BOOKS

Diplomacy in insurgency

A.G. NOORANI

THE Party must guide the gun, not the other way around. Mao fully lived up to his famous dictum. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) was guided by the Chinese Communist Party whose leaders were themselves prominent members of the party. Over the years, the PLA acquired a voice of its own, but one to be used in the party's councils. Whether it is a revolutionary movement or an insurgent one, mindless violence is self-defeating.

India has faced several insurgent movements since Independence. The Telengana movement was the first. The ones who took to the gun in Punjab were terrorists devoid of ideas and disdainful of politics. Ever since insurgency broke out in Nagaland decades ago, those who led the wielders of the gun were also participants in political negotiations. The Hurriyat Conference began as a united front of separatist bodies, each of which claimed the loyalty of a militant body. But none of them controlled it. In the last couple of years of his life, the People's Conference leader, Abdul Ghani Lone, urged repeatedly - but unrealistically - that the militants leave politics to the Hurriyat. It was unrealistic because they owed nothing to the Hurriyat. Its leaders could at best claim moral authority over the militants. They frittered away the arrest with intrigues and open squabbling. Right now, none of them, bar Syed Ali Shah Geelani, is in good standing with the militants, thus diminishing, if not destroying, their capacity to deliver.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in contrast, was set up and has functioned on the fascist principles of a single leader, intolerance of dissent, and iron discipline. M.R. Narayan Swamy, who won praise for his book Tigers of Lanka, pens an able profile of its leader, Velupillai Prabakaran. His outlook and techniques are well known. The book provides information on important aspects, particularly on the LTTE's organisational set-up within and outside Sri Lanka.

It owns businesses and property in India, Thailand, France, Canada and Singapore and owns and operates a fleet of ships. It runs a de facto State in the Northeast of Sri Lanka and seeks to gain a de jure status through its proposals on the Interim Self-Governing Authority (ISGA). Narayan Swamy's book should dispel any illusions on what the ISGA spells.

It is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which provides the most fascinating study in the interaction between wielder of its guns, and its political wing, the Sinn Fein, its politicians' interactions with the British and Irish governments, and, not least, those governments' firm but patient dealings with the Sinn Fein, especially with its legendary leader, Gerry Adams.

Ed Moloney has spent two decades writing about the IRA. Elected as Irish Journalist of the year in 1999, he has been Northern Editor of The Irish Times and then of The Sunday Tribune. The title of this solid volume is no idle boast. With his unrivalled access to players, the author exposes some dark secrets of the IRA and of Adams. The book reveals how he ruthlessly eliminated or marginalised those who differed with the peace process, which he had come to accept 20 years ago and manipulated the IRA into believing that he was committed to the war, while struggling at all times to win its confidence and that of London and Dublin that he could deliver a peace package.

Adams had come to realise that Northern Ireland could not be united with the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland against the wishes of its Protestant majority, however slim it was. The best that the Roman Catholics in the North could expect was an end to the hostile discrimination to which they had been subjected for centuries, even after the island's partition in 1921, a guaranteed power-sharing arrangement and institutional links between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. British sovereignty would continue, but Northern Ireland would enjoy a substantial degree of self-government (vide the author's article "Irish Lessons for Kashmir", Frontline, April 11, 2003).

Eventually, an all-party accord on these lines was concluded in Belfast on Good Friday, April 10, 1998. Referenda in both parts of Ireland endorsed the Accord. Power-sharing arrangements went into force. The Sinn Fein joined the government. But devolution was suspended in October 2002 after an IRA spy ring was detected at Stormont.

This has been a difficult year for the peace process and it is hard to say how far the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, held on November 26, will help in restoring it.

None of the parties emerged with credit in the spate of disclosures this year. John Stevens, London's Police Commissioner, found after an inquiry that "the undercover Force Research Unit, which reported directly to the Senior British Commander in the province, colluded systematically with loyalist (Protestant) terrorists in the murder of Republican (Catholic) sympathisers. They gave loyalists all the intelligence they need for their brutal murder spree." The report was presented in April. Stevens found also that in 1989 British security forces and Northern Ireland police colluded with a Protestant hit-squad to kill a Catholic civil rights lawyer, Patrick Finucane while he was sitting down for a Sunday family dinner. These forces and the police obstructed subsequent investigations into the crime.

The governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom concluded in April an accord on matters in dispute and set up an Independent Monitoring Body to consider charges of breaches of the Good Friday Agreement made by any party. In May, elections to the Assembly were postponed. Blair hinted at Adams' "management problems". On October 2, Adams gave assurances of commitment to exclusively peaceful means which the IRA endorsed, besides performing its third act of decommissioning arms before the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning headed by General John de Chastelain.

A deal had been arrived at but the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader David Trimble had his own "management problems". The IRA said it had authorised a "process of putting arms beyond use at the earliest opportunity". But Trimble wanted John de Chastelain to reveal the details of decommissioning which he is barred from doing. If the deal had gone through, the UUP and the Sinn Fein would have returned to a power-sharing government. On October 22, London announced that elections would be held on November 26.

Meanwhile, Gerry Adams' authority was affected by the disclosure, in May, that a senior IRA figure and his trusted friend Alfredo Scappatici, was the British spy, "Stakeknife". He was responsible for the deaths of some 40 IRA activists. He was head of the IRA's dreaded internal security unit. Sir John Stevens' requests to the British government to be allowed to question him drew a blank.

PAUL MCERLANE/REUTERS

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams at his party's headquarters in west Belfast, Northern Ireland, on October 21.

The IRA had long suspected penetration of its ranks by British Intelligence, but it was shocked to learn how far it had gone. Ironically, it was Scappatici's job to punish informers. He worked in the IRA for 25 years and was paid, reportedly, £80,000 a year by British Intelligence, which was deposited in a Gibraltar bank account. In 1994 an MI5 agent on the IRA's executive was exposed.

Ed Moloney begins with an episode of betrayal and keeps asking throughout the book who the traitor was. The trawler Eksund, was loaded at Tripoli, on October 13 and 14, 1987, with some 150 tonnes of modern, sophisticated weaponry supplied by Libya. This was the fifth trip since August 1985. Earlier cargoes, amounting to a total of 150 tonnes, were safely delivered. The fifth would have significantly altered the course of the insurgency.

"The Eksund's manifest was breathtaking: 1,000 Romanian-made AK-47 automatic rifles, a million rounds of ammunition, 430 grenades, 12 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with ample supplies of grenades and rockets, 12 heavy Russian DHSK machine guns, over 50 SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles capable of downing British army helicopters, 2,000 electric detonators and 4,700 fuses, 106 millimetre cannons, general-purpose machine guns, anti-tank missile launchers, flame throwers, and two tonnes of the powerful Czech-made explosive Semtex."

The leader of the operation, Gabriel Cleary, detected sabotage of the timing power unit after the ship left Tripoli. He could not blow up the cargo when the ship, under surveillance by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was surrounded by armed French customs men. "Cleary never got as far as even connecting the device. Instead, the realisation of treachery forced a number of thoughts to flash through his head, as he later told IRA colleagues. The British must have known about their plans all along, and soon the media would know as well. But the question that brought a cold sweat to his brow concerned the identity of the traitor. There was certainly a collaborator on board, but was there another one, someone back in Ireland who had betrayed the Eksund and its precious cargo?" There was suspicion that the informer was "at the very top" of the organisation.

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi was livid. However, the disaster had an effect none had imagined. It strengthened Gerry Adams' hands. A militarily weakened IRA was easier to wean away from war than one which was armed to the teeth. The core of the book is about his struggles and eventual success in ending a conflict that had taken a toll of nearly 4,000 lives since its renewed outbreak in 1969. Renewed, because the partition of 1921 triggered off a civil war, which the IRA bitterly fought. The partition accord was a hastily contrived deal. "Had the architects of the 1921 settlement set out to create an inherently unstable entity, they could scarcely have done better than to design Northern Ireland in the way they did. The state contained within its boundaries the seeds of its own devastation. Packed into its narrow confines were two troubled communities."

The Republicans expected, not unreasonably, that the northern state would collapse once its boundaries were drawn. The Treaty of 1921 had set up a Boundary Commission to draw the borders of Northern Ireland. Even anti-Treatyites believed that when nationalist areas were removed from the six partitioned counties in the north, as the British had implied during the Treaty negotiations, the truncated remnant would not be viable and the new state would collapse into their hands. "The British had reneged on promises made in 1921 when the Boundary Commission was set up. In a majority report the Commission brushed aside nationalist concerns and recommended that all six partitioned counties be incorporated in the new Northern Ireland state, and the fledgling administration in Dublin had little option but to acquiesce. The decision made the new entity a viable one but at the cost of sowing the seeds of future conflict. Nearly half a million Catholics and nationalists, a third of the population, had been forced against their will into a state with which they did not identify and whose leaders were openly hostile to them."

The Irish Boundary Commission's Report, submitted in 1925, was suppressed until 1968. It was published the next year (Report of the Irish Boundary Commission. Introduction by Geoffrey J. Hand; Irish University Press; pages 264, 65 shillings). Its terms of reference were to determine the boundaries "in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions".

If this was a forerunner of the terms of reference of the Radcliffe Commission on the boundaries of the Punjab and Bengal, in the wake of the partition of India in 1947, so was the conduct of its Chairman, Justice Richard Feetham of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He met British politicians - Boldwin, Churchill, and others - at the House of Commons on December 3, 1925, six days before signing the Report. Radcliffe, as we know, met Mountbatten and altered his draft Report behind the back of the upright Secretary of the Commission, Christopher Beaumont who exposed the deceit in 1992.

The author narrates briefly the facts of history essential to an understanding of the present. The IRA split more than once. The 1969 split yielded the "Provisional" IRA which Adams came to dominate. He has been understandably reticent about his role. He has practised, less subtly, the kind of ruse which Charles de Gaulle famously did on the rebellious colons in Algeria on June 4, 1958: "Je vous ai compris" (I have understood you). He bought time to negotiate Algeria's independence.

Gerry Adams said in 1983 in his first address as party president that the IRA's campaign was a "necessary and morally correct form of resistance". This was a year after he had begun the peace process. This is the core of the author's thesis and it is very instructive for those handling insurgency situations. "The Irish peace process was not a spontaneous phenomenon, tossed around by forces outside its control, nor was it forced upon its architects by the fortunes of war. The process was a little like a precooked dinner whose basic menu had largely been decided long before most of the diners knew the meal was planned, even if the table settings, the guest list, the size and shape of the crockery, cutlery, and condiments, and so on were not. The peace process was, in other words, an exercise in management toward an already decided outcome, as much as it was anything else."

While the parameters of a realistic deal were obvious, success in diplomacy aimed at achieving it depended on a host of factors; not least the mind-set of the rulers. To seek a military solution is to pursue a mirage. The IRA had many dreamers. Gerry Adams' charismatic leadership alone could have marginalised them.

"The people guiding the organisation were longsighted, bright, talented, dedicated, determined, pragmatic, cunning, and all too often duplicitous. They were also utterly ruthless in their mission, which above all else was to survive and prosper, and were devoted to their leader and inspiration, Gerry Adams. The idea that he or the people around him would allow any but one of their own to control and direct their journey was so absurd that it was not even worthy of consideration." Were Adams himself to endorse publicly now what Ed Moloney has revealed, he would undermine his own leadership.

Libya gave the IRA $3.5 million in the banks of the City of London followed by another $10 million plus 300 tonnes of weaponry. But it was not the only benefactor. "The only reliable source for guns was, as it always has been for Irish insurgents, the United States, where large Irish-American communities, especially on the East Coast, began providing generous amounts of sympathy, money and guns once the `Troubles' broke out in 1969." No insurgency can survive without external aid. Even with that aid, the IRA's violence was nowhere near the scale needed to force Britain to quit from Northern Ireland. It planned "Tet offensive", modelled on the Vietcong's, in January 1968. It did not work.

Gerry Adams could succeed in his mission because he was, as many were shocked to discover, an IRA commander in Belfast. This authentic terrorist was received by President Clinton in the White House; and rightly too. A terrorist who is prepared to eschew terrorism should be encouraged to do so.

Adams was engaged, as Fintan O' Toole of The Irish Times has remarked, "in an epic task: trying to get the IRA, an undefeated and highly effective terrorist organisation, to abandon violence and adopt a fully political strategy. He needed and deserved a large measure of tolerance from governments and the press. The very ambiguity of his position, after all, was one of the great assets of the peace process. If Adams were not accepted as a democratic politician, he could not be brought into negotiations. If, on the other hand, he did have at least a significant degree of control over the terrorists, he could deliver what the governments and most of the Irish people wanted: an end to the IRA's sordid campaign."

He had himself established a unit which killed and buried informers. It reported to Adams alone, directly. He was involved in the Bloody Friday atrocity in July 1972 when the IRA exploded 20 car bombs killing nine persons and injuring 130. A widowed mother of ten children was among the so-called "Disappeared". The order could not "have been issued without his (Adams) knowledge". His close ally Martin McGuinness, who became Minister under the accord, was also an IRA leader.

The very qualities which made Adams a dangerous terrorist - ruthlessness, duplicity, planning ahead, willingness to intimidate others - equipped him to turn the IRA around. The British knew all that and encouraged him.

The South was the IRA's logistical base; the North was its war zone. The first IRA commanders were from the south. The foot soldiers came mostly from the North. "The early Provisional leaders were determined that they would not stray down the path of parliamentary reformism trod by other nationalist and republican leaders. Each previous generation of freedom fighters had been betrayed, they believed, by leaders seduced by the siren call of parliamentary politics. They would be the exception. For this reason they defined the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA in simple and traditional terms. The military wing, the IRA, was in charge, and Sinn Fein would obey and be subservient to the Army Council."

Once the troubles broke out in 1969, British repression increased. It was censured repeatedly by Amnesty International. London devised ingenious methods for enlisting informers. "A favourite tactic was to drive these agents through nationalist districts in military vehicles to identify and photograph other IRA activists through the slits in armour plating." The military Reconnaissance Force "constructed an intricate undercover intelligence network that included a massage parlour, ostensibly run by English prostitutes, an ice cream business and the Four Square Laundry, which operated in West Belfast. The Four Square operation was simplicity itself: a van would tour housing estates offering cut-price laundry services so as to acquire clothing to be analysed for traces of explosives and gunpowder and so to identify IRA houses."

Typically in insurgent situations, each side repeatedly hailed outbreaks of false dawns of victory, only to be disillusioned. "Secret contacts with the IRA leadership were opened up by a group of liberal Protestant clerics, and there were other indirect conversations between the Army Council and the British Government, mostly through its Secret Service, MI6, which produced a short-lived truce over the Christmas holiday of 1974 and early new year of 1975. The ceasefire was renewed in early February 1975, and there were reasons to believe that this time it would not be like 1972, and that the British wanted to hold serious talks."

Between 1969 and 1997, on the eve of the accord, a ceasefire was ordered five times - in 1972, 1974, 1990, 1994 and 1997 - in the expectation each time that "serious talks" would be held. None but Gerry Adams in the IRA had seriously thought through the outlines of a deal that London could accept and sell to the Unionists. Each ceasefire caused dissension in the IRA. It shed, albeit gradually, its policy of "absolutionism" (from contesting elections) and was surprised at the dividends it reaped in elections.

The peace process began in earnest only in 1982, 15 years before the 1997 Accord. The author describes in detail the help extended to Adams by a Catholic Priest, Father Alec Reid, and John Hume, leader of the constitutional Social Democratic and Labour Party. Trust among the three was crucial in secret negotiations with the British and Irish governments. They were kept secret from the IRA Army council.

Adams posed three questions to the British. "The first question was `what would the parameters of a political settlement be if there was an IRA ceasefire?' Second, `would the Unionists and the British just pocket the ceasefire and return to the trenches?' and third, `how influential would people like me be with unionists? How proactive was I prepared to be?' "

Ed Moloney traces the other processes on which Adams was simultaneously at work - infighting in the IRA, parleys with Dublin and crafting a negotiating strategy with Hume and Reid. He was clandestinely in touch with London since 1986.

Adams posed another six questions to Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, of which two were crucial: "1. What is the nature of the British government's interest in Ireland? 2. What is the British government's attitude toward self-determination, and what will it do to ensure that there is no veto exercised which would militate against the exercise of self-determination?"

Britain made it plain that while it had no selfish interests of its own, it would not force the Unionists to accept Dublin's rule. Their consent - "veto" to the IRA - was not negotiable. Adams knew that. But many others disagreed with him. The author's detailed description of the IRA set-up and how close Adams came to defeat in 1996 is fascinating. Supreme power vested in the 7-member Army Council, including the power to "conclude peace or declare war". Adams had a majority of one on this body which was elected by a 12-member executive, which, in turn, was elected by a General Army Convention. This general body was elected by the rank and file through an elaborate procedure.

Operational control was in the hands of the Chief of Staff, who had at his disposal the service of a General Headquarters' staff and a Northern Command, whose task was to conduct the day-to-day campaign of violence against the British. In the years before the 1994 ceasefire, GHQ consisted of nine departments, each headed by a director who reported to the Chief of Staff. Each department carried out specialised functions and had its own identity, traditions, and culture. When it came to gauging sentiment in the IRA about political matters - such as whether or not a ceasefire should be called - departmental loyalties and differences mattered as much as, if not more than, geographical ones. The quartermaster's department procured weaponry. Next in importance was the engineering department, followed by the operations department. Six other departments were concerned with intelligence, finance, publicity, and so on. It was a de facto state.

Only a leader with Gerry Adams' charisma and tactical skill could have persuaded such a body to accept a compromise. By the summer of 1995, ten out of 12 members of the executive were against him. The Convention, which met in October 1996, sought to curb the Council's powers to call ceasefires in future, and at one remove, Adams' authority. A timely switch by one of the dissidents helped Adams acquire yet greater authority on the council.

Father Reid and Adams devised "two positions - one for the consumption of the IRA and Sinn Fein base and one for the rest of the world. Once again, it would be the version prepared for those outside their ranks that would prevail."

The 1998 Accord split the IRA but none could be in doubt that Adams had prevailed. The Accord was ratified. "The leadership's control over the IRA was by now complete and dissent virtually non-existent. Sinn Fein, though, was a different matter. It was supposed to be a democratic body in which debate, argument, and dissent were encouraged, and for some IRA members unwilling to challenge military authority, the party's forums provided an opportunity to challenge orthodoxies more safely while wearing a different hat." The crucial test is yet to come. Will the IRA dissolve itself and allow the Sinn Fein to function as a political party in a democracy without a military arm?

A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney; W.W. Norton & Co., pages 600; $28.95.
Inside an Elusive Mind: Prabhakaran by M.R. Narayan Swamy; Konark; pages 290; Rs.400

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail