The following is the Irish News article in which John Hume warned nationalists against voting for Sinn Fein
THE coming Westminster election will be the most critical election for the Northern Ireland community since the beginning of the present troubles 29 years ago. Sinn Fein leadership's immediate rejection of my recent call for a ceasefire (in a recent newspaper article), to be followed by discussions of an electoral strategy to maximise nationalist representation, makes one thing very clear. Sinn Fein are really only interested in misrepresenting the SDLP in an effort to achieve more votes.
The SDLP has over the past 25 years made it clear that it is opposed to pacts of any form which involve people who refuse to give up violence as part of their overall political strategy.
To make an electoral pact with Sinn Fein without an IRA ceasefire would be the equivalent of asking our voters to support the killing of innocent human beings by the IRA. The electorate should be aware that in voting for Sinn Fein, that is what they are voting for Sinn Fein call it the armed struggle.
The SDLP will not ask its supporters to undermine the huge amount of work being carried all over the world by SDLP representatives; attracting inward investment, creating jobs and building on the considerable links which have been developed with others who agree that democratic politics is the only way of bringing about a resolution to our conflict.
Within hours of my making the offer to enter into discussions regarding an electoral arrangement with Sinn Fein in the circumstances of a ceasefire, the Sinn Fein leadership pronounced any hope of an electoral arrangement "dead" and a few days later Sinn Fein announced its panel of candidates. There were no requests for "clarification", no requests for discussion of the issues, and no pleas for time to consult their own members.
Compared with the agonising delays in which we awaited their response to every development in the peace process, from the Downing Street Declaration onwards, the speed of their response on this issue was breathtaking. It calls into question the good faith of Sinn Fein in their professed wish for a consensus among nationalists, and it stands in stark contrast to the consideration and sensitivity with which I and my colleagues have attempted to facilitate them in moving from a strategy of undemocratic violence to a strategy of democratic politics. Having availed of our good faith as honest brokers, they now intend to cast us aside, using any means, fair or foul.
Already the preparations are under way. My party has recently revealed evidence of their continuing intention to engage in every kind of electoral malpractice, from multiple registration of their own members, to the forging of medical cards to facilitate vote-stealing.
Already there have been brutal and cowardly attempts to intimidate leading SDLP members in Derry who man the polling stations to prevent personation and electoral abuse. And all of this is followed by hypocritical and false allegations that it is the SDLP which steals votes, when the dogs in the street know the truth of it.
Nationalist voters must consider the consequences of voting for the people who do these things, who pretend to be democrats while stealing people's votes, and who pretend to stand for the rights of the Irish people while defying and denying the will of the Irish people for peace, expressed in election after election these last 25 years.
Consider the impact upon our fellow Irish citizens south of the Border if northern nationalists were seen to throw in their lot with the movement that murdered Jerry McCabe and so many other innocent people. Consider the impact upon opinion from Washington, where so many powerful people (including the President) have invested so much political and financial capital in the movement for peace in Ireland, only to have it exploded in their faces at Canary Wharf. Consider the impact upon our fellow citizens in the rest of Europe who have also invested heavily in peace and reconciliation in Ireland.
And then consider the satisfaction of the British and the unionists, as nationalists isolate themselves as never before, and cut themselves adrift from the most powerful international alliance ever to concern itself with our problem, an international alliance so painstakingly built, brick by brick, over the years by the SDLP.
For these will be the consequences if the republicans are successful in their bid to win the leadership of northern nationalism.
For the plain fact is that the so-called republican movement are the people who got it wrong, consistently, over the last quarter of a century, and the SDLP are the people who got it right. And the consequence of them getting it wrong is that over 3,200 people are dead - the vast majority of them non-combatant civilians - and 25 thousand million pounds worth of damage has been done to the economy of Ireland, north and south.
ALL DOWN the years the republicans told us that armed conflict was the only way to solve the problem.
Now, after a quarter century of bloodshed, agony and destruction they tell us that the armed struggle is stalemated, and that neither they nor the British army can win. What a tragedy for all of Ireland that they couldn't see that blindingly obvious truth 25 years ago, when we told them.
The leader of Sinn Fein wrote in the Belfast Telegraph this week: "Sinn Fein is totally and unreservedly committed to democratic negotiations, to inclusive dialogue as the only way of resolving conflict and securing a lasting peace.
Why then, does the republican movement continue to make war? If the Sinn Fein leadership truly believe in what they say, then they must join with me today in publicly calling on the IRA for an immediate and unconditional end to a war which - by their own admission - has no purpose, and cannot resolve this conflict or produce a lasting peace.
In our discussions about inclusive all-party peace negotiations, the Sinn Fein leadership made clear Sinn Fein's wish that an indicative timeframe should be agreed. I accepted and supported that view because it would not serve the cause of peace if such discussions were allowed to drag on interminably, with any party able to block progress.
However, I believe the same considerations apply to our dialogue about creating a ceasefire. It would be unreasonable to expect me and my party to go on, month in month out, going over the same arguments endlessly.
Ninety-five per cent of the people of this island want a ceasefire now. If we truly believe in the sovereign right of the Irish people to self-determination then the rights of that 95 per cent cannot be ignored or set aside. The right of self-determination involves the right to determine the means by which we work out our future. We have a democratic right to demand a ceasefire from the IRA and to set a timeframe within which the questions must be resolved.
The deep and bitter arguments in the nationalist community over the issue of violence, which have gone on since the foundation of the Northern Ireland state, have been one of the main causes of our weakness as a people, and our inability for so many years to prevent the discrimination and abuse which our parents and their parents had to suffer.
The undemocratic refusal of those who wrongly describe themselves as republicans to accept the will and the right of the Irish people, expressed in election after election, to pursue our cause by political means, has repeatedly set Irish nationalists at each others' throats. The acrimony of this division has repeatedly absorbed and wasted the political energies of the nationalist community when all of those energies should have been concentrated on the struggle for justice and democracy.
If you stand for human rights then your methods must respect them, particularly the most fundamental human right, the right to life. Murder undermines human rights.
The fact that the republican movement, over the last quarter-century, has again led a substantial section of the nationalist population down the blind alley of violence - which they now agree has reached the predictable dead-end has had two tragic consequences.
Firstly, it distracted attention from, and shifted the focus of the political argument from those fundamental questions about the nature of the Northern Ireland state, which had been raised in a responsible, peaceful and democratic fashion by the Civil Rights Movement, and which led to the dismantling of the old Northern Ireland state. By changing the focus of the argument through violence Sinn Fein allowed the British and the unionists off the hook.
The tragic consequence of the republicans' war was that it tainted and weakened the struggle for change in the north. It disgusted our fellow countrymen in the south, and revolted public opinion elsewhere in the world. Again the British and the unionists were allowed off the hook.
When, as a consequence of my dialogue with Sinn Fein, the ceasefire was declared in August 1994, most of us believed that the nightmare was over and that the republican movement had at last come to its senses. Many of us took enormous political risks to reach the goal of peace, and having achieved it, some of the most powerful figures in the western world threw their weight behind the effort to secure a just and lasting settlement. A major share of the blame for the fact that a viable political process of peacemaking did not follow the ceasefires lies at the door of the British government. But that in no way justifies what followed.
Canary Wharf was not only an obscene and murderous outrage, it was a disastrous political miscalculation and a betrayal of all of those people who had offered help to the republicans to enable them to move away from war. It threw the peace process into turmoil, and it has resurrected the traditional animosities within the nationalist community. Now it appears that the republicans are again to turn their ferocity on their rivals within the nationalist community as though they were the real enemy, in a naked attempt to advance their own partisan interests.
SOME people make the mistake of thinking they can play about with their vote, to point here, or to send a message there. They seem to presume that the SDLP will always be there, strong and reliable to pick up the pieces and get on with the serious business when the dust settles.
Last May some people - even local SDLP supporters - thought they could have the luxury of voting for Sinn Fein to encourage the IRA to make peace and to send a message to John Major that they wanted inclusive talks. The result was that the republican movement claimed an increased mandate for their strategy, and within weeks they had broken their de facto ceasefire in the north, threatening to plunge us back into a full-scale resumption of violence on both sides.
Those voters were totally sincere people but Sinn Fein let them down. Those people will stand very solidly with the SDLP in the future. The lesson is that you cannot play about with your vote.
The only strength which the SDLP has is the support of the voters. If you want peace and proper representation then you have to vote for it; otherwise you will be conned and your vote will be used in a way you never intended.
This cannot go on. There must be a ceasefire, so that we can begin to put the pieces together again - difficult though that might be. We can begin to rebuild a viable strategy for achieving a democratic settlement. Without a ceasefire we are going to have to look elsewhere for a means of making progress.
