Peter Trumbore: Observations/Research/Diversions

Brexit renewed for another season!

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(Credit: Telegraph)
(Credit: Telegraph)

 

About that last minute reprieve I alluded to in my post the other day …

BRUSSELS — With less than 48 hours before Britain’s scheduled departure, the European Union extended the exit deadline early Thursday until the end of October, avoiding a devastating cliff-edge divorce but settling none of the issues that have plunged British politics into chaos, dysfunction and recrimination.

Fittingly, the new deadline for Britain to get out of the EU is October 31, Halloween. As the BBC put it this morning, that’s both a trick and a treat.

The treat is that the UK gets to postpone the disastrous no-deal crash out that tomorrow would have brought. The trick is that the delay solves nothing, and has the counterproductive effect of taking the immediate pressure off the British parliament to find a way out of the European Union that they can actually agree to.

The dynamic is reminiscent of the caution that negotiation and conflict resolution scholar I. William Zartman makes about the downside of ceasefires in a stalemated civil war. The upside of a ceasefire, Zartman acknowledges, is that the killing stops, at least temporarily. The downside, though, is that a ceasefire allows both sides to become comfortable with the stalemate and gives them no incentive to negotiate an actual end to the war.

Sometimes, Zartman suggests, it’s better to let the parties race up to and even across the precipice of disaster so that the resulting pain forces a resolution once and for all. A no-deal Brexit would be painful indeed, but perhaps necessary for the UK to snap to its senses.

Because frankly, given their inability to figure this out over the last almost three years of deliberation and negotiation, there’s little to suggest that more time will produce much beyond more dithering and dysfunction.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has been reporting on the very same thorny issues of Brexit, identity, and conflict in Northern Ireland that my colleague and I are exploring in our research. Give a watch.

Peace process at risk from whom?

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Actually, the Provos pretty much have gone away.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams warned today that any coalition deal between Britain’s grievously wounded Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party would put the Northern Ireland peace process at risk.

Given that the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which Adams denies ever being part of despite all evidence to the contrary, has been on ceasefire for more than 20 years, to call this a hollow threat seems generous at best.

Or, as Adams frequent critic, former Republican prisoner and blanket man Thomas ‘Dixie’ Elliot, put it on Twitter:

Certainly there was a time when the kind of warning Adams gave carried real menace. But that was before 2005, when the Provos stood the vast majority of their activists down and dismantled the bulk of the operational capabilities that allowed them to prosecute their war against Britain and the Northern Irish statelet.

While command, intelligence, and internal security structures were allowed to be remain mostly intact after 2005, as British security services were compelled to acknowledge in 2015, what armed capability the PIRA retained in the years since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has been largely used to cow – and occasionally quiet – opposition to the political direction taken by Adams and the leadership of Provisional Republican Movement.¹

None of this is to say that a deal between the Tories and the DUP is a good thing for Northern Ireland in general or for the stability of the Six Counties in particular.  It’s just that the time is long past when Adams or any other leading figure in the Provisional Movement could credibly warn that  peace there is threatened if they don’t get their way.

This is not to say that the peace that has held for two decades is assured. There are any number of armed Republican dissident groups (sometimes derisively referred to as “alphabet soup” IRAs) fully capable of causing some degree of mayhem even if not on the horrific scale of the Troubles. And Loyalist paramilitaries like the Ulster Defense Association, while also on ceasefire, never went so far as the PIRA in dismantling their structures and remain active to this day, primarily menacing their own communities.

But it’s really hard to say what Adams is driving at in his warning. The Provisionals are not about go back to war, and Adams and his comrades neither speak for nor have influence over the armed groups that could.

So while Sinn Fein and its supporters have good reason to vigorously protest any arrangement that further empowers the DUP, they have little actual leverage to apply.  Claims of a threatened peace process hardly qualify anymore.

¹I go into some detail on this in research I published last summer in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

What the Provos can, and cannot, do

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Official acknowledgment that the Provisional IRA still exists, albeit in a form distinct from the years when it was engaged in armed conflict with the British state, has led to calls for the resurrection of an independent group, separate from the PSNI, to once again monitor Northern Ireland’s paramilitary ceasefires.

Alderdice
Alderdice

Lord John Alderdice, one of the four commissioners of the Independent Monitoring Commission, established in 2003 by agreement of the British and Irish governments to do just that in an effort to build trust and confidence between parties as the peace process moved forward, last week threw a bucket of cold water on the idea, telling the BBC that “the IMC was appropriate for the time and it worked but I don’t think it would be an appropriate thing to bring it back.”

I first interviewed Alderdice in early 2010 as part of the research that I have been doing on the maintenance and durability of the peace process. One of the issues I was interested in understanding was how the Provisional Movement had managed to bring so many of their volunteers along as the transition was made from armed struggle to constitutional politics.

What Alderdice argued to me helps put the recent revelations of the continuing existence of elements of the Provisional IRA into context. Keeping intact a command structure, he contended, was essential to keeping volunteers on side even as the military structures that had prosecuted the war were being wound down.

One of the observations we made was even when they’d got to the point of standing down the military operations and not recruiting, engineering had gone south and all these kinds of things, there still was a necessity – there was a little bit of debate about this when we said it – still was a necessity to keep a kind of Army Council and structures in place as you brought it down because that exercised what you’d call a degree of moral authority, to tell people to “stop it.”

And people stopped, not necessarily because they immediately thought somebody was coming into the back door but because there was that sense of authority.

Alderdice was essentially arguing two things:

First, that the Army Council carried sufficient authority that when they ordered volunteers to stand down from a military posture and transition from being members of an underground army into above-ground political workers, those orders could be expected to be obeyed.

Second, that the volunteers that made up the ranks of the Provisional Irish Republican Army were sufficiently disciplined that they would, on the whole, follow the orders passed down from their leadership. They followed orders not out of fear, but out of loyalty.

This squares with one of the points that Tony Catney made when I interviewed him in 2013:

In 35 years of armed struggle, the membership of the IRA never let the leadership down once. Anything that the leadership asked for they got. They might not have got it to the degree or as quickly as they wanted but they got it to the best of the ability of the volunteers within the IRA. What happened from 1994 onwards was a failure of leadership not a failure of the IRA. It was a failure of the people who made the decisions as opposed to the people who were prepared to honor their commitment to the liberation of Ireland and were quite prepared to do it in a different fashion.

The important point in this context is one that Catney did not make. The discipline within the ranks of the PIRA was powerful enough that when told to stand down, the overwhelming majority of volunteers did. Catney characterized that moment this way:

In August 2005, all volunteers were informed that they were to report in to the chair of their local branch of Sinn Fein, and all their future activity would be directed by Sinn Fein.

Some who disagreed with the decision simply walked away. A few, like Catney, became critics of the Provisional Movement and the political direction its leadership had taken it. And a smaller fraction subsequently threw in their lot with one or another of the armed dissident groups.

Crucially, what those armed dissidents haven’t done is go after the leaders that they accuse of betraying Republicanism. If the IRA had gone away, as so many chose to believe, why hadn’t the dissidents moved against those leaders whom they charge with  selling out the cause of Irish freedom in exchange for the Queen’s shilling?

I interviewed Alderdice a second time in 2011, and I asked him specifically about the relationship between the dissidents and the Provisional Movement:

These are people that fell out in a very, very bitter way with Adams and McGuinness. … What happened was they absolutely didn’t agree with Adams and McGuinness, and every time you came to a key moment when something was moving forward, these were the losers. And some of them dropped out, packed it in. Some of them dropped out and said, “Well, we’ll still be here when they’ve betrayed everything.”

He then made two points, that while at first glance appear contradictory, actually make a great deal of sense now given what we have learned about the current status of the PIRA. As much as the dissidents brand the leaders of the Provisional Movement traitors, Alderdice said:

They haven’t the guts to take the Provos on, because the Provos will put them to bed. And in fact, it is ironic. It is because the Provisional IRA is effectively over in a meaningful sense that these guys popped their heads up. Because otherwise they’d have got their heads cut off.

What Alderdice seemed to be arguing back in 2011 was that the PIRA retained enough military capability to defend itself were it to be challenged directly by the dissidents. What it had not given up, however, in standing down from its wartime footing, was an ability to prevent open challenges to its authority.

This, added to what we have learned after the last several weeks, seems to me to offer a compelling explanation for the current landscape of “alphabet soup” IRAs and their apparent unwillingness to move against a leadership whom they have branded the worst kinds of traitors.

The Provos can still “put them to bed” if they try it.

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