Blessed are the peacemakers who did right from the very start.
Fergal Keane Sunday Independent on March 26 2017
“All week I have carried the image of a brave Irishman in my mind. He is a man who never lifted his hand in anger against an enemy, much less helped direct the shooting and bombing that warped the future of thousands. He is a blessed man. A peacemaker.
As it happens he comes from the same city as Martin McGuinness, who, by his own admission, did deal in death and destruction before his conversion to political realism.
There was a time when this other Derry man dominated our television, radio and newspapers. John Hume’s voice evoked calm and argued with reason while others urged on the sectarian mobs or spewed out weasel words justifying atrocity.
But these days we rarely hear of his role or of the other politicians in the North who believed in talking not fighting. Hume imagined and worked for a power-sharing future from the earliest days of the Troubles. He was one of those who helped to create the Sunningdale Agreement with a nationalist and unionist executive and an all-Ireland council, only to see it wrecked by Paisley and the Provos.
But the story of the peace process is being polished into a romantic fable where noble warriors and their old oppressors walk towards “a shared future”, “where no one has to fight” and “all communities enjoy equality” and the bloody past recedes into our beloved national zone of forgetting. There was some of the same when Ian Paisley died. Too much Chuckle Brother, too little reflection on the flames he had so deliberately fanned for years.
Hume, and the idea of non-violent politics he encapsulated, warrants our unmitigated admiration. Unless you are a maniac driven by compulsion, killing other people always involves a choice.
For some it is a choice they make because they fear being killed themselves – think the luckless battalions of Stalin’s forces advancing into German machine guns on the Eastern Front.
Others kill in the spur of a heated moment or in the middle of a period of turmoil, or to defend themselves against annihilation. There are not many who can keep killing for decades. That calls for a very deliberate kind of choice, one that must be made and re-made day after day down the years. Until the IRA declared an end to its war, it was a choice Martin McGuiness made for more than 30 years. The fact that he was also operating a political strategy at the same time does not alter that fact.
Nor was it a choice made in the absence of alternatives. At any point from 1969 onwards it would have been possible to declare a ceasefire, had the war been about delivering equal rights and dignity for northern nationalists.
But the Provisionals’ war was about winning a united Ireland and that ideal was not something about which they wished to compromise until after they had brought a shattered silence to so many homes.
It is essential to remember this in the midst of myth-making that seeks to portray the IRA struggle as being the same as the ANC, and McGuinness as an Irish Mandela. I lived in the North for five years during the Troubles when the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries, the latter sometimes enjoying the collusion of state agencies, were busy with the business of killing.
I also lived in apartheid South Africa as the black majority struggled to attain freedom, and I knew Nelson Mandela. He and McGuinness were not the same kind of men, nor did the IRA leader suffer anything like the persecution and indignity heaped on black South Africans.
This does not deny the discrimination suffered by nationalists in the Orange state prior to the outbreak of the Troubles, or the human instinct to defend one’s own community from B-Specials and loyalist mobs, or the outrage after Bloody Sunday which drove many young men into the Provos, or the courage and guile required of Adams and McGuinness to bring the IRA to the point of ceasefire.
They had to convince their core that they would have to put a united Ireland on the long finger and not the trigger finger, like Collins and de Valera before them. McGuinness was brave enough to embrace realism knowing there were those on his own side who might want to kill him for it. And, once he had made the conversion, he worked relentlessly to try to make the peace a thing of permanence.
But please, in the interests of history and decency, forego the egregious comparison with the nightmare of black South Africa under apartheid. The peace process has demanded many forms of psychological accommodation but most of all from the families of the victims of violence. They have been asked to accept the release of killers from jail, and the likelihood for many is that they will never see truth or justice. They have watched as their oppressors – loyalist and republican – were feted in their new-found roles as peacemakers.
Which brings me back to the Derryman who made a different choice and who showed us another way. Hume was the most visible symbol of the politics of reason. But the North would have descended into Bosnia-like catastrophe had there not been many more like him who renounced atavism. They tried to build, conversation by conversation, with hand after outstretched hand, a bridge to normality.
Fergal Keane is a BBC special correspondent.