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Peace - and the price

Thursday, May 10, 2007

It was quite a moment – and quite some image. The Hammer and the Hero laughing at each other's jokes, and setting out ceremonially on the road of cooperation – putting bloody and deadly enmity behind them. I mean of course the "Hammer of Irish Republicanism”, as the Protestant die-hard Dr Ian Paisley was often called – and a “Hero of Irish Republicanism”, the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness.

It was a both a media spectacle and a telling moment of history this week when each of them was sworn in respectively as First and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland’s new power-sharing government, after four decades of turbulent violence. (It turned out, too, to provide a fitting swansong for the departing Tony Blair - these hard-won peace arrangements represent a very real Blairite achievement amid the cloud of disappointment he leaves behind.)

 

Through those decades, talking with Ian Paisley was rarely easy for journalists like myself – he simply never granted me an on-record interview - though it should be said he could be courteous and even charming in private. But his violent rhetoric could also be decidedly personal and threatening, once coming out as a blunt promise that if he met an IRA man he’d kill him. Now of course he engages in scenes of what a veteran Ulster-watcher called “heavy-handed jollity” with, oh yes, an IRA man.

 

And I can’t help recalling that same IRA man, now bespoke-suited and sporting a red silk tie, as a twenty-one year-old in jeans and combat-jacket, scuttling through the side-streets of Derry’s Bogside district wielding his ArmaLite rifle – followed often pantingly by myself, then a twenty-three year-old wielding my rain-soaked notebook. (In those days it always seemed to rain for the Derry IRA brigade’s maneuvers – probably good operational conditions for them.)

 

All is different now – and the media were in determinedly celebratory mood for the official ceremonies at Belfast’s Stormont Castle. But I was impressed by a powerful piece of journalism from the BBC’s Ireland Correspondent, Kevin Connolly who at 46 years old has memories of much, though not all of the so-called “Troubles”.

 

Like many reporters, Connolly struck a note of high drama, saying that for ten years now the Northern Ireland story “has been all about this moment”, and he dutifully noted the striking “images of reconciliation” that abounded. But then his tone changed decisively as he ended – pointing out all too truly: “We must remember the victims of the last forty years, the more than three thousand dead and the legacy of grief they leave behind.

 

"They have no voices now, of course, but somehow in all the celebrating their silence should be heard”.

 

That, too, was quite a moment.

 

 

 

AMONG THE SIZEABLE UNITED STATES CONTINGENT THAT FLEW to Belfast for the event was Senator Edward Kennedy, who played a significant role in the peace process – as did his sister Jean Kennedy Smith when US Ambassador, for President Bill Clinton, to Dublin. I hear that moves are now afoot to have her contribution memorialized in an exhibition – probably at the John F Kennedy Library in Boston – later this year or next.

 

Senator Kennedy told reporters in Belfast that Northern Ireland is showing the world "an extraordinary example ... that you can disband militias and private armies, and put away the bomb and bullet." While his and his sister’s efforts had an obvious and public dimension (as well as the more private arm-twisting that went on) much lower beneath the media’s radar were some other people’s important involvement. There was about fifteen years of tireless, often secret work by leaders of the Irish-American business community – people like Tom Moran, head of the insurance giant Mutual of America, and his predecessor Bill Flynn. They wielded the power of the dollar - both as carrot and as stick - to effect a lot of attitudinal change among the various players in the conflict at various critical times.

 

Money talks, of course, and the Senator’s citing of Ulster’s example for other parts of the world could be buttressed by the additional case of South Africa, where a peaceful end to a long-running conflict was hastened (just as I recalled here in THE MEDIA BEAT the insightful British journalist Anthony Sampson once prophesied it would be) by America’s business world divesting in the apartheid system.

 

So here’s an idea, which I expect the mainstream media may take up increasingly in the coming months.

 

The Sudanese regime seems impervious to international pressure seeking to prevent its continuing genocide in Darfur. Sudan’s effective paymaster, buying an estimated two-thirds of its oil, is China - and what China pays helps to defray Sudan’s undoubted expenses incurred in bombing its own people. (And maybe China does more - Amnesty International has just presented evidence of Beijing directly breaking international arms sanctions on Sudan, and itself supplying much of the actual weaponry that’s used against the western province).

 

PetroChina is a company in which the Fidelity Investments mutual fund, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, both invest. PetroChina is wholly owned by the China National Petroleum Company.

 

Accordingly anti-genocide campaigners are targeting those two major American investors, Fidelity in Boston and Berkshire in Omaha, to get them to withdraw their alleged financial support for genocide. The media tools the lobby has employed so far include (what else?) a YouTube video-posting. In it a Darfur citizen, on site, reads in halting English Fidelity's own blithe, impersonal rationale for its investment decisions. See it – it’s simple, homespun, effective.

 

 

 

MONEY PLUS IMAGE, WHEN CONSIDERED TOGETHER, can – unsurprisingly – work a little better sometimes. The Save Darfur campaigners are taking some encouragement from the efforts of actress Mia Farrow, who has repeatedly visited the region and been increasingly outraged. She managed, after all, to get producer-director Steven Spielberg to wave some stick at China (or at least implicitly threaten to remove some carrot) in his role as Beijing’s chosen international media adviser for its much-cherished 2008 Olympics, which have been shrewdly labeled by the campaigners "The Genocide Games".

 

Farrow got Spielberg’s attention with a forceful reference to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the nauseating Nazi propaganda film made about them by Adolf Hitler’s favorite female film-director. Spielberg would "go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games”, Farrow wrote in an open appeal on the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page.

 

So Spielberg, suitably stung, promptly asked China's President Hu Jintao to intercede in Darfur. A high-ranking Chinese official was duly dispatched to Sudan.

 

However … we should not get too excited. The Chinese envoy reported back that the situation was “improving”.  A Save Darfur activist Eric Reeves commented: "That visit meant nothing. He toured the camps with the most food and the most control. This was airbrushed genocide."

 

While Spielberg himself remains silent, his spokesperson Marvin Levy now says: "This is a step-by-step process. We think there was some movement. We'll see."

 

We will, indeed.