The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  Netanyahu’s government lost power in 1999. A further attempt to find agreement was made between his successor, the Labour Party’s Ehud Barak, and Arafat at Camp David in 2000. Israel appeared prepared to make concessions that would cede the vast majority of the West Bank to Palestinian control but not to lose access to the holy sites in East Jerusalem and to trade some Israeli land for keeping some West Bank settlements. This proved to be a sticking point for Arafat who not only demanded his share of the ancient city but, allegedly, also raised the right of the Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) of 1948 to return to their former homes and properties in Israel. The talks collapsed. The Times, at any rate, believed it knew where to apportion blame. ‘Mr Arafat has passed up a Palestinian state that would include 90 per cent of his goals, plus the certainty of economic support,’ bemoaned the leading article, written by Rosemary Righter:

  Instead, he has gone home insisting that he will unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, on September 13, that will cover only a morcellized 40 per cent. Basking in the praise of Arabs who have never seen a defeat they did not call victory, Mr Arafat may not yet see what he has lost – both in American goodwill, and on the ground. But his negotiators do see it. They left Camp David insisting that the talks will go on and that they saw in the outcome ‘seeds that will grow very fast’. They know that, nurtured by revived Palestinian militancy, the seeds of war could sprout fast too. Mr Barak’s position is difficult; Mr Arafat’s is perilous. Before September 13, this Houdini of the Middle East must measure the depth of the abyss.6

  It was not quite the end. Talks in Taba, in January 2001, proved to be Arafat’s last chance to negotiate a settlement. In the event, he failed, once again, to grasp the opportunity. The Israeli people responded by voting out Barak. In his place they turned to a Likud administration under the hard-line Ariel Sharon, whose failure to prevent the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982 continued to hinder his claims to statesmanship. Arafat was once again seen as part of the problem rather than key to a solution. He found himself hemmed in and under effective Israeli house arrest in Ramallah on the West Bank. President Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, endorsed a new ‘road map’ for peace that envisaged a Palestinian state in the West Bank with a democratic leader (though not Arafat) if the bloody attacks on Israel stopped. Plans were one matter, delivery quite another. Arafat’s health deteriorated and it became clear that it would take a new Palestinian leader to establish any basis of trust with his Israeli interlocutors. Hope remained. But it was yet to triumph over experience.

  Closer to home, a different peace process also struggled to bring harmony where there had been discord. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement failed to assuage the arguments of the gunmen. Atrocities continued to stain the late 1980s in Ulster. In 1988, the IRA marked Remembrance Day in Enniskillen by detonating a bomb there, killing eleven and injuring sixty-one as they gathered around the memorial to the fallen of two world wars. In March the following year, two British corporals who found themselves confronted by mourners at an IRA funeral were beaten to death on the street. Having narrowly failed to blow up Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton Grand Hotel in 1984, the IRA’s first attempt to murder John Major had come within two months of his becoming Prime Minister. On 7 February 1991, an IRA van sped up Whitehall and fired two mortar bombs at 10 Downing Street while Major was with his War Cabinet (it was the middle of the Gulf War). One bomb landed in the 10 Downing Street garden, smashing windows. Two others landed close by without exploding. Subsequent outrages were even less discriminate: a bomb in central Manchester in December 1992 wounded sixty-four while fifty were injured and two children killed by a bomb placed in Warrington’s town centre in March 1993. The following month, the IRA struck the City of London, inflicting £1 billion worth of damage and forcing the introduction of a ‘ring of steel’ to protect one of the world’s greatest financial centres.

  It was against this background that the search for a negotiated solution recommenced. In November 1993, it was revealed that the British Government had held secret talks with the IRA. A further effort at rapprochement with Dublin was also attempted. In May 1993, the Queen met Mary Robinson in London. It was the first meeting between the British and Irish heads of state since 1937. In December, Major and the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, agreed the ‘Downing Street’ peace accord. Sinn Fein were offered the chance to join the peace process if their terrorist accomplices ended the armed struggle. This appeal was met, if not quite in the desired form of words, in August 1994 when the IRA declared a ‘complete cessation of military operations’ – after a quarter-century of Troubles that had claimed three thousand victims. Loyalist terror groups followed suit in October. In January 1995, British troops ended daytime patrolling of Belfast’s streets. On the last day of January, the Prime Minister’s office fielded a telephone call from Stuart Higgins, the editor of the Sun. He asked, speculatively, if Major was planning to meet the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams. When asked why he should imagine this, Higgins replied that he was guessing that there must be some big story brewing because the Wapping print hall appeared to be preparing an unusually large print run of The Times’s Irish edition. The Sun’s editor did not know what The Times was up to, but thought Downing Street might be able to tell him. Clearly, something was afoot and when Downing Street discovered The Times had gained access to a draft of the framework document drawn up by the British and Irish governments for Ulster’s constitutional future, feverish attempts were made to prevent publication. During the evening, Christopher Meyer, Major’s press secretary, made several telephone calls to Stothard begging him not to publish the details before the final terms were officially released, arguing that doing so imperilled the peace process. Unmoved, The Times went ahead with its scoop, although the Government’s statement was added to the later editions. The front page report was written by Matthew D’Ancona, a Roman Catholic with Unionist sympathies, who stated that the draft terms brought ‘the prospect of a united Ireland closer than it has been at any time since partition in 1920.’ Given that the draft included proposals for strong north-south executive bodies it was a fair comment. With Unionists duly alarmed and John Hume, the SDLP leader calling for everyone to ‘shut up’, Major went so far as to deliver a television address to reassure the people of the province. The Prime Minister had every cause to be alarmed and not just for the peace of Ulster. His dwindling parliamentary majority at Westminster had forced him to be reliant on the goodwill of Ulster Unionist MPs. In his autobiography, Major accused the scholarly D’Ancona of being ‘an ambitious young journalist’ and his disclosure evidence of ‘malign behaviour.’ It certainly gave Unionist politicians the opportunity to make clear to Major that the sort of terms revealed in The Times would be unacceptable as a basis for a settlement.7

  The final draft of the framework document was published on 22 February. It proposed an Ulster legislative assembly and a revocation of the Republic’s constitutional claim on the province. The cross-border aspects that had caused such fury in the leaked draft remained, although in a more carefully circumscribed form. While accepting that much remained vague and uncertain, The Times gave qualified support to the process.

  However vague remained the details, The Times supported the concept. The IRA was less trusting. Despite the acceptance of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, that the decommissioning of IRA weapons was not a precondition of the talks, Republicans remained suspicious that a new assembly would be another means of turning back the clock to a province under permanent Stormont Unionist majority rule. In February 1996, they returned to violence, killing two in a blast in London’s Docklands and injuring two hundred in Manchester. Coded warnings paralysed railway stations and motorways during the 1997 general election campaign and it was not until Tony Blair had been elected that a new ceasefire was declared. Sinn Fein was duly rewarded with a seat at the peace talks. In 1998, the party joined a new power-sharing assembly at Stormont. In return for supposedly removing the armalit
e from their ballot-box strategy, convicted terrorists (both Republican and loyalist) were conditionally released from prison. The following year, Chris Patten issued a report that wound up the RUC, replacing it with a new police service whose structure was supposed to reassure nationalist apprehensions.

  There were those who wanted some clarity on what Ulster’s new state of constructive ambiguity actually involved. Despite the Patten Report, Sinn Fein continued its policy of non-compliance with the new police service and the scale of the IRA’s decommissioning, although secret, was clearly symbolic rather than substantive. A splinter group, the ‘Real IRA’ killed twenty-eight and injured 220 by detonating a bomb in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. Unease continued in the Unionist community. David Trimble had been elected First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly but had to find a means of reaching out to unionism’s disaffected voices. Attempts to curtail the Orange Order marching season had already become a flashpoint, particularly, at Drumcree. Furthermore, devolving authority to a power-sharing executive in which the main parties were all guaranteed key portfolios appeared to encourage voters to register their apprehensions by endorsing the more extreme parties. Thus, the nationalist SDLP haemorrhaged votes to Sinn Fein while Trimble’s pro-agreement but deeply divided Ulster Unionists lost ground to the fundamentalists in the Revd Ian Paisley’s DUP. A process intended to make the politicians behave in a more consensual way actually encouraged the electorate to vote increasingly for the hardliners. The IRA’s continual dalliance with illegal activity led to Stormont’s temporary suspension.

  The experience of post-apartheid South Africa was uppermost in the minds of those trying to drive the peace process forward and there was no shortage of precedents for terrorists being brought into mainstream politics. The fall in the number of fatal shootings (although punishment beatings and kneecapping continued unabated) raised expectations that more normal living conditions in Ulster would breed more normal politics. The first leading article after the 1998 Agreement saluted the deal, but the piece’s author, Michael Gove, was deeply uneasy about the terms and became more alarmed once the details emerged. He almost succeeded in persuading Stothard to oppose the Agreement.8 When nationalist objections had curtailed the marching season two years before, Orange Order Unionists were pitted against the security forces in ugly scenes at Drumcree. Stothard had sent Gove over there to cover the event at a time when most of the media were reporting it in a light highly unsympathetic to the Unionist cause. Gove empathized with Unionist fears, ‘the sense that Ulster is a province under siege has been a persistent feature of life in Northern Ireland’, he wrote. He quoted sympathetically the opinion of the Drumcree marchers which summed up their attitude succinctly: ‘“Only a couple of years ago Sinn Fein were murdering innocent people; now they’re treated like film starts and lords of the manor. It proves violence works. Of course we’re angry.”‘9 In the succeeding years, while the peace process switched repeatedly between gears and indeed was repeatedly flung into reverse, Gove continued to provide commentary that balanced sympathy for David Trimble’s predicament with doubts about the price paid for appeasing Sinn Fein-IRA. Gove was perplexed by the double standards of commentators who called for life prison sentences for child molesters but supported the British Government’s release of ‘some of the UK’s most morally culpable mass murderers after sentences which would be considered lenient for robbers’. ‘The price of the “peace” negotiated on Good Friday in 1998 has been the freeing of hundreds of Barabbases to satisfy the mobs which call themselves paramilitary organisations,’ Gove maintained. ‘How can the rule of law maintain respect if it is applied arbitrarily?’ Furthermore, he believed there was ‘a clear moral difference’ between the democratic emancipation of Nelson Mandela’s ANC and the embrace offered to both Republican and Unionist gunmen whose role had been to disrupt the workings of a democracy. ‘The fate of terrorists, we are told, is to end up dancing with duchesses at Lancaster House,’ he began his peroration. Yet, in this instance, ‘ministers are not executing another skilful diplomatic pas de deux’ but ‘dancing on the graves of children’.10

  II

  There was no shortage of symbolism when the thirty-four countries of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe met to bury the Cold War hatchet in Paris in November 1990. History was punctuated by peace treaties signed in Paris and the most famous – or notorious – had been agreed at Versailles. ‘Can permanent peace in Europe at last be celebrated today?’ asked the leading article in The Times commemorating the latest endeavour to settle the Continent:

  Unfortunately not. In burying the Yalta status quo, the popular revolutions in central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself have unleashed local, national and regional tensions, fed by ethnic rivalries, disputed borders and the fragility of renascent democratic processes. These instabilities, though preferable to Yalta’s sleep of the living dead, make the celebration of continental peace premature.11

  At the time Rosemary Righter composed these lines, the three Baltic States had unilaterally declared their independence, but the Soviet Union was still in existence. It would survive, at least officially, for another year of troubles during which Gorbachev was briefly toppled in a coup by hardliners only to be reinstated by the man who delivered him and humiliated him within the space of hours, Boris Yeltsin. A Russian, as opposed to Soviet, identity would now elbow itself to the fore. On 2 December 1991, Ukraine voted for independence, destroying Gorbachev’s hopes of a new, looser confederation surviving. Two days before Christmas, and within days of the superpower’s seventieth year, the headline on The Times’s front page proclaimed simply, ‘The Soviet Union is no more’. It fell to the paper’s Moscow correspondent, Mary Dejevsky, to pronounce its end: ‘The world’s second superpower and communist prototype ceased to exist at the weekend by common consent of its unhappy constituents’, her front-page lead began. A temporary fig leaf was created in its stead, a Commonwealth of Independent States, but its ‘only one central structure agreed so far is the strategic nuclear command – a fitting legacy for a regime built on military power’.12 On Christmas Day, Gorbachev stood down, handing over his control of nuclear weapons to Russia. In a leading article entitled simply, in the manner of an obituary, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’, The Times paid tribute to him, recalling the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu: ‘When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, “we did it ourselves!”’13

  In the autumn of the following year, Dejevsky reflected, ‘somewhere between the winter of 1989 and the summer of 1991, the mass fear which held the Soviet Union in thrall dissolved’. The menace of the KGB lost its hypnotic effect to dictate thoughts and actions. ‘For the onlooker it was like watching one of those accelerated films of a plant’s life, but on a grander scale: the fall of an empire in four months and four days, as the ascendant Russia stripped the authority, then the power and finally the dignity, from the unsustainable Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.’14 By then, another multi-ethnic socialist federation was being rent asunder, in the Balkans.

  Between 1991 and 1995, Europe experienced its bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War. Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics, three religions and two alphabets that, with Josip Tito’s death in 1980, had no leader who inspired the requisite awe and confidence to keep it together. A (frequently amended) constitution, a Communist doctrine and opposition to becoming a Soviet satellite proved, by the end of the decade, unequal to the appeals of nationalism and disillusion with economic underperformance. This was all too evident when, in 1990, multiparty elections came to the constituent republics. Croatia turned to the nationalist, Franjo Tudjman. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the winner was Alija Izetbegovic’s Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Both Tudjman and Izetbegovic had previously been imprisoned by the Yugoslav authorities, Tudjman for questioning the scale of pro-Nazi war crimes committed by the Croats and Izetbegovic for his Islamic proselytizing. Serbia, too, voted to move away from pieties of m
ulti-ethnic sentiment. Its new President, Slobodan Milosevic, frightened the other members of the Yugoslav federation with his increasingly nationalistic and bellicose rhetoric, although in this he was, if anything, surpassed by the leading opposition party in Belgrade.

  Confronted by these assertions of national and religious identity, the federal authorities withered. In July 1990, the Slovene assembly declared independence, a verdict endorsed by 94.6 per cent in a subsequent referendum on the proviso that a looser arrangement could not be agreed instead. The one federal institution that did have the will to assert itself, the army (the JNA), prepared to intimidate this Slovene Spring into submission. In Belgrade, however, Milosevic was content to let Slovenia secede. Apart from any other consideration, Slovenia’s departure would enhance Serbian predominance in the remaining federation. Meanwhile, the Serb minority were encouraged to create their own enclave in Croatia so that if that republic also seceded the borders of greater Serbia would be stretched further. The ethnic Serbs boycotted a Croat referendum that returned a massive majority in favour of independence. Croatia followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence. Pulled out of Slovenia, the JNA clashed with the lightly armed but tenacious Croatian National Guard and bombarded Dubrovnik and Vukovar. An armistice was agreed on 2 January 1992. By then, Germany had unilaterally recognized Slovenia and Croatia. The promptitude of Helmut Kohl’s government was surprising. Although Germany had recently advocated moves towards a common European foreign and security policy during the Maastricht negotiations, it was quick to act independently when pressured by Croatia’s Catholic co-religionists in Germany. Kohl’s European partners, with varying degrees of reluctance, followed suit. The same process took place in Bosnia, its ethnic Serb minority boycotting the republic’s referendum – which went overwhelmingly in favour of independence – in March 1992. The EU duly recognized Bosnia. In May, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all admitted to the UN.