In Northern Ireland. Christopher Hitchens dissects the recent accord between Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, without mercy. A must-read.

No, we´ve been here before, but there is a lot of excitement over the IRA announcement today. For a round-up of sobering comments and reactions go to Slugger O´Toole and just keep scrolling.

I have been watching the news reports on TV and a lot of credit for this development is given to the role played by the McCartney sisters. Sure, their case has helped move things, but it is highly doubtful that the relatives of a man murdered by the IRA would be able to force the organization out of its core business. The affair however was very bad PR for the group and the announcement to disarm could easily be read as a ploy to curry favor and re-establish some legitimacy without really dismantling IRA operations. Destroying arms is a very different step and so is giving up some of the very lucrative and illicit franchises the group enjoys.

What is probably far more destablizing for the IRA is the new anti-terror mood in Britain following the London underground attacks. New legislation when implemented is not going to be kind to any terrorist activity. It makes you wonder why Britain had to wait for jihadist attacks to start to take terror this seriously, certainly a question posed by those occupying the 3600 graves that the Northern Ireland conflict has left in its wake.

At the White House:

President Bush stood in solidarity with the family of slain Belfast man Robert McCartney on Thursday in a St. Patrick's Day event that snubbed Sinn Fein, the political ally of the IRA. Bush told the five sisters and fiancee of McCartney at a White House reception that he admired their courage and supported their efforts to have the killers of McCartney brought to justice.

That support should extend beyond the St. Patrick's Day festivities of today, one would hope. Meanwhile in another part of town Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams got a hero's welcome at the American Federation of Labour:

Gerry Adams was not invited - no politicians from Northern Ireland were - just like he wasn't invited to meet his former close supporter Senator Ted Kennedy either.

"The White House, Teddy's House, the only house that counts is this house and you're always welcome in our house," said the American Federation of Labour President John Sweeney. It was a gushing, rousing introduction to the man he called his "hero."

A remarkable statement in the wake of recent events and once more evidence of the Left's general unwillingness to see terror for what it really is: terror. But then it took many others, including Bush who hosted Adams in previous years, quite some time to see the IRA and Sinn Fein for what they really are.

The McCartney sisters have arrived in the States and are ready for action, or so it seems. Upon arrival Catherine McCartney commented:

"The only thing that's stopping us getting the murderers brought to justice is secrecy, collusion and cover-up," she said. "And we're going to be raising that with the president an letting him know the true story."

"We're now dealing with criminal gangs who are still using the cloak of romanticism around the IRA to murder people on the streets and walk away with it," she said, adding that was the message they intend to take to Americans who have political and financial influence in Ireland.

Dispelling "the cloak of romanticism" is indeed an important part of revealing the IRA and Sinn Fein for what they are, but you have got to wonder how both organizations have been able to perpatrate this bizarre romantic notion for so long. Even more questionable is how anyone could have bought into it in the first place.

The McCartney sisters in the USA: a time for action, a time for an awakening.

Following the shocking comments of Martin McGuiness yesterday his partner in crime - or peace, depending on which way you look at it - Gerry Adams sang from a different book yesterday in New York:

"The people -- apart from Robert McCartney's immediate family -- who've been most angry, frustrated by this man's death, are people like myself"

Touring the US, Adams does not have that many options in front of him following the snubs from the White House and Ted Kennedy. Adams' comments are designed both to placate his traditional American supporters and avoid his trip turning into a complete disaster which is what it is beginning to look like. Meanwhile McCguiness at home can be the bad cop and keep the troops sufficiently motivated with some veiled threats and traditional rhetoric.

Following Adams' speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York its President, Richard Haass, made the apt comparison in warning Adams he risked becoming another Arafat. The problem is that that is exactly what the current Sinn Fein/IRA leadership has been for a long time, yet no one was willing to see it, much less say it, notably Clinton and Blair. The desperate quest for an elusive peace deal blinded too many to the obvious truth.

As such any progress, any justice for the surviving members of IRA violence, any hope for a definitive settlement will only be likely when a new reform minded generation of republicans steps up to the plate. They will have to disband the IRA and move to reform and rebrand Sinn Fein into a modern and moderate political group, anything less will not suffice. Adams and McGuiness are too invested in the past to embark on that course. Whatever routine they will put on, at home or in the US, it will be painfully clear that their days as credible partners for peace have long passed, if they ever existed. Let's move on, please.

A bit slower out of the gate than usual the bloggers are now picking up the McCartney story and are moving it. Richard Delevan, a yank in Ireland, has a good round-up of reactions and comments. Expect more in the next few days leading up to St. Patrick's Day but it is important to note that the story and its long term implications remain on the front pages well after that.

The positive outcome of all the attention is that it is now moving beyond just the McCartney case with other stories getting coverage:

Families coming forward include those of Mark Robinson, a 22-year-old Catholic who was stabbed 11 times, beaten and left for dead by a known I.R.A. fighter in Derry in 2001; of Raymond McCord, a 22-year-old Protestant whose body was found in a quarry outside Belfast nearly eight years ago, after he had been abducted and beaten to death by a Protestant gang called the Ulster Volunteer Force; and of Gareth O'Connor, a 24-year-old Catholic who never came back from a drive in the I.R.A. heartland in 2003, days after the group had threatened him.

And as a result there's pressure now on Tony Blair who in the words of former Tory politician Lord Tebbit has failed to clamp down on IRA terror. And Tebbit has every right to be furious:

He criticised the decision to free Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber, and said he was "nauseated" that Mr Blair was the Prime Minister.

Lord Tebbit said: "Considering Blair is the man who let out of prison a whole battalion of murderers, including the man that crippled my wife, that nearly killed me and murdered my friends, I find it difficult to take his claims seriously.

As I said, there's more to come.

UPDATE: That didn't take long. It's only Monday and here's the jaw-dropper for this week: Sinn Fein-leader Martin McGuiness essentially tells the McCartney sisters to back-off and shut up. Yes, this is the leader of a political organization closely affiliated with a terrorist group telling the victims of terror to get lost. In the United Kingdom in 2005.

Not only do these comments reveal once more the nature of the way IRA/Sinn Fein does business but it also looks like they are beginning to get desperate. Lots of material for a Bush speech this Thursday.

Via Slugger O'Toole, read this long and detailed account of the brave battle the McCartney sisters are waging:

The family are setting up an office from which to run a Truth and Justice for Robert campaign. It seems an almost inhuman burden for one family to take on. But they say they will keep going. Gerry Adams said this week that the IRA will not be "embarrassed, demonised or repressed out of existence". Nor will the McCartneys.

And if you ask why they defy the odds to stand up for justice, here's the answer:

What drives them? "Love," Gemma says. "Basic love for my brother. Only now I'm in this situation do I realise how essential justice is. You see people on TV saying they're fighting for justice and you think, why don't they just accept things and get on with the grieving process? It's only now that I realise how important justice is. Otherwise he would have died in vain."

Following my longer account of this affair yesterday be sure to check out Winds too who are looking at this from the American angle.

And while we're at it, here's an account of my days in London when my office was shut down for a few days after an IRA attack devastated a part of the city's financial district.

The jaw-dropping award for this week is not going to Giuliana Sgrena, although she comes in as a very strong runner up, but to the IRA for suggesting to “penalty-shoot” the perpetrators of the heinous Robert McCartney murder (click the link, read it, and imagine that you were having a casual pint in the pub where he got butchered). The IRA’s suggestion to resolve the situation it had all of sudden found itself in after McCartney’s sisters drew media attention to the murder was so baffling that Irish Prime Minster Bertie Ahern reacted as follows:

“We all want to see justice to be done but their (IRA) response to that was to eliminate three or four people. It’s horrific. I have to say I was shocked last night and I read that statement more than once"

Tony Blair was apparently equally stunned as he should be for he is directly responsible for the continued existence of a group with such a disgusting mentality. There are a lot of reactions on this, Dan Drezner and Daily Pundit offer some good round-ups and comments as does Slugger O’Toole, the grand central station for all things Northern Irish. The deeper question however is why it is only now – after years of terror and years of peacemaking – that the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein are all of a sudden under pressure. Michael Gove of the Times comes up with a credible explanation when he looks at the IRA:

For one simple reason. Because it has, literally, been getting away with murder for years. The IRA has been indulged, excused and accommodated so often since the signing of the Belfast Agreement that it had no reason to believe that it would ever face the proper consequences of its immoral actions.

The parallels with other armed conflicts are interesting. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge not only got away with murder, for years after its military defeat in 1979 it managed to remain a player of importance, helped by a lucrative drug and lumber business which it controlled. The same can be said for the PLO, Yasser Arafat maintained an iron grip on his subjects, funded himself by applying all the rules of the corruption handbook and at the same time managed to achieve a measure of respectability by talking peace with the West for decades. Look at how upset the members of his organization are now that there’s a very real hint at change. It’s exactly the same with the IRA and its Sinn Fein affiliates: they’ve kept their constituents in an iron grip of fear, they’ve enjoyed a lucrative franchise built on that position of power and the Good Friday peace accords allowed them a measure of respectability without any real prospect for an end to their unique (and profitable) position in Northern Ireland. When peace between Israel and Palestine remained elusive many pointed to the progress made in Northern Ireland, if it can be done there then surely with some effort it can be done in the Middle East. Well no, it’s the other way around. The reason it wasn’t working in Israel was proof that someday the Good Friday accords would become unstuck as now they have.

Asymmetric deals won’t work. You can’t sign peace agreements with thugs who think they are unaccountable to the people they claim to represent, who rule by fear and who engage in all kind of criminal activity. The IRA has survived many situations that should have spelled its end (anyone remember Omagh?) but somehow it always veered back from a difficult period, helped no doubt by its more respectable brethren in Sinn Fein. What the past weeks tell us though is that eventually a confluence of events will lead to the demise of a terrorist organization and I expect that it won’t be long before both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness’ roles will equally be subject to a veritable call for reform. It’s telling that it’s coming from where it should always have been coming from: Irish Catholics that are sick and tired of the senseless spiral of criminal violence to which they have been subject for decades. Expect that message to be reiterated when the McCartney sisters attend St. Patrick’s Day events at the White House next week.

When I wrote my views on asymmetric peace deals and how they couldn’t work I always had the Good Friday accords in the back of my mind for they seemed to invalidate my theory. Well, no longer:

“ … Sinn Fein should be financially penalised after concluding that the IRA were responsible for the robbery, in spite of denials by Mr Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, and Mr McGuinness, the party's main negotiator.

Ministers expressed deep anxiety about the decision, which they fear threatens to unravel the Northern Ireland peace process. One minister said: "We seem to be going backward, not forward on this. It's very worrying."

The IRA recently hinted that it could end its ceasefire because of the failure of Tony Blair to revive the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland, which was suspended over spying allegations against Sinn Fein.

The asymmetric nature of the deal is pretty evident when your partner in peace starts robbing banks in order to stockpile weapons to fight you, something he vowed not to do according to the terms of the peace agreement you just signed.

Tony Blair, hardened after his Iraq experiences, will no doubt take a far tougher stance in dealing with Gerry Adams and his cohorts than he did before. I am not pleased to see a peace arrangement fall apart, but I can't say that I am surprised.

From time to time I have touched on Northern Ireland, but the topic never materialized into a regular feature here, although I do follow events over there. If you want in-depth and detailed coverage, Slugger O’Toole is an excellent blog that deals with Northern Ireland politics, history and culture on a daily basis. Definitely worth a visit.

If I had seen this movie a decade ago I would probably have been shocked, upset and disgusted, but from today’s vantage point I looked at it very clinically. That may be a result of my age and the amount of violence I have seen in recent years, but it may also be the knowledge that “Bloody Sunday” while a very good docu-drama devoid of the usual Hollywood tricks and stunts, was not very balanced in the way it represented the story that unfolded on that dreadful day in Northern Ireland in 1972. Whilst the horror of seeing unarmed civilians bleeding to death in Derry’s streets is mind-numbing and shocking today, we also know more about the events leading up that day and know that the violence perpetrated by Irish republicans and the death toll among British soldiers in the years prior to Bloody Sunday were not very well presented in the movie. In essence, the movie I think underrepresented the dangers that the British were exposed to.

For those of you not entirely familiar with the story, Bloody Sunday was a January Sunday in 1972 when British paratroopers shot and killed 14 demonstrators during what was intended to be a peaceful civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. I was always stunned by the fact that the Brits who had been instrumental in supporting the Dutch during the Second World War and who played such a phenomenal role in destroying Nazi Germany would shoot and kill innocent demonstrators, in the 1970s, no less. To some extent, it remains a mystery today. An initial inquiry shortly after the fact by a committee chaired by Lord Widgery exonerated the British troops, the latter having successfully established that they had come under fire with shots fired at them from the direction of the demonstrators. We know now that there were many material deficiencies in the Widgery report and it was not until 1998 that the British government - under Tony Blair - announced another inquiry into Bloody Sunday. That inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville, is now well underway and if you are interested I urge you to visit their website which has copies of all the statements and depositions made so far and they make for very interesting reading. The inquiry is not a trial, it is more like a truth finding commission and they will not report back with their final conclusions until late 2004.

Without venturing into the intricacies of the inquiry, the process is, much like the film, an attempt to unearth the facts, trying to comprehend what happened and in doing so achieve a measure of healing as it is next to impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened and bring those that are responsible to justice. The Saville inquiry is no doubt better equipped to do that than the filmmakers in trying to expose the facts of that dreadful day and come up with a comprehensive picture. While that is an admirable goal, I doubt that it is possible to do that, one day after an event taking place, let alone 30 years. Here’s what Derek Wilford, the commander of the paratroopers had to say about it:

"Well, how can one say that, of course, you know, I am being asked 30 years on to remember all these incidents and I have -- trying to remember detail is almost impossible. You have a negative of certain things and then you have been -- over the years you have been fed certain information and some of that information takes on, on, if you like, a part of the negative and you are not quite sure what is right and what is wrong and what is real and which is unreal. It becomes a whole mishmash and I would defy anybody to remember exactly what happened and I have been very, very careful to try and say: yes, I remember that distinctly, and in fact I do not think I have ever actually said that "I remember it distinctly," but I have tried to say what I have remembered and what I recall and what I do not recall. Some things have been put to me and I do not recall it and I am sure there is evidence somewhere that in fact it did happen, but I did not recall it"

Wilford has been one of the more controversial figures in this drama as many loath his unrepentant attitude, yet for some reason he does not believe the need to repent and he stood up for his men and has continued to do that for over 30 years. The manner in which he has done that always struck me as convincing. That is not to say that I cannot feel the pain of those that have died. The scene in which Barney McGuigan dies is heartrending and it is the one part during the movie that I got upset:

Barney McGuigan was going to the aid of Patrick Doherty and was signalling with a white handkerchief held in his hand when he was shot dead by a single bullet through the back of his head. The bullet entered close to his left ear and exited through his right eye travelling forward and upward through his skull. He died where he fell near the corner of Rossville Flats between Rossville Street and Joseph Place. A number of eyewitnesses stated that he was unarmed. Lead particles were found on both his hands which drew Lord Widgery to conclude that: "he had been in close proximity to someone who had fired" (Widgery Report, Paragraph 74). This finding ignored the possibility of contamination from a number of other sources.

The events of that day were correctly billed as a major victory for the IRA as it had no problem finding new recruits that were committed to seek revenge against the British. It almost certainly added a number of years and deaths to the conflict, with one bombing taking place very close to the place I worked in London, some 20 years after Bloody Sunday.

Again, the current inquiry comes across as a fact finding mission with a goal to heal, much like the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa a number of years back. It will unearth a number of unpleasant facts for sure and it will therefore not be able to close the books on this episode for good. It may however bring the parties together again, and at a cost of US$190 million the British government is not only its underlining its commitment to achieve this, it is also expressing its guilt over what happened in Derry on that Sunday.

Some progress with the asymmetric peace deals over the past few days, both the IRA and the Palestinian Authority appear to be making some progress towards peace. My regular readers will be aware of my skepticism towards these arrangements and I do not want to dwell on them much further for now, but what I wanted to reflect on was the memory I have of an IRA attack that came close to home.

It was in April 1992 when I was working in the City of London that I went on my first real business trip. For a young guy, a great milestone in a career and the location was not bad either, Athens in Greece. It was a business development conference and that week, apart from the conference, was pretty much dominated by the very close election race back in the UK where the unexciting John Major eked out a narrow election victory over the clueless Labour Party. By the way, this was the victory that set the stage for the Conservative Party’s journey of self-destruction and Tony Blair’s subsequent comfortable election victories. On Saturday morning as the conference wrapped up we heard the news that a big bomb had gone off in London’s financial district, the area where most of us worked. There were no clear indications of the exact location, casualties or damage other than it was a fairly huge explosion. Those were the days before the internet, so we digested the news slowly and did not race to our laptops to have a complete minute rundown of events. I stayed the extra day and when I got home on Sunday night one of my managers was on the phone shortly after my arrival asking me whether I had heard about the attack and how the trip to Athens had been. I never cared too much for the guy so I summarized what I had to say briefly and let him know that I would give a full report of my trip the next morning. Well, Pieter, he said, you are going to have a few days off because the bomb exploded at the Baltic Exchange and our office building is in such a shape that it is very unsafe for staff to return to work. This was quite a surprise, our office was at the northern end of St Mary Axe, in fact everyday I walked right past the Baltic Exchange at the southern end of St Mary Axe, the place were the bomb had gone off.

The next morning, the day off, I went to the area, camera in hand, and what I witnessed perplexed me completely. The area that had been damaged not only extended well beyond to what anyone would have believed knowing the location of the bomb; the damage done to that area, now cordoned off by police, was phenomenal. The impact of the explosion had covered the direct area with endless mountains of glass as nearly all of the windows of the adjoining Commercial Union skyscraper were knocked to smithereens. The force had also seriously damaged many other buildings, destroyed windows over a vast area, damaged cars and what amazed me and for some reason stuck in my mind: it left most traffic signs in a very wide area curved. The damage had thus also affected our building at the very end of St Mary Axe, although from the outside things did not look that bad. Apparently, there was significant damage and one of the greatest concerns in situations like that is structural damage that is not directly visible to the eye. Hence our few days off, in fact we spent the next two months in some reserve office space the bank had available near St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The background to the bombing was soon clarified in the press. The IRA’s political affiliates had apparently lost a seat during the election (Sinn Fein did contest seats in Westminster but they never occupied them) and the heinous attack was a “punishment” for the conservative victory. Three people were killed and I remember very clearly that one of them was a teenage girl who had happened to be there, waiting in a car while her mother picked up her dad from work. The other victims were also innocent bystanders and all were killed by flying glass. It was a miracle that not more people were killed, the bomb had gone off around 7:00 PM by which time most people had gone home.

I never directly linked the attack to myself or the chance that I could have been killed by it although the bomb went off right on the route that I walked every day from the Underground station to the office and back. I just did not happen to be there that day, I was in Athens, and there was, and is, no other way to look at it. During my stay in London Downing Street 10 had been attacked by a rocket propelled grenade launcher and one day the entire Underground system was shut down leaving my then girlfriend, and now wife, Irene presuming I was dead, however I was just four hours late being stuck in a bus somewhere on Picccadilly. The terror never felt like it was directed at me, or us, or to anyone close to me and I never got the sense from my British colleagues that they felt like they were the object of terror. It was a constant, it was there, and if it came close to home it was sure to move on to another location. I never sensed fear, pain or worry. The nature, origin, much less a solution was ever discussed. The IRA was qualified as a group of isolated fanatics who did not even have majority support in their own ranks, losing a seat during the election was yet more evidence of their failure, isolation and irrelevance. For me, it left a very vivid image of the physical impact of a bomb attack and it makes it easier to picture what will happen to human beings if they are in the vicinity of such a dreadful blast. Whenever I hear that we are close to a final deal in Northern Ireland, and we have been hearing that for well over five years now, I see these colossal mountains of glass right there on St Mary Axe, claiming the lives of three people.

More evidence of the fundamental imbalance of peace deals between democratic and terrorist entities has emerged today in Northern Ireland. Tony Blair who rode to the unique position of international statesman in the wake of the crisis in Iraq now has to apply his moral stature to the deal he is negotiating with Sinn Fein. This article highlights a number of the issues that are currently preventing the full implementation of the power sharing peace arrangements in Northern Ireland. The IRA base fears a future of irrelevance through the required decommissioning and democratization process, as it will no longer be able to achieve its stated goals and no longer hold a grip on the people it claims to represent. Absent from my earlier analysis of asymmetrical peace was the fact that the terrorist organization loses another important franchise:

The IRA had offered a substantial act of arms decommissioning, although apparently not its entire stock of weapons. But it refused to budge on the issues that would infringe on its criminal, money-making activities.

The economics part, of course. It is always about politics and markets, isn’t it?