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This is an
article – published December 5th 2018 - from Turning
Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this
year might mean for the year ahead.
TURNING POINTS
The Alternative to Arms
By Gerry Adams
·
Dec. 5, 2018
When the
Second World War ended in 1945 there were 51 member states in the United
Nations. Today there are 193. Many of the new states emerged out of struggle
and conflict as old empires crumbled.
That cycle
of political struggle continues today. The Brexit crisis may cause huge
economic damage to Ireland’s economies and may even threaten the Good Friday Agreement.
In Catalonia and the Basque Country, both of which seek independence from
Spain, in Hong Kong and Palestine, people fight or have fought for the right to
self-govern.
The world is dominated by nations’ struggles to
make their own laws and to decide their relationships with other nations. But
for people to have control over the decisions that affect their lives, we must
empower them through diplomacy, cooperation and dialogue. When governments put
simple human decency and the rights of their people first as they negotiate the
world’s conflicts, democracy will follow.
That,
however, is easier said than done, especially when the individual people
responsible for upholding the law often value their own power over the common
good.
When I was a
teenager in Belfast I realized that my peers and I were not being treated
fairly. Northern Ireland was created when the British government partitioned
Ireland. People were divided on sectarian lines and Catholics were deemed to be
disloyal. We were denied basic rights in what was effectively an apartheid
statelet.
The inequality
we experienced was deeply embedded in our society, to the point of being
policy. Still, I thought that fixing it was only a matter of bringing it to the
attention of the people in charge. Once they realized the problem they would
rectify matters.
I soon learned that the people in charge relied on
that inequality for their power. They were unlikely to eradicate it if that
would cost them their leverage, and any solution would be tempered to a degree
that would keep them in charge. People who have power, or even the illusion of
power, are loath to give it up.
Those on the other side of this equation — the
disadvantaged — include many who believe they cannot change their situation.
Some are reluctant even to consider that change is possible. Some are afraid of
change. Some are used to society being organized in a certain way, even when
that society discriminates against them. Some are too busy surviving or living
their lives to consider that things could be different.
There can be
no progress without political struggle, but for it to succeed, people must be
empowered. They need to have a stake in society and in their communities. They
have to be cherished, and their humanity has to be respected and defended. They
have rights and entitlements that must be upheld and promoted. Society needs to
be citizen-centered, shaped around these rights.
The reality,
of course, is that progressive change in society rarely comes of its own
accord. It has to be engineered, negotiated for. Violence often breeds when
people believe that they have been left with no alternative. And this belief
can become more entrenched as states use extrajudicial and violent means to
defend their interests.
Annual
worldwide military spending is estimated to be over $1.7 trillion today, whereas the United
Nations and its related agencies spend around $30 billion annually. Conflict is
fueled by poverty, economic exploitation and the desire to control water
rights, oil reserves and other natural resources.
Britain had
fought dozens of counterinsurgency wars before it sent its soldiers to
Irish streets in 1969. It had a well-established policy that
saw the law, according to Brigadier Frank Kitson, as “just another weapon in
the government’s arsenal … little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal
of unwanted members of the public.”
Irish
republicans and others succeeded in shifting from conflict to peace by building
an alternative to armed struggle with the Good Friday Agreement. It provides
for certain rights for Northern Ireland, including the right to a referendum on
whether to remain a part of Britain or to end that relationship and establish a
united Ireland. The agreement emerged slowly as a result of hard work, with
parties and governments eventually being prepared to take risks, and with the
support of the international community. It is still very much unfinished
business.
In the conflict between the Spanish state and the
Basque independence campaigners a similar process, closely modeled on
Ireland’s, has succeeded in ending armed conflict, even though the Spanish
government has not fully engaged so far. Sinn Fein leaders have often traveled
to other conflict zones, including Afghanistan and Colombia, advocating the
primacy of dialogue, negotiations and peace processes.
I have
traveled to the Middle East on several occasions, speaking to Palestinians,
visiting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and speaking to senior leaders in
Israel and Palestine. Regrettably, the failure of governments to uphold
international law and U.N. resolutions, and the Israeli government’s refusal to
defend democratic norms and find equitable and fair compromises, has left many Palestinians
living in desperate conditions, with no hope of a different, better future. As
a result, the Middle East exists in a permanent state of conflict.
To change
this demands a genuine effort to understand what motivates, inspires and drives
people to make the choices they do. The dialogue that fosters that
understanding is what ultimately empowers opposing sides of a conflict to come
together.
Whoever described politics as the art of the
possible was reducing politics to a mediocre trade. People’s expectations of
their worth must be raised — not lowered. When we do that, we enable democracy
to take hold in even the most dire situations.
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