Question: when is a war not a war? Answer: when it's a "war". For the past 22 months, the pro-unionist forces on both of "these islands" have been working assiduously to dismantle the understanding implicit in the Belfast Agreement that what was being negotiated was the end of a war rather than a terrorist campaign. Their goal was the restoration of those inverted commas in the universal mind. But you cannot have the punctuation without the war.
This is the chief subtext of the decommissioning issue. On a surface level, as unionists and their fellow-travellers allege, the issue is whether a "private army" should be allowed to hold on to its illegally-held weaponry. This, we are fairly easily persuaded, is a simple moral matter. But, deeper down, the issue is about whether republicanism can be persuaded to acquiesce in the moral analysis of its opponents, and about whether the IRA can be fooled into accepting that illegality and immorality amount to the same thing.
To say other than that the IRA has perpetrated innumerable immoral acts would be to imply that morality had lost all meaning. But loyalist paramilitaries, the RUC, the British army, the UDR, have perpetrated many acts of gross immorality as well, and perhaps the greatest immorality of all is that many of these acts were carried out under cover of the alleged rule of law.
There is an obvious difficulty, then, with the present resolution paradigm, which is predicated on the notion of bringing to an end the paramilitary remit of one organisation, the IRA. This frame is too narrow and one-sided.
WHAT unionists want above all from this process is that the world declare them innocent of all wrongdoing, error or fault. (The last time I made this rather unexceptionable observation, a leading unionist, clearly anxious to prove me right, wrote into the Letters page to assert that the only victims of discrimination under the old Stormont regime were Protestants.) Unionism demands that it be acquitted of all charges, and that republicanism be indicted, convicted and sentenced. In this it has the support of virtually all participants in the process, and most of those who provide the public with information and commentary about it.
It has accordingly been obvious from the outset that, even if it wished to demobilise for reasons of its own, the IRA could never agree to hand over even a single bullet in response to demands emanating from such a hostile coalition. To do so would be to accept implicitly that all republican operations since the outset of the conflict had been criminal acts without justification, and would immediately make Bobby Sands a thug rather than a patriot.
Conversely, the withdrawal of the unionist demand for decommissioning would implicitly declare that what has been brought to an end was a war in which there were several combatants, each of which must bear its share of responsibility. It would also make clear that any attempt to place the conflict within a moral paradigm must stretch itself beyond a self-serving desire for vindication or acquittal for one side. This, I thought, was the purpose of the Belfast Agreement.
And this is why republicans have constantly sought to place these issues in a wider frame - demilitarisation, or, in the well-worn mantra of the Sinn Fein leadership, "the decommissioning of the mindsets which created the conflict". Their purpose was not what-aboutery, or even to provide a rationalisation for the IRA's refusal, but to alert the world to the impossibility of the demands being made.
Only if the concept of decommissioning could be elevated out of the narrow, self-serving unionist insistence could the possibility of progress be created. Only if there was a willingness to perceive the concept of decommissioning in its broadest context - the cessation of armed activity and the withdrawal of offensive weaponry on all sides - could the debate have a fruitful conclusion.
It is true, as we keep being reminded, that decommissioning is specifically mentioned in the Belfast Agreement. All participants agreed to "reaffirm their commitments to the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations", and confirmed their intention to "continue to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent Commission, and to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the agreement . . ." The agreement also stipulates that all this will occur "in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement". Here lies the rub.
Before the agreement was signed, for very good reasons, nobody was prepared to spell out what decommissioning would actually mean, to say precisely whether it required the handing over of complete arsenals or simply some token gesture of good faith. This fudge was an essential part of the scaffolding of the agreement. The issues of violent resistance and weapons had been openly on the table and the formula arrived at was one which sought to factor in the conflicting imperatives of all the participants with a view to a complex, long-term settlement. The avoidance of precise definitions was precisely calculated to persuade as many of the participants as possible aboard the peace train.
No sooner had the doors been closed, however, than the unionists sought to impose the most literal interpretation of the agreement's deliberately woolly terminologies.
When the agreement was signed, I was one of those who criticised it on the basis that it contained too much fudge. A friend pointed out that perhaps what was needed was an abundance of fudge. His point was a good one, in so far as it suggested that energies preoccupied with politics are at least distracted from more physical kinds of activity. The problem with fudge, however, is not necessarily with its texture, but rather the subsequent process of hardening and clarifying.
To propose, in the context of decommissioning, that fudge was acceptable up to the point of signing up, but suspect thereafter, is to suggest that the point of the Belfast Agreement was to create a trap for republicanism.
If this is the tactic now being put into effect, we should be clear in our minds that it has no chance of success. Given what is at stake, this alone places its morality in question.