Licence to kill must be revoked for all sides in conflict

AFTER an explosion has separated flesh from bone and life from both, it doesn't much matter whether the bombs that caused it were the lawful weapons of democratic governments or the illegal ones of terrorists. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence is not entirely meaningless, but in the aftermath of an atrocity it can certainly look that way.

How could you explain to the survivors of the Qana massacre that their loved ones died in a "tragedy" (the word used five times in the first four paragraphs of an article by the Israeli ambassador, Zvi Gabay, in The Irish Times on Wednesday) while the victims of the IRA bomb in Canary Wharf died as a result of terrorism?

Qana has real significance, not just for international law, but very specifically for the peace process in Ireland. It reminds us that terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes - can be deployed by democratic states as well as by private armies. And the extraordinary reluctance of the United States, the European Union and the international community to condemn state terrorism in the same terms as private terrorism reminds us of one of the problems in the Irish peace process. It is the problem of acknowledging that the violence of a democratic state, Britain, has contributed to the conflict over its entire history.

Qana has reminded us that dividing violence into the legitimate and the illegitimate serves only to make a hollow nonsense of the idea of an international peace founded on respect for basic human rights. The key question in Northern Ireland - the disposal of paramilitary arms - is unanswerable unless the double-think of Qana, whereby the taking of innocent life by a democratic state is seen as somehow less reprehensible than the murder of civilians by private armies, is ended. Abuses of human rights by the security forces do not make private armies legitimate. But neither do the actions of private armies make state violence any better.

In the Northern Ireland peace process, many people have been reluctant to say this because the abuse of legitimate state power has been used by republicans to justify their own atrocities. Over the course of the Troubles, moral clarity has been lost in a haze of what-aboutery.

Greysteel was terrible, but what about Darkley? Enniskillen was wrong but what about Bloody Sunday? Bloody Sunday was desperate but what about Bloody Friday? The deaths of children in Warrington were a shame, but what about the kids killed by plastic bullets? Each party to the violence, instead of seeing the obvious truth in such comparisons - that each has sunk to the level of its own worst enemy - has used them to hold revulsion at bay.

But just because abuses by the British state have been used as artillery in a propaganda war doesn't mean that they don't matter. At a really cautious estimate, well over 200 civilian deaths in the 25 years of the Troubles can be attributed directly to the security forces. These deaths matter just as much as all the others, and they have to be part of a final reckoning.

THE PROBLEM is that, as well as covering up these abuses when they happened, the British government has refused, even the ceasefires, to take responsibility for its own role in the conflict. When the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that the SAS killings of three IRA activists in Gibraltar in 1988 was a breach of fundamental human rights, Michael Heseltine announced that "we shall not be swayed or deterred in any way by this ludicrous decision." Britain proposed effectively to silence the European Court.

This week, too, the contemptuous offers of compensation to the Birmingham Six renewed this refusal to engage at all with the state's own injustices.

The way to engage with state violence in Northern Ireland is not to rake over the past, but to look to genuine multilateral demilitarisation as a critical part of the peace process. The removal of the British army and the development of an unarmed police force are not just republican demands, but genuine conditions for a peaceful and democratic society.

The linkage between paramilitary arms and the presence of armed security forces has long been acknowledged by the British government itself, which has consistently explained the military presence as a reaction to the IRA campaign.

Before the ceasefires, Sir Hugh Annesley and Sir Patrick Mayhew both strongly implied that a permanent ceasefire would find a reciprocal response. If the peace process is to be restored, that element of reciprocity has to be far stronger than it has been.

The business of getting the guns out of politics is not a matter for the paramilitaries alone. Britain has responsibilities too, and it must start facing them by setting out precisely how the threat of state violence will be lifted.

IF IT does that, it will destroy the IRA, for whom the presence of the British army has been, and remains, an invaluable ideological asset. Whatever it has lost militarily by the army's presence it has gained politically by the effect of that presence on the definition of the conflict itself.

It would have been very difficult for the IRA to sustain a pure terror campaign against Protestants who arc, in its own rhetoric, fellow-Irish. The army on the streets, and in the skies, though, has allowed it to gloss over the internal conflict of loyalties in Northern Ireland and imagine itself as a heroic resistance to an occupying power.

Everything else - unionism, loyalist paramilitaries, southern critics of the IRA, the absence of a democratic mandate for violence - could be dismissed as a quisling adjunct to the "real enemy".

Israeli atrocities against Lebanese civilians don't make Hizbullah any less atrocious, just as Britain's contempt for international law doesn't make the IRA's contempt for human life any less degenerate. But it works the other way around as well: terrorist atrocities don't legitimise human rights abuses by democratic states.

The belief that state terrorism is okay so long as it claims to be directed against terrorists has been shown at Qana for what it is - a licence to kill. If we are to have peace on this island, that licence has to be revoked for good and for everyone.