Human Rights as War by Other Means: Peace Politics in Northern Ireland

Chapter 1. Whose Rights and Whose Peace?

CHAPTER 1 Whose Rights and Whose Peace? I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.” —George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” “We have peace,” declared “Séamus,” a taxi driver in national west Belfast. “And they can have their culture, or whatever they want to call it, as long as it’s not in my face. And I can have mine, and I hope I’m not in their face.”1 Séamus was explaining to me his attitude toward loyalists and the new, separate peace in Northern Ireland in May 2010, while he showed me around the West Belfast Taxi Association’s new taxi terminal in Belfast city center. The spacious new terminal, its outer walls decorated with murals from Irish legends, serves as a sort of bus station for what are locally called black taxis. Black taxi services began in the 1970s as a grassroots initiative to provide transportation in areas where widespread violence restricted buses’ regular operation. Of course, then, the taxis—one of the radical cooperatives of the period—were illegal and unlicensed. Enterprising activists drove used London hackney cabs up and down main arteries to the west of the city, charging passengers a shilling per journey. More than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), black taxis are legitimate. The Northern Ireland minister for regional development appeared at the new terminal’s opening in 2010. The association serves the area of nationalist west Belfast. In addition to providing cheap, reliable transportation , the association offers historical tours, nicknamed “terror tours,” 2 Chapter 1 in partnership with some loyalist black taxi drivers. (There are similar black taxi services in loyalist west Belfast, but they do not serve as large an area and populace.) Drivers are understandably proud of their new status. The terminal , the history tours, and recognition as a transportation provider are part of a peace dividend for west Belfast. As the political context changed more than a decade since the GFA, Séamus’s perspective on the conflict changed as well. When our conversation turned to the Protestant drivers on the loyalist Shankill Road segment of the tours, we talked about the Shankill bomb in 1993. This Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) operation killed ten people, including the bomber and two schoolgirls.2 “It was terrible,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I’d have been, like, ‘Fuck them’.” With this new, separate peace, sympathy, like terror tours, was possible. Having survived injuries from a loyalist attack in his youth, Séamus’s newfound sympathy was a major shift. But others are less sanguine about the soundness of this peace and more cynical about enterprises like terror tours. “The problem is that it [the conflict] isn’t over,” another research participant explained a few days after I visited the new taxi terminal. “Ruth” was a long-time activist in the loyalist Shankill area, who, like Séamus, had experienced loss during the conflict. Now working for a parenting education program, she had been a community activist for decades, often meeting with foreign researchers, politicians, donors, and filmmakers—including me. Ruth admired the success of development efforts like the taxi terminal and tours, but she had reservations about nationalist interpretations of the peace process: “Some [nationalists] seem to really think that the war was won on their behalf, and the IRA were winners in that way. But there were no winners. We all lost.” For all the changes in Northern Ireland since the settlement, she said, outsiders struggle to understand that peace is not complete. An American once asked her opinion about “taking the peace wall down.” Ruth replied, “Which one? What do you mean? There’s 88 of them. What are you suggesting?” She claimed that some community organizers make their living monitoring interface areas between nationalist and loyalist neighborhoods, where walls and other defensive architecture have been erected to protect people and property from vandalism and violence. Meanwhile, taxi drivers, Catholic and Protestant , make a living taking tourists to see the walls. But the walls, phone networks , and tours, she argued, are not emblematic of past conflict and present peace; instead, they are persistent expressions of divisions that still require walls to protect people from their enemies—their neighbors.3 Whose Rights...