Adrian Hamilton: We can learn from Stormont. So why don't we?

The restoration of power sharing at Stormont this week, said the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, was an achievement that the world could learn from.

He could be forgiven for the hyperbole. The agreement that saw Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness joshing each other almost as old comrades-in-arms was historic. As for it being the example for other conflicts in this strife-torn world - well, if only it could, and if only the British government could follow its own example.

Related articles

• Ulster politicians hit ground running
• Search the news archive for more stories

The nearest parallels are in Palestine and Lebanon, where desperate efforts are being made to bring the armed militia and the extremists into government. And what do we do? We consistently refuse to recognise the "men of violence". In the case of Palestine, we are starving a people of funds while we impose impossible demands on Hamas for prior recognition of Israel, demands we never made of the IRA before John Major and then Tony Blair started treating with them.

We are doing the same in the Lebanon, where our demonisation of Hizbollah and persistent demands that they disarm is making a bad situation worse and threatening a return to civil war. What Blair, as his predecessor, understood was needed in Northern Ireland, they obstinately refuse to recognise in the Middle East.

This is not a simple matter of yesterday's terrorists being today's governing politicians, or of shaking the hands of murderers, as we have done in most of our former colonies as well as Northern Ireland. If that were the only message from Belfast, then there would be no more trouble with the Basques, Sri Lanka would be at peace and Iraq would be a haven of pacifists.

But that is far from the lesson of Northern Ireland, where it has not been the centre or the cross-community parties that have triumphed in the ballot box. If only they had. It has been the extremes that have come out on top, and the success of the peace process has been in getting the leaders of these polar opposites to see it in their own interest to pursue a political path.

If anything, the communities they represent seem to be as divided as ever. The majority of the population certainly wanted peace, but they do not appear to have sought reconciliation. Their demand for an end to civil strife played its part in propelling events. But, in essence, the restoration of power sharing has been a triumph of top-down politics, not bottom-up social change.

You can see the parallels elsewhere, and not just in the Middle East. The comfortable liberal dream of the post-Cold War world, reflected in Tony Blair's vision of a new policy of ethical intervention, was that the moderates would triumph in a new democratic era and that it was only the extremists who were holding them back.

That didn't happen in Northern Ireland and it isn't happening anywhere else very obviously. Instead, the ethnic and tribal rivalries, frozen in the Cold War, have burst out again in the thaw. Peace and reconciliation may be working in South Africa, but, in every other part of the African continent, from Darfur to Zimbabwe, events are moving in the opposite direction.

Foreign intervention, far from confronting the extremes and allowing the centre to reassert itself, has largely served to promote one group against another - the Northern Alliance over the Pashtun in Afghanistan, the Shia and Kurds over the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, the Albanians against the Serbs in Kosovo. Instead of being an umpire, we have acted as a participant - which has been the fate of foreign interference through the ages.

Northern Ireland could show a better way. Just as the nationalist movement in Ireland saw the potential benefits of the political process, so Hamas and Hizbollah have moved from early dreams of revolution and religious takeover to a preference for politics as the route to power. It may be happening in Aceh, in Indonesia. It should have been happening in Sri Lanka, only the government in Colombo decided to reverse track and go for confrontation with the Tamil Tigers. It was on the cards in Darfur, only the government in Khartoum wouldn't, and couldn't be forced, to take the plunge. You can argue the merits of letting in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and in Algeria.

These are not nice groups. Far from it. The IRA hasn't given up the struggle with its arms. It has been persuaded it has a better chance of achieving a united Ireland through the legislature than through the gun - and it may well be right. But we live in a time of hard power politics, and bringing the militia into that process remains the best chance for peace. The alternative we see all about us now. Northern Ireland has lessons, if only we would understand them.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

More from Adrian Hamilton