GARY RYNHART: Achieving peace and democracy is only half the battle

Last month saw the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. Current and former US presidents gathered in Ireland to celebrate what was a remarkable achievement. Growing up in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, “the Troubles”, as it was called, was a deeply personal and cruel cycle of violence and destruction.   

The kidnapping of the wife and children of a Catholic cleaner who worked in a British Army barracks — thus making him a “legitimate target” in the eyes of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) — and forcing him to drive a truck filled with explosives to a checkpoint to save his family, killing himself and five soldiers, sticks in my mind. Civilians were the overwhelming majority of victims. When I was growing up, seeing an end to it seemed impossible.  

The SA connection was not insignificant. According to former ANC minister Kader Asmal, the IRA helped carry out one of the biggest bomb attacks against SA’s apartheid government in the early 1980s. The attack on Sasolburg was the result of reconnaissance carried out by members of the IRA. On the other side of the coin, the apartheid government indirectly armed paramilitaries on the opposing side, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force. 

Later, when the Northern Irish peace process started, SA influence was again notable. Listening to a recent podcast about the Good Friday Agreement, one of the Sinn Fein/IRA negotiators, Gerry Kelly, recalled the important support role the ANC played. Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj held secret meetings with IRA leaders after the agreement in the 2000s, when a deadlock over arms decommissioning arose. Later, President Cyril Ramaphosa was one of the selected international observers who oversaw the actual decommissioning process. 

During the peace process in the 1990s and leading up to the Good Friday Agreement parallels with SA — inaccurate as they were — were often drawn in the Irish media. Calls for a “De Klerk-like figure” to emerge on the Pro-British unionist side were often called for. Then he appeared in the form of David Trimble, future Nobel peace prize winner.  

SA and Northern Ireland, divided societies with century-old grievances, both seemed destined in the early 1990s to spiral into chaos. And then they didn’t. Steely negotiations produced agreements that utterly changed the landscape. 

Twenty-five years later, the peace in Northern Ireland has held and the situation, in terms of the absence of violence, is radically different. What is not different is the polarisation of society.

Catholics and protestants overwhelming go to different schools, play different sports, socialise in different clubs and stay in different areas. Belfast today has more “peace walls” designed to separate communities than it had 25 years ago. More than eight in 10 people still vote along tribal — or constitutional, to use a more correct term — lines. 

SA remains a divided country too, and while you could point at similarities to the situation in Northern Ireland, even substituting electric fences for peace walls, any parallels would be unfair. Divisions exist, but they are narrowing. Transformation is an active policy. A further major difference from Northern Ireland is that SA is largely unified in terms of identity. It’s not a small thing. 

The main lesson in looking at transformational agreements such as the Good Friday Agreement or the Codesa negotiations and eventual agreement that led to democratic elections in 1994, is to not to take them for granted. 

In Northern Ireland the main risk to peace is fear of a loss of identity. In SA the risks are from marginalisation and unfairness leading to a rupture in social peace. Take the following examples. According to the Centre for Development & Enterprise, about 78% of SA school pupils are not able to read for meaning at the end of grade four.

The global benchmark for how much a person from a developing country should spend on public transport is 10% of a commuter’s income. In SA’s metros, this figure sits as high as 50%, according to the SA Competition Commission report. The richest residents in Cape Town, 14% of the population, consume 51% of the water in the city, while the poorest group, about 64% of the population, use just 27% (Reading University research).  

In one way it is naive to think that reaching an agreement for peace or democracy is the end of conflict. It is the start of another. Keeping it. That is a decades, even centuries, long process. 

• Rynhart is senior specialist in employers’ activities with the International Labour Organisation, based in SA.