In his article, "What I learned in Belfast" (May 2008), Jonathan Powell denies that the British government deliberately sacrificed the moderate centre of Northern Ireland politics. I have never claimed that Tony Blair deliberately sacrificed the centre ground. But the centre did lose out, because of several factors which require more careful consideration than Powell gives. The same applies to the global lessons of the conflict.
Powell says that he and Blair wanted to build from the centre, "but we were stymied by the refusal of the SDLP to move ahead without Sinn Féin. John Hume had sold that pass in the 1980s when he began talks with Gerry Adams." That is a travesty of the facts. The 1998 Good Friday agreement was made by the centre ground—the SDLP and Ulster Unionists. In the final phase of the talks, Sinn Féin put huge pressure on the SDLP to resist an agreement with us. On Good Friday, Sinn Féin did not vote for the deal, it abstained. But one lesson that Powell should have noted was that after the agreement, there was big movement on the republican side, because of the firmness of the centre ground and of the British and Irish governments.
Powell is right to say that such a breakthrough "counts for little if the parties do not apply themselves to implementing it." But the British government was among those who should have implemented it. On Good Friday, Blair signed a letter to me which concluded: "I confirm that in our view the effect of the decommissioning section of the agreement… is that the process of decommissioning should start straight away." The government made no real effort to implement that section of the agreement.
But there was never any ambiguity in the agreement. It never envisaged a dual political-paramilitary approach. It emphasised that all parties must commit to exclusively peaceful and democratic means, and prescribed 22nd May 2000 as the date for the completion of the total disarmament of paramilitary bodies. As noted above, the British government considered that the agreement called for disarmament to begin immediately. So when in October 2002 (not 2003) Blair said that there would be no more inch-by-inch negotiation and called for the completion of the transition, he was trying to cure the problems caused by the government's own failure to insist on full prompt implementation. Characteristically, Blair and Powell then failed to stick to their own call.
In 2004, shortly after he arrived as President Bush's special representative on Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss pulled me aside and asked, "Why is Tony Blair so soft on Gerry Adams?" Powell's article gives the answer. Even after 2002, the British government feared the IRA would return to violence. This appears to be why the government allowed the continued existence and criminality of the IRA. Powell recently told me that this was what they were hearing from the intelligence agencies up until 2003. But it was not what I was hearing on the ground. My view, especially after the Omagh bomb in August 1998, was that there was no likelihood of a return to violence by the IRA—and that Adams and McGuinness were firmly in control. While there were management problems, they had the authority to deal with the weapons and end paramilitarism. Indeed, when we forced the beginning of decommissioning in 2001, republicans talked about the process as being driven by the leadership.
The DUP failed to defeat us in the 2001 elections, but we were losing support nonetheless. Elements in the Irish government, who had long been over-solicitous of Sinn Féin, along with parts of the Northern Ireland office (NIO), began to emphasise the need to bring in the extremes. That seemed to me to be using the consequences of their mishandling of the process as justification for doing even worse. Blair resisted this pressure, but because he failed to get republicans to move in response to his 2002 speech, he, and the situation, drifted to the point where those who did want to sacrifice the middle ground got their way.
Powell lays much emphasis on process and the need to keep talking to our enemies. In particular he refers approvingly to a channel that was opened with the IRA in 1974. He concedes that it was not used seriously until 1993. But he does not ask why. For his answer, he should look to the effectiveness of the security forces during that time, rather than any Damascene conversion among republicans. Likewise when republicans finally moved to complete decommissioning, end paramilitary activity and support the police, their actions were driven by external pressures, three in particular. Continuing criminality threatened the electoral progress they hoped to make, especially in Ireland. The independent monitoring commission, which the NIO fought tooth and nail when we proposed it early in 2002, added to that pressure, as did the emphasis that the US administration placed on Sinn Féin supporting policing—as demonstrated by Mitchell Reiss's restrictions on, and occasional refusals of, Sinn Féin visas.
Any consideration of global lessons has to begin with a clear understanding of what happened. Jonathan's account does not provide this.
