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Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan
In amongst the news yesterday of COVID 19 crisis measures and the associated death rates was the information that the three Irish citizens known as the Colombia Three had been awarded a partial amnesty by the Colombian Transitional Justice system. The Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP) is the special legal entity established as part of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla organization with responsibilities to investigate and rule on cases involving the long-running civil conflict in Colombia in the years prior to the signing of the agreement. The three men (James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connolly) had been arrested in Bogotá airport in August 2001, having returned from a five-week stint in the department of Caqueta (an area which formed part of a huge demilitarized zone under the control of the guerrilla group on account of peace talks which were occurring at the time). Their clothes showed traces of chemicals associated with the making of explosives, and international intelligence agencies claimed the men were members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army). The Irish citizens were also travelling under false documents, and following a near three-year legal process, the three were sentenced to 17 years each in prison in 2004. However, they disappeared shortly before the final appeal only to reappear in Ireland the following year. The decision by the JEP is the first step in admonishing the men from legal responsibility in Colombia. The case and ruling appeared to draw little attention in the public sphere in Colombia this week, perhaps understandable given the precedence given to the current public health crisis, but its ramifications at the time were huge; the arrests frayed international relations, placed huge strain on the then nascent Irish peace process, angered many allies of Sinn Féin (political party emanating from the IRA) in Washington, and ultimately accelerated the process of IRA arms decommissioning. The original disappearance from Colombia also raises interesting questions.
The IRA officially ended its near 30 year armed struggle against British rule in Ireland with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. The agreement saw the military organization agree to disband in return for a power sharing political deal in Northern Ireland. In effect, the organization was moving on from the “Armalite and Ballot-box strategy” (military actions combined with political moves in the 80s and 90s) to a purely political focus via the Sinn Féin party on both sides of the Irish border. Without getting into the specifics of the Irish peace agreement, it is important to point out a couple of important details. First, the agreement led to a power sharing deal for political participation in the devolved government of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin emerged from the peace process as the dominant political force among the nationalist/Catholic population, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would later establish itself as the dominant unionist/Protestant political party; meaning the most extreme elements on either side of the divide would govern together. This relationship was frayed from the beginning and it has not made a huge amount of progress in the 20 plus years since. Second, the peace agreement placed no firm specific dates on when the IRA would dismantle their weapons; it merely stated that the weapons would be “put beyond use” at some point to be agreed upon. Such a situation contrasts greatly with the Colombian Peace Agreement, which saw the FARC hand over all weapons within 8 months of signing the agreement in November 2016; a process overseen by the UN. One reason for the lack of definitive dates for disarmament in the agreement was the relatively strong position Sinn Féin took into negotiations; British prime minister Tony Blair and U.S. counterpart Bill Clinton were both keen for foreign policy victories, and had sympathy with Sinn Féin leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness who were walking a tightrope in trying to convince IRA hardliners to accept a deal which fell well below the stated aim of a 32 county Irish Republic. Their determination to get a deal done meant that IRA decommissioning could wait for the time being; a fact which greatly angered the unionists and was a constant cause of tension as well as causing obstacles for the establishment of the new power sharing executive. The issue of arms decommissioning was one Adams would use in order to extract further political benefits in the years following the signing of the agreement in 1998. However, events in Bogotá and New York in 2001 would alter the scenario greatly.
Despite the numerous atrocities carried out by the IRA during their years of armed struggle, Sinn Féin had always maintained a strong bipartisan level of support in Washington. This was mainly on account of the political and economic influence of Irish-Americans; evidence perhaps of that old adage of one man´s terrorist being another´s freedom fighter. However, the arrest of James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connolly in August of 2001 at Bogotá´s international airport caused great anger and embarrassment among Sinn Féin’s U.S. allies. Fighting the age old battle against British colonialism, even accounting for some of the heinous bombing campaigns, was one thing for U.S. politicians, but being caught training Marxist rebels with links to the drug trade, and at a point when the U.S. was pouring vast amounts of money, arms and resources into Colombia to battle the FARC via the Plan Colombia program was beyond the pale even for the staunchest supporters of Sinn Féin in Washington. It also created huge problems for the Irish peace process and the British and Irish governments who supported it; the IRA were supposed to be disbanded, yet here they were supposedly training the FARC in the Colombian countryside. Sinn Féin rejected claims that the three men were members of the IRA, imploring justice for the Colombia Three (the name was likely strategically used to hark back to past cases of injustice such the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six). There were even fanciful claims that the three had been on a bird-watching trip. However, various intelligence agencies were adamant that both Monaghan and McCauley were members of the IRA´s engineering department with expertise in the creation of mortar bombs to be used in urban environments. The general consensus was that the organization was exchanging technological knowhow in return for payment. Worse still for Sinn Féin was confirmation from Cuba that Connolly had been Sinn Féin’s representative to the government of Fidel Castro, never the most popular of foreign leaders in the U.S. Within a few weeks, the situation and the world would change dramatically with the 9/11 terrorist atrocities in the United States. The Bush administration had never been as enthusiastic in its support or tolerance for Sinn Féin, but the events of August and September 2001 had altered everything; the War on Terror would begin in earnest and support would be prioritized for those battling terrorists, a point which the soon to be president of Colombia Alvaro Uribe seized upon with relish as he took the fight to the FARC backed by U.S. arms, weaponry and expertise. For Sinn Féin and the IRA, given their need for political and economic support from the U.S., there was no choice but to accelerate negotiations over weapons decommissioning.
The process of IRA arms decommissioning was completed in September 2005, one month following the reappearance of the Colombia Three in Ireland. The timing, in hindsight, seems curious although it could of course be a simple coincidence. The three had been released on bail while awaiting news of their appeal in 2004, but mysteriously vanished before the appeal was rejected. In a televised interview upon their return to Ireland in 2005, James Monaghan refused to give details of how they evaded justice to return home; only mentioning that they “had got a lot of help from a lot of people” who he did not wish to endanger by revealing names. It seems likely they were brought to Venezuela and from there to Cuba, before making their way back across the Atlantic at some point. It is worth pointing out that Colombia at this stage was experiencing perhaps its murkiest period of its long running armed conflict, with the FARC still controlling large swathes of territory, and right-wing AUC paramilitaries committing massacres, exercising control in many regions, and carrying out executions of journalists, trade union members and anyone else suspected of having left-wing leanings, often with the compliance of state security entities. Furthermore, during this period the state security agency (the now defunct DAS) had opposition figures and others suspected of being sympathetic to the FARC under surveillance, with this information being shared with President Uribe. It would seem strange in such a context, that a trio of foreigners found guilty of training the FARC could just disappear into thin air. The then president is an avowed enemy of the guerrilla group, with his father being killed by the organization during a botched kidnapping in 1983. Indeed, his own inauguration, in August 2002, was the target of a terrorist attack by the guerrilla group, with homemade mortars being fired at the House of Congress from the nearby city centre streets in Bogotá. Coincidently, mortars such as these were said to be the specialty of James Monaghan, the eldest of the Colombia Three. It seems likely that President Uribe, like the majority of Colombians at the time, would have been determined to see the three Irishmen behind bars for their crime. Was there, perhaps, a quiet word from Washington encouraging the state security agencies to look the other way? The twitter feed of the former president, never shy in berating what he views as the inadequacies and bias of the JEP, has been surprisingly quiet in relation to the news of the partial amnesty. Either way, almost twenty years on from their initial arrest, the curious case of the Colombia Three continues to serve as an interesting lens through which to view the internal conflicts in both Ireland and Colombia as well as analysing international affairs at the beginning of the new millennium.
*Article written by Paddy Pelican
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