By Harald Küst
When the IRA terror came to Duisburg. The Duisburg notary Spieker mediated in top secret between the hostile Northern Irish civil war parties.
Tourist advertising for Ireland often plays with clichés. A green island in the Atlantic, rain, sun, red-haired Guinness beer drinkers belting out Irish songs in pubs and eating dishes like Irish stew, fish and chips and chowder (a fish and vegetable soup) - but the advertising idyll is deceptive. Beneath the glamorous surface, the Northern Ireland conflict is bubbling - "The Troubles": Catholic Irish against British Protestants. Only superficially a religious struggle.
Retrospect: Protestant English and Scots settled in the province of Ulster in northeastern Ireland since the early 17th century, and in 1801 Ireland was completely subjugated to the English crown. The tensions between pro-Irish republicans and pro-British unionists reflect an age-old conflict. In predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland, the Catholic working and underclass still feel discriminated against, socially and economically marginalized. The long-simmering conflict has repeatedly developed into a dangerous explosive. In the 1970s and 1980s, brutal clashes dominated the divided Northern Ireland: assassinations by militant Catholics were followed by revenge killings by Protestants, and vice versa. A spiral of violence. But this was only marginally registered in Germany and also in Duisburg - until on July 3, 1988, an explosive attack with considerable damage to property rocked the British barracks in the Duisburg-Wanheim district. Nine British soldiers were injured. Soon after, the underground organisation IRA in Dublin claimed responsibility for the attack. Suddenly, terror had arrived in Duisburg and Germany.
A pacification of the hostile parties seemed hopeless. Few know that a "man of ecumenism" from Duisburg played a prominent mediating role in the search for peace in Northern Ireland. It was the Hamborn lawyer and notary Dr. Eberhard Spiecker, who had already organised the Protestant-Catholic dialogue in the 1970s and had excellent contacts in Ireland. Irish church circles were impressed by the ecumenical attitude and diplomatic skills of the Duisburger and asked him to take on a political mediating role. A difficult, almost hopeless mission in view of the heated situation. On October 14 and 15, 1988, Eberhard Spiecker succeeded in bringing representatives of the two opposing parties - Catholic Irish Republicans and Protestant supporters of Great Britain - to the same table in Duisburg for top-secret talks.
They met at the "Angerhof" in the south of Duisburg at a time when the IRA had bombed the Glamorgan Barracks in Wanheimerort a few weeks earlier. Representatives of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Alliance Party took part in the talks in Duisburg. Spiecker's balancing negotiating skills made him a sought-after negotiator. Spiecker (1931-2017) played a "significant but little-recognised role" in efforts for a Northern Ireland peace process in the 1980s, according to a British BBC obituary. In 1990, an agreement to stop attacks against British installations on German soil was reached with the IRA. That this succeeded is to Spiecker's credit. In the decades that followed, Spiecker remained active in the settlement of the Northern Ireland conflict. On Good Friday 1998, a peace agreement was signed by all parties - to this day it holds .....
Image from the BBC News Article linked at the top of the page.
Comments