The last two weeks have provided stark evidence that the world, which will always be challenged by difficulties and disagreements, is, in essence, divided between two competing ideologies. Those who believe in using violence and murder to impose their political views on others and those who use peaceful and democratic means to achieve their aims.
Iraq is struggling to shake off the last vestiges of the civil war that nearly ripped the country apart in 2006, but recent progress has been real, tangible and is, perhaps, becoming irreversible. However some of those who imposed Ba’athism on Iraq for three decades and in recent times have murdered soldiers, police, intellectuals, Government workers and those Iraqis deemed to have ‘sinned’ against Islam, continue to employ extreme violence in order to achieve their hateful aims. Today in Baghdad at least 33 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a conference aimed at securing national reconciliation and a peaceful democratic future for Iraq. The BBC reported that an Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, insisted after the bombing that there would be "no going back" from the path of reconciliation in Iraq.
"Reconciliation is the response to the devilish acts that try to wreck nationalist efforts between Iraqis,"
It took the Iraqi militias six years of civil war to understand that political violence destroys society. Unfortunately there are those in Ulster who have still failed to learn that lesson in spite of 40 years of bloodshed. The Republican splinter groups, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, know that they do not have a fraction of the resources of the Provisional IRA, which failed to achieve its objectives after 30 years of war. Therefore it is evident that their rationale, and murderers can all too often be extremely rational, is to provoke retribution and to draw the army back onto the streets. Such is their arrogance and lack of humanity that they want to re-ignite a bloody conflict in order to achieve their own narrow and pointless political aims. Indeed they consider it to be worth sacrificing the blood of innocent humanity in order to achieve their goal of swapping the passport of one prosperous democratic state for that of another prosperous democratic state.
At least in Ulster and Iraq we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and the majority of citizens appear to have turned their backs on political violence. In Pakistan, where the Sri Lankan cricket team was recently attacked by teenage gunmen, there does not appear to be a tunnel. Since the attack on the cricket team, the Pakistani Taliban has blown up 16 music shops, it has destroyed the shrine of a Sufi poet in Peshawar because it was visited by women, it has beheaded two supposed ‘spies’ and it has murdered 14 captured Pakistani soldiers. And of course the Pakistani Government has surrendered the Swat Valley to the terrorists, who will now impose their backword and brutal version of Sharia law onn the territory, and all that that entails for women and those who want to pursue a free life.
In Ulster and Iraq we can be confident that the collective will of societies now committed to democracy and political reconciliation will, one day, triumph over the evil ideology of the gunmen. In Pakistan on the verge of bankruptcy, with a population that the state cannot feed, educate or provide employment for, it is unclear which ideology will carry the day.
