The Provisional IRA and
the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan
On October 24, 1990, gunmen from the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) entered the Londonderry home of Patsy Gillespie, a fifty-five-year-old Catholic father of three who worked as a cook’s assistant at a nearby British Army canteen.1 As a civilian worker for the British Army, he was seen as a collaborator by the IRA and therefore a valid target in the organization’s war against the British.2 The gunmen took Gillespie’s family hostage in order to force him to drive a truck provided by the IRA to a nearby army checkpoint. It was the second such time that Gillespie had been commandeered in such a manner. The IRA members told Gillespie’s wife to expect him back from the mission within a half hour. They were lying. The IRA had no intention of allowing Gillespie to survive this particular mission. In fact, the mission depended on his death. The vehicle Gillespie was forced to drive was laden with a thousand-pound bomb and was being followed by an IRA vehicle. When British Army personnel stopped Gillespie’s vehicle at the checkpoint, an IRA member detonated the bomb by remote control, killing Gillespie and five soldiers.
The IRA attempted two other “human bomb” attacks of this nature on the same day. John McEvoy, a sixty-five-year-old man dying of cancer, was compelled to drive a bomb-laden truck to a target near the city of Newry in order to protect the eight members of his family that had been taken hostage by the IRA. McEvoy managed to escape from the vehicle and shout a warning, but the blast still killed one British soldier and injured ten others along with some police officers.3 The third bomb was delivered by Gerry Kelly to an army base in the city of Omagh. Kelly had been tied to the vehicle and told that he would have plenty of time—fifty minutes—to free himself before the bomb went off. Instead, the bomb partially detonated as soon as Kelly was clear; the army defused the remainder of the bomb.4
The bombings of October 24 were meant to be a dramatic, three-pronged attack at the heart of British defenses by hitting previously inaccessible targets and delivering a sizable body count. For the IRA’s public image, however, the attacks were a catastrophe. The following day, Londonderry MP John Hume, leader of the Catholic Social Democratic Labor Party, condemned the group in a radio interview: “The anger at this particular atrocity is far deeper than anything I have seen in this city since 1972. The one word that is on everybody’s lips is the word ‘coward.’ Let me repeat it. I hope you are listening, you cowards, using a human being in the way that you did.”5
By the early 1990s suicide bombing had been invented, reinvented, and legitimized through its successful use in two different contexts. From that point on, the story of suicide bombing is one of the diffusion of a particular innovation rather than its reinvention. Despite the examples set by Hizballah and the LTTE, the diffusion of suicide bombing has been a curiously slow process, suggesting that although suicide bombing can spread readily from culture to culture, there are also constraints that serve to slow its diffusion or even prevent it.
Two other groups—the Provisional IRA and the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (Partia Karkaren Kurdistan, PKK)—attempted to deploy human bombers in the 1990s, but they were unable to use them effectively over a lengthy period of time. The IRA exhibited many of the requisite attributes necessary for suicide bombing—most notably a perceived need for effective control technologies and an organizational reverence for self-sacrifice—but the threat posed by the British military was not sufficiently extreme to motivate republicans in Northern Ireland to support such a radical form of resistance. In addition, the IRA’s reverence for its martyrs never came to resemble the cultures of martyrdom that had emerged in Russia, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka, making suicide missions inconsistent with IRA cultural norms. The leader of the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, Abdullah Ocalan, proved to be a poor user of suicide bombing. His methods of recruitment did not reinforce a preexisting willingness toward self-sacrifice, forcing him instead to resort to violent coercion in order to deploy suicide attackers. Because of this, the use of suicide bombers did not enhance group solidarity or strengthen the connections between the PKK and its reference community.
Some analysts have explained the spread of suicide bombing by referring exclusively to rational factors: Suicide bombing is effective, the argument goes, so many groups are anxious to try it.6 Utility is indeed an important factor that seems to drive organizational decision making, but other cultural and psychological factors matter as well, which is why suicide bombing, like all technologies, does not automatically flow from one society to the next. There is always friction as the original culture and that of the adopter collide. In cases where the technology is transferred successfully, this friction transforms the initial technology into something slightly different, which explains the lack of uniformity in the ways that different groups have manufactured and used their suicide bombers.
The successful transfer of technology or innovation always requires local modification when the product of one culture is adapted to the norms and constraints of another. Such changes are sometimes understood as “resistance” to the new technology, but this term is misleading in that it connotes deliberate opposition instead of a process of learning and choosing. This “resistance,” while it does serve to winnow out inappropriate technologies, is fundamentally a learning process, a “positive opportunity for de-centralized innovation and learning by self-reflexive actors.”7 The diffusion of technological innovation is therefore a process of the ongoing reinvention of a basic technology by its users; every successful case of transfer results in a new technology that is a hybrid of imported and indigenous characteristics.
The diffusion of technological innovations is governed by many factors. Everett M. Rogers developed a model for it in his classic text Diffusion of Innovations. He cites five particular attributes of innovations that contribute to their spread:
• the relative advantage offered by the innovation
• the compatibility of the innovation with a group’s ideas, beliefs, and needs
• the complexity of the innovation
• the trialability of the innovation, that is, the extent to which a technology can be explored prior to a large-scale commitment of resources
• the observability of the innovation, which measures the degree to which the advantages of the technology are observable by others.8
Suicide bombing can satisfy all five of these attributes, with three of Rogers’ five factors being consistently applicable to it. Observability, the ease by which the results of the innovation can be seen and understood by others, is one attribute that contributes to the diffusion of suicide bombing. It is positively related to adoption of a new technology, and this is very much the case in suicide bombing, whose value stems largely from its public, spectacular nature.9 Complexity, which Rogers defines as “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as relatively difficult to understand and use,” is another applicable factor.10 Complexity is a matter of perception. Rogers suggests, “The complexity of an innovation, as perceived by members of a social system, is negatively related to its rate of adoption.” In contrast to a weapon systems developed by state powers, suicide bombing does not require complicated and expensive hardware, making it appropriate for use by small, covert groups lacking in material resources and infrastructure. Suicide bombing is consequently a technology that may be experimented with fairly easily. Rogers calls this characteristic “trialability,” and finds that it is positively related to the rate of adoption of an innovation, especially among early users. As the case of Captain Miller of the LTTE demonstrates (see Chapter 3), suicide bombing is easy to utilize on a trial basis. Trial runs of a technology can reveal the utility (or lack thereof) of the technology for solving a set of problems and also allow for limited reinvention, in which the basic innovation is customized to the user’s needs.
Based on these three criteria, suicide bombing is a technology that has the potential to diffuse readily among militant groups, subject of course to Rogers’ other two criteria—relative advantage and compatibility. These two factors vary significantly when assessed among different groups and can affect the willingness of organizations to decide whether to attempt suicide bombing. At the same time, they can indicate whether suicide bombing will become a culturally acceptable form of weapon technology.
Relative advantage is to the adoption of an innovation by a new culture what perceived need is to the process of innovation itself—that is, the extent to which an idea or tool solves a specific problem relative to other solutions. Rogers defines relative advantage as “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes.”11 There are numerous ways in which an innovation can be “better”: through lower costs, economic or otherwise, greater effectiveness, or greater reliability, to name a few. Whatever the particular advantage, the perception that an innovation is inherently better than its predecessors is one of the strongest indicators that a new technology will be adopted. This contributes to the perception that technology transfer is primarily about effectiveness.12
Compatibility, in turn, is to diffusion what possibility is to innovation—that is, the extent to which a technology is consistent with a particular set of cultural or social norms. Of these norms, Rogers suggests that the most important are compatibility with values and beliefs, compatibility with previously introduced ideas, and compatibility with a group’s perceived needs.13 Members of extremist groups, the most frequent users of suicide bombing since the early 1980s, have chosen to fight and perhaps to die for a cause, which means that suicide bombing is potentially compatible with overall group norms. Suicide bombing can be consistent with previously introduced ideas, for example, martyrdom, which is a universal phenomenon in the world of armed struggle. Suicide bombing is also compatible with the perceived needs of a variety of organizations because they seek reliable control.
Of course, compatibility with the values, beliefs, and needs of some organizations does not imply compatibility with the values, beliefs, and needs of all organizations. The individual willingness for self-sacrifice varies tremendously between groups and also within groups. When individual members of militant groups demonstrate publicly a willingness to sacrifice their lives, they claim an elevated moral position for themselves and legitimize their sponsoring organizations in the eyes of their supporters, creating a positive feedback between individual suicide attackers and society. If willing volunteers are not available, the group either cannot proceed or must use more coercive and less inspiring means of recruiting its attackers; this, however, might break down the relationships between the individual, cultural, and organizational levels of the suicide-bombing complex. Organizations have considerable latitude in how they manipulate these relationships, but they cannot make something from nothing and are therefore constrained by what their members and societies are willing to accept.
Since these factors vary greatly, there have naturally been instances in which suicide bombing did not offer enough of a relative advantage to a group or was incompatible with cultural and social norms, resulting in limited or ineffective use. As a consequence of this, in the 1990s the number of interested users exceeded the number of capable users. The latter have dominated analytical interest for obvious reasons, but the less-proficient users warrant analysis as well, because their challenges in developing an effective suicide bombing capability shed light on the limitations of suicide bombing, which, after all, has remained a rare form of attack relative to gunfire, rockets, mortars, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The October 24 proxy bomb attacks highlight one of the more curious aspects of suicide bombing in the late 1980s and early 1990s—its conspicuous absence from the conflict in Northern Ireland. On the surface, all of the necessary preconditions seem to have been present. Northern Ireland was viewed by the IRA and its leaders to be under a colonial occupation by a religiously different adversary. A veneration of self-sacrifice within the republican tradition dated to at least the late 1700s and had been manifested in 1981 in the fasting deaths of Bobby Sands and nine other republican prisoners. In addition, the IRA was constantly searching for more accurate and reliable weapons that would allow it to strike difficult-to-access military targets while limiting counter-productive civilian casualties. This need drove them to innovate constantly in the realm of control technologies, which was costly and sometimes deadly for the organization. Thus the lack of suicide bombing in such an environment, when its utility was being demonstrated in Lebanon and then later in Sri Lanka, is noteworthy.
The Troubles—as the conflict pitting Irish republicans against Northern Irish authorities and the British government was known—emerged in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, when the Catholic civil rights movement encountered opposition and adversity, leading to wide-scale civil disturbances, arson, and murder. During the chaotic months of late summer and autumn 1969, the IRA was irrelevant, having dwindled in the north to just a few poorly armed members. In August British soldiers were deployed in Northern Ireland to restore order, but soon inadvertently alienated much of the Catholic population. This created the opportunity for a resurgent IRA—renamed the Provisional IRA after a split within the organization in December 1969—to step forward as the defender of Northern Ireland’s Catholics.14 To replace the established authorities as the defender of order, the IRA needed to act with restraint and control.15 For much of the 1970s, however, the chaotic and multifaceted nature of the conflict ensured that deadly violence, indiscriminate and often unrestrained, was the norm. After a leadership change during 1976–77, the IRA reorganized and adopted restraint against civilian targets in a clearly articulated military strategy presented in the Green Book, its new training manual that articulated a five-part guerrilla strategy.
Bombs played a significant role in the first three parts of the strategy.16 The first part involved a war of attrition against enemy personnel, including British military and Northern Irish police forces, with the stated goal of causing as many casualties and deaths as possible. The second part required a bombing campaign in waging economic warfare against the United Kingdom by making financial interests in Northern Ireland unprofitable and discouraging further investment. The third part was to make the six counties of Northern Ireland “ungovernable except by colonial military rule.” The fourth provision called for national and international publicity and propaganda campaigns to gain support for the IRA’s position. The only way to reconcile the first three parts with the fourth was through the controlled use of force.17
Such control was not always successful. The nature of the IRA, despite its conventional military language and disciplined imagery, precluded complete control of the periphery by the core. IRA operatives from rural areas often found themselves at odds with the urban leadership of Belfast and preferred armed struggle to politics, which they considered to be a betrayal of the republican cause.18 Because the middle and lower ranks of the organization had a fair degree of flexibility in target selection, violence initiated by them could and did take the form of revenge killings and sectarian violence. Centrally directed, high-profile operations on the other hand were supposed to conform to the ideal of controlled force. When they did not, the reason was often technical failure, which drove the IRA to innovate constantly in the means by which it could control its bombs.
From the beginning of the Troubles, the use of various kinds of emplaced explosives against police and British soldiers became an essential and effective element of the IRA’s campaign. The first mines, even then referred to as IEDs, were relatively primitive and were often wired to a detonator controlled by an IRA member.19 These bombs required a great deal of preparation, especially in the concealment of the command wires and in perfecting the timing of the detonation. The triggerman was at risk unless concealed in an area safe from the blast and positioned in a place where he could escape quickly. In areas where the IRA enjoyed a permissive operational environment it was able to use such bombs effectively, but on the whole the obstacles to the successful use of “trap bombs” were many.20
To minimize these complications and to ensure the safety of its volunteers, the IRA tried to separate its bombers from their weapons while still allowing for ongoing feedback from the mission environment. Creating a space between the bomber and the weapon, however, came with a price that put the missions at risk of failure. Automatic detonation via timers permitted no feedback, was inflexible, and allowed the possibility of deactivation of the weapon prior to triggering. Remote manual detonation, first by command wire and eventually by radio control, was potentially more flexible, but its drawbacks included the possibility of mechanical failure and intervention or jamming by the authorities.21
The possibility of intervention escalated an ongoing arms race between the IRA and British authorities.22 The fuses, simple timers, and trigger wires used in the early stages of the Troubles were soon replaced with radio-controlled devices, sometimes derived from model aircraft kits. The authorities could jam these devices relatively easily, forcing the IRA to innovate to bypass the army’s countermeasures. The authorities then devised new methods for jamming, which led the IRA to use portable radar guns—originally designed to catch speeding motorists—to detonate bombs.
Still, in spite of such innovation and flexibility, the IRA’s experience with bombs was a decidedly mixed affair, with successes counterbalanced by numerous failures. The more complex the bomb, the more likely it was to fail. According to Eamon Collins, an IRA member from the town of Newry, in the early 1980s as much as 50 percent of the organization’s bombings failed to detonate as planned.23 Even more problematic was the danger involved in experimentation with such technologies as detonators and anti-tampering devices. Lt. Gen. George Styles, responsible for British explosive ordnance disposal efforts early on in the Troubles, took solace in the fact that the job of the IRA bomb makers was at least as dangerous as, if not more so than, that of the British soldiers responsible for disarming the bombs. “Yet, the heartening fact for people like me,” he wrote in his memoir, “is that the more difficult the bomb-maker tries to make his bomb, the more liable he is to blow himself up. In fact he usually does.”24 The numbers bear him out. Bombing accidents killed approximately 120 IRA volunteers during the Troubles. In comparison, British authorities and police killed perhaps 300 volunteers.25
The IRA’s experimentation with control technologies was driven partially by the need for restraint in the use of force, but this restraint did not extend to operations against the police or the British military, which the IRA attacked with ferocity. The “Green Book” states clearly that the IRA’s struggle with the British military should consist of a “war of attrition against enemy personnel which is aimed at causing as many deaths and casualties as possible so as to create a demand from their people at home for their withdrawal.”26 Consequently, throughout the Troubles, “Military targets were executed with maximum ruthlessness, to take maximum life.”27
The attack that the IRA considered to be its finest military operation of the Troubles illustrates this commitment to maximum ruthlessness. On August 27, 1979, the group set up a complex ambush utilizing two emplaced bombs near Narrow Waters castle on the border with the Republic of Ireland. The first bomb, hidden along the road, was detonated by radio remote control as a patrol of British paratroopers passed by, killing six and injuring several others. IRA snipers just over the border in Ireland then opened fire, forcing the troops to fall back to the castle gatehouse, an obvious defensive location. Anticipating this maneuver, the IRA had hidden a larger bomb in the gatehouse. They armed this second bomb by using a radio remote control to activate a commercial timer that in turn detonated the bomb after a half-hour delay. The second blast caught the soldiers by surprise and was by far the more lethal of the two. The ambush killed eighteen elite paratroopers.28 Early on the morning of August 21, 1988, an IRA roadside bomb killed eight British soldiers near the town of Armagh, and on September 21, 1989, an IRA bomb planted in the Royal Marine’s College, in Deal, Kent, killed eleven guardsmen and injured twenty-one others.29
The IRA’s willingness to kill was complemented by a sacred cause that its members believed was worth dying for.30 For many members of the IRA, whatever their religious feelings, Irish nationhood was a transcendent, moral, historically necessary cause. It had been bound in sacred ritual and imagery since the beginning of Irish national consciousness. It is no exaggeration to say that self-sacrifice launched the IRA’s form of nationalism. In 1798 Theobold Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen and one of the founding fathers of republican nationalism, was captured by the British while attempting to lead a French attack to free Ireland from England. Tone slashed his own throat while in prison and suffered terribly for several days before finally succumbing and becoming republican nationalism’s first martyr.31 After Tone’s death, republican nationalism was influenced by the emotion and passion of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, which reinforced the Catholicism central to the self-identification of many Irish nationalists, leading them to glorify Tone and others as martyrs.
In the early twentieth century, the sacralization of republican nationalism reached its high point in the orations of Patrick Pearse, an Irish author and political activist who would become one of the leaders of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. In a 1913 speech commemorating Tone’s death, Pearse told his audience, “We have come to the holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down.” The following year while commemorating Robert Emmet, an Irish nationalist executed by the British in 1803, Pearse made the connection between sacred cause and self-sacrifice explicit: “There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter, and these are the salt of generations, the heroes who stand midway between God and men.”32 Pearse and other nationalist leaders who staged the Easter Rebellion against the British did so knowing full well that it would not succeed in practical terms, but believing that the example of men willing to fight and die for Ireland was necessary for the movement. Their selection of Easter Monday as the day to launch the rebellion was of course deliberate. According to Pearse, it would establish a “theology of insurrection.” In a letter to his mother, Pearse even compared himself to Jesus Christ.33
During the Troubles, the republican nationalism of the IRA replaced Catholicism with secular nationalism of a vaguely socialist type, but the sacredness of these earlier sacrifices and of the cause overall remained. Catholicism per se was not at the heart of radical republican nationalism; rather nationalism appropriated many of the symbols and rituals of Catholicism for a movement driven by people whose commitment to Catholic Christianity varied broadly in contrast to their staunch dedication to Irish nationhood. This is not to downplay the significance of republican nationalism or the power of self-sacrifice at the heart of so much of its ritual, but to argue that for the IRA, as with the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and the LTTE, a secular phenomenon became an unquestioned article of faith justifying and on rare occasions necessitating self-sacrifice on the part of its true believers.34
The introduction of suicide bombers into Northern Ireland would have been consistent with a sacred ideology worth dying for and would have had the potential to allow the IRA to strike its enemies with maximum ruthlessness while minimizing unintended civilian casualties. Thus the lack of suicide attacks is puzzling. To date the explanation offered by scholars has been one of voluntary restraint by the IRA; that is, the lack of suicide attacks must have resulted from a conscious decision not to use them for fear of the negative effect that indiscriminate civilian casualties might have on the republican cause.35
This explanation is flawed because it depends on a direct correlation between suicide attacks and indiscriminate civilian casualties that does not exist. Suicide bombing is not inherently indiscriminate. Rather, it is the exact opposite—precise and controllable. When suicide bombers cause indiscriminate civilian casualties, it is because their users want to cause indiscriminate civilian casualties. Suicide bombing can also be used to minimize casualties, which is one reason why Russian terrorists, such as Kaliayev, risked killing themselves while carrying out their bombings. Therefore, if the IRA wished to limit counterproductive civilian casualties, its leaders would only have needed to deploy suicide attackers against military targets—as it did with its proxy bombers—rather than exclude their use altogether. In fact, rather than demonstrating restraint, the whole purpose of using proxy bombers was to signal an escalation to British authorities. According to one IRA member involved in the attacks, the IRA hoped to “shake the Brits out of their complacency” by utilizing this new form of attack.36
Instead of restraint, a more convincing explanation for why suicide bombing failed to spread to the IRA is that the conditions in Northern Ireland during the Troubles were not conducive to the production of willing suicide attackers. Republican paramilitaries never developed a culture of martyrdom, so individual suicide, even in the course of an attack, was incompatible with overall group norms. In terms of necessity, British restraint in the use of force meant that the threat posed to the Catholic community by the British Army was not nearly as extreme as in the other cases examined here, making the need for an extreme form of resistance less compelling. The cost of suicide attacks, in terms of the value of volunteers’ lives, and the less pressing need for such attacks on the part of community need meant that suicide operations came at a price that IRA volunteers and their supporters in the nationalist community were unwilling to pay.
The IRA’s attitude toward life within the organization differed markedly from the one held regarding the British and members of the police force of Northern Ireland. Despite the sheer ruthlessness that the IRA often displayed toward them, never did a subculture of volunteers enthusiastically seeking to end their own lives emerge during the Troubles. On the contrary, the safety of IRA volunteers was always a top priority for the organization. Eamon Collins, who became an informer and left the group after being arrested in the 1980s, wrote that the group had two golden rules about operations, the first of which was “regardless of whether an objective had been achieved successfully, if a volunteer were captured or killed in the process, then the operation was a failure.” According to Sean O’Callaghan, another disillusioned former member, “As far as everybody was concerned a successful operation was one where damage was inflicted and everybody escaped unscathed.”37 The obvious exceptions to this overall outlook were of course the deaths of ten republican prisoners during the 1981 hunger strike. Upon closer examination, however, the deaths of these ten men were the exceptions that proved the rule: The men came to be revered, even venerated decades after their deaths because their behavior was so contrary to the culture of the IRA.
The hunger strikes carried out by republican prisoners in 1980 and 1981 were the consequence of an unanticipated yet ruthlessly steady confrontation between the prisoners and authorities that had begun in the late 1970s. In the early 1970s paramilitary prisoners had been granted special category status. Unlike other prisoners, they were housed in compounds resembling POW camps. They wore normal clothing and could associate freely with one another. Paramilitary prisoners from all groups considered special category status to be de facto political prisoner status.38
Beginning in 1976 the British changed strategies and began to de-escalate and criminalize the conflict. This shift entailed revoking special category status and transferring paramilitary prisoners to recently constructed prisons, where they would be housed in individual cells and required to wear uniforms like regular criminals.39 For republican prisoners, this was not a possibility. To them, acquiescing to the change of status would have meant accepting that the entire tradition of Irish republicanism was a criminal phenomenon. The British failed to recognize the extent to which the criminalization strategy attacked the sacredness of Irish republicanism and were therefore unprepared for the prisoners’ response.40 The first prisoner confronted with the change, Kieran Nugent, refused to wear his prison uniform, telling prison officials that the only way to keep it on him would be to nail it to his back. Word of his defiance quickly spread, and republican prisoners collectively began to refuse to wear their uniforms, wrapping themselves instead in their blankets. Within months, hundreds of prisoners were protesting in such a manner.41
The conflict between prisoners and their warders steadily escalated.42 Prisoners who were “on the blanket” were refused towels to wrap themselves in to walk to the shower facilities, so they refused to wash, turning the blanket protest into a dirty protest. The prisoners eventually refused to clean out their chamber pots or their food trays, which guards sometimes dumped on the floor anyway. The result was that the cells of “blanketmen” became caked in rotting, uneaten food, urine, and feces. In warm weather, maggots hatched in the filth and crawled through the cells and through the hair of the protesters.43 The prisoners drafted a set of five demands and presented them to the British, but they lacked any means to force a favorable settlement. By 1979, with years of misery behind them and no end in sight, the prisoners were beginning to feel trapped. Many went off the blanket, threatening to undermine the entire protest. In April of that year, recalled prisoner Leo Green, “We were in a corner and were increasingly aware of it.”44
The only option the prisoners felt they had left was to escalate the conflict even further by going on a hunger strike. The first hunger strike began in October 1980, when seven prisoners—one from each of the six counties in Northern Ireland and one representing Belfast—simultaneously refused food.45 By December, the health of several strikers had deteriorated significantly. When the British appeared willing to grant concessions on the five demands, Brendan Hughes, the leader of the strike, called it off rather than allow Sean McKenna, who had slipped into a coma, to die. The British never followed through on the anticipated concessions, so the strike ended in failure.46
In March 1981 a new group of prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, decided to carry out a second hunger strike. They did so against the wishes of senior IRA and Sinn Fein leaders who feared that a second failed strike would only harm the image of the republican cause.47 To increase pressure on the government, the prisoners decided to stagger the strike, with one new prisoner refusing food each week so that there would be constant pressure and less chance of the strike collapsing. Of course this strategy also put extraordinary pressure on the prisoners themselves, for if the first man were to see the strike through to the end, the succeeding strikers would not be able to back down without feeling the shame and humiliation that came with betraying a dead comrade who had himself already made the ultimate sacrifice for the movement.48 Sands refused food on March 1, 1981, and died sixty-six days later. The British government refused to capitulate to the prisoners’ demands, so the strike continued.
Within two weeks of Sands’ funeral, three more hunger strikers—Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, and Patsy O’Hara—also died, for a total of four deaths within seventeen days. It was six more weeks before a fifth hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, died, on July 8. This time lag occurred because the strike had originally been confined to the first four men. Only later, as it became clear that their deaths would not force the British to budge, did the IRA leadership decide to select replacement strikers and to continue the hunger strike.
The strike continued over the summer and into early autumn. The deaths of the first hunger strikers made compromise on the part of the remaining strikers all but impossible. By the end of the summer, hunger striker Liam McCloskey recognized this, remembering, “We were caught in our own trap where there were ten men dead and we felt we had to keep going and look for a way out of it.”49 By September family members began to intervene by authorizing medical treatment of hunger strikers who had lost consciousness. The strike was called off in October. Ten prisoners—seven from the IRA and three from the Irish National Liberation Army—had fasted to death.
Technically the strike failed. The British government never formally gave in to the strikers, although in the aftermath of the strike it did meet many of the five demands in practice. On a political level, however, the strike had a profound effect. During Sands’ fast, the local MP for his district, Frank McGuire, had died. Sinn Fein ran Sands as their candidate in the election to replace him, and Sands narrowly won, capturing more than 30,000 votes.50 Although Sands never took his seat in Parliament, the election opened up the possibility of complementing the armed struggle with an electoral strategy, which would eventually supersede the armed struggle, allowing Sinn Fein to eclipse the IRA.51
Furthermore, the strike rehabilitated the republican cause on a moral level. Thuggish and sectarian behavior on the part of IRA members had been bolstering the British criminalization strategy, convincing many that the IRA was little more than an organized crime racket. Criminals, however, did not voluntarily starve themselves to death for an abstract political principle. Despite Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ongoing effort to portray the hunger strikers as criminals, the men’s resolve stunned people around the world, lending moral legitimacy to their newly discovered political track. So important were the strikers for reviving the IRA’s cause, and so extraordinary was their suffering for a movement that tended to avoid self-sacrifice, that years later the men were still regarded with reverence among former republican prisoners. Anthony McIntyre, a former “blanketman,” wrote nearly three decades later, “The hunger strike was the most intense moment in the history of the Provisional IRA. It has assumed the status of sacred. Those of us involved in the blanket protest still shake with emotion when the memory of the ten men visits our consciousness.”52
As negotiations with the British over special-category status collapsed in early July 1981, the resolve of the prisoners and of the IRA leadership only hardened. Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, the prisoner representing the hunger strikers to the Army Council, originally believed that the first four prisoners to go on strike would be sufficient to make their political point. In a communication to the IRA leadership, he wrote, “If public pressure failed to move the government by the time the first four had died, the republican movement would have effectively shot its bolt. And after four, with the authorities still adamant, more deaths would start to look like suicide, which would be damaging for the movement.” In a message dated June 28, he wrote to Gerry Adams, who would later become president of Sinn Fein, “If we continue with the hunger strike we will be faced with a situation whereby Joe [McDonnell] will die, followed by others and after X amount of deaths public opinion will hammer us into the ground, forcing us to end the hunger strike with nothing to show but deaths that could have been avoided and a shattering defeat in the bargain.”53 By July his attitude had changed considerably, and he wrote to Adams, “I believe it would be wrong to capitulate. We took a decision and committed ourselves to hunger strike action. . . . It’s rough, brutal, and ruthless, and a lot of other things as well, but we are fighting a war and must accept that front line troops are more susceptible to casualties than anyone.”54
Despite the resolve of the strikers, McFarlane’s concern that public opinion would “hammer” the strike into the ground was becoming a reality by the end of the summer. Families of the hunger strikers in particular mistrusted the IRA, and some believed that the organization was pressuring the men to continue the strike. Joe McDonnell’s family had concerns that the external leadership of the IRA was using the prisoners, and Geraldine Scheiss, girlfriend of hunger striker Kieran Doherty, came to believe that the behavior of the prisoners made it seem, she said, “almost as if they had been programmed.”55
Father Denis Faul, a Catholic priest who was sympathetic toward the prisoners but at the same time opposed IRA violence, also noticed the shift that took place in the strike as it dragged on over the summer. Faul initially declined to condemn the hunger strikers as committing suicide, but as more and more republican prisoners died, he said “the motivation doesn’t seem to me to be about drawing the attention of the British public to the situation by fasting. It seems to me to be about drawing attention to death and big funerals. This thing is no longer a valid public political protest. It’s becoming suicide.”56 Faul was instrumental in convincing the families of some of the hunger strikers to authorize medical intervention in the event of unconsciousness and therefore helped undermine the solidarity that drove the strike. For this reason, he was vilified by many within the IRA as a traitor and became the scapegoat for the failure of the strike.
From the perspective of this analysis, Faul’s comment suggests that the hunger strike was coming to be seen more like tactical martyrdom—the organizational use of individual self-sacrifice for specific short-term goals—than martyrdom as understood within the context of the Catholic faith and tradition. Martyrdom has been viewed as the definitive act of witness because the martyr’s willingness to suffer death rather than concede the truth of his or her position demonstrates certainty beyond a doubt. Authenticity and thus the public, symbolic power of martyrdom derives from this certainty and passes from the martyr to the cause for which the martyr died. The martyr’s certainty is in turn only possible through self-realization and the freedom to pursue it.57 The families and Father Faul therefore became a significant threat as they called into question the very legitimacy of the strike. If the men were not acting freely but instead were being compelled, like frontline troops in times of war, then the strike was less about the authenticity of individual commitment and more about an organization using the devotion of its members for its own purposes, a situation far less acceptable to the hunger strikers’ families and the broader Catholic community. To further complicate matters, Protestant clergy in Northern Ireland universally condemned the hunger strikes, going so far as to charge the Catholic Church with hypocrisy for its refusal to recognize the deaths of the prisoners as suicides.58
The misgivings of the families, Father Faul’s criticism, and the lack of uniformity among Christian clergy regarding the “martyrdom” of the hunger strikers thus called into question whether the last six hunger strikers truly sacrificed themselves or were sacrificed by others. This distinction is not trivial. In the hunger strikes and in suicide bombing, public perception of the intention and freedom of possible suicides plays a significant role in determining acceptance of their deaths.
The hunger strikes proved to be a complicated experience with self-sacrifice for the IRA leadership. The organization’s leaders recognized that the willingness to die for the cause was contrary to republican paramilitary culture, a norm that could be set aside only in the most extreme instances. They also understood that the length of the strike and the number of men who died nearly became counterproductive in terms of public perception, providing critics with grounds to allege that it had degenerated from political protest into organizationally driven mass suicide.
Finally, the hunger strikes provided the IRA leadership an opportunity to witness the diminishing power of repetitive self-sacrifice to mobilize supporters outside the republican community. Bobby Sands’ funeral was an international event. In Northern Ireland, perhaps 100,000 people lined the route between St. Luke’s Church, near Sands’ home, to Milltown cemetery, where he was buried.59 There was markedly less attention for Joe McDonnell’s funeral. After Mickey Devine, the last hunger striker to perish, died on August 20, few outside of family and the republican paramilitary community paid close attention.60 Based on this experience, to the leaders of the IRA the prospect of recruiting willing bombers, using them repeatedly over time, and expecting the Catholic community to support such behavior probably seemed implausible. They therefore devised an alternative, but failed to anticipate the public revulsion at such callous use of human life.
The high cost of blood within the IRA is only half of the equation explaining the lack of suicide bombing in Northern Ireland. The other half is the perceived need on the part of the nationalist community to support the use of extreme forms of resistance against the British military. This was by design and was the result of Britain’s patient and often underappreciated efforts to de-escalate the conflict from the mid-1970s onward.
The use of British force was instrumental in escalating the Troubles in the early 1970s, particularly the 1972 shooting of twenty-seven unarmed Catholic civilians, thirteen of whom died, on Bloody Sunday in Derry. The British strategy of de-escalation and criminalization therefore entailed a much greater level of restraint in the use of force. After beginning this process in 1975, the British never again used tracked vehicles or heavy armor in the conflict. They never again fired on crowds or carried out collective punishments, such as curfews, and never made use of helicopter gunships or fixed-wing aircraft to attack ground targets. For the most part, the British Army and state endeavored to appear as though they were remaining within the confines of the law, even though certain members did not always do so in practice.61
The British were careful not to introduce the most devastating tools of modern warfare into the conflict, and in doing so denied the IRA a powerful rhetorical tool that would have allowed them to escalate the conflict from their side.62 In other conflicts, the availability of overwhelming force to one side created a sense of desperation that opponents seized on to justify the use of suicide bombing to their communities and to pressure members to become bombers. In the case of the IRA, however, the sense of desperation was not strong enough to create the motivation for anyone to become a suicide attacker.
British restraint also had an effect at the community level. In the cases examined thus far in this volume—the Kamikaze, Hizballah, and the LTTE—the civilian population suffered terribly at the hands of their adversaries. Indiscriminate brutality toward civilian populations provided leaders, such as Prabhakaran, the opportunity to depict their struggles in existential terms and was essential in creating the synergy between organizations, societies, and individuals that allowed suicide bombing to be adopted in Japan, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka.
In Northern Ireland, British soldiers harassed, intimidated, and humiliated Catholic civilians with regularity, but the situation never escalated into a war between the British government and its Catholic citizens in Northern Ireland. In 1988 Gen. Patrick “Paddy” Waters, incoming head of British forces in Northern Ireland, told the historian Martin van Crevald that his mission was not to smash the IRA but to ensure that as few people as possible died on both sides of the conflict. This required patience and the willingness of British soldiers to make themselves vulnerable to an “army” that was far less powerful than they were. During the Troubles, from 1969 to 1998, the IRA killed approximately one thousand British soldiers, police, and other authority figures. On the other hand, the authorities, including the army, killed approximately three hundred IRA members. The ratio was therefore more than three to one, IRA deaths to military and police deaths. This stands in stark contrast to every other known case of counterinsurgency, in which the forces of “order” have always killed far more people than they had lost.63 The IRA could therefore condemn the British presence in terms of colonial occupation, but it could not describe it as genocide or an existential war. Under these conditions, the “need” for suicide bombers was simply not compelling, and the use of proxy bombers was therefore doubly counterproductive. It suggested hypocrisy on the part of a group willing to fight for a cause, but not to die for it, and demonstrated an excess that the political and military situation simply did not warrant.64
The PKK is one of several parties claiming to represent the approximately 16 million people of Kurdish ethnicity spread throughout Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. In all these states, the Kurds have been a minority, a status that left them open to abuse, the most extreme example being the attempted genocide by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s.65 Many Kurds believe that the establishment of a Kurdish state is therefore the only answer to resolving their concerns and history of discrimination, abuse, and attempted genocide.
The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, formed in 1978, is among the most resilient and brutal of the groups who have fought for Kurdish nationhood. After years of preparation, the PKK launched its armed struggle against the Turkish state in 1984.66 By 1999, when the group’s captured founder and leader Abdullah Ocalan stood trial in Turkey, the struggle launched by the PKK had claimed more than 30,000 lives, many of them civilians murdered as a result of the indifference and cruelty of the PKK and the Turkish government.
The charismatic leadership of Ocalan is a distinctive feature of the PKK. In many ways Ocalan played a role similar to that of Prabhakaran’s in the LTTE. Ocalan is a university dropout with no tribal or familial distinctions. In their place, he substituted leftist rhetoric of a Leninist nature, calling for a secretive, professional revolutionary movement and the creation of a one-party state.67 Ocalan assumed the role of leader, tolerating no alternatives and no dissent, thus using ideology to substitute for more traditional forms of cultural capital. The centrality of Ocalan as leader and ideologue created an organization that one analyst called a “political cult.”68 Once having joined, members are expected to remain in the organization for life. New members must swear allegiance to Ocalan, and only by extension to the PKK and the idea of Kurdish statehood.
Ocalan, like Prabhakaran, always viewed alternative Kurdish nationalist movements as threats to his own. The PKK therefore dealt violently with other Kurdish groups and was responsible for inflicting an extraordinary amount of harm on members of the Kurdish community while in theory fighting for their statehood.69 In addition, beginning in 1985 it was PKK policy to hunt down and kill former members who criticized the group. During the later 1980s, fear of spies, informers, and rival claims to leadership led to murderous internal purges of the PKK, weakening it internally and eroding morale.70 The PKK did, however, have an internal history of self-sacrifice as political protest. In 1982 a PKK prisoner named Mazlum Dogan hung himself in protest of Turkish prison conditions. The following May, four other prisoners burned themselves to death in protest, and by the summer several had started a hunger strike that resulted in the deaths of four by September.71
Given the similarities between the PKK and the LTTE, it is hardly surprising that Ocalan attempted to avail himself of the new weapon that by the mid-1990s was being used so effectively by Prabhakaran. The PKK’s experimentation with suicide bombing took the form of two waves of attacks, the first consisting of three operations in 1996 and the second consisting of ten attacks during 1998–99. Authorities managed to prevent several others. The first three were the most effective, resulting in nine, five, and four fatalities, respectively, as well as numerous injured.72 After these attacks, the group refrained from using suicide bombers for almost two years. Then, when Ocalan called on his followers to resume suicide bombing, they proved to be relatively ineffective, with eleven bombers killing only six people.
Ocalan chose to begin suicide attacks during a period of weakness in the PKK’s history. By 1995 the group had been devastated by the Turkish government’s measures against it and by infighting with other Kurdish groups. The public sensation caused by LTTE and (after 1994) Palestinian suicide bombings probably suggested to Ocalan that the use of such attacks would provide the PKK its best chance to reverse its fortunes. Ocalan may also have hoped to use suicide bombings to provoke additional repression by the Turkish government, as its heavy-handed counterterrorism had generated sympathy for the PKK in the past.73 Whatever Ocalan’s actual internal calculus, from a perspective outside the group, the motivation for the use of suicide bombers seems to have been desperation. According to the most thorough study of the PKK, “Certainly, the turn to suicide bombing underscored something Ocalan refused to publicly admit: that the rebels had lost the initiative and without some radical, tactical, and strategic change, had no way to regain it.”74
The brutality of the Turkish state in suppressing the Kurdish nationalist movement thus suggested the need for suicide bombing to Ocalan and also pushed certain PKK members toward the self-sacrificial mindset conducive to suicide bombing. Need and possibility were present, at least to an extent, allowing the group to begin using suicide attackers, but Ocalan’s poor use of it was most likely the factor that prevented suicide bombing from becoming sustainable within the organization.
The greatest propensity for self-sacrifice had been among male prisoners, a situation that is not surprising given the brutality and despair of prison life. Ocalan, however, chose instead to use female members of the group for the first few attacks. There seems to have been agreement among the upper echelon of the PKK leadership for the need for suicide attackers, but the recruitment of young women was not on a voluntary basis.75 For example, the PKK’s second suicide attack, which took place on October 25, 1996, was carried out by a woman named Leyla Kaplan, but she was not the first candidate to be considered for the mission. The first woman chosen for the attack refused the mission. She was immediately executed in front of Kaplan.76
The decision to force women to become suicide attackers limited the power of suicide bombing to serve as a means of individual empowerment and group solidarity. For women, membership in the PKK had been potentially liberating in that it allowed them to break away from the confines of a rigidly paternalistic and traditional Kurdish culture and fight for a cause under conditions of relative equality.77 Killing themselves on behalf of the PKK may have been a much less attractive proposition, however, especially given the attitude of some male members, who viewed women as a burden and suggested that the suicide missions would be a good way to use them effectively while simultaneously decreasing their numbers.78 In addition, the attacks were not accompanied by the type of publicity that had become characteristic of suicide bombing by the LTTE and Hizballah.79 Without group identity or the promise of secular or religious immortality, there was simply no way for prospective bombers to be assured that their deaths would be remembered and honored, and therefore no way for them to know with conviction that the sacrifice would be worthwhile. The PKK’s use of suicide bombing in the mid-1990s was therefore a trial run that produced ambiguous results. Its cost in terms of morale seems to have been high, and its payoff in terms of coercive power somewhat limited.
The resulting balance was insufficient for encouraging regular use of suicide bombers, but not great enough to completely delegitimize the technology, so two years later Ocalan could again call upon PKK members to carry out suicide attacks. As before, the decision appears to have been based on desperation. In early 1999 Ocalan was captured by the Turkish government and was sentenced to death on June 29. Although he appeared to be conciliatory and cooperative with the authorities during his captivity, he called on his followers to carry out attacks, including suicide missions, to pressure the authorities. His followers responded with a wave of poorly coordinated violence, including several attempted suicide missions. This second wave of attacks lacked centralized direction and without competent organizational mediation was far less lethal than even the PKK’s first wave of attacks (see Table 4.1).80
TABLE 4.1 Suicide Bombings by the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, 1996–1999
Source: Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge, U.K., and Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), 243–44.
By this point, the civil war launched by the PKK had claimed tens of thousands of lives, and in comparison the actual effects of PKK suicide bombing were meager indeed. After being sentenced to death, Ocalan called on his followers to end their struggle, perhaps in an effort to win clemency. The Turkish government had been under pressure from leaders in the European Union to spare Ocalan’s life, so when Turkey abolished the death penalty for civilians in 2002, Ocalan’s sentence was commuted to life in prison.81
The diffusion of an innovation such as suicide bombing from an established user to a new cultural context is governed by numerous factors, the most important of which are the extent to which the innovation is compatible with the culture of the new society and the degree to which the innovation is perceived to be better for solving a given problem relative to other solutions. These two factors are integral at all three levels of the suicide-bombing complex: in the minds of prospective bombers, in the decision making of their sponsoring organizations, and in the support (or lack thereof) of their reference community (i.e., culture). When people at all three levels are of like mind regarding the ability of suicide bombing to solve their problems and are accepting of the price in human life, suicide bombing becomes sustainable. All levels, however, need not share the same position on the desirability of suicide bombing as a potential form of attack. When elaborate cultures of martyrdom, such as the one that characterized the LTTE, are absent, or when the military situation does not justify the militancy of suicide bombing, there is less pressure compelling societies to support suicide bombing and less motivation on the part of individuals to become suicide attackers. In such instances, the challenge for the sponsoring organization, should its leaders still desire to deploy suicide attackers, is to manipulate the expectations of individuals and communities in an effort to bring them into alignment with the organization’s decision making. As this chapter illustrates, they are not always successful. The IRA’s leaders wanted to use the power of suicide bombers to shock the British, but they knew that few of their ranks would be anxious to volunteer for such missions. They had already learned via hunger strikes that there would be little support in the nationalist community for “martyrs” who might have been pressured to carry out a suicide mission. Abdullah Ocalan forced his variant of suicide bombing upon an unenthusiastic subset of his followers and thereby could not reinforce group coherence or connect the group to the broader Kurdish nationalist community.
These two trial runs suggest a self-limiting factor that is potentially inherent to suicide attacks. Suicide bombing is by definition an organizational phenomenon. The legitimacy that makes the self-sacrifice of the individual admirable and acceptable to the community derives paradoxically from the individual’s stated commitment to comrades, cause, and society, a decision that must be made free of organizational coercion. Leaders who seek to deploy suicide attackers must therefore minimize the rather significant role that they play in selecting and preparing suicide attackers to prevent themselves from being seen as cynical manipulators of human lives. Their task is made easier when a culture that devalues individual lives relative to the good of the community is firmly entrenched or when extreme need makes suicide bombing appear as a necessary force equalizer. Among Palestinian Islamists in the 1990s, the first factor was present, making the sustained use of suicide bombing possible. By the new millennium, the second factor, military need, was present as well, leading to an exponential increase in the number of suicide attacks carried out against Israeli targets.