Brian Rowan: the ‘long and difficult journey' to decommissioning in the North

Irish Times

2 days ago

My anxious wait was for the post from
Helsinki
; for the brown padded envelope to arrive, to be able to look inside and find a printout of a diary entry from one day in September 2005.
It was sent to me by Aaro Suonio, the former chef de cabinet of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (the IICD), the body that oversaw paramilitary disarmament after the
Troubles
. It arrived last month, the day before I was to sign off on the latest phase of an archive project I am developing with
The Open University
in
Ireland
.
I knew there would be little reading in the correspondence. Forty of the 52 lines in the diary entry were redacted by Suonio, and what had been left to read was written in Finnish.
The day in question – September 25th, 2005 – was one of those key signposts in a phase of the Northern Ireland peace process that was about dismantling the wars.
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Suonio himself was not in the fields of rural Ireland with the IICD, church witnesses and the IRA as weapons, explosives and ammunition were put beyond use between September 17th and 25th that year.
He was in Dublin waiting for colleagues to return and to plan a news conference for the next day, September 26th, at which the commission chairman – Canadian general
John de Chastelain
– with the late
Fr Alec Reid
and the former Methodist president
Harold Good
would speak to what they had witnessed.
The arrangements for that news conference – in Finnish – are all that Suonio left for me to read in his diary .
Decades later, the 40 redacted lines speak loudly of the secrecy that still applies to IRA decommissioning; and to an agreement on confidentiality that has not been breached.
In the peace process, context is everything. The path to September 2005 was made two months earlier when the IRA formally ended its armed campaign, in
a statement on July 28th, 20 years ago this week
.
Back then I was a BBC correspondent in Belfast. Months later I left that post with a sense of being weighed down by the responsibility that comes with reporting a long transition from conflict to peace, especially when you live in that conflict.
Former chef de cabinet of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning Aaro Suonio and extracts from his diary. Forty of the 52 lines in the diary entry were redacted by Suonio, and what had been left to read was written in Finnish. Photographs: Brian Rowan personal archive for The Open University
The heavy files I have kept are a constant reminder of that responsibility: thousands of notes, statements, diary entries, tape transcripts and reports that I am sharing with The Open University. For me, it is a deliberate shedding of the load; of memories and records that relate to moments when this place lived and died.
I have been revisiting the years 2005-2010. We often highlight the 1994 ceasefires and the Belfast Agreement of 1998 as the headline period in the peace process. But my recent reading as part of this archive project made me pauseto rethink and to consider the five-year stretch from 2005 as even more significant:
That end to the IRA armed campaign;
The move by the British army to a peacetime garrison;
The guns – IRA and loyalist – that were put beyond use;
Sinn Féin's first, tentative steps into the North's new policing structures;
And, at Stormont, the remarkable coming together of a government in which Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness had the lead roles.
These were the years and the moments that confirmed the wars were over.
In April 2005, Gerry Adams, then Sinn Féin president, made a speech in which he publicly asked the IRA: 'Can you take courageous initiatives which will achieve your aims by purely political and democratic activity?'
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Full text of speech by Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams
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There was a view at the time that Adams would not have asked such a question without being confident of the answer; that, before speaking, he would have known the mind of the IRA leadership.
That speech was the beginning of the end of the IRA campaign. It created a framework for an internal debate, that would move it beyond ceasefires and towards the statement of July 28th, 2005.
It was read to camera by the Belfast republican Séanna Walsh, one of the longest-serving IRA prisoners in the conflict period.
One week ago, he spoke of being 'a wee bit taken aback' when asked to read the statement, and about being nervous.
In July this year, he gave me a handwritten reflection as a contribution to my archive work: 'The political and peace process had reached a critical juncture. Marking time wasn't, isn't an option. So, initiatives have to continuously be taken to move us forward ... For the army [the IRA] to leave the stage it had to do so on its own terms, therefore in moving into a new era we had to do so boldly. The reading of the statement was a part of all that.'
That it was done to camera was something new, and it was to maximise impact.
In the conflict years, many IRA statements were dictated to me or given to me, often in face-to-face meetings far away from any camera.
Séanna Walsh, pictured by MT Hurson, was one of the longest-serving IRA prisoners in the conflict period: and a handwritten reflection he gave to Brian Rowan. Photographs: Brian Rowan personal archive for The Open University
Communicating in peace demanded a different approach and placed Séanna Walsh on the most public of stages; there to be seen and heard in this moment of world news – on one of those days and dates that stand out in our recent history.
Handwritten notes of a hundred words or so are a thread in the pattern of this archive; a conscious decision on my part to bring something out of fashion back into style.
Today, nearly every communication is a text or a message or an email. But when we are asked to write with pens it brings out something that is more real and challenging.
I read this across the various contributions, including from the British army's former chief press officer at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn, Mervyn Wynne Jones.
Two days after the IRA statement of July 2005, a briefing from him – under embargo for 48 hours – helped me to better understand the purpose of the negotiations at that time.
They were not about trying to re-establish the political institutions at Stormont. There was no chance of doing so in the summer of that year or, indeed, throughout 2006. Rather, the focus was on dismantling the wars.
The army spokesman described a starting pistol being fired on 'normalisation', and a significant basket of measures, including a phased two-year ending of 'Banner' – the longest-running operation in British military history, in support of the police in Northern Ireland.
This included a plan to disband the home service battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment.
The unionists heard it in my BBC news reports on August 1st. They were not in the loop, and the army spokesman had correctly predicted an 'earthquake' when the story ran.
The negotiations involved the Sinn Féin leadership, Downing Street, the British ministry of defence and the Northern Ireland Office.
Twenty years later, Mervyn Wynne Jones writes about something seismic that needed sensitive handling: 'There was a steadfast and perhaps hopeful logic to it all, but there was a keen awareness too of decades of turmoil, pain and raw emotion across all communities, not least among the courageous men and women, past and present, of the home service battalions.'
Within weeks, that 'earthquake' he predicted sent tremors through the peace.
A note from Mervyn Wynne Jones, the British army's former chief press officer at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn. Photograph: Brian Rowan personal archive for The Open University
An Orange parade in Belfast was rerouted, and a day of mayhem followed with loyalists firing live rounds at police officers and soldiers.
It was the manifestation of a sense of losing in the peace, of being on the outside, as the UK government – 'their' government – negotiated an end to the IRA war.
Had it wanted to, the IRA could have used that convulsion within the loyalist community, that threat to the peace, to delay its decommissioning plans, but it chose not to.
In his handwritten note for the archive, Aaro Suonio describes 'a quiet and profound sense of relief'.
'It had been a long and difficult journey and now, finally, the weapons were verifiably gone ... But my thoughts also turned to the loyalist groups. They hadn't believed this day would come. Now the burden of reciprocation was theirs.'
Harold Good, one of two church witnesses alongside Fr Reid, writes on events 'which brought to an end the dark and fear-filled days and nights of terror which blighted our beloved land for almost four decades'.
The loyalists waited, delaying that 'reciprocation' and response for four and more years.
But now we have a little more detail about their acts of decommissioning that stretched from the summer of 2009 into the cold, early days of 2010.
In 2006 the UVF told me from behind a balaclava that 'decommissioning is not a word that we use in our vocabulary'. But it eventually made a significant arms move in June 2009. Months earlier, those plans were almost derailed when dissident IRA organisations murdered two soldiers and a police officer.
Veteran Belfast loyalist Jackie McDonald photographed by MT Hurson; the note he gave Brian Rowan on his involvement in the UDA decommissioning; and the front page of The Loyalist magazine from 2010. Photographs: Brian Rowan personal archive for The Open University
There were two parts to UDA decommissioning – June 2009 and January 2010 – at which the veteran Belfast loyalist Jackie McDonald was present.
He writes for the archive about how General de Chastelain invited him 'to help use the electric saw to cut up a few machine guns'; something he did with 'mixed feelings, but the time was right for them to be destroyed'.
At the time, the magazine – The Loyalist – had a front-page headline: UDA 'has decommissioned all weapons'.
It was a big statement, but it was an overselling of what happened.
No organisation – IRA, UVF, UDA – put all of its weapons beyond use.
Trust is a process, as is peace, and in this place, the road away from conflict is a long one.
My archive also records the headline moment of Sinn Féin stepping into the new policing structures in the North; something that required an IRA convention to clear the way before the vote at a special Sinn Féin ardfheis in January 2007.
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Sinn Féin endorses PSNI by overwhelming majority
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In the British intelligence community this is considered to be the 'landmark event'; more important than the ceasefires, the statement ending the armed campaign and the weapons that were put beyond use.
The policing decision, more than anything else, was the confirmation that the war was over. Yet, there is a huge contradiction in that assessment, that we see in the British Security Service MI5 headquarters outside Belfast – likened at the time by the former Policing Board member Brendan Duddy to the building of an air raid shelter after the war was over.
Why is that MI5 building and presence still needed? And why, more than 30 years after the original ceasefires, have we not yet been able to find a process to answer the questions of the past?
The Patten Report on police reforms dates back to 1999. It was silent on legacy.
'Did Patten envisage an under-resourced, overstretched police service unsure of itself and poisoned by the past?' asks Debbie Watters, a former vice chair of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, in a handwritten note.
Similarly, SDLP leader Claire Hanna writes: '26 years on from the Patten Report is the right moment for a clear eye on what is working, what is not, and how we sustain the promise and progress of the new beginning to policing.'
The Sinn Féin vote for policing in 2007 is what made the agreement on a new Stormont executive possible; that government in which Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness had the lead roles.
But politics in the North is still a work in progress, and like policing it is poisoned by an unanswered past.
As I develop this archive with The Open University, my plans are for chapters on those complex issues of legacy, the troubled politics of peace and leadership. I am working with creative designer Ciarán Hurson, whose earlier contributions in this project have been included in Ireland's prestigious '
100 Archive
'.
On the work so far, The Open University's director in Ireland, John D'Arcy said: 'It offers fresh insight into the years that followed the IRA's disarmament – a time of immense complexity and quiet transformation.
'It builds on The Open University's commitment to open access to knowledge and understanding ... We hope this latest work will inform public dialogue, education and reflection for years to come.'
Former Westminster MP Lady Sylvia Hermon reminds us of the importance of leaders and of how quickly they can be discarded. Citing the example of the late David Trimble, former Ulster Unionist Party leader, she said: 'Without Trimble's courageous and inspirational leadership we would not have had the Agreement in 1998. Yet, in 2005, he lost his Westminster seat and resigned as leader of the UUP.'
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Trimble to resign after electoral meltdown
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Trimble is one of many who helped change this place – one of many no longer with us.
In today's world, we watch as power and ego masquerade as leadership. We think also of the international support that helped end the so-called Troubles, and made the peace of this place possible.
Today, Gaza and its people need that same help, and my question is this: Where have all the leaders gone?
Brian Rowan is a former BBC correspondent in Belfast and an author on the peace process, including of the books
Political Purgatory
and
Living with Ghosts
.
His personal archive is on
Open Learn
, the free learning hub of The Open University.
The latest contribution is here
.