Belfast United by Wish for No More Violence

A large, neatly painted white graffiti message appeared on a wall here the morning after the Irish Republican Army ended its 17-month-old cease-fire with a massive bomb attack in London.

“Either Ballot or Gun, Our Day Will Come,” read the message, followed by an IRA signature.

But in a province whose people have been divided for as long as they can remember by sectarian differences and, more recently, by a 25-year campaign of organized violence, almost everyone--Roman Catholic or Protestant, pro-British or ardent Irish nationalist --shares a single wish: Please, no more violence.

To be sure, Northern Ireland’s capital has been quiet in the wake of Friday’s bombing in London’s Docklands redevelopment area that claimed two lives, injured dozens of people and threatened the fragile peace process. But an uneasy tension mixed with a sense of sickening anticipation hangs over the city as residents fear their brief flirtation with normalcy may be ending.

“It’s a disappointment bordering on despair,” said one resident, who asked not to be named. “We’re staring into the abyss.”

As stunned residents weighed their future, speculation nearly everywhere centered on two fundamental questions:

* Was the London attack a one-bomb offensive whose real purpose was to break the diplomatic impasse on Northern Ireland and refocus the minds of political leaders on the stakes involved, or did it mark the start of a new reign of sectarian terror and violence in the province?

* What exactly was it that led the IRA to carry out the bombing? Observers now dismiss the initial assumption that the perpetrators were a splinter group acting on their own. Indeed, some now argue that the bombing may have been ordered precisely to head off a threatened split by placating the organization’s hard-liners.

On Saturday, daytime shopping was light in Belfast as many residents in outlying areas of the province canceled trips into the capital. In the evening, nightspots usually overcrowded with customers and throbbing with heavy-decibel music were subdued and half empty. People have become cautious, wary.

The city’s mood wasn’t helped Sunday by reports that the British and Irish governments, two key players in the peace process, seemed headed for a major falling-out over the issue of who is to blame for the failure to begin much-anticipated negotiations despite the passage of nearly 1 1/2 years since both sides in the conflict agreed to stop fighting.

In a BBC interview, Irish Prime Minister John Bruton warned his British counterpart, John Major, to drop his insistence that elections be held before the talks can begin.

“I believe the idea of having an election of the kind suggested immediately after the resumption of violence would pour petrol on the flames. I think it would be a serious mistake,” he said.

On Sunday night, Major was meeting with senior Cabinet ministers, reportedly to try to forge a new way to break the impasse in the talks.

That those who pledged to bring peace to Northern Ireland have faltered so badly has also generated plenty of anger and frustration on both sides of the sectarian divide here.

At St. Peter’s Church in Belfast’s staunchly Catholic Falls Road section, where IRA support has always been strong, Father Tom Toner spoke of rage directed at both the IRA and the British government.

“For the first time, people felt they could build, that they could give their children a future,” he said of the last 17 months of peace. “The thought of returning to violence is devastating.”

In an emotional sermon, he told his parishioners that Major was “criminally irresponsible” for failing to launch the all-party talks, whose goal is to resolve Northern Ireland’s long-simmering political crisis. But the priest also denounced the IRA attack.

Less than a mile away in the mainly Protestant Shankhill district, whose residents profess unwavering loyalty to the British crown, 56-year-old Tommy McAuley said the normally militant neighborhood is holding its collective breath that the London bomb will not reignite the sectarian war.

“If it starts again, it’ll be a massacre,” he predicted. “We’re hoping our boys hold tight until we know where we are.”

David Ervine, head of the Progressive Unionist Party and a voice of Protestant militant opinion, also cautioned against retaliation.

“It would be pathetic to destroy the only path to peace I’ve ever known in my lifetime,” he warned.

More than 3,000 people died as a direct result of sectarian warfare that gripped the province between 1969 and 1994.

The strikingly broad and unified reaction to Friday’s bombing underscored just how much peace has brought to the 1.6 million people of Northern Ireland in the months since the IRA announced its cease-fire in August 1994 and Protestant militants followed suit two months later.

In a broad range of interviews here Sunday, people spoke of how peace had brought hope, optimism and other improvements, such as a huge redevelopment of the Belfast Harbor area, new Hilton and Holiday Inn hotels, rising housing prices and a new phenomenon, at least on a large scale: tourism.

But most of all, they spoke of the ability to enjoy simple luxuries that the majority of Western Europeans take for granted: freedom from the fear of violence, the ability to go shopping without having to look over one’s shoulder, the freedom to openly cross the sectarian divide without fear of reprisal.

“For the first time, we could relax,” said a social worker, Joseph Morgan. “We could live a set of values worthy of passing on to our children.”

Those familiar with IRA tactics were pessimistic Sunday about the future, noting that the organization announced Friday not just the London bomb but the end of the cease-fire.