WARS AND CONFLICTS | IN FOCUS


any part of the UK. Tourism has also benefited greatly and overseas investors such as Canadian aerospace manufacturer Bombardier, US insurer Allstate and Japanese medical firm Terumo BTC have all recently created jobs. Northern Ireland has also become a popular destination for film companies such as HBO, which made part of the blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones there.


“A CHALLENGING NEW ERA” The CBI chose to play a positive role in the peace process that was emerging in the early 1990s. In 1994, CBI Northern Ireland produced a landmark publication, Peace – A Challenging New Era. Better known as the “peace dividend paper”, the document spelled out in detail the economic rationale for peace. It identified the economic costs of the conflict as increased security costs, reduced investment and a “brain drain” of the brightest young people. It argued that, if violence ceased, the money currently spent on law, order and protective services could be reinvested in other sectors. In 1996, the CBI joined six other trade and business organisations in Northern Ireland to create the Group of Seven (GoS). It invited representatives of all nine political parties involved in the peace talks to a meeting in Belfast at which it stressed that the collapse of peace talks would be catastrophic and asked all parties to seek new solutions.


SPENDING CUTS Nevertheless, neither Northern Ireland nor the skirmishes the Army has been involved in since the mid-1960s are conflicts the average Briton would think of when asked about the UK’s military history over the past 50 years. What will stand out for most people are the falklands conflict, the two Gulf wars, and the 13 years of military presence in Afghanistan. British forces were deployed in 1982 in the operation to liberate the falklands Islands after they were seized by Argentina. forces were also involved in international peacekeeping operations in Bosnia (1992–95), Kosovo (1999) and Sierra leone (2000). The UK took part in the joint military


operations with the United States and other allies in the first Gulf War in 1990 to liberate Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. Thirteen years later the UK was part of the controversial invasion of Iraq that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but meant that British troops remained in Iraq until 2008. Britain has now ended its formal presence


in Afghanistan, which began in 2001 when it joined the military operations to topple the Taliban regime that had hosted al-Qaida during its plotting of the attacks of 11 September 2001. The government is reducing defence spending, with a 20 per cent reduction in regular army numbers from 102,000 to 82,000 between 2010 and 2018. So the UK may need to take a different role in the world in the future.


• Left: British troops withdraw from Afghanistan 207


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