Bill Clinton and the “Peace Process”

BILL CLINTON & THE “PEACE PROCESS”

by GERRY FOLEY At the start of President Clinton’s visit to Northern Ireland, the U.S. capitalist media announced with great fanfare that there had been a breakthrough in the negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the decades long conflict in the British-ruled enclave.

What the “breakthrough” amounted to was that the British agreed to temporarily suspend of their demand for the IRA to give up its weapons as a condition for accepting representatives of the republican movement into “all-party” talks.

According to the agreement, an international commission presided over by former U.S.

senator George Mitchell. is to make nonbinding recommentatons on the surrender of weapons by the middle of January. Then, “all-party” talks are to be convened by the end of February 1996. Thus, there is no guarantee that the British demand on mc TRA to surrender its weapons as a precondition for “all-party” talks will not be reraised ag in Seay with the additional force of an international commission behind it.

This is not the first time that the capitalist press has touted a breakthrough in the “logjam.” The first time was when the republican leaders accepted the principle of setting up an international commission to study the surrender of weapons. The British corresp sndingly accepted the possibility of “twin-track” negotiations, that is, that the discussion of arms surrender could proceed simultaneously with “all-party” talks.

Subsequently, the British spokesmen made it clear that they had no intention of yielding on their demand for surrender of weapons as a precondition to “all party talks,” even though of course, such talks in themselves mean nothing.

The latest “breakthough” is not even an agreement between the contending parties, but one strictly between the neocolonial Dublin government and its British overlord. On the day the agreement was announced, the leader of the republican political organization Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams promised only to “explore this positively as we have all other propositions to re-establish the peace process.”

In fact, the demand for the surrender of weapons is a trap laid for the republican leadership. The IRA is a small guerilla force up against an enormous British military machine. It has only token offensive weaponry, but the generations of young people who have hurled themselves desperately against the British machine over the last 25 years would regard its handing over as a betrayal.

As much wider section of the Catholic population view the hand guns held by the IRA as their only defense against the sort of Protestant pograms they faced in 1968. A handing over of these weapons would destroy the credibility the IRA as a force defending the Catholic ghettos. Thus, if the IRA agreed to hand over its weapons, it would almost certainly lose control over sections of its followers. And that is clearly the goal that the British are relentlessly pursuing. The “agreement” announced on November 29 is only another maneuver in this game, one that has the objective also of pulling the republicans into accepting the Dublin government and Clinton as their lawyers.

It is certain that whatever illusions the republicans may harbor about the “democratic” and “peace-loving” intentions of these governments, the British have none. They recognize their own kind and their own creatures.

In the buildup to Clinton’s visit to Ireland, which began November 30, Irish republican leader Gerry Adams repeatedly to the U.S. chief to save the “peace process.”

Speaking in Washington on November 15, Adams said, according to a Reuters dispatch of the same date: "We all need to focus on the need to have a Dayton in the Irish situation." (For an analysis of the Bosnian settlement imposed by the U.S. in Dayton, see article elsewhere in this issue. ) The Irish republican leadership has been warning for many weeks that the so-called peace process that was launched by the IRA ceasefire more than a year ago has reached the brink of collapse. In Washington, Adams told U.S. officials that he felt “fear” about what would happen if the negotiations remained stalled.

The Clinton administration has issued statements warning the public not to expect it to be able to do anything to break the deadlock. Of course, Great Britain is a power of another scale altogether than the contending parties in Bosnia. But why expect Clinton to force the British to offer concessions to the Irish republicans when his administration has offered no mercy to Irish Republican refugees in the United States?

The major test case in the U.S. is that of the “H-Block Four,” four men who escaped from the main British prison in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the 1980-1981 hunger strike to the death of ten republican prisoners. They were tracked down in the United States by the U.S. political police, and imprisoned in California.

One of them, Jimmy Smyth, after a long stay in prison, was_ released on bail some months ago, but the U.S. Justice Department is appealing a favorable District Court ruling and trying to put him back in jail and deport him.

Recently, the attempt to get the U.S. courts upheld the extradiction statute under which the three H-Block escapees still in prison—Pol Brennan, Terry Kirby, and Kevin Barry Artt— face the threat of being handed over to the British authorities.

U.S. courts have issued 15 deportation orders against Irish political refugees. In early November, federal judge Wayne Iskra ordered Gabriel Megahey deported.

The British have offered a small concession to republican prisoners, increasing remission (time off for good behavior). But the British Home office recently informed three republican prisoners sentenced to life that they have to expect to serve a minimum of 50 years. Adams commented: “It is absolutely astounding that 15 months into the peace process political prisoners are being informed that they can expect to serve at least 50 years in jail.

The British government is sending out clearer signals by the day....

“Coming hard on the heels of the derisory tinkering with the remission system, which will bring benefits to only a few prisoners, this is further magnification of the begrudging attitude which lies at the heart of the British government's approach to the peace process."

Another signal from the British authorities was the promotion of paratrooper Lee Clegg, a soldier who was briefly jailed for the murder of a Belfast teenager from a nationalist neighborhood. Clegg has only been out of prison a few months. His release in August

sparxed furious mass protests in the nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. The fact that the British army took him back and promoted him without even waiting a decent interval, was rubbing salt in the wound.

The British minister for Northern Ireland, Patrick Mayhew chose Derry, the cockpit of republican militancy, for a speech on November 22 announcing that Britain had no intention of backing down on its demand that the IRA start handing in its weapons before the republicans could be included in any “all-party talks.”

A Reuters dispatch reported: “Initial reaction from Sinn Fein was one of bitter disappointment. There had been hopes Mayhew might set a date for all-party talks while an international panel discussed the timing and practicalities of disarming guermillas.”

The greatest danger in this situation, and that is probably what prompted Adams to say that he felt “fear,” is that groups in the nationalist community may be provoked by the British into isolated armed actions that would provide an excuse for a massive military crackdown. The British government seems to be preparing for that by letting it be known that its intelligence service thinks that there is an imminent danger of a breakdown of the ceasefire. In this situation, however, nothing can undermine the authority of the republican leadership more quickly and give greater encouragement to desperate attacks on the British forces than Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams relying on false friends like Clinton, to say nothing of British prime minister Major.

The disillusioned nationalist people need another alternative besides pleading with the political mouthpieces of ruthless regimes. An editorial October 28, the Andersontown News, one of the main nationalist papers published in Belfast is probably, whatever else it may be, an indication of the direction in which minds are turning in the nationalist neighborhoods. “The sight of protesters on the stret carrying placards demanding all-party talks is one that for many nationalists has become a virtual irrelevance, because in real terms it means nothing to them in their daily lives. The phrase ‘all-party talks’ has become a cipher for cul-de-sac politics and spirit-sapping mean-mindedness....

“We should all be out in search of the things that can be delivered, which are ours of right and which we haven’t yet got because we haven’t started to demand them. and as those things start to come our way, which they certainly will if we want them enough, the new found confidence and optimism thus engendered will prove more potent in the search for a new Ireland than a lifetime of sterile and hollow demands for talks.”

In other words, back to the street for the concrete demands of the people, back to the line of action that created the mass upsurge in Northern Ireland in 1968, to the people relying only on their own strength to win concrete gains for themselves and those who have suffered on their behalf, like the republican political prisoners.