How Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah can learn from the IRA’s demise

A devastating explosion rips the heart out of a community, killing dozens of people and destroying homes and businesses. 

Amid the grief and recrimination, attention is focused on a paramilitary group funded in large part from another country. There are calls for it to be eradicated, or at least disarmed.

All this is of course familiar to any observer of events in Beirut, and of the castigation of Hezbollah. But in fact it refers to an event 22 years ago and 4,000 km away; on Aug. 15, 1998, 29 people died when a car bomb exploded in the center of Omagh, Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The perpetrators were members of a splinter group of the republican paramilitary Provisional IRA.

It was assumed at the time that the outrage would destroy the fragile Northern Ireland peace process, which had culminated only four months earlier in the Good Friday Agreement to end four decades of violence. Counterintuitively, the opposite happened. The wave of revulsion that followed the bombing was such that paramilitary violence became hopelessly tainted and discredited, and disarmament accelerated.

Do the lessons of Northern Ireland apply to Lebanon? Can Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, learn from the transformation of the IRA into the political powerhouse that is Sinn Fein, and that of its leaders Gerry Adams and the late Martin McGuinness from terrorists to statesmen? I believe they do, and they can.

When I worked in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, the influence of the IRA was malign and pervasive. Whole swaths of Belfast and Derry cities, and the “bandit country” of South Armagh, were off limits to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British army, policed instead by IRA thugs who dispensed summary justice. Much of the IRA’s funding came from deluded Irish-Americans in the US, persuaded that these bloodstained terrorists were fighting for liberation from the British colonial yoke, and apparently happy to deny the right to self-determination of the Northern Ireland majority who wished to remain part of the UK.

None of this would be unfamiliar to people in south Beirut and southern Lebanon, policed by paramilitaries armed and funded by the regime in Tehran.

The Lebanese would also recognize the travesty of democracy that obtained in Northern Ireland, where for decades people have voted according to their religion and their view of Irish unity, rather than any considered judgment of their best interests in terms of employment, housing, education or health care. Indeed, this “confessional” system was effectively enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement, which guaranteed a semi-autonomous power-sharing administration in Belfast. It succeeded in weaning extremists on both sides away from violence, but it remains fundamentally flawed.

Equally, Lebanon’s myriad religious sects claim that their representation in parliament and in government was established and guaranteed by the Taif Agreement, which ended the civil war in 1990. In truth, it is nothing of the kind. Confessional representation in the Middle East was invented by the Ottomans more than a century ago and, insofar as it was covered by the Taif Agreement, it was intended to be temporary: Article 24 of the Lebanese constitution makes clear that it should operate “until such time as the Chamber enacts new electoral laws on a non-confessional basis.”

In Northern Ireland, that is beginning to happen. A growing number of people are declaring “a plague on both your houses,” and profess to be neither nationalist nor unionist. The non-sectarian Alliance Party doubled its vote in three elections in 2019, and is now the province’s third-largest political party.

If Northern Ireland can achieve this 22 years after Good Friday, then so can Lebanon 30 years after Taif. However, there can be no functioning representative democracy when people vote at the point of a gun. How, then, can Nasrallah and Hezbollah be persuaded to give up their weapons, as Adams and the IRA did?

Let us be clear: Adams is a killer, albeit unconvicted (feel free to sue, Gerry; I’ll see you in court, we both know who will win, and the still-grieving relatives of Jean McConville will be there to watch). But he is also a smart, pragmatic politician; he and McGuinness were the first Irish republicans to realize that the game was up, that the “armed struggle” was a busted flush, and that the future of Irish republicanism lay with the peaceful politics of Sinn Fein. 

No paramilitary group can operate without at least the tacit support of the community it claims to represent. After every murderous IRA outrage, a common response among civilians in its West Belfast stronghold was: “Ah, the lads… they go too far sometimes, but their hearts are in the right place.” However, as a raft of social and electoral reforms dismantled the institutional discrimination that had for decades denied Northern Irish Catholics their rights to employment, education, political representation and fair treatment under the law, the sense of injustice that fueled their support for the IRA melted away, and the armed group became irrelevant.

Hezbollah claims to be the ‘resistance,’ but what it is resisting is not entirely clear.

Ross Anderson

As Lebanon’s equivalent armed group, Hezbollah suffered that fate some time ago. It claims to be the “resistance,” but what it is resisting is not entirely clear. Israeli forces are long gone and have no incentive to return, even in the face of Hezbollah’s futile provocations. So what exactly are the guns for, if not a macho prop for people who fear that, without weapons, their politics may have little appeal to the people they claim to represent? And, in any case, for how long can the flow of funds continue from an Iranian economy collapsing under the weight of US sanctions and other countries’ fear of breaching them?

It remains to be seen whether Nasrallah possesses the intellectual firepower to realize that he has two possible futures. In one, he skulks in the shadows for the rest of his miserable existence, until it is brought to an inevitable end by a Mossad bullet or a US drone, just like his late paymaster Qassem Soleimani. In the other, he renounces violence, lays down Hezbollah’s weapons, embraces peaceful politics, and campaigns to give his followers the democratic representation they are entitled to.

If Adams can do it, so can he.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News, and former editor of the Sunday News, Belfast.