Did British forces engage in full scale warfare to counter terrorism of the IRA

"Sri Lanka has failed to do what it was supposed to do to uphold unity and diversity and to respond to minority grievances in a positive and accommodative manner politically." File Photo: Member of IRA.

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by R. Jayadevan

(January 19, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The terrorism of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the opposing paramilitary forces in the Northern Ireland for over two and a half decades was brought to and with the Good Friday - Belfast Agreement that was reached between the conflicting parties in Belfast on Friday, April 10 1998 which brought the cessation of hostilities in Northern Ireland.

The agreement ‘sets out a plan for devolved government in Northern Ireland on a stable and inclusive basis and provided for the creation of Human Rights and Equality commissions, the early release of terrorist prisoners, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and far reaching reforms of criminal justice and policing’.

Photo: Good Friday Agreement

Peace in Northern Ireland was as a result of careful handling of the matters by the British establishment during the conflict and post conflict period. During the height of the tensions, very serious terrorist attacks took place in the mainland England. Killing of Lord Mountbatten, bombing in Brighten to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Ministers and various other serious crimes have now become part of the history.

‘An internal British Army document released in 2007 stated an expert opinion, that the British Army had failed to defeat the IRA by force of arms but also claims to have 'shown the IRA that it could not achieve its ends through violence'. The military assessment describes the IRA as 'professional, dedicated, highly skilled and resilient'.

The quotation aptly summarise the end of the world famous violence of the IRA.

Judging from the conduct of the operations against the IRA, a lot of credit must be given to the British establishment and its forces in not engaging in provocative and full-scale warfare against the IRA. Though tensions were running high within the communities in the Northern Ireland, the British government did not alienate the people by overtly engaging in a bloody warfare. Northern Ireland was considered inclusive part of United Kingdom and the Irish civilians were not selectively targeted in Northern Ireland or in the mainland.

The British forces did not engage in full scale air raids of IRA targets and there is no record to confirm it engaged in massacres of civilian population and carrying out random shootings and running torture chambers like the Sri Lanka forces. Even at the time Tamil uprising since the late 1970’s, the conduct of the armed forces contributed towards further escalation of violence and eventual domination of the LTTE which carried out equal and worse than the crimes committed by the government forces. The successive governments in Sri Lanka never had serious intentions to resolve the conflict amicably and continued to resort to violence to counter the violence of the LTTE. It could be applied visa versa as well, that LTTE too engaged in counter violence to respond to the state forces violence.

In Northern Ireland, there were places that were no go areas and the British Intelligence had an uphill task to penetrate into obtain hard intelligence about the IRA. Though the presence of British forces in large numbers was a provocation and there were terror attacks on the forces, the government forces did not respond to the IRA in the same scale and manner like the Sri Lankan forces had responded against the civilian population.

British forces had all the military arsenals to bomb the enclaves of the IRA and carryout incursions into the Irish Republic to bomb IRA targets giving scant regard to civilian casualties. If this had happened, the politics of Northern Ireland would have been different today. Possibly this is what IRA would have wanted, but the patience of the British establishment was able to resolve this conflict with minimum human losses and infrastructural damage and destruction.

Sri Lanka has failed to do what it was supposed to do to uphold unity and diversity and to respond to minority grievances in a positive and accommodative manner politically. The start of the Tamil militancy was when the selective state standardisation policy was introduced by the government in the 1970’s to severely restrict Tamils access to university education.

The successive governments have invested billions of dollars to fight the Tamil militancy and to this date no one knows the exact cost of its war efforts. The Sinhala leadership had the vision of suppressing the Tamils. With the money they spent on war efforts to suppress the Tamil militancy and its present manifestation of terrorism, Sri Lanka could have built many schools, universities and pioneering institutions and could have become a world class nation in the global map.

Having heavily invested in the war machinery and alienated the minority Tamils to such an extent, government of Sri Lanka now has an uphill task to build bridges. But its sixty years of minority hate culture is not permitting it to find a peaceful route to end the conflict and the present Colombo leadership has become the worst in the Sri Lankan history to undermine any peace effort.

The resolution to the Irish conflict had its due international pressures in particular from America. The politics of Sri Lanka is a very vicious and dangerous one. Only way violence could be brought to an end is with extensive international engagement and pressures. The international community must open the doors of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to make the violent parties accountable to their conduct. Sri Lanka with its present and its historical stance against the minorities will not subscribe to the Rome Treaty. It is time amends are made to bring those who commit war crimes in states like Sri Lanka without asking them to subscribe to the Rome Treaty.

Sri Lanka which carries very much guilt on its part of War Crimes will not subscribe to such treaties, unless it is enforced by international efforts.