I’d like to start by talking about peace-building and the process of addressing the root causes of conflict. In particular, when you’re looking at the issue of violence, one of the lessons from Northern Ireland that’s most important is the intervention of state actors and the military. Take for example the 1972 Bloody Sunday, or what’s known as the Bogside Massacre: There was an incident on the 30th of January where British military went in and killed a number of civilians. This has a knock-on effect in terms of support for violence in Northern Ireland. The Provisional Irish Republican Army, which had begun a campaign two years previously, had a boosted status and an increase of recruitment and support after Bloody Sunday.
This is an important lesson to look at how to undermine violence. It’s a cliché, I suppose, that violence begets violence. When we’re looking at the Israeli-Palestinian context, a large focus is on how to prevent Hamas from using weapons, and the political violence of Palestinian groups as well as Israeli groups. A lesson to look at is that when you use violence against civilians, it usually breeds support for violent responses, and in that is the use of armed violence, as well as non-armed violence. With that, we have to look at how to build a sustainable process as to how to deal with that.
One of the discussions that have been happening recently, since the summer operation in 2014, is the decommissioning for development, or the disarmament for development concept. And that is a problematic route to go down, because what it essentially suggests is that the whole population of the Gaza Strip must be held to ransom on the basis of a few military groups. And that doesn’t work, because you punish the civilian population for something which they are not all responsible for, and a decommissioning process in itself is very delicate, it has to go through stages. And one of those stages that’s most important is the way in which military groups and armed groups need to be invited into a political process so that they can then voice the grievances that they have – some of the grievances may be legitimate, some may be illegitimate – but the point is that if you can find a way to stop armed groups from trying to legitimize violence to their constituents, then you can undermine that and bring those people into a process where they can deal with these sorts of issues in a nonviolent way.
I believe it’s important for people to engage on these issues, so if anyone wishes to reach out to me on twitter it’s @garyspedding and we can discuss some of these issues. If anybody who is listening would like to talk about it, I would like to engage with people about that. Thank you.
Gary Spedding is a human rights and conflict resolution activist in Northern Ireland.
Want to submit a TalkBox? Send us an email to talkbox@tlv1.fm
