The London Blasts: Media Review

DAY 22: Friday 29 July 2005

THE IRA AND AL QAEDA: Bringing The War To An End

THE IRA AND AL QAEDA: BRINGING THE WAR TO AN END

IRELAND: LEARNING THE LESSONS?

We seek, but we do not find. Despite the Prime Minister himself drew together the different campaigns of the IRA and al Qaeda (and found them very different) just two days ago, no serious national British newspaper reporting the end of the IRA campaign has drawn any lessons from the one war for the other.

Tony Blair said, "I don't think you can compare the political demands of republicanism with the political demands of this terrorist ideology we're facing now." He added, "I don't think the IRA would ever have set about trying to kill 3,000 people," as al Qaeda did in New York.

So there are differences in the demands (amazing that Mr Blair even suggested the possibility that al Qaeda has demands), and there are differences in tactics (the IRA high command did not seek mass civilian casualties). Mr Blair could have added that the IRA is and always has been a conventional (para-)military organisation, with a conventional command structure, whereas al Qaeda is remarkable for its formlessness and its fluidity - a network of networks.

All well and good. What is of significance to the British people (and to others faced with a similar situation) is: how did we arrive at the point where the IRA ended its campaign? Can we apply the lessons to the al Qaeda crisis?

These questions are not being addressed. Perhaps they will be alluded to in the reporting that follows, but, despite the fact that the IRA's declaration has long been expected (there were signs that it might come before the last election) and the overwhelming nature of the current crisis in London, no comment was commissioned on the connections between these two problems.

FIRST LESSON

The first point about the IRA's declaration is that the IRA was never defeated. Bringing the IRA's campaign to an end was not achieved by either 'militarily defeating the terrorists' or 'intelligence outsmarting the terrorists' or 'police catching and locking up enough of the terrorists'.

The fundamental problem was political, and the combined violence and skill of the British armed forces, its intelligence agencies, and its police could not solve that problem, or end the IRA's campaign.

This is the first and most important parallel with the current al Qaeda crisis.

Just as with the IRA, al Qaeda-type attacks will not and cannot be brought to an end simply by military, intelligence or police means. The fundamental problem is political.

The 7/7 bombers came 'out of a blue sky', said the government. That doesn't mean that such attacks weren't expected, it was just that these particular bombers were not under surveillance, they had 'clean skins'. People who the intelligence services didn't know about were angry and despairing enough and hated enough to become involved in the mass killing of their fellow citizens.

During the IRA's armed campaign, there was a similar use of 'clean skins' to carry out operations.

As long as the grievance is there, there will be young people who are willing to put themselves on the line. It's the grievance, and the supply of volunteers, that is the problem. You can't shoot a grievance or arrest it. You have to do something to solve it.

SECOND LESSON

What was/is the grievance?

In the case of Northern Ireland, the fundamental problem was the Protestant majority who held power were unwilling to give up their power over the minority Catholic community, and that power was guaranteed to Protestants by the British government so long as the British government was committed to retaining a monopoly of sovereignty over Northern Ireland.

That British connection was the determining factor in maintaining the economic, social and political inequality between the two communities, hence the key issue was either 'unionism' (those who favoured the 'union' with Britain) or 'nationalism' (those who favoured re-union with the rest of Ireland).

British segmentation of Ireland, and its determination to retain control over this part of the United Kingdom, interlocked with the oppression of the Catholic minority in the six northern counties that Britain retained when it granted the rest of Ireland 'independence' in the 1920s.

The fundamental grievance was not enough for there to be a supply of volunteers for armed operations. It is well known (but not recorded in today's newspapers) that in the 1960s the IRA gave up its military function. There weren't enough volunteers, there wasn't enough support in the community.

An internal IRA document concluded in the early 1960s that, 'A dwindling of public support both North and South [of the border was] making it virtually impossible for men to operate on Guerrilla lines - one of the basic ingredients for a successful guerrilla campaign is the support of wide sections of the people'. (Document seized by the Northern Ireland security forces, cited in Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets: The origins of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, 1990, p. 126)

What brought about an end to this nonviolent phase, and the start of the campaign which has now been officially terminated? What reversed this disastrous lack of public support?

One could make a parallel with the bin Laden networks, and note that after the success of the Afghan mujaheddin campaign, Osama bin Laden went home to Saudi Arabia, just as many other fighters retired from the 'holy war'. Why then did they resume fighting?

In a later time frame, one could note that the long-standing grievances of Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya did not trigger violence in Britain itself. What was it that triggered violence here?

The grievances provided the fuel, but there were further events that sparked and spread the flames.

THIRD LESSON

What triggered the armed struggle?

In Ireland, the IRA lent its (unarmed) muscle to the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, stewarding several marches and so on. The nonviolent struggle of the Catholic minority for basic civil rights (an end to job and housing discrimination against Catholics; one adult, one vote; and so on) was met by repression and violence from both the Protestant community and the security forces (overwhelmingly Protestant).

Here is a BBC potted history which is reasonably accurate (emphasis is added by JNV):

'In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was set up and organised street demonstrations to lobby for civil rights. The Stormont government branded the movement a front for the IRA and banned its marches. In October 1968 the RUC used heavy-handed tactics to disperse a Civil Rights Association march in Londonderry and in January 1969 a People's Democracy march was attacked. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants deepened and by August 1969 Catholics were being burned out of their homes and shot on the streets of Belfast.'

The initiative for large-scale violence came from the State and from unionist mobs. The first armed function of the IRA in 1969 was defence of Catholic communities under attack.

In his lamentable history of '30 years of war' today, the Independent's David McKittrick does at least write clearly about this phase (page 6):

'If there is one single place which symbolises its 1969 rebirth and growth, it is Bombay Street in the Falls Road area of Belfast, where marauding loyalists [extreme unionists] burnt down much of the street and killed a junior IRA member. The IRA split at that point, one faction going into eventual obscurity while most activists joined a hugely expanded "Provisional IRA".... The initial emphasis was on defence, the IRA vowing to protect areas open to loyalist attack.'

Similarly, one could say that the first major functions of the networks that came together in al Qaeda was 'defence' of the people of Afghanistan, and the Muslims in Bosnia.

The IRA then moved onto the offensive. One could say the same about al Qaeda. Why did this happen?

FOURTH LESSON

In 1969, the British Army was deployed in Northern Ireland to pacify the growing crisis. At first, they were seen by the Catholic/Nationalist community as a protective force, holding back loyalist mobs and sectarian security forces. This changed, until there was widespread community support for the targeted killing of British Army soldiers. Why?

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Dewar, who served in Belfast, wrote in his book The British Army in Northern Ireland (1985):

'It can be argued that the failure to ban the 1970 Orange parades, and the massive arms searches and curfew in the Lower Falls area which followed, was the last chance to avoid the catastrophe that has since engulfed Ulster [a name unionists use for Northern Ireland]. The previous August was the watershed, the spring of 1970 the last opportunity for a settlement. Until the spring of 1970, most Catholics regarded the [British] troops as their protectors. The Lower Falls operation changed everything...' (pages 39-40)

In April 1970, in one of several incidents demonstrating their solidifying commitment to the unionist cause, rather than any evenhanded 'peacekeeping' role, the British Army defended a unionist Orange march in West Belfast by attacking nationalist protesters and flooding a nearby nationalist estate with CS gas. At the end of June, when a loyalist mob attacked a nationalist enclave in East Belfast (the Short Strand), the British Army did not turn up at all to defend the Catholic householders. It was left to the Provisional IRA to fend off the mob.

Then, on 3 July, as British military vehicles were leaving the nationalist Falls area of Belfast after an arms search, they crushed a man against some railings. Stones were thrown at the vehicles, which stopped and disembarked British soldiers. They were soon trapped by crowds, and a rescue mission had to be mounted - which also became bogged down. The soldiers fired waves of CS gas. The crowd threw nail and petrol bombs. The troops were eventually evacuated.

The Army then launched a colossal invasion of the Falls in a pre-decided show of force. 3,000 troops, half of the British Army's strength in Northern Ireland, was sent into the Falls area. At 10pm, General Freeland declared a curfew in the Falls, which lasted for 35 hours, preventing bread and milk vans entering the area. Soldiers conducted house to house searches for weapons, smashing doors and furniture, and tearing away floorboards and walls in the process.

Three people were shot dead by the Army. Sixty people were wounded.

It was later conceded that the curfew had been illegal.

54 rifles and shotguns and 52 pistols were recovered, and 20,000 rounds of ammunition (from 20,000 people under curfew). One gun for every 200 people, one bullet for each person living in the Falls, at a time when there was a real danger of loyalist attacks.

Michael Farrell notes that at the time of the Falls Curfew, there were 100,000 licensed guns in Northern Ireland, 80 per cent of them in Protestant hands. (Northern Ireland: The Orange State, 1980, p. 274)

No such heavy-handed arms searches were ever carried out in Protestant neighbourhoods, despite the armed mobs which set out from such areas.

To emphasise the sectarian nature of the Falls Curfew operation, the Army ended the curfew by driving two Unionist ministers on a triumphal tour of the conquered territory. Michael Farrell comments that the curfew 'outraged almost the whole ghetto population, to whom the British Army was now just another instrument of the Stormont government for terrorising Catholics in order to appease the Orangemen.'

According to Michael Dewar, the British Army's own assessment was that after the Falls Curfew, the Provisional IRA grew from 'fewer than 100 activists in May-June to roughly 800 in December 1970'. (page 47)

At the beginning of 1971, the IRA Army Council reportedly authorised attacks against the British Army, but it wasn't until October 1971 that the shift to an 'offensive' strategy was publicly announced. (M. L. R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, 1995, p. 95)

Things just got worse. The Sunday Times Insight team of reporters concluded in their book Ulster that, 'a good deal of inquiry produced the tentative conclusions, first, that the Army had through 1971 increasingly used physical violence in circumstances which did not warrant it; and second, that the Catholics' awareness of this - and their inevitable exaggeration of its frequency and severity - was a major factor in securing a popular base for the Provisionals'.

In August 1971, the British government arrested over 300 suspected republicans to detain them without trial - internment. British intelligence was out of touch, leading to the arrest of many people who had nothing to do with the IRA. Over 100 people were released within days of the sweep. The BBC notes that,

'Many of those arrested were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The army, determined to get up-to-date intelligence, resorted to interrogation methods previously used in the former British colonies. Detainees thought likely to have important information were physically weakened through sleep deprivation and a bread and water diet. They were then spread-eagled for hours against a wall with hoods over their heads and subjected to disorientating electronic white noise.

'Civil rights lawyers accused the government of torture. The Irish government made a formal complaint to the European Commission for Human Rights and later the European Court of Human Rights. The Commission found Britain guilty of torture but the European Court ruled that the treatment was inhuman and degrading but did not constitute torture.'

Internment united the nationalist community, and galvanised its hatred. 'In the four months preceding internment, there had been a combined total of eight civilian and military deaths' in Northern Ireland. 'The four months after the introduction of internment saw the deaths of thirty soldiers, eleven RUC officers and seventy-three civilians.' (M. L. R. Smith [Senior Lecturer at the British Naval College, Greenwich], Fighting for Ireland?, 1995, p. 101)

Then, in 1972, we meet Bloody Sunday, a day when the British Army shot dead 13 unarmed civilian protesters on a civil rights march in the city of Derry. (Bloody Sunday Trust)

Ivan Cooper, a Protestant MP in the Northern Ireland parliament, led the march. He reflects on the effect of internment and the Bloody Sunday killings: ""It's difficult for people to appreciate the ethos of the non-violence movement at the time. It was almost like a religion which you were indoctrinated into. But internment was the big issue that would ultimately do more harm than good. Before Bloody Sunday, I believe there were no more than 30 to 40 IRA volunteers in Derry. They had a very small base, small amounts of hardware and, most importantly, very little support. The support was with [nonviolent politicians] John Hume and Ivan Cooper. We were still reasonably integrated in the city. The IRA's campaign of violence that followed in the wake of Bloody Sunday [and internment] changed all that."

It wasn't the IRA's campaign that changed all that. It was Bloody Sunday that changed all that, and enabled the Provisional IRA to develop enormously, and to move towards offensive rather than defensive operations. Ivan Cooper fails to mention that his fellow 'moderate' MP, John Hume, later leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, said in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday that the choice now facing Catholics was 'a united Ireland or nothing'.

What was the IRA's strategy at this time? One British assessment seems plausible: 'the Provisionals were realistic enough to accept that, given the disparity of resources between themselves and the British, they would be unable to defeat the British Army in any conventional military sense. However, they did believe it would be possible to wage a limited form of war "until Britain is forced to sit at the conference table" to negotiate on PIRA's terms.' (M. L. R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, 1995, p. 95)

Smith continues: 'The Provisionals strategy was premised on the assumption that individual military engagements could generate a degree of coercive psychological pressure out of proportion to their destructive consequences... According to Maria McGuire, who was close to Army Council circles in the 1970s, the Provisionals had keenly studied recent conflicts such as those in Palestine, Cyprus, and Aden... She also claimed that the Army Council set an initial target to kill thirty-six British soldiers because it was thought that this figure matched the number of troops killed in Aden and would supposedly impose enough pressure on the British to oblige them to negotiate.'

Does this seem at all familiar?

[More lessons to follow]

JNV welcomes feedback.