With reports of defections from the Irish Republican Army and its political arm, Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams was asked last week why he couldn’t steer his supporters in line. Why were the defectors jeopardizing the Northern Ireland peace process?
The president of Sinn Fein answered with a bit of understatement. “We are not leading sheep,” he said.
No, no sheep. Yes, people armed with AK-47 rifles and Semtex plastic explosives provided by Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. Yes, people armed with homemade mortar shells and fertilizer bombs. Yes, people who accepted Adams as a leader because he preached revolution and because he had been shot, his house had been bombed, and he had served five years in prison in the name of the cause.
But no, there are no sheep in Sinn Fein or the IRA. Adams and the other leaders didn’t raise sheep. And that’s a problem for them as they attempt to move from revolutionaries to peacemakers.
With Sinn Fein’s promise of non-violence, and with each step the party takes toward a Northern Ireland compromise, Adams loses some of the cachet of warrior and terrorist, the stature by which he was brought to, and has held, power.
He is supposed to be a diplomat now, and diplomats seek middle grounds, and middle grounds don’t stir men’s blood like fiery vows to fight to the death.
This is hardly lost on Adams, who in conversation often brings up Michael Collins, who led the IRA guerrilla campaign against British rule, and negotiated the 1921 agreement that freed most of Ireland but partitioned Ulster. Collins was a survivor until he became a diplomat. The agreement provoked civil war, and Collins was assassinated by those who had once believed in him.
If that message somehow were lost on Adams, he would only have to walk a few blocks from Sinn Fein headquarters in West Belfast and take in the menacing wall murals of hooded gunmen to remember that there is a stubborn constituency that isn’t interested in middle grounds.
It invites an interesting question: How does the world build trust in the terrorist turned diplomat?
It is much the same question posed by the role of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in the Middle East peace process. When Hamas terrorists bomb Israel and Arafat doesn’t crack down on them, there is impatience with Arafat. When Arafat embraces Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, there is outrage at Arafat.
The outrage and impatience are natural, but they neglect that Arafat gained power as a terrorist, not as a diplomat cutting deals with the prime minister of Israel. He is attempting to hold power while he reinvents himself, a perilous job.
In Northern Ireland, the reinvention of Adams and Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, from terrorists to diplomats, had to come before any serious peace negotiations could take place. The transformation is incomplete, and is now threatened. The reinvention has survived some risky steps. Adams and McGuinness joined the peace talks without prompting a walkout by the largest of the opposition political parties. Adams and McGuinness negotiated the second IRA ceasefire in three years–the condition that allowed them to join the talks–without splintering the group.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to Belfast and shook hands with Adams last month, a move that could have had ominous consequences for both men. The next step, British officials hint, is likely to be a visit by Adams to 10 Downing Street. Every other party to the peace talks has visited 10 Downing Street. Of course, none of those parties has shelled 10 Downing Street with a mortar attack, as the IRA did six
years ago.
The reinvention, such as it is, apparently has faced its most serious threat in the last two weeks, with the defections of a dozen members of Sinn Fein and 20 members of the IRA who think Adams and McGuinness have sold out. The defectors included the quartermaster who controlled the IRA’s weapons arsenal.
The defections are a reminder that Adams can be reinvented, but the underpinnings of IRA influence remain unchanged.
With all Adams’ international celebrity, his party is still a distant second in political support among Catholics in Northern Ireland, surpassed by the Social Democratic and Labor Party led by the veteran peace activist John Hume. In recent years Sinn Fein has started to narrow the gap with Hume’s party, largely because Catholics were encouraged by Adams’ rhetoric about seeking peace. But Sinn Fein still represents a minority of a minority in Northern Ireland.
The IRA’s trump card remains the gun, not the vote. That can be hazardous for diplomats, even the IRA’s own.
