Dragging it on and on... and down?

The longer the stalemate in Northern Ireland lasts, the greater is the danger, says Hasan Suroor.

THIS HAS been a bad week for Northern Ireland, where at the best of times peace sits on a knife's edge. The outbreak of violence in Belfast within hours of the collapse of peace talks at Downing Street reflects the new, more militant mood in Northern Ireland after the recent elections which saw moderates on both sides lose ground to the hardliners. After days of rioting, tension was still simmering at the weekend amid signs of increased belligerance across the sectarian divide.

The week saw a marked hardening of positions, evident as much in the rhetoric of major players as in their body language as they emerged from Downing Street last Monday after talks with the British and Irish Prime Ministers, Mr. Tony Blair and Mr. Bertie Ahern. The hitherto moderate Unionist leader, Mr. David Trimble, shook with rage as he lashed out at the IRA for dragging its feet on giving up its weapons and repeated his threat to quit as head of Northern Ireland's ruling coalition if there was no progress on the issue by July 1. The Sinn Fein chief, Mr. Gerry Adams, speaking for the IRA, was equally livid and accused Mr. Trimble of trying to ``hijack'' the peace process. A leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), declaring ``plague on both your houses'', pronounced the Good Friday Agreement virtually dead saying it was in ``big trouble''.

The first hint of how ``big'' the trouble was came the next day when Belfast exploded - and for the next four days Catholic and Protestant extremists slugged it out in what has been described as the worst rioting in a long time. The trouble, which started outside a Catholic school in North Belfast, a volatile area, over flaghoisting by Protestants, soon spread to other areas plunging the beleaguered Good Friday Agreement into deeper crisis.

The Downing Street summit was billed as a major initiative by Britain and Ireland to get the stalled peace process moving but despite official optimism it was never going to be easy to defy the logic of election results which hardlinders see as a verdict in their favour. Mr. Adams, whose party gained significantly at the expense of his more moderate republican rival, Mr. John Hume's SDLP, was predictably hawkish in pressing his two main demands - scaling down the British security presence in Northern Ireland, and a revamp of the provincial police force to the satisfaction of his Catholic constituency. The SDLP, having lost its position as the principal nationalist/republican voice in Northern Ireland thanks to an anti-moderate swing in the June 7 elections, was reduced to playing second fiddle while Mr. Adams flexed his muscles. He ruled out any compromise dismissing Mr. Trimble's resignation threat as political brinkmanship and making clear that there was no question of meeting his July 1 deadline for arms decommissioning.

With the ``summit'' ending in mutual recrimination, the very future of the power-sharing coalition looked bleak prompting speculation that the British Government might be forced to suspend the Provincial Assembly to allow passions to cool. If this happens, it would be the second time in less than three years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed that such an extreme measure was taken. Inevitably, this has raised questions about the fragile nature of the peace process in Northern Ireland and even the supporters of the agreement have begun to wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to have another look at the way it has been sought to be implemented.

A crisis has been brewing for months and for all practical purposes the Good Friday Agreement is at a standstill despite two high-profile interventions by the former U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, and frequent nudges from Downing Street. Virtually a civil war has been raging inside the power-sharing executive at Stormont after Mr. Trimble decided to bar Sinn Fein Ministers from attending cross-border ministerial meetings as a punishment for lack of progress on arms decommissioning. It was intended to appease his own party hardliners who had been pressing him to take a tougher position on decommissioning.

In the event, the move succeeded neither in achieving decommissioning nor in heading off challenge to his leadership from his party rivals. If anything, it hardened positions on both sides and Sinn Fein's spectacular performance in both general and local elections is seen as a vindication of its position. Similarly, the gains made by the anti-agreement Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) at the cost of Mr. Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) have been interpreted by the DUP leadership as a vote of no-confidence against the pro-agreement Unionists. The polarisation between hardline Unionists and Republicans is complete.

Within the UUP, the hawkish lobby has stepped up its campaign against Mr. Trimble's leadership arguing that the election result is a verdict against his ``softly softly'' policies. It is a measure of the new equations in the UUP that when Mr. Trimble went to the Downing Street summit he was forced to take with him the hardliner, Mr. Jeffrey Donaldson - one of his bitterest critics and a potential candidate to replace him - a signal to Sinn Fein that henceforth it would need to contend with more demanding voices. With the political temperature in Northern Ireland at boiling point, a stalemate can only help extremists and the danger of the sort of violence witnessed in Belfast this week can hardly be exaggerated.

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