Michael Ancram's legacy offers lessons for a time of war
Just over 30 years ago, Conservative politician Michael Ancram made a journey into the heart of IRA territory in Catholic Derry in Northern Ireland.
Accompanied only by his driver, Ancram, then Britain’s Northern Ireland minister, visited the home of Edward Daly, the bishop of Derry. A meeting took place in Daly’s front room with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader who was also believed to serve on the IRA war council. Ancram had only his armed driver to protect him.
The IRA cut off both entrances to the road so their talks could take place in safety. Ancram’s journey was fraught with personal, professional and political risk.
But this first-ever meeting between a British minister and an IRA representative on IRA territory was a signal that the British government wanted to talk - and so did the IRA.
For the first three hours, McGuinness lectured Ancram about past British injustices towards Ireland. Gently, Ancram moved the conversation across to the real purpose of their meeting: opening up a line of communication between the British government and the Irish republican paramilitary.
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This conversation ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement, the end of the Troubles, and peace in Northern Ireland.
Ancram, who died early this week, told me about this covert meeting with McGuinness 15 years later over a bottle of Chateau Musar at the Albergo, a Beirut hotel.
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The following day, we drove across the the Bekaa Valley from Beirut to Damascus, where we met Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal. By then, Ancram was out of ministerial office, but still a Tory MP. Determined to learn from his successful Northern Ireland negotiations, he was eager to open up lines of communication with Hezbollah and Hamas.
After a 90-minute meeting in a secret location - Israel had previously tried to assassinate Meshaal by poisoning, and has a record of killing Hamas negotiators - Ancram turned to me: “He is the kind of man we could do business with.”
Wasted opportunities
Our meeting with Meshaal took place in the aftermath of the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, which, to the fury of Israel and the United States, had been comprehensively won by Hamas in what observers agreed was a free and fair vote.
The US refused to accept the result. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice set to work undermining Hamas, imposed sanctions on Gaza, and in effect left the enclave to rot.
This was the most important of a number of wasted opportunities to allow Hamas to participate in a government of national unity that would include all Palestinian factions and be truly representative - as former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and even (eventually) former Prime Minister Tony Blair have come to recognise.
He will be especially missed, because so few like him survive today. He was not a great man. He was better than that. He was a good man
The course we took to stop war in Northern Ireland was the opposite of the one we, the collective West, are taking in Palestine. And it’s easy to see why: Sinn Fein, whose spokespersons were once banned on the BBC, is now the biggest political party in Northern Ireland. Israel and the international community could not conceivably allow Hamas to do the same in Palestine.
Ancram’s conversations with Meshaal and others, which he told me were faithfully repeated back to the Foreign Office in London, were an honourable attempt to keep lines of communication open.
It is now clear that his efforts, along with those of others - such as Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy and Alastair Crooke, the Beirut-based former British diplomat who facilitated Ancram’s meetings with Meshaal and others - were doomed.
They were hopeless in the face of former US President George W Bush’s intellectually primitive and morally derelict division of the world between “good” and “evil”.
Apocalyptic vision
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reasserted this deranged ideology in July, when he told the US Congress that Israel and its American ally were involved in an existential “clash between barbarism and civilisation … between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life”.
This elemental worldview drove the catastrophic Iraq invasion and the murderous “war on terror” that followed. Since it insists that the ends justify the means, it justifies unlimited violence, savagery and slaughter, as well as the most terrible forms of torture.
By defining the opposing side as evil, it leaves no room for negotiations. The US and Israel do not want negotiations with Hamas of the sort that successfully occurred with the IRA.
They want only to defeat it militarily.
The same applies to Hezbollah. Lebanese diplomats now say Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated shortly after he agreed to a temporary ceasefire with Israel. This may well explain the need to assassinate him.
Tragically, this apocalyptic vision has infected the West. It explains why the US and Britain continue to back Netanyahu as his semi-fascist government goes on a rampage across the Middle East.
Ancram was a scion of a great British landowning family; by the time he died, he had become the 13th Marquess of Lothian, having inherited the title from his father. Perhaps because of that, he understood and cared about the burden of history, and the unresolved problems and unforgotten injuries it brings.
He was a Catholic, which might explain why he understood persecution, suffering and intellectual humility. In short, he represented an older and wiser statecraft than the ignorance and inhumanity of Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden or British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
He understood that it was as important to listen as to lecture; that the other side has a point of view; and above all, that intractable problems can be solved without going to war.
He will be especially missed, because so few like him survive today. He was not a great man. He was better than that. He was a good man. May he rest in peace.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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