This is the time of year for political modesty, for people to remind themselves of the weakness of state institutions in their attempts to compel enduring intellectual and emotional submission. Homicidal grudges can remain, quiescent and invisible, like poppy-seeds in the soil, through generations, until disturbance brings them to the surface again, to a bloody flowering. Those who say the Good Friday Agreement will bring a lasting peace should remember what happened five years ago in the wooded hillsides around Srebrenica, when 7,000 Muslim males were done to death and the world looked on.
Even now, this massacre should move us all to feel an icy frisson of shame, but amid that shame, it might also incline us to some wisdom about the nature of tribal disputes. They endure the coming and going of political dispensations; they seemingly vanish during tyranny and totalitarianism, but remain in the blood and bones of those who guard their identity by the crooning fireside. Orangeism survived prohibition in Ireland in the 19th century, and Serb nationalism survived all of Tito's attempts to quell it.
Protestant population
It did not go away; Orangeism will not go away, other than by the process of expulsion and coercion which saw the Protestant people of independent Ireland gelded and made mute in the 1920s. What was the Protestant population in 1919? About 10 per cent. What is the Protestant population of this Republic now? Two, three per cent? And what percentage of that is drawn from immigrants to Ireland over the past 80 years? Without reinforcement from abroad, what would the southern Irish Protestant population be today? To be sure, there is no anti-Protestant discrimination or feeling in Ireland today; it is not an issue. Nor, might it be said, is that such a very great distinction: to be tolerant of so few - law-abiding, politically conforming, racially identical and theologically separate in ways so minuscule as would baffle a Muslim - is hardly any great achievement. What will we be like when entire districts of Dublin become Asian and Afro-Caribbean? How tolerant will we be when immigrants are not merely not grateful to be admitted but demand ethnic rights of identity?
Identity: what sins are done in its name, and what amnesia it conjures over the graves of those it has caused to be slain. Earlier this week, when a few Muslims returned to Srebrenica to remember their dead, they had to pass through lines of jeering Serbs; and while an imam read from the Koran, Serbs whistled in derision at him from the homes which five years ago contained Muslims. In other words, no regrets, no apologies, no acknowledgment, though the animal-gnawed bones of the butchered men of Srebrenica still lie in the open on the surrounding hillsides.
Unrepentant killers
And what justice follows where conscience has failed to go? Northern Ireland has unloaded its full cargo of killers, cheerfully unrepentant, their various wars fully justified in their own eyes. Deeds which would have been answerable to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague are, by a magic wave of a political wand, forgiven within the peculiar terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, General Mladic, the author of the Srebrenica pogrom, lives at his ease at 119, Blagoja Parovica, Belgrade.
In the absence of retribution for the dead, in the absence of justice for the living, what is the message which is being given to the next generation of killers, as it was in the 1950s, the 1940s, and the 1920s, when IRA campaigns wound down and amnesties were declared, without contrition for or renunciation of murder as a political tool? Is not amnesty culture as deadly as its political companion, gun culture? Does it not hold out the prospect that, whatever your deeds, you might escape the consequence of them and might one day even be hailed on the White House lawn as a statesman?
But there will be no next generation of killers, say those who see final solutions in the present political arrangements in the North. But a final solution to Yugoslavia's ethic disputes has been found repeatedly this century, and always failed, and always resulted in bloodshed. Final solutions can occur only with genocide, as was tried right across Europe 60 years ago, and in Yugoslavia from 1941 onwards, when the Serbs were the objects to be exterminated, and in Srebrenica five years ago, when the Serbs did the exterminating.
First Minister
It might have escaped your attention, but we have a cross-community Executive in Northern Ireland. To be sure, it hasn't been doing very much recently. Its first Minister is a member of the organisation which over the past week has closed the province down, and cost hundreds of millions of pounds in economic damage. Its Ministers for Education and Health are political associates of a terrorist organisation which was almost certainly responsible for the recent murder of a man in South Belfast, and which, despite the release of almost all of its prisoners, hasn't surrendered even a rusty bullet as quid pro quo.
No, I am not pessimistic; nor am I optimistic. These tribal angers preceded my birth and they will succeed my life by generations. As Gerry Adams so presciently said of the IRA, they haven't gone away, you know. Nor have those historical currents which caused the IRA and the Ulster Freedom Fighters to come into existence. We are obliged to remember this forcefully each July; not just the month of the Orange, but also the month of Srebrenica, "the place of silver".