Reborn Belfast Has High Hopes for Clinton Visit : Northern Ireland: A fragile cease-fire brings economic boom. The President will hear partisan visions of peace.

Troops are gone from city streets, and police who once wore bulletproof vests to track terrorists now clock speeders with radar guns. New businesses are opening, and tourism is booming.

This divided city is recovering from decades of ethnic strife, and President Clinton will add his own morale boost this week with an overnight stop Thursday at a downtown site that defiantly calls itself “the most bombed hotel in Europe.”

On the eve of the presidential visit, though, a fragile 15-month cease-fire by Roman Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups that underpins the Northern Ireland renaissance is in danger. Repeated attempts by the British and Irish governments have failed to extend the cease-fire into an ongoing search for peace.

For the 1.6 million people of Northern Ireland, then, the first visit by a sitting American President is a chance to both celebrate the absence of violence and press partisan visions for a long-term peace settlement.

“Clinton will help prospects for peace. His welcome will come from across the community. Both sides have strong links to America, and people feel they are emerging from a long, dark period in history,” City Councilor Reginald Empey said at City Hall, where Clinton will light Belfast’s official Christmas tree, a gift from Tennessee.

“Belfast has been a red-lined city that produced Beirut-style news for so long that Clinton can do more to repair our image in one overnight stay than we could in a decade,” said Empey, a unionist who has twice been Belfast’s lord mayor.

Militants from both sides--republican Catholic and unionist Protestant--have halted 25 years of violence with separate cease-fires. Now, security checkpoints and British army patrols, like the fear of bombs in shops and pubs, are memories among people who tell pollsters that they overwhelmingly welcome peace. Belfast residents are losing the dread of answering the doorbell. They no longer jump at slamming car doors or the screech of tires, Empey said.

“This is becoming a normal city again,” said Maria McCann, a Belfast businesswoman. “We go out at night, worry about speed limits and licenses, do things we wouldn’t dream were possible for many long years.”

Unemployment is falling sharply, and Northern Ireland is now growing faster than the rest of Britain, according to Michael Roberts of the province’s Industrial Development Board.

A number of U.S. companies are operating profitably in Northern Ireland, and more may follow a successful Clinton visit, Roberts said. Local and foreign entrepreneurs are testing the waters: There’s a new beauty parlor in the oft-bombed but now-refurbished Europa Hotel, and last week a French company announced a $260-million investment expected to generate 1,400 jobs and give Belfast Europe’s largest aluminum foundry.

Yet the turnaround hinges on the continued cease-fire by the Irish Republican Army, which has used terrorism in its efforts to join Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, and unionists who have also killed to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom.

Both have huge stockpiles of arms. When and how to reduce them has become the roadblock in translating the truce into all-party peace talks.

The unionists promise that they will not end the cease-fire first and insist that London press its demands for at least a token surrender of arms in advance of talks--”decommissioning” of the weapons is the euphemism being used.

The IRA, though, adamantly opposes this condition, saying it agreed to a cease-fire, not a surrender of any sort. Disposal of arms, says Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, is a topic for peace talks.

“We hope the Clinton visit will provide an incentive to the British government to change its position. The only resolution can come through all-party talks in which every party is willing to put weapons on the table,” Mitchell McLaughlin, the national chairman of Sinn Fein, said in an interview.

At a barricaded Sinn Fein headquarters, where concrete has replaced windows since a terrorist attack, party official Bairbre de Brun said the United States is widely seen as an evenhanded player for peace in the Ulster vortex.

“Clinton’s visit may instill hope into the peace process at a time when people are losing hope,” she said. “The cease-fire is on the point of collapse. We have two unanchored cease-fires. What’s missing is that there is no coming together, no date, no plan.”

Northern Ireland is governed directly by the British government from an old castle in a hillside park. From his office there, Michael Ancram, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, argues that despite differences there is a steady move toward peace.

Since the cease-fire, he noted, the improved climate has allowed 1,500 army troops to return to England; 16,500 remain. By Christmas, about 100 Catholic and Protestant militants will have been released from prison under reduced-sentencing initiatives.

There have been about 250 so-called punishment attacks, in which informers or petty criminals are savagely beaten by members of their own communities, but only one political murder since the Aug. 31, 1994, IRA cease-fire, and that was apparently the work of republican terrorists outside the IRA chain of command, Ancram said.

“Five or 10 years ago, it would have been impossible to have gotten this far. The Clinton visit is encouragement of the fact that we have peace. That is the biggest piece on the chessboard,” Ancram said.

But he added: “Peace without fundamental solutions is not a permanent peace. So we ask those with arms, ‘If you are committed to peace permanently, why do you need a vast arsenal?’ ”

The plot is complicated by the fact that parties representing Protestants--who are a 58% majority in Northern Ireland--say they will not sit down with the IRA without prior weapons decommissioning.

Supporters of continued union with Britain are not convinced the IRA is prepared to abandon terror.

“Laying down arms is a test that the IRA is truly committed to peace. As long as they can turn on terror, we are not playing on a level field,” said Empey, a member of the Ulster Unionists, the largest political party in Northern Ireland.

David Trimble, the new leader of the Ulster Unionists, said in an interview that he would ask Clinton in their scheduled meeting Thursday to pressure Sinn Fein.

“The United States does not have as firm a position as the U.K. government on the question of handing in the weapons. But Clinton said [in May] that decommissioning was the next step, and we endorse that,” Trimble said.

For a time, the White House had hopes that Clinton might be able to jawbone old enemies to the negotiating table. But nobody now expects that to happen during the visit, and Downing Street sources made it plain last week that Britain would not welcome any American effort to mediate the impasse.

Rather, the government of Prime Minister John Major--with whom Clinton will confer in London before coming here--has devised what it calls a “twin track” approach to work around the roadblocks.

The proposal is for an international commission, headed by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, to address the arms question while parallel preparatory talks establish the participants, format and agenda for peace talks.

The political wrangling weighs on the people of Belfast, but only a handful of them have any use for terrorism on either side. And peace is sweet. Fifteen months after the cease-fire, civic booster Empey said proudly, bloody Belfast has a crime rate lower than Switzerland’s.