-Hillsborough decla- Good Friday ration" setting out the latest spin 01l the pacification process in Ireland has been presented as the final triumphant step in the implementation of the political settlement in Ireland. It was left to David Irvine, leader of the ultra-right Progressive Unionist Party, itself the mouthpiece for the deathsquads of the Ulster Volunteer Force, to spell out the reality. The new declaration should be supported by unionism because it represented the opportunity to blow out of the water the nationalist family which linked Sinn Fein to southern capitalism and US imperialism.
In practice Irvine's observation comes after the fact. Finish has already been called on the fairy story of the "Nationalist family" on which the entire Sinn Fein strategy was based. They are left bereft of any strategy, with the choice of open capitulation or repression and marginalisation by their erstwhile friends.
The grim reality of this long Good Friday was telegraphed in February, when The Northern Stormont assembly mOel and endorsed a report outlining the new partitionist structures. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Irish premier Bertie Ahern, the titular head of the nationalist family, indicated that Sinn Fein would have to surrender weapons in exchange for seats in the new government.
The Good Friday agreement nowhere requires this, and Sinn Fein have been clinging desperately to the assurances from their erstwhile partners that they would stand by the letter of the agreement, but that was then and this is now.
For all Sinn Fein's illusions, the core of the pacification process is the restabilisation of partition.
The heart of this is the unionist basis on which the British occupation rests.
The key task of the agreement is to stabilise that base with the aid of Southern capital and the Catholic middle class in the North, in spite of Unionism's constant longings for a full-blooded sectarian repression of the nationalist population.
Today that means preventing the "Faulknerisation" of Unionist leader Trimble. (Faulkner was a previous unionist leader who agreed to the Sunningdale settlement in the early 1970s, only to lose majority unionist support).
Trimble, for his own survival, needs the political defeat republicanism to be made expticit, hence the significance of decommissioning - an act which has no military significance but massive political impetus.
The wording of the Hillsborough declaration, which called for the nomination of ministers followed by an act of reconciliation involving putting veapons Don't ask Tony the way forward, Gerry: he's lost, too! out of use, was an attempt by capitalism and imperialism to provide soft landing for republicanism allowing the republican leadership to claim decommissioning as a voluntary act following a recognition of their place in the new structures. There were even hints that there would be minor changes in troop deployments to sweeten the pill.
The republican street graffiti: "Not a bullet, not an ounce (of Semtex)" and the subsequent statements from the Sinn Fein leadership are a clear rejection of these calls for surrender.
They immediately, however, bring to mind the question asked by Bernadette McAliskey at the beginning of the process: Plan B?"
It is quite clear from the leadership statement that Plan B is a plea to save the peace process. The republicans are not involved in a process of constructing an alternative to the peace process but in civil disobedience within the process.
This strategy is likely to prove difficult. On the one hand, the British and southern capitalists will turn a deaf ear to these pleas On the other, it will be difficult to mobilise their base to demand the of implementation of the sectarian structures that they accepted only with the greatest difficulty.
In so far as the process faces a crisis it does so from the right.
The marching season is under way. Orangemen are determined to assert their supremacy on the Garvaghy Road and intimidate and humiliate nationalists. across the six counties. The British don't even pretend to have the aim of protecting nationalists, and constantly attempt to present the intimidation as cultural divergence, with nationalists under an obligation to come to an accomrnodation. A savage sectarian campaign of intimidation, including the murder of Rosemary Nelson, is under way. Needless to say, this is not even an issue in the decommissioning talks. The unionist right will mount a strong campaign in the coming European elections and the British will have to come up with further shifts to the right to try and conciliate the The great Frankenstein monster they have created in transitional Ireland and to prostructures that would tect Trimble's lead to a united Ireland base. have faded away to be To some extent, the latest declareplaced by Mickey ration adds to the Mouse committees instability in the like inland sense that it leaves open the prospect of waterways endless demands for yet even now many in the leadership cling to the reformist illusion that they can turn dross into gold. This illusion is summed up most clearly in the laughable expectation that Chris Patten, Tory grandee, will propose any fundamental reform of the RUC.
Britain
evidence of police racisin in the investigation of Stephen Lawrence's death has caused outrage. In Ireland, evidence of the routine involvement of the RUC in sectarian killing produces only indifference. Police threats to the aside.
Nothing could make the reality of the pacification process clearer. The murder of Rosemary Nelson carries a simple message: things are not getting better but worse. magazine!
The forces of sectarianism and the state will join to prevent even the most basic of legal representation. The pacification process has reached a stage familiar in many other parts of the world. Illusion The murder is replaced by a of Rosemary growing sense of a terrible Nelson carries a reality. The simple message: peace process things are not bumps along the bottom getting better but -quite clearly having failed worse. but with many of the oppressed clinging on desperately for lack of an alternative plan B. Plan B remains what it has always been - not in pacification * structures, not in capitalist influence, but in mass and class action. What we need to do right now is build a socialist movement that can make these alternatives a reality and end the dependence on the twin illusions of militarism and reformism. --