The British Government and its Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson are being reckless and short-sighted over Northern Ireland. The Government has introduced a Bill into Parliament that will come into force at the end of the week unless the Irish Republican Army begins decommissioning its weapons. The Bill would reimpose direct rule from London, taking power away from the local Northern Ireland legislature and two-month-old power-sharing Government. The British Government acted after the independent commission, led by Canadian General John de Chastelain, reported to the British Government about the state of progress in weapons decommissioning. The report has not been made public, but it is widely thought that it says absolutely nothing has happened. No weapons have been turned in or rendered inoperable.
That is a frustrating turn of events, but it should not have provoked such a sudden, tightly framed deadline which the British Government knew would not be met. The history of IRA behaviour would have made it obvious. So now after two years of enormous effort, peace in Northern Ireland is threatened. It is almost as if the British Government wants the peace framework to collapse.
In the face of the de Chastelain report, the British Government should have concerned itself with what was happening on the ground in Northern Ireland, not about the symbolism of the IRA decommissioning its first weapon. There is peace, albeit fragile, and there is shared government. Britain has now made the task of Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn, Fein, the political wing of the IRA, that much harder, if not impossible. Mr Adams has spent the past several years, till now successfully, convincing a terrorist organisation to give up its central aim of a united Ireland and join in what is to be a purely political struggle to get greater opportunity for Catholics in Northern Ireland. On the other side, David Trimble, too, has had to hose down the hot-head among the Protestant para-militaries. To date, their achievement has been significant. At the weekend they had talks face to face – itself unthinkable two years ago.
The British Government misses the point with its deadline. It is absurd to impose a deadline of a week in an dispute that has been running several hundred years. It is like the absurd weekly and monthly deadlines the United States tried to impose when it has hosted Middle East talks, when the dispute at issue goes back thousands of years.
The success – now threatened – in Northern Ireland has been brought about by gradually bringing parties together without tight deadlines. Sure, parties can huff and puff every now and then, and that should have been the response this time. The bringing together of these parties is now at a critical stage. They are actually in Government together. The longer they are in government together the more they will see matters from a different perspective. They will have to deal with schools, drains, hospitals and crime (as distinct from terrorism). Dealing with the business of government together will make them see they can achieve much more for their people than by the bullet and the bomb.
But now the British Government is threatening to take away the one thing upon which lasting peace can be built – shared Government. The real deadline is that under the 1998 Good Friday accord the IRA must end decommissioning of weapons by May. The starting point was deliberately left ambiguous. The British Government should allow the shared government to go on till May. That would have bought valuable time.