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April 7,
2003
Ireland of the Welcomes
War
and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
By HARRY BROWNE
Dublin.
"We intend to give George Bush a
welcome he won't forget." No, that's not the Northern Ireland
Tourist Board talking -- it's Richard Boyd Barrett, chair of
the Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM). When the President choppers
into the grounds of Hillsborough Castle on Monday evening, protesters
from all over Ireland (and, one hopes, beyond) plan to put paid
to the notion, advanced in some corners of the British press,
that he chose this island, like the Azores last month, to approach
Tony-territory while remaining as far removed as possible from
the global peace movement.
Unfortunately, the protesters will in
fact be rather far removed from the Bush-Blair summit. Not for
us the pretty little Protestant village of Hillsborough, overlooked
by the 18th-century castle where the queen and her ilk stay and
entertain when they're in "the province". The Police
Service of Northern Ireland (you may remember them as the RUC)
has reportedly decided to corral us, along with the international
media, in the car-park of Sprucefield shopping centre, in the
shadow of McDonald's golden arches, two miles away.
Disgusted though we are at that treatment,
at the thumbed nose to Irish anti-war sentiment, at the cynical
use by Bushies and Blairites of the North's interminable "peace
process" as a warmongers' backdrop, we must admit there's
a certain poetry to the occasion. Even two miles away, we're
sure to hear the imperial echoes.
Hillsborough, you see, is a typical relic
of the 17th-century "plantation" of Ulster, a process
that we sometimes like to soft-pedal in the name of harmonious
community relations. The local tourist body's website strays
toward the historical reality when it notes, without apparent
irony: "The Hill family built the whole of the village of
Hillsborough, starting with the fort in 1650." No family
is complete without one, huh? As an example of a sort of privatised
military occupation, the settlement of Ireland has few equals;
Jay Garner, take note.
Just to prove that pacification eventually
works a treat, the website continues by calling the old fortress
"a fine example of an artillery fort but with pretty additions
in the 18th century. Surrounded by parks, Hillsborough, pretty
as a picture, provides lots to see in a small space. Start at
the Courthouse in the middle of the Square and be shown the full
range of possibilities." At the time of writing it's not
clear how many protesters may yet get to see the inside of the
courthouse, or enjoy the full range of possibilities on offer
in the North's criminal-justice system.
For all the prettifying, Hillsborough is more a fortress than
ever -- three decades of IRA activity made sure of that. That's
the real reason the summit has come here: the North has a security
apparatus that even London can't match. Remember, during the
1991 Iraq-attack the IRA was able to land a mortar in the garden
of 10 Downing Street while John Major was holding a "war
cabinet" meeting. Now the IRA guns are quiet, but the infrastructure
for handling protesters and more substantial "threats"
is still in place here.
The immediate local population should
certainly prove little bother. Dubya's personal unpopularity
is virtually universal outside the US, but the proud tradition
of British military service and loyalty to Her Majesty among
Northern unionists make them rather less likely protesters once
a war involving "Crown Forces" is in progress. The
major unionist parties, who were never entirely sure about Bill
Clinton even when he was attracting thousands of cheering admirers
to public rallies in the North, are pro-war and now extending
the warmest welcome to his successor, with Ian Paisley's DUP
moaning about not being asked to the Bush meetings just because
they oppose the power-sharing agreement currently in place.
Nationalist Ireland, North and South,
is visibly squirming. The Taoiseach (prime minister), Bertie
Ahern, goes north from Dublin on Tuesday to play his part in
the War & Peace farce. His attitude to the Iraq invasion?
With Shannon Airport still an important stop-over for troop reinforcements,
he and his party have spent the last three weeks struggling to
find that elusive word that lies somewhere between "oppose"
and "support" -- even "regret" sounds too
rude, it seems. Last week, when he probably knew Bush was coming
(though we didn't yet), in parliament Bertie wandered off into
strange musings about how the war wasn't really "pre-emptive"
because the US and UK had written to the Security Council to
let 'em know it was coming. (Was he thinking, Bush-like, of pre-something-else,
we all wondered?)
The Northern nationalist parties, the
SDLP and Sinn Fein, are against the war; the latter has been
fairly visible in anti-war activities both sides of the Border.
However, the SF leadership is defying the call by other anti-war
campaigners to boycott Bush; they say they'll tell him what they
think of the war when they see him, but are too far stepped in
to the Clintonite precedent that declares Washington to be a
big player here to back away from even this transparent piece
of New Labour stage management. Gerry Adams says the visit is,
wait for it, "a strong signal of President Bush's support"
for the 1998 Belfast Agreement. "Sinn Fein will be pleased
to discuss the Irish peace process with President Bush and Prime
Minister Blair."
Any Irish nationalist who can keep his
Hillsborough breakfast down while Bush and Blair strike their
poses of righteous militarism surely has an iron stomach. For
a Sinn Feiner, less than a decade removed from a brutal "war"
in which the British and their loyalist allies employed, shall
we say, extra-judicial means (everything from torture to shoot-to-kill),
it might be best to avoid eating altogether. The British military
and media attitude to the war has reveled in the allegedly superior
interpersonal skills of Our Boys, honed in 200 years of colonial
managementA story from last week's Guardian is typical:
"A British officer was alarmed
when the American marines who were escorting him through the
port of Umm Qasr let loose a volley of rifle fire at a house
on the outskirts of town. The officer told Reuters reporter David
Fox: 'They said they had been sniped out from there a few days
ago so they like to give them a warning every now and then. That
is something we [the British] would never condone.' A US special
forces officer said it was sometimes difficult to contain the
exuberance of men doing the actual fighting."
Another expert contrasts the Yankee
exuberance with British "precision, guile and forbearance".
This doesn't play well in most Irish homes, where disgust at
bloodstained imperial hypocrisy is instinctive, and the moral
superiority of shelling and besieging Basra as opposed to bombing
and shooting-up Nasiriyah doesn't quite compute. Some of us even
recall a few checkpoint incidents in Ireland, not so long ago,
when the trigger-happy lads were British.
Even among people far removed from support
for the IRA and other outgunned "terrorists", there
has been "sneaking regard" here for the Iraqis, fighting
this war by the Michael Collins anti-colonial guerrilla rulebook,
as amended by Hamas.
Harry Browne lectures in the school of
media at Dublin Institute of Technology and writes a weekly column
in the Irish Times. He can be reached at harrybrowne@eircom.net
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
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