Sir, – Not since a news item on August 29th, 2011 announced the posthumous publication of Kader Asmal's memoir, Politics in my Blood, has there been any Irish Times mention of that book until Conor Brady's article (Opinion, December 28th). Editor at the time of Mandela's July 1990 visit to Dublin, when Mandela's "negotiate with the IRA" remarks were described as "dangerous" and "not well informed", Conor Brady now writes that "revelations since would tend to suggest that he knew precisely what he was saying". Asmal had related how the spectacular Sasol bombing carried out in 1980 by MK, the ANC's military wing, was as a result of IRA reconnaissance, secured through the indirect mediation of my late father, Michael O'Riordan, and Gerry Adams.
Fintan O’Toole’s uncritical hagiography of Mandela (December 6th) sits illogically alongside his column’s vituperative denunciation of Adams (December 10th). Conor Brady’s critique of Mandela at least restores some consistency in having a double target for his hostility. He, however, harps back to the argument that there was no Irish comparison with Mandela’s example of Britain not insisting on a ceasefire before engaging in talks with Mugabe and Nkomo, on the grounds that the white racist regime in Rhodesia was illegal under international law. He misses the point that, if Mandela knew what he was saying, he also knew what he could not say at that juncture about his own South Africa, whose apartheid regime, however odious, was not illegal.
Mandela had been freed in February 1990, without abandoning the armed struggle, and political violence in the first half of 1990 had already led to 1.500 deaths, or more than in the whole of the previous year. ANC talks with the South African regime nonetheless continued. It was only a month after his Dublin visit that Mandela acceded, at first reluctantly, to the proposal by the MK chief-of-staff, the South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, that the armed struggle should be suspended. Mandela and Slovo are to be applauded for the successful transition from war to peace in South Africa.
As one who had always been opposed to war in Northern Ireland, I also recognise that Adams and McGuinness are as essential to the successful maintenance of its peace as to the achievement of that Belfast Agreement welcomed by Mandela. Conor Brady is at least consistent in his opening comments, if only to the extent of finding nothing incongruous in Adams being in the guard of honour at Mandela’s funeral, when an ANC debt owed was appropriately repaid. – Yours, etc,
MANUS O’RIORDAN,
Finglas Road,
Dublin 11.
Sir, – The former editor of this paper Conor Brady has done a service in recalling the episode in 1990 when Nelson Mandela, receiving the freedom of the city in Dublin and seated next to the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, in the Mansion House, endorsed the idea of talks without a ceasefire between the IRA and the British government (“Mandela remarks on ceasefire reflected close links with Irish republicans”, Opinion, December 28th).
What actually happened that day is that early in the press conference Eamonn Mallie asked Mandela a question along those lines and was given the positive, if initially general, answer which Conor Brady cited. Other journalists present failed to appreciate the seismic significance of what Mandela had said and a series of unrelated questions followed. I (then editor of Fortnight magazine) eventually lobbed in something of a tennis ball of a question, inviting Mandela to clarify his remarks – only for the ANC leader specifically to introduce the comparison with Rhodesia, which carried the implication of talks similar to those at Lancaster House in 1979 with Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, which had led to an end to white rule there.
When I returned to Belfast it was no surprise to find on my fax machine a press release from Gerry Adams endorsing Mandela’s comments.
This was, of course, hugely important to the IRA. No reasonable person can doubt that the ancien regime at Stormont was oppressive towards the Catholic community and represented an illegitimate denial of democratic pluralism and human rights. But the campaign by the IRA never met the twin criteria of a “just war”: ius ad bellum (the right to wage war, based on the absence of any democratic alternative, which the achievements of the civil-rights movement showed to be false) and ius in bello (maximum restraint within war, which the ruthlessness of the IRA towards civilians, such as Jean McConville, completely traduced).
The ANC’s case in these regards, however blemished by the torture camps it established for “collaborators” in the neighbouring “frontline” states, was much more positive and it is no surprise that the IRA grabbed at its coat-tails. The Provisional IRA campaign was so prolonged, we now know from Rogelio Alonso’s interviews with members, not just because of iron discipline on the part of the Adams/McGuinness leadership but also because of the misplaced idealism which formed the enduring “groupthink” of many who joined.
It was evident at the press conference that Mandela had gone into a long, dark, 27-year tunnel on Robben Island and had emerged from it, however heroically, still caught in the cold-war, “anti-imperialist” simplicities of the 1960s. History will rightly be very kind to him but no one should recast him as a bronze icon without blemish. – Yours, etc,
Dr ROBIN WILSON,
South Studios,
Tates Avenue,
Belfast.
Sir, – Conor Brady (Opinion, December 28th) insinuates that Nelson Mandela may have delayed the peace process in Northern Ireland because of remarks made at a press conference in Dublin in 1990. There is a massive leap of the imagination involved in this assessment backed by a highly selective and self-serving version of the event.
I was at that press conference and saw a world figure, suffering from pneumonia, being dragged into the provincial mire of Irish politics by those who wanted, for various reasons, to associate him with the IRA. It became clear quite quickly that he knew little about the situation in Ireland and that he had never even heard of the Birmingham Six, whose case was very prominent at the time.
Brady’s attempt to associate Mandela with IRA assistance to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in the 1980s is a specious and self-serving attempt at guilt by association. At that time the entire mature leadership of the ANC, Mandela included, was in prison and MK had fallen into the hands of a younger more violent group.
By the time Mandela had been released from prison in 1990 the MK's armed struggle had become a policy rather than a practice. Archbishop Desmond Tutu made this clear to me at the time saying: "I think their stance is really rhetorical, I mean almost an academic issue and many in the South African government are aware that hardly anything has happened which could say these people are violent." (The Irish Times, March 2nd, 1990).
It is regrettable that a veteran journalist such as Conor Brady should descend into the contrarianism that infects so much of today’s editorial commentary. – Yours, etc,
SEAMUS MARTIN,
Raymond Street,
Dublin 8.