DUBLIN -- "Spin," stage-management and all the black arts of politics attended the IRA's formal end to its terrorist campaign even before it was announced last Thursday. Three days before, Irish Justice Minister Michael MacDowell, a fierce critic of Sinn Fein-IRA, announced that its two leading figures, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, had resigned from the IRA's supreme decision-making body, the Army Council.
It seemed an odd way for Sinn Fein-IRA to make this known -- through the mouth of one of its bitterest enemies. But neither Adams nor McGuinness could announce their own resignations since they had always denied being members of the council in the first place.
A stately minuet of diplomatic approval followed the IRA declaration. Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that it was "a step of unparalleled magnitude." Irish premier Bertie Ahern added that it was "historic." Adams gave a historic press conference. And so on. Immediate media reports treated the IRA statement favorably as the historic end to the Northern Ireland "troubles." But a second wave of commentary and reporting was more skeptical.
Critics pointed out that Blair and Ahern had hailed previous IRA statements in similar terms -- using such phrases as a "seismic shift" and "the hand of history." Yet murder, maiming, intimidation, thuggery and racketeering -- albeit on a smaller scale and not directed at British forces -- continued throughout.
When this latest IRA statement was examined in detail, it contained loopholes you could drive a car bomb through. The IRA will "dump arms," but it does not promise to hand over all arms. It still refuses to cooperate with the reformed police force. Above all, the IRA has not promised to disband. It will maintain its paramilitary structure (justifying its continued existence as necessary to protect the Catholics) and merely suspend military operations. That will hardly reassure those who remember it did exactly that in 1962.
If the IRA statement does not really offer peace, then, what is it meant to achieve? It enables Sinn Fein-IRA to pursue two opposite courses simultaneously. The first course is to demonstrate that they have finally given up terrorism for democratic politics -- a demonstration more or less forced on the IRA by a succession of dramatic events:
1. Sept. 11 brought home to Americans the reality of terrorism. Former Irish-American supporters began to shun Sinn Fein.
2. The international "war on terror" obliged the United States to take action against terrorism in Ireland. President Bush signified that he would crack down on Sinn Fein fund-raising if it continued -- a determination signaled by his decision not to invite Adams to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in the White House.
3. The arrest of IRA advisers to the FARC terrorists in Colombia exposed the IRA's links with anti-American terrorists worldwide.
4. The murder of Robert MacCartney by IRA "volunteers" in a Belfast pub -- and the silence of 70 witnesses -- focused U.S. attention for the first time on the IRA's brutal intimidation of Catholics.
5. Above all, the Northern Ireland elections shifted power away from moderate unionists who had previously served alongside Sinn Fein in a coalition government to Paisleyite unionists who insisted on a full and final IRA disarmament as a first condition of power-sharing.
Adams and McGuinness had to respond to these dramatic events with something equally dramatic. Hence their deftly spun promise to end the terror campaign yet again.
At the same time, they did not want to entirely abandon the second course that had served them well in recent years -- keeping a private army in the wings, intimidating opponents and implicitly threatening to resume terrorism unless London and the unionists keep the concessions coming. Hence, the IRA will not disband, not cooperate with the police and not surrender all arms -- or at least it will cultivate a sinister ambiguity on these questions.
In plain language, Adams and McGuinness will keep their private army but confine it to barracks. They probably calculate that such silky tactics will restore them to government as ministers within the year. And given the evident desire of London and Dublin to appease them, they may well be correct.
But two obstacles are emerging in their path. No unionists will serve with Sinn Fein until they are fully convinced that IRA terrorism is irrevocably over. They will demand irrefutable evidence that the IRA has destroyed or surrendered all its weapons rather than merely "dumped" some of them. Even then they may make Sinn Fein wait several years in the cold.
And while Sinn Fein-IRA wait, a new kind of law may catch up with them -- and with the "loyalist" paramilitaries in the Protestant community. Throughout the world, in post-conflict situations from Chile to South Africa, families of terror victims are using civil and international law to bring their murderers to justice. Legal action against the breakaway "Real IRA" terrorists who carried out the horrific 1998 Omagh bombing is winding its way through the Northern Irish courts.
Omagh murdered 29 innocent people and maimed 220. But literally thousands of innocent people died as a result of the long terrorist campaign directed by the IRA Army Council. And last week no less an authority than the Irish Republic's justice minister confirmed that Adams and McGuinness had served on that council until very recently.
They may find themselves in court long before they get their official limousines back.
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