The Irish Republican Army (IRA) – Freedom fighters or terrorists?
Throughout its history, the Irish population had to struggle for their Emerald Island, as many seafaring nations, like the Vikings or Danes, were trying to invade it over time. However, while former groups of intruders eventually assimilated with the existing population, one conflict took place that would throw its shadow for over 400 years over the nation and take until the 21st century to be resolved at last. The occupations of Ireland by the English, and their systematical attempts to incorporate Ireland in its state, continued to strain societies on both sides. All the while, the Irish kept trying to defend their land throughout the centuries, and continued to demand the establishment of the union of their island under self-governance. When negotiations did not succeed, some of them resorted to armed struggle and guerrilla warfare against the English and Northern Irish governments – which at times turned to be one and the same government. The group that kept claiming the Irish independence and union over more than seventy years and continued armed conflicts with Northern Ireland and England over these claims was the Irish Republican Army (IRA), in Irish “Óglaigh na hÉireann”.
The IRA was the biggest one of the Irish Republican military organizations. It originated from the Irish Volunteers. The 1913 established organization that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916, demanding the establishment of an independent Irish Republic (“The Irish Volunteer Force/Irish Republican Army”). In 1919, in agreement with the English, the Irish Republic was formally established by an elected assembly and the Irish Volunteers became its legitimate army. However, the newborn Republic did not include the six counties in the Northern part of Ireland that remained under English rule and therefore many Irish disagreed with the conditional ceasefire and founded the IRA - the force that continued to wage a guerilla campaign against British rule in Ireland until 1998.
In 1921 the two parties, Britain and Ireland, agreed to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty determined that Ireland should become an independent entity from Britain, but stay within the domination of the British Empire. The signing of this agreement meant a split in the IRA, as some
IRA leaders supported and joined their principal leader Michael Collins, who became the chairman of the first provisional Irish government. Those IRA members who agreed to the treaty became the nucleus of the new Irish national army of the Irish Free State (Saorstat Eireann) or Irish Republic. Yet, many IRA members disagreed with the conditions of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and involved in a civil war against their former comrades, which lasted from 1922-1924. Their intention was the creation of a fully independent all-Ireland republic, including its Northern parts with Dublin and Belfast. They considered the treaty as a betrayal to the Irish Republic (The Irish Republic had been officially proclaimed during the Easter Rising for all of Ireland). In a sad irony, the Civil War might have claimed more lives than the War of Independence; a fact which kept the Irish population divided and embittered. Two of the most important political parties in today’s Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are direct descendants of the opposing sides of the Civil War (Kissane p.2). After a 2 year battle, the anti-treaty faction of the IRA had to admit defeat, but the group remained in existence holding on to their objective to overthrow the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland and to re-establishing the Republic.
The post Civil War IRA -referring to the anti-treaty wing- was badly reduced in numbers and clout, but it took its members only two years to resurface. Many republicans viewed the Free State, with its censorship of newspapers and extensive coercive legislation, as a sham democracy, in the service of British imperialism. Therefore, they continued their armed fight during 1926-36. Between1932-34, the IRA's membership grew from a low of 1,800 to over 10,000. This was partially caused by the friendly stance that the governing party, Fianna Fail, took towards the IRA in the beginning of their term by legalizing the organization and releasing its members from prison. However, in 1935, the IRA accused Fianna Fail to outsell Ireland by failing to proclaim the Republic and by tolerating the continued partition of Ireland. They reinforced their stance by a series of violent attacks on several officials and a land agent. By 1939, the IRA Army Council declared war against Britain, and what is known as the Sabotage Campaign began shortly after. The Sabotage Campaign was a campaign of bombing and sabotage against civil, economic, and military infrastructure in the United Kingdom itself and British custom houses in Ireland. It lasted from 1939 to 1940.
After the theft of almost the entire reserve ammunition store of the Irish army by the IRA, the Irish government took harsh measures against IRA members. They hastily introduced a bill that reinstated internment, military trials and execution for IRA members. As a result, in 1941the IRA counted only about 1,000 members, most of them in prison.
During WWII, the IRA tried vainly to gain advantage in its war with Britain by capitalizing on their ties with Germany. Anyhow, all operation planned and intended to serve the goals of the IRA to attack targets in Britain and North Ireland were prematurely discovered and foiled by the British forces (Higley).
From 1948 on, the IRA started rebuilding its organization and initiated another campaign against Britain and North Ireland called: Operation Harvest, or Border Campaign, as it became generally known. In principal, the IRA policy had been to overthrow not only the governments of Dublin and Northern Ireland, which to them represented illegitimate entities imposed by the British occupier. Nonetheless, in 1948, the IRA adopted a General Army Convention Order to forbid recruits any armed force in and against the Republic of Ireland. From this moment on, the armed forces’ actions were focused on Northern Ireland only, and as later clarified by an IRA spokesperson the Border Campaign was targeting British forces in Northern Ireland. The IRA declared itself “apolitical” in their struggle, but dedicated to force Britain out of Northern Ireland; however their members renewed their ties with the political party of Sinn Fein, which had been the closest political wing to them since the end of the Irish Civil War. Between 1951 and 1954, the IRA succeeded to re-arm itself through several arm raids on military facilities in Northern Ireland and England. When they started their campaign in 1956 and 1957 the Irish government re-introduced the internment without trial for IRA members and in 1961, established military courts to try IRA members; these military courts handed down long prison sentences to the convicted. However, in the Irish general election in 1957, Sinn Fein, the political representation of the IRA, gained 4 seats which was considered a sign for the rising popularity of the alliance of Sinn Fein with the IRA. Facing internment on both sides of the border made it soon impossible for the IRA to conduct their operations, and in 1960, the Campaign was considered a failure by many IRA recruits. No longer considered an eminent danger by the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, both entities started releasing the interned IRA members. From the 400 released fighters, 89 had signed a pledge to renounce violence in the future. The IRA had significantly lacked the support of the Irish population and especially the Northern Ireland population during this campaign. In an attempt to redefine itself the IRA split once more. The resulting politically engaged wing, the Official IRA, held on to armed fights until 1972 in order to protect Catholic communities that came under attack from loyalists in Belfast.
The Provisional IRA, however, continued the armed resistance and fought officially until 1997 – a struggle which was to claim up to 1,800 lives. These 30 years are generally referred to as “The Troubles”. The times of The Troubles started out with a series of riots in August 1969 against the Catholic population in Northern Ireland and led to several battles involving the IRA forces that were trying to protect the Catholic communities in Belfast. Disappointed by the outcome of their attempts to defend the Catholic population of these areas the IRA split again: This time the Provisional IRA left to dedicate their efforts to the protection of the above mentioned communities from future attacks, while the Official IRA continued to focus its campaigns against Northern Ireland and pursuing the goal of a united Ireland for the years to come. During the seventieth, the Official IRA continued their campaigns against England and Northern Ireland and succeeded to largely destabilize Northern Ireland through bombings of commercial targets and gun battles with soldiers. All the while, the Northern loyalist groups retaliated in a guerilla civil war, killing and torturing IRA members, while the English government was trying in vain to stabilize the situation by sending troops that in the course of events became biased against IRA fighters though officially they had been commanded to stay neutral ("Flashpoints: Guide to World Conflicts" ).
During the eighties, the IRA became able to import weaponry to support its fights. This support mainly came from the Libyan leader at the time, Muammar Gaddafi, who was at odds with the British government (BBC NEWS). These arm deliveries significantly increased the IRA’s firepower and enabled its fighters to intensify its campaigns and guerilla attacks. However, it seems that the IRA had been interested in terminating the violence since the late 1980’s, when its political wing SinnFein started secret talks with government officials. The year 1994 that led up to a first ceasefire was an extremely tense one, marked by atrocities between the loyalist guerrilla groups of Northern Ireland and the IRA. As the English government seemed to unnecessarily procrastinate the negotiations, the IRA revoked the ceasefire, attacking the Canary Wharf and parts of Manchester. However, when negotiations began in 1997, the IRA reinstated the ceasefire and the talks led to the Belfast agreement in 1998. The Belfast agreement returned self-governance to Northern Ireland and aimed to establish security normalization by involving a certain quota of Catholics into the police force and by disarming both sides –IRA and Northern Ireland- as well as closing military structures. It took the IRA until 2005 to disarm to a point that satisfied most of the parties involved. Since this time, the acts of violence related to guerilla groups have mostly ceased and the remaining incidents are often between different groups or within a certain group. As a matter of fact, the Irish society is still recovering from centuries of relentless fighting and the collective trauma is rooted deep within the social tissue of today’s Ireland.
During its over 70 year long struggle, the IRA clarified its objectives several times, renewing them, but never changing them. Its fighters wanted to achieve the complete departure of English soldiers and government from the Island of Ireland and they insisted on an independent, united, and self-governed Ireland. Their opponents were England and Northern Ireland, the extended arm of the English power. Since the 1600s, the English had begun in multiple campaigns to expropriate the Irish population and to forcibly convert the Catholic communities to Protestantism. Landownership, survival and social respect was only attainable through the adoption of the English faith and lifestyle – anything else was declared subprime and unworthy. This approach had system, as it allowed the English to install their citizens as the new landowners and rulers of Ireland and to push aside the genuine population, permitting them to take over Ireland and to integrate it into the English kingdom and the British Commonwealth. When the IRA started their activities at the beginning of the 1900’s, their enemies were the armed forces of Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The latter, because they considered them traitors to the cause by agreeing to the independence of the Irish Republic while accepting to leave the Northern part around Belfast under English control. For the IRA, the civilians of North Ireland were partly considered allies to the English; partly, as they were Catholic Irish, similar to the rest of the Irish Republic, they were considered part of the genuine Irish community: The Protestant population of Ireland were either those Irish who chose over time to convert in order to facilitate their lives or to survive the English occupation, or they were part of the population that came through the English to take advantage of the “new territories” that now belonged to the English state. Under the new English rule, they were able to become land owners on the account of the genuine Irish population. Generally, the IRA fighters had to be suspicious against the Protestant population, because they were more likely to be loyal to the English forces. Both sides though, Protestant and Catholic Irish produced their amount of traitors to the IRA cause – as it happens in most conflicts.
During the War of Independence, the IRA fighters targeted armed forces of the English; in fact the war started with an attack on a Royal Irish Constabulary (an English police station in Ireland) in county Tipperary. Later into the war, the event known as the Bloody Sunday took place, where IRA members killed 14 people, 9 of them English agents in Dublin. It is also known, that in County cork for example, the IRA is responsible for the death of about 200 Protestants, possibly –or not - loyalists to the Crown. These killings occurred exclusively in counties in which the Protestant population outnumbered the Catholic population. It might have therefore been an attempt to loosen the grip of the English by attacking those who predominantly had taken over the Irish land at the time in certain areas. To the defense of the Irish fighters it needs to be pointed out that the English side did not respond in a much less bloodier and undiscerning way: In reprisal of the Bloody Sunday event, the English forces opened fire on a football crowed at Croke Park, killing 13 civilians ("Enyclopaedia Britannica"). In return, the IRA involved in destroying many stately Protestant owned homes in Munster, attacking police stations and fortified police barracks in several towns and undertook a significant number of successful actions against British troops. At some point about a hundred IRA fighters were fighting a sizable engagement with a British column of 1,200. And while the English resorted to terrorizing, burning and burglarizing Catholic homes and killing the Catholic population, the IRA undertook an arson campaign against factories and commercial premises in Belfast and attacked and burnt the Custom House in Dublin. The guerilla warfare of 1919-1921 had made Ireland ungovernable for the English, except by military means. As the military and financial costs rose and the strategy of terrorizing the population did not stop the campaigns of the IRA, Britain had to enter negotiations with the Irish fighters. As the historian Dr Michael Hopkinson admitted in his book Irish War of Independence, the guerrilla warfare "was often courageous and effective”); “courageous” because the IRA fighters were largely outnumbered by the British troops, “effective” because their decentralized approach and their hit and run style campaigns made it difficult for the English to target them and break up their organizations. In conclusion, the IRA fighters were carefully selecting their targets: mainly armed forces, loyalists to the English Crown, which they considered invaders and profiteers, as well as English state constitutions and commercial entities. The British were pushed into a situation, were their only defense was the indiscriminate persecution of the Catholic population – how could they discern a fighter from a civilian? Consequently they did to the Irish, what they had done or were doing in many of their colonies: a small sample of those victimized nations and ethnicities that could tell us about this are Aboriginal Australians, New Zealand Maoris, Indians, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankans, Burmese, Canadian and American Indians as well as big parts of Africa. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century Britain's empire spanned the globe, her economy was strong and the political system seemed to be immune from the ills that afflicted so many other countries. Britain kept a strict and often cruel rule in its territories and colonies and suppressed revolts or demands of the population by internment, torture and assassination of the revolt leaders. The British were known to utilize measures like terrorizing the civilian population or ordering shot-to-kill commands to its armed forces, as well as other now so popularly known atrocities. While in the beginning of the century, Britain was still celebrating her fame as one of the most powerful nation on earth, the empire was doomed to fail in the upcoming years and the revolt in Ireland was to become a significant part of the downfall.
With the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Civil War began. During this time the declared targets of the Anti-Treaty Wing IRA (in the following referred to as IRA) continued to attack state installations and armed forces. With the limited independence that England had granted to the Irish Republic, she had also rid herself largely from the involvement in the armed struggles within the borders of the Republic. From now on the armed forces of the Irish Republican had to deal with the problem IRA on her own. Britain was providing the necessary arms, ammunition, armored cars, artillery and airplanes, but the fighting itself had to be done by the Irish Republican soldiers. The IRA continued their guerilla tactics by attacking the Four Courts in Dublin, assailing the members of the parliament that had voted for the Treaty and burning their properties together with many more stately homes of the old Protestant Anglo-Irish land class. In areas like Kenmare, where heavy fighting was going on between the IRA and the Irish troops, the IRA was relatively popular due to the brutality of the occupying Irish Republican troops. The Irish Republican Government officially executed 77 anti-Treaty prisoners and carried out a number of atrocities against prisoners; on at least three occasions in March 1923, IRA prisoners were massacred by landmines in reprisal for killing Free State soldiers. The focus of the IRA had widened, now including the armed forces of the Irish Republican state, as well as its political representatives. However, it can be argued, especially under the consideration that Britain equipped the Irish Republic with everything necessary to fight and win this war that the Irish State represented the extended arm of the British in Ireland. It should also be taken into consideration that Ireland was divided into an Irish state bereft of two economical key cities and considerable parts of land, assets that the ill-ridden Irish economy would have been in dire need of. Per contra, and in today’s historical context, the Free State signified the first step away from direct English occupation.
As the defeated IRA members were sustainably dissatisfied with the political situation, they reorganized and took up their fight again in 1935. The Sabotage Campaign was directed against British civil, economic and military infrastructure in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The main events included the seizure of police barracks and the killing several officers. In two further incidents IRA members assassinated the Irish minister Kevin O’Higgins, who they believed had played a crucial role in the executions of IRA fighters during the Civil War and killed a landlord’s agent over a land dispute. The Irish Republic responded with mass internment and military trials for IRA members and their executions.
Later, during the Border Campaign the IRA changed their strategy and adopted a General Army Convention Order to forbid acts of violence within the borders of the Republic of Ireland. Their main targets became British forces in Northern Ireland. The objective was to force Britain out of Ireland. The campaign was launched by simultaneous attacks on targets at the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Damage occurred to a BBC relay transmitter, a courthouse and several army barracks in Northern Ireland. In a statement of the 12 December 1956, the IRA announced that they had “carried the fight to the enemy…”, that their aim was “an independent, united, democratic Irish Republic”, and that they would fight “until the invader is driven from our soil”. As a response to the bombings of several Royal Ulster Constabulary posts (Northern Irish police stations), the Northern Irish government and the Irish Republic both responded with internments without trial and long prison sentences for the convicted. In the following hundreds of IRA fighters were arrested. This and the need of the Catholic communities for protection during the campaign made it difficult for the IRA to establish units in the Northern parts of Ireland. Only a few causalities during the Border Campaign have been counted.
The time of The Troubles began in the 1960s with attacks on Catholic Civil Rights marches in Northern Ireland, as Catholics were demanding to be treated as equal citizens. The troops sent by the British government to reinforce the Northern Irish police force and troops were officially neutral, and supposed to uphold law and order and the right of Northern Ireland to self-determination. For the IRA these forces were forces of occupation and combatants. As an investigation conducted by the police force in Ombudsman proved later on, the British troops colluded with loyalist paramilitaries on several occasions, were involved in murder and obstructed the course of justice and investigations in favor of the loyalist parties involved ("Investigations into the circumstances surrounding the death of Raymond McCord Jr and related matters ") . The main characteristic of this three decades lasting struggle was the formation of Northern Ireland paramilitary groups that organized bloody campaigns against the Catholic population and took up the armed fights with IRA members. The Ulster Volunteer Force possibly the most famous of these paramilitary groups attacked and killed several store owners in 1966. They would also play a key role when the peaceful acts of civil disobedience and protests would turn into a battlefield. During several civil rights marches, protesters were attacked with clubs by Protestant loyalist; while police did little to protect the protesters. These ongoing street fights, led to vicious sectarian battles in Belfast and elsewhere and in 1969 homes were burnt and many people died in an escalation of the violence: 8 Catholics were killed, 750 injured and 1,505 had been forced out of their homes – five times the number of Protestants. In 1969, and on the request of the Northern Irish government, English troops arrived to restore order and prevent sectarian attacks against the Catholic communities. Those initially welcomed them, but the relation soured soon because of the heavy-handedness of the British army. Between 1970 and 1972 the situation deteriorated further and 500 people among them just over half civilians lost their lives. These incidents were partly related to armed fights between the IRA and Northern Ireland troops, IRA campaigns to protect Catholic communities, battles over internment and torture as well as to the internment itself, and the killing of 14 unarmed nationalist civil rights demonstrators by the British army on what we know as “Bloody Sunday”. The IRA conducted 1,300 bombings that cost the lives of about one hundred soldiers and wounded 500 more, but also unfortunately cost the lives of many civilians. The loyalist paramilitary groups were another factor in increasing the death toll: they went on a campaign of sectarian assassination of nationalists, simply defined as Catholics. In 1975, sectarian killings spiked again along with internal feuding between paramilitary groups. After the attack on Lord Mountbatten of Burma, in 1979, who was killed while vacationing on his boat in Northern Ireland by the IRA, the courts decided to try members of the IRA no longer as political prisoners but treat them like ordinary criminals. This led to prison protest and hunger strikes among the IRA inmates and the death of several prisoners who simply starved themselves to death. Their cases entailed a wave of support and sympathy from the civilian population and guaranteed the IRA broad support. In addition, the weapon donations received from Libya in the 1980s enabled the IRA to step up their campaigns and attack higher profile targets. The Brighton hotel bombing on 12 October 1984 is an example of this empowerment. The campaign was aimed at figures of high prominence, like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who was staying for the Conservative Party conference. The attack killed five people including a conservative MP, and injured thirty-four others, like the Trade and Industry Secretary. The year leading up to the ceasefire in 1994was a particularly tense one with death tolls of Catholic citizens spiking due to the killing sprees of paramilitary loyalist groups; this lead to a ‘tit-for-tat situation with the IRA which claimed even more lives. Not always successful in their plans, the IRA tried to restrict their attacks at this point to the hostile paramilitary groups and enter at the same time negotiations leading to a ceasefire. After the ceasefire went into effect, the IRA felt that their English counterpart did not follow up on the negotiations and attacked the Canary Wharf in London and large parts of the city Manchester causing a substantial damage of almost five hundred million pound sterling to the British; the attack also injured about 200 civilians and left two employees of the wharf dead. After this campaign, they returned again to the negotiation table and ever since the ceasefire has been widely respected.
Leaving aside the last attack that occurred on British soil, it becomes evident, that most of the times the IRA aimed to cause damage and causalities to the military and governmental institutions and representatives. Their actions clearly stand in strong contrast with those of the paramilitary groups of the loyalists, whose only ‘raison d’être’ was the terrorizing, expulsion and often gruesome murdering of civilian Catholics. It is important to note the fact that criminal investigations like the one executed by police forces in Ombudsman proved that the British military and the Northern Irish armed forces often indirectly supported these paramilitary groups during The Troubles and facilitated their criminal conduct by turning a notoriously blind eye ("Investigations into the circumstances surrounding the deathof Raymond McCord Jr and related matters "). One has also to examine the political agenda and intentions of the British and the fact that Northern Ireland stayed, even though declared independent from the English government, an entity that was allied with Britain. In this context it should also be taken into consideration that the Northern part of Ireland has always been the most industrialized part of Ireland and therefore the part that generated the most revenues, which made it an interesting and profitable bait for Britain that they would not want to easily let go of.
It has been characteristic in history, that in the face of a revolt of the people, the occupying force has practically no other choice than to break down on the population itself and therefore on civilians, as it proves impossible for them to identify fighters within the people’s lines. It also needs to be pointed out that this strategy of intimidation uses civilians as a pawn to force the fighting part of the citizens to cease its activities and riots. It is also a policy of “hitting the masses” and hoping that among some of those arrested or killed might be part of the original target.
The English and later on the government of Northern Ireland did exactly this, until the situation escalated and the IRA was able to attain more fire power through weapon deliveries. Once it became clear that the IRA would have access to advanced and more weapons, this strategy could not work any longer. Also world media began to turn its attention towards the hunger strikes and protests of the IRA members and the Catholic repression and persecution that was escalating during The Troubles. People all over the world began to relate to the Irish cause, some of them from just freshly emerged nations born out of former colonies. There was a growing public support and empathy for the Irish cause. In a post-colonial and post-imperialistic world there was little justification for not granting the right of self-determination and full independence to the people of a nation. Therefore the agreement of 1998, with the right for the Irish –North and South- to determinate to which entities they would want to belong, was long overdue.
During their armed struggle, IRA was classified by the British as a proscribed terrorist organization. Later on, they based their judgment on the following definition stated in the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1989 : “terrorism…is the use of violence for political ends, and includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear…”(Lord of Berryiew QC). While terrorism seems to be as old as mankind, yet interestingly the term was created in the context of the state terrorism that the French government practiced during the Reign of Terror, a time of severe government initiated coercion. The word “terrorism” is emotionally and politically highly charged and that greatly complicates the attempts of finding a precise definition of the term. The term is often used to delegitimize political opponents and at the same time to legitimize the state’s own use of force against the so-called terrorists. Terrorism has been practiced by many political organizations to help them to pursue their goals: right- and left-wing parties, nationalistic groups, religious groups, revolutionaries as well as ruling governments. So what makes the terrorist a real one? One defining characteristic might be the indiscriminate use of violence against noncombatants or civilians for the purpose of gaining publicity for a group, its cause or an individual - but this has not been agreed upon widely.
These divergences have made it impossible for the United Nations to agree on a single convention to define terrorism. Therefore, the international community has adopted a series of sectoral conventions that defines and criminalizes different types of terrorist activities. These sectoral conventions follow an operational approach by sector, like for example conventions for the suppression of unlawful seizures of aircrafts, terrorist bombings, or financing of terrorism or on the physical protection of nuclear materials ("Treaty Collection"). This approach does not take into account the motivation of the perpetrators and automatically assumes that the states are active allies of the international community in the fight of terror, as the definition of terrorist applies only to non-state entities. The state is also the actor that would apply the criminal law scenario on the terrorist group and apprehend and persecute those who have committed the acts. The development of these sectorial conventions took the UN over 20 years, with the result that the issue of terrorism is basically sent back to the level of the nation in which these acts occur. It also excludes the possibility of state terrorism against its population, while history has shown contrary evidence.
According to British attempts of definition as well as the approaches developed by the UN, the IRA would clearly classify to be a terrorist organization. The United States, whose definition is the updated version of the British one of 1989, also clearly identified the IRA as a terrorist organization ("National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism") .
Nonetheless, we have to consider that many of these definitions were tailored to the circumstances and by a nation with certain interest or concern that was itself involved in a struggle. Even the UN does not consist of all world members with equal rights. Its decision making nucleus is restricted to the permanent member countries. The Big 5 include China, France, Russia, UK and the United States and their status allows them to veto the adoption of any substantive draft.
However, as a world community, we have to ask ourselves, if we want the interest of the majority of our world’s population in the hands of a few. Do we really want to live in a world where the definitions derived of a certain conflict and tailored to meet the needs of the powerful at that time become our universal standards; the very standards to determine the fate of minorities and people who are trying to keep what is legally theirs: their country and their homes? What about the rights and interest of those nations and countries that did not make it into the Big 5? And furthermore, is a fighter who defends his country a terrorist, because it is convenient for the aggressor and invader to label and discredit him as such? Does it seem just to say that the IRA should have ceded to the British and never should have sought independence in the first place not to be labeled as “terrorists”?
Just imagine you show a map of the world to an elementary student who knows nothing about the political implications of the subject. And while showing him you ask to which people the island on the upper left of Britain should belong in his opinion; this island has no land connection to Britain and it has always had an indigenous population. What looks like an easy exercise of common sense, becomes a sophisticated and almost dangerous subject in today’s geopolitical world. Maybe this is why so many nations of oppressed people had to resort to the religious approach. The big world religions defend people’s right to self defense and to living without coercion and oppression, especially when it comes to violent governments or occupiers. The Old Testament is full of examples of people who went to claim their land by armed struggle. In the Hindu religion, military and secret (terrorist?) warfare are clearly defined and have to be fought as just and righteous wars with the approval of the society – not just the rulers. Similar to Islam, war is defined to happen between combatants and the term combatant is clearly defined. In Islam the civilian population has to be protected on both sides of the conflict and their means of livelihood cannot be taken or destroyed. And the Jesus of the Bible was more than just a mild mannered rabbi, he also brought revolutionary ideas of justice and freedom from oppression.
So where are we as a world community today and how can we judge and pinpoint, if organizations like the IRA are terrorist organization or freedom fighters? The truth is we cannot; at least not under reference of all the definitions that are out there. Our conscience and our common sense paired with the most possible knowledge and understanding of the situation and the historical and political circumstances has to guide us to make the right decisions and judgments. And our own judgment risks being as subjective as the definition produced by the governmental institution that have attempted this so far (Weir). But one last thing deserves consideration on the specific subject of the IRA. In 1998 the Department of Education for Northern Ireland cofounded a project called CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet) with the objective to document all causalities that occurred due to the Conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 until today. The results tell us that, while the majority of the victims were civilians, the highest ratio of civilian killings was not the one resulting from IRA violence. The IRA ratio of civilian death was –though sadly enough- about 35%. Yet the civilian death toll out of all casualties caused by British security forces was 51% and their secret allies and protégées, the loyalist paramilitaries, brought it to a terrifying 85% ("Sutton Index of Death"). The IRA was clearly not the party whose major objective it was to kill and terrorize civilians So again it will be up to our sane discernment and sense of justice to draw the right conclusions in this historical conflict. And as the late President John F. Kennedy remarked: Those who make a peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
