adultery and was being blackmailed into lying
about decommissioning. Nonsensical stuff but, extraordinarily,
it was eagerly lapped up by a base which otherwise
would have to confront the appalling vista of a lying,
treacherous leadership.
This
time, the IRA has, according to a number of reports,
decommissioned the largest ever amount of weaponry
but the scale of the move has been effectively camouflaged
by the political row that followed de Chastelain’s
press conference. Adams et al are able to divert internal
attention away from what they have done by pointing
to Trimble’s discomfort. The fact that the leadership
has received no guarantee of a place in government
in return for destroying so many weapons is overlooked.
Nice one, Gerry! Nice one, Martin.
For
years the IRA grassroots had been told repeatedly
that decommissioning was one line in the sand that
the leadership would never cross. The leadership’s
problem however was how to reconcile these pledges
with the deceitful reality. The answer was to lie,
not for the first nor last time in the peace process.
The result was a passive rank and file which went
along with events, happy in its bovine contentment,
and an IRA leadership delirious at its success, but
surely contemptuous of its own supporters.
And
so, de Chastelain’s willingness to indulge the
IRA Army Council’s dishonesty laid the basis
for the crisis which now threatens to destroy their
shared ambition to see the peace process to its final
conclusion. It was not the intended consequence of
de Chastelain’s action but once the General gave
the Adams’ leadership a licence to lie, the die
was cast. There is a delicious irony in that.
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