Neuter the dogs of war and restore peace-promoting neutrality, writes Edward Horgan.
The debate on Irish neutrality has been gagged since March 20th, 2003. Close to 900,000 armed US troops have marched through Shannon airport to make war on Iraq in contravention of the UN Charter, and militarism is being promoted at the expense of peace and global sustainable development.
Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea continues to have problems with the fact that the EU battlegroups are actually called "battlegroups". Guns are made for killing people, individually, and armies and battlegroups are made for fighting wars, and killing people on an industrial scale. We could call the Irish battlegroup contingent the "Fighting 51st" (given our virtual status as the 51st US state), as distinct from the "Fighting 69th" eulogised in The Irish Times on May 13th, and saluted by Minister for Transport Martin Cullen. There appears to be a propaganda campaign in progress to soften up Irish people towards sending their children to fight for the West against the Rest. International peace and justice and equitable distribution of the world's resources is a worthy cause for which Irish soldiers have given their lives with the UN, but participation in internationally divisive resource wars is not.
The Irish Times editorial of May 12th commends Willie O'Dea for "bringing forward these new ideas", such as changing Irish legislation to make it easier to send Irish soldiers to their deaths on foreign battlefields. These ideas are not new. O'Dea and the present Government have plagiarised the ideas and practices of John Redmond. Calls for humanitarian military intervention are no more sincere than the 1914 call to "defend small nations". Fine Gael has called for the abandonment of all aspects of the so-called triple lock, and Irish neutrality.
O'Dea and his admirers repeatedly refer to the "need to avoid other Srebrenicas or Rwandas".
Ireland did nothing to avoid such atrocities in 1994/95, and is doing little to prevent crimes against humanity in Chechnya and Sudan, while facilitating atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are also planning on deporting asylum seekers to Afghanistan, having helped to destabilise it. One of the first EU battlegroups was deployed by France in Rwanda in 1994, with UN approval, not to prevent the Rwandan genocide, but to help the mass murderers escape into the Congo, sparking off civil wars that caused up to four million deaths. Francophone interests were at stake because the Tutsi rebels, who stopped the genocide, spoke English. These are the type of battlegroups that Ireland is set to join, any day soon.
The Holocaust is often cited as a reason for abandoning Irish neutrality. Preventing wars that cause such acts of genocide is the strongest reason for promoting positive active neutrality. Wars to end wars, and wars on terror that become wars of terror are good for the arms business and hell for humanity.
Ireland is now proposing to join, or gate-crash, the Nordic battlegroup with an assortment of at least four other states that speak Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Estonian, if they will have us. This is referred to as a "coherent military force of 1,500 soldiers able to operate in a stand-alone fashion with full logistic and transport support", etc. Far more coherent English-speaking forces, such as the British and US armies, have suffered serious friendly fire casualties in all their recent joint actions.
The editorial states: "Public opinion strongly supports Ireland's overseas military operations." Ireland should never have "overseas military operations". We have rightly participated in many very worthwhile "United Nations peacekeeping operations", but are now drifting dangerously into such Irish overseas military operations. Only minimal thought has been given to Ireland's almost complete lack of modern battlefield equipment. The costs of equipping such a battlegroup would pay for several Tallaght-size hospitals. Ireland's only armoured warfare equipment are the light Scorpion tanks whose main 76mm weapon has been removed from service in most other countries for safety reasons.
None of the battlegroups already in place have requirements for UN approval before being deployed.
This is a breach of the UN Charter, which dictates that military force may only be used outside state borders in self-defence or with UN approval.
Britain and France, two UN veto powers, decided to set up their own single-state battlegroups, which will operate with minimal EU control as was the case with the French operation Turquoise in Rwanda and British WMD attack on Iraq in March 2003.
There will be no locks on any of these battlegroups. They are the dogs of war, not the doves of peace.
The Taoiseach stated in February 2003 that US military use of Shannon for a war against Iraq would require a UN Security Council resolution. Within weeks this "lock" was shattered, along with tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.
Of course Irish military officers welcome the opportunity to expand their professional opportunities. But let us not forget that Irish officers sent soldiers to their deaths in the Congo in Ford Armoured Cars that were not actually armoured, and sent troops on isolated unsupported patrols to places such as Niemba. In the Somme it was easy to shout "Over the Top" from a bunker, well to the rear.
Ireland's priorities should be UN reform, yet this State, most of Europe and the US are effectively abandoning the UN, and a multilateral approach to international peace and international law, in favour of what has become known as plurilateralism. This entails a few like-minded states pursuing their own national interests, such as the US and Britain in Iraq. The five UN permanent members placed themselves above the UN when they effectively wrote the UN Charter in 1945, and gave themselves the power of veto, and are now placing themselves "beyond" the UN and beyond international law. Ireland, by joining in NATO PfP and EU battlegroups, both outside the UN framework, is rushing to join the equivalent of the global schoolyard bullies, or vigilantes, rather than supporting the rule of international law, and reinforcing and reforming the UN.
Neutrality and battlegroups are not vital issues per se, but the killing of innocent people is so appalling that ways must be found to curtail militarism, and promote peace and positive neutrality. About 46,000 children have died as a result of the Iraq war so far. The EU battlegroups will cause the deaths of many more children, as they did in Rwanda and the Congo, and are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now is the time to neuter the dogs of war, and restore peace-promoting neutrality.
Edward Horgan is international secretary of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance and a former UN peacekeeper