Ireland offers indispensible lessons for Turkey
by
Aengus Collins*

A fragile political settlement

There are other ways of approaching these conflicts. In this article I want to consider Northern Ireland, where over the past decade the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) 30-year armed campaign has given way to a fragile political settlement. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution; there are important structural differences between the conflict in Northern Ireland and Turkey’s Kurdish one. But there are lessons to be learned.

The 1998 Belfast Agreement is the heart of Northern Ireland’s political settlement. The basic trade-off underpinning it was that the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, would commit to pursue their objective of a united Ireland through purely peaceful, democratic means. In return, the UK would introduce elaborate regional power-sharing structures to ensure that nationalists could play an active role in political life despite their minority status.

It’s worth pausing to consider some of the details that flowed from this grand bargain.

The UK agreed that it would cede Northern Ireland to a united Ireland if that’s what a majority of its inhabitants wanted.

For its part, the Republic of Ireland relinquished its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland.

Power was devolved from London so that Northern Ireland would increasingly run its own affairs, including in sensitive areas such as policing and security policy.

Men known to have been actively involved in the IRA moved into positions of political leadership within Northern Ireland’s new government. Perhaps most notoriously, Martin McGuinness, a former senior IRA member, became minister of education and then deputy first minister.

Meanwhile, hundreds of terrorist prisoners were released, including high-profile killers such as Patrick Magee, who in 1984 had nearly killed the UK’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

These measures would be inconceivable in relation to Turkey’s Kurdish question today. But the point is that many would have previously been inconceivable in Northern Ireland, too. What allowed that to change was the kind of political freedom and debate that is so strikingly lacking in Turkey.

A wide range of political actors contributed to political change in Northern Ireland, but some of the most important developments took place within Irish nationalism. Nationalists committed to democratic methods slowly shifted the movement’s center of gravity and won over those who had been committed to violent methods.

There are indispensible lessons for Turkey here. From the outset, facilitating political discussion and change within nationalism was a cornerstone of the approach of the UK and Irish governments. In stark contrast to what happens in Turkey, Sinn Féin was never closed down, despite its clear support for violence. Even in prison, politics was allowed to continue. One of the major catalysts for Sinn Féin’s gradual turn towards electoral politics in the 1980s came when an IRA prisoner, Bobby Sands, stood for election to the UK parliament and won.

That victory kick-started a process within nationalism that 30 years later sees the IRA disbanded and Sinn Féin in government. That could not have happened if the Turkish approach to Kurdish politics had applied. In December last year, the Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) was closed down on the basis that it was “focal point for terrorism against the indivisible integrity of the state.” One wonders what Turkey’s Constitutional Court would have made of Sinn Féin in the early 1980s. In 1981, at the party’s annual conference, a spokesman expressed their strategy as follows: “Who here really believes that we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite [gun] in this hand, we take power in Ireland?”

It wasn’t out of weakness or stupidity that the UK tolerated this kind of ambiguity from Sinn Féin. It was a calculation that in the long term the party would be the vehicle for moving extremist nationalism towards peaceful means. The fact that this resulted in a grey zone where democracy and violence overlapped wasn’t a blind spot in the approach, it was part of its raison d’être.

From the mid-1980s on the killings continued but the pace of change within nationalism increased. Three strands of dialogue are worth mentioning. First, a “New Ireland Forum” established in 1983 formalized discussion within democratic nationalism about what its aims and objectives ought realistically to be. (Sinn Féin was excluded on account of its support for violence.) Second, the UK and Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, creating an advisory role for the Irish government in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Regrettably, there is no equivalent in the Turkish case for this stabilizing partnership between two sovereign states.

Finally, while Sinn Féin may have been excluded from formal talks, the late 1980s saw the beginning of secret meetings with John Hume, the leader of the moderate nationalist party, Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), as well as (via back channels) with the UK and Irish governments. The conversations with Mr. Hume, in particular, were hugely influential. In movements like the IRA -- or the PKK for that matter -- pressure to disarm is always going to carry more weight if it comes from authoritative moderate insiders rather than from “the enemy.” But that can only happen if those moderate insiders are given the political space to emerge and the freedom to engage with their extremist counterparts.

Looking at the 1998 Belfast Agreement

It’s tempting to look at the 1998 Belfast Agreement and wonder whether some similar burst of institutional ingenuity might resolve the Kurdish question at a stroke. That would be premature. Perhaps structural reforms of one sort or another will be needed, but that phase of any process is years or even decades away. The lessons for Turkey to draw from Northern Ireland don’t lie in the endgame processes from the late 1990s, they lie in the efforts of politicians during the dark days of the preceding two decades. Many hundreds of civilians, soldiers and paramilitaries were still being killed. But politicians of many stripes managed to keep piecing together the ideas and the relationships that in time would provide the basis for a new beginning.

Is there any possibility of something similar occurring in Turkey? It is difficult to be optimistic, because the points of departure in terms of political freedom are so different in the two cases. In Northern Ireland all shades of nationalist opinion had political expression from the outset. That was the context within which the gradual shift in the movement’s center of gravity could occur. In Turkey, some measure of increased political freedom needs to be achieved before any real progress is likely. A way needs to be found to loosen the constraints on the practice and discussion of Kurdish politics. The current arrangement, in which a combination of party closure, censorship and imprisonment hangs over all participants, will have to be recognized for the dead-end that it so clearly is.