Justice is the glue that holds society together. Without an agreed system of law, people have no recourse when they have been wronged but revenge, blood-feuding, and conflict.
But here is an irony: The price of conjuring peace out of conflict is that justice is not done; most crimes go unpunished.
As participants in the recent Annapolis Conference try yet again to negotiate a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is the critical point politicians, diplomats and the wider public need to remember: Peace doesn t only mean agreeing who gets to control what. Peace also means that those who have suffered most – the families of the dead – will not see the killers of their loved ones brought to justice.
The parallels between the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Israel can be exaggerated, but on this issue they prove the point. The Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland, only became possible when ordinary people there accepted that those in prison for terrorist acts and paramilitary crimes committed during the Troubles would have to be released, and their representatives would have to be part of a new political settlement. That didn t happen overnight.
In the early to mid-1990s, as the political process unfolded that led to the Good Friday Agreement, correspondents reporting from Belfast grew used to being quietly accosted in pubs or at press conference by someone who had lost a relative to paramilitary violence.
With the dignity that only enduring loss can impart, the relative would politely ask for a moment of a reporter s time to tell their story, begging that their loved one be remembered. In some cases they asked a reporter to help find out where their dead had been buried; others asked for help in making the case that justice not be sacrificed for the sake of a politically expedient agreement.
Occasionally, dignity disappeared, and the understandable and boiling desire for vengeance asserted itself. On July 12th, 1993, the great tribal victory celebration of Northern Ireland s Protestants, one Shankill Road man in his 70 s, only partly caught up in the alcohol and martial spirit that mark the day, swore to me he would not rest until he had found the killer of his son George, dead these 20 years. After he d had his revenge, he said, the police would have no need to look for him – he d present himself at the station house and they could do with him whatever they wanted to. The old man was in his cups but he meant every word.
The broad outline of the Good Friday Agreement was already known in 1993 – just as the broad outline of the settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is known today. Yet years went by in negotiation, almost all of it centered on the difficulty of legitimizing the actions of paramilitary groups like the IRA.
And no matter what the politicians did, there was no prospect of selling the agreement to the Northern Irish people until the desire for revenge and the demand for justice had waned. Then, inevitably, those already imprisoned for terrorist and paramilitary activity became the focus of the deal.
The IRA and Sinn Fein had long established the connection between paramilitary groups and political parties, and now Protestant paramilitary groups did the same. If the deal was to happen, said the political representatives of paramilitaries, the prisoners had to be released. They were soldiers fighting in a war, not terrorists.
So negotiations faltered, until, in January 1998, Tony Blair s Northern Ireland Secretary, Marjorie Mo Mowlam, went to the Maze Prison to meet Protestant paramilitaries face to face.
She persuaded them to allow their political representatives to participate in the talks; the quid pro quo as it played out was their early release from jail. A little over three months later, the Good Friday deal was done. And the people of the North accepted it.
What had changed over the five years? The wider public in Northern Ireland, most of whom had not lost relatives in the Troubles, came to the conclusion that letting murderers go free was a worthwhile price for peace.
Prisoners are as much a bargaining chip in negotiations to end the Middle East conflict as bits of land in the West Bank, as much as the question of Holy Places in Jerusalem.
As a prelude to the current resumption of diplomacy, Israel s government released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. If there is to be a successful resolution to the conflict, eventually all the prisoners, including the most famous – Marwan Barghouti – and the most notorious – those of Hamas – will have to be released.
The Palestinian leadership will have to convince their own people that no acts of revenge will be countenanced, that the acts of the IDF are forgiven. Sinn Fein provided similar orders to its Irish Republican adherents concerning the British army.
Perhaps the IDF will have to submit to an inquiry about specific actions, similar to what the British Army has undergone in the Widgery Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday. While it is difficult to subject oneself to such a process, reconciliation is helped by establishing the truth, by attributing responsibility. But an inquiry is not a form of justice.
Peace does not equal justice. And so long as the Israeli and Palestinian publics and their respective diasporas do not accept this painful truth, so long as they prefer to dwell on every crime done to them, so long as they take satisfaction in the other side s suffering as down payment on a later day of reckoning, there is no prospect of a resolution to the conflict, no matter what deal political leaders agree among themselves.
Michael Goldfarbhas reported extensively from the Middle East and covered Northern Ireland throughout the 1990s for American public radio. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service, and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.com.
