Why Negotiation Can Make Sense

By Cernig

If you want to know how negotiation with (former) terrorists can be a good thing, look no further than the life and times of Brian Keenan, who died today. Keenan was the man who did arms deals with Libya for the IRA - one of which resulted in the passing of British military EFP know-how to Columbia's FARC, Spain's ETA, Hezboullah and others, including eventually modern insurgents in Iraq. He was the mastermind behind the IRA's terror campaign on the British mainland in the 70's, one which claimed over 50 lives, and was described by Blair's former chief-of-staff as "at one stage the biggest single threat to the British state".

The IRA career of Brian Keenan contains a paradoxical duality in that he first helped build up the organisation and then, decades later, helped shut it down. Few outside Irish republican circles will laud his role in the 1970s, when he roamed the world seeking guns for the IRA and masterminded a campaign which claimed many lives in both Northern Ireland and England.

Yet tributes have been paid to his part in the later peace process, when he played a key role in facilitating Sinn Fein's entry into politics and having the IRA abandon its weaponry. Specifically, he served as the IRA's link to the official decommissioning body which eventually put the guns and explosives beyond use. In other words, he spent years building up the killing machine which in later years he devoted himself to dismantling.

...His appointment as the man in charge of any discussions involving weapons decommissioning worried some, since at that time it was difficult to envisage such an iconic militant giving up the guns. But in the end he negotiated away the weapons, Gerry Adams remarking that "there wouldn't be a peace process if it wasn't for Brian Keenan".

Clearly Keenan had come a long way since the days when one of his men declared "As volunteers in the IRA we have fought to free our oppressed nation from its bondage to British imperialism." He and his colleagues had over the years lowered their sights from seeking victory to accepting compromise: he himself mutated from one of the most fearsome of the hawks to one of the most effective doves. Gerry Adams said of him yesterday: "Brian was a formidable republican leader over 40 years of activism – four decades of unstinting effort on behalf of republicanism."

When Sinn Fein went into government with loyalists last year Keenan was in the public gallery looking down on the spectacle. Jonathan Powell mused: "He had lived long enough to politicise the volunteers of the IRA over time, and gradually to transform physical force republicanism into a political movement."

I wonder if John McCain and George Bush - or any of their coterie of War Party pantswetters masquerading as online John Waynes - would like to go on record as saying they would have preferred that what went before had continued instead of the "appeasement" in Northern Ireland?