POLITICAL leaders in Northern Ireland should follow the example of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and go the “final mile” for peace, Peter Hain tells The Times today.
In his first newspaper interview since becoming Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mr Hain warns the IRA that its imminent statement on its future must be “credible, definitive and verifiable”.
If it delivers, Mr Hain believes there is a will on both sides of the political divide to return to devolved government. His optimism will surprise many. The general election has left the political situation more polarised than ever before, with the Democratic Unionist Party on one side and Sinn Fein ahead on the nationalist side. The two parties that took Ulster to the Good Friday Agrement, David Trimble’s Unionists and the SDLP, are no longer centre-stage.
The Assembly remains suspended, the marching season is already tense, and Northern Ireland waits for the IRA to answer Gerry Adams’s call to abandon the armed struggle.
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Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern attend together for only the second time the British-Irish intergovernmental conference in London today. Another critical moment has been reached.
Mr Hain came to Britain, aged 16, when his South African-born parents were forced out by apartheid, and he remains best-known for his role as an anti-apartheid campaigner, helping to stop a South African cricket tour to Britain.
“My South African experience shows me that in the end the deal there was done by the two most polarised positions, the African National Congress and the Afrikaner apartheid elite that had locked them up and killed them.
“Obviously, Northern Ireland is not a replica of that situation. But if you are going finally to crack the end of the process that culminated and then went beyond the Good Friday Agreement, these are the two parties that can most effectively deliver if they choose to do so. They are polarised. But talking to both sides privately and in public positions, I think there is a will to crack it.”
However, Mr Hain said that the DUP wanted to be certain that it would not be duped as it felt it was when the parties were within a “hair’s breadth” of an agreement last Christmas.
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“Then we had the Northern Bank robbery and the McCartney murder. Dr Paisley and his colleagues felt they had gone a mile further than anyone expected and then had the rug pulled from under them. They do not want to be sold a pup. They want to know the IRA statement will be not just credible but results in definitive, verifiable action on the ground.
“But the DUP knows it is the leading Unionist party by quite a long way. I am convinced that Dr Paisley understands that there is a responsibility on their shoulders now. We can expect leadership from them and a willingness to take tough decisions provided the IRA statement is credible.”
He does not know when it will come. The IRA is “in consultation”. Mr Hain said that he believed Mr Adams and Martin McGuinness were “determined to put Republicanism on a permanent political route map forward, which opts for democracy rather than the bomb and the bullet. But the problem is not just paramilitary activity on both sides. Now the even more difficult problem is criminality, which has infected the scene in a disturbing fashion.” Terrorist outrages were done in the name of an ideology. When people engaged in outright criminality — drug running, international crime with all the violence and arms that surrounded it — it was much more difficult to wean people off it.
He has a warning for the IRA. “I do not want to see this dragged out forever. Anybody who thinks they can play games, or who believes the timescale for verification is limitless, will get a very firm response from me.”
He returns to South Africa: “When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 and four years later became President, people saw that rightly as a miraculous transformation. But more people were killed in those four years than at any time in South Africa’s history. Change from embittered and entrenched positions is incredibly difficult.
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“But if Nelson Mandela negotiated with people who took away 10,000 days of his adult life, killed many of his close comrades and left thousands in penury and destitution, I would have thought that Northern Ireland’s leaders could show even more courage and leadership than they have already shown in the last eight years, and go that final mile.”