Epochal moment in Northern Ireland

It could be said to be a testing time for the whole of Britain; particularly for the champions of non-violence and democracy.

Apparently, a May 8 deadline to put in place a power-sharing administration between the main Protestant and Catholic parties in Northern Ireland would now be met and if all goes well sectarian strife in the British province would ease off.

The mood likely to be prevailing among those opposing peace deals with "terrorists", was summed up in a pronouncement by Lord Norman Tebbit, who was injured in an IRA bomb blast in 1984: "It is a pity, I feel, that we now expect to see those who have been tried for conspiracy to murder taking office as Ministers in a government in this United Kingdom".

This is no unfamiliar dilemma; particularly for those states battling insurrectionist violence in South Asia.

There is an experiment in the making in Nepal, for instance, where the most violence prone Maoist rebels are in a power sharing administration with the Nepali Congress and its allies. In fact, they are a party to drawing up a new constitution for Nepal.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines the Moro rebels have been assured "self-determination" by the centre and in Indonesia the Aceh province has been granted a measure of regional autonomy following a long-running bloody rebellion. These are only the latest in a number of Asiatic armed movements for separate statehood or regional autonomy which have been defused by political means. Identity-based armed rebellions such as these are usually contained by addressing the legitimate political aspirations of the groups concerned.

India could provide a rich harvest of lessons in this regard and its recent moves to carve out more and more states are dictated by the need to contain identity-based separatist movements.

Ideally, armed groups bent on bloodshed and destruction should be alienated but experience proves that the more cost-effective approach to resolving these conflicts is to get the groups concerned into the democratic process or mainstream politics. In the alternative what happens is that violence by these disaffected groups and counterviolence by the state, allied with other repressive measures, only lead to a vicious circle of violence which does not tend to end in a hurry.

Therefore, Northern Ireland and the British polity would be severely affected in the long run as a result of not giving a power-sharing deal between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) a try. It was indeed "a turning point in the history of Northern Ireland", in the words of Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, when the heads of Sinn Fein and the DUP, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, decided for the first time in the history of the conflict to have face-to-face dealings with each other.

Although this cannot be construed as an immediate cure for the decades - long protestant-Catholic strife in Northern Ireland, the experience of working together in a power-sharing regional administration would enable the parties to adapt to each others essential needs and resolve their problems more amicably.

Besides, since a measure of the Catholic community's power aspirations would be met through the Northern Ireland assembly, the possibility is great that the former "men in arms" would not be compelled to revert to violence. Despite the justified and principled opposition to violence, therefore, it would be in the interests of all concerned, to give the power-sharing experiment in Northern Ireland a try.

Accordingly, a power sharing arrangement should soon be in place in Northern Ireland as a further expression of the democratic spirit pervading Britain. Nothing could give more eloquent testimony to peaceful cohabitation between the communities than a regional administration with DUP chief Ian Paisley as First Minister and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness as his deputy.

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