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A year ago the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast with much ballyhoo. Billed as it was as a successful once-and-for-all peace settlement it was presented as another great achievement for Tony Blair. All that remained, seemingly, was to set up the structures agreed upon. Now the Agreement is once again in crisis. This time there may be no 'compromise' or 'breakthrough' to rescue these tortuous, long-drawn-out negotiations to allow the Government to continue to pretend that they accomplished something worthwhile last year. Rosalind Robson reports. |
This year's Good Friday - 2 April 1999 - was a particularly important deadline: all the parties involved had to form a multi-party Executive. The stumbling block is that the IRA refuses to disarm, to 'decommission'. Certainly they will continue to take that stance until after Sinn Fein is let into the government. Yet David Trimble could not agree to share power with Sinn Fein without prior IRA decommissioning without losing members of his Assembly party, without whom he could not work the Agreement.
On the night before the Good Friday 1999 deadline a joint 'declaration' between Ireland's Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair was read out on the steps of Hillsborough Castle. The declaration extends the timescale for the formation of a multi-party Executive, applying maximum 'diplomatic' pressure. It repeats the statement that power would be devolved 'in a matter of weeks' - as if by repeating enough times 'we will succeed, the Agreement will go through' the Agreement will, as if by magic, succeed. The declaration says that Sinn Fein has a right to be in the multi-party government but also says that Trimble is right to insist that he cannot sell a government with Sinn-Fein to his party unless there is some sign of decommissioning. Therefore Sinn Fein is 'obligated' to make the IRA do something which Gerry Adams has repeatedly said he can't deliver. The declaration asks for a collective act of 'reconciliation' in the course of which some arms would be 'put beyond use'. 'Put beyond use' is the key phrase here. Trimble's Unionists had accepted the Agreement on the basis of an actual handover of weapons.
Perhaps Blair and Ahern genuinely hoped they could force the IRA to move if the Loyalist paramilitaries made some simultaneous gesture - a kind of 'I'll show you mine, if you show me yours' pact. In effect, it puts Sinn Fein and the IRA on notice that unless they go through some of the motions of decommissioning - which the Provos say would be, and be seen as, an 'act of surrender' and which they will not do - an attempt may be made to go ahead with the power-sharing Executive without them. That would depend on two things. First, the SDLP risking a coalition with Trimble for which they might have to pay dearly in the next election in Nationalist votes lost to Sinn Fein (and Gerry Adams has already put Sinn Fein on a war footing for the upcoming local and European elections). It also depends on Trimble's party holding together. The Bad Thursday 'announcement' was probably meat to alibi the SDLP and put the blame on the IRA for Sinn Fein's exclusion. It created uproar in Trimble's camp because it seemed to be asking the IRA for the merest token of disarmament.
Fortunately, for Blair's image-makers, the war in the Balkans has overshadowed events in Northern Ireland and little has been said in the British media about what may be the start of collapse for the Good Friday Agreement.
The day after the declaration, Sinn Fein - taking their lead from the IRA - spoke out against the 'Hillsborough declaration' saying that it represented a 'massive change' to the Belfast Agreement. They argued that the pressure to decommission was all on their side, that there was never any 'obligation' or 'precondition' for the Provisionals to disarm before Sinn Fein could take a seat in the new government and therefore this new declaration had been drafted in Unionist terms. Gerry Adams repeated these points - to reassure the IRA - in speeches at the parade marking the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising - while at the same time saying he would go back to the negotiating table.
On Thursday 8 April the UVF and Red Hand Commando said they would not be handing over any weapons even if the IRA decommissioned. Trimble's majority in the Protestant camp has depended on the UVF/PUP's two Assembly members. Talks will restart on Tuesday 13 April with the two sides presently digging themselves into more and more entrenched positions.
As the marching season begins clashes between the two communities, individual acts of communal violence - beatings, shootings, forced exiles - are likely to escalate. Portadown may again be the flashpoint. Because the Good Friday Agreement maintains the artificial partition of Ireland all the desperate juggling-style exercises in diplomacy are likely to founder. The alternative remains the same: Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, should unite and insist on a consistently democratic solution instead of the Good Friday Agreement - a federal united Ireland, with autonomy for the Protestant majority areas.
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