IRA Kills 2 Policemen, Sabotaging Peace Hopes

Irish Republican Army assassins shot two police officers walking their beat in a quiet market town in Northern Ireland on Monday, killing them instantly--and with them lingering hopes for an early peace in a bleeding province.

“The whole street was in tears,” said Brid Rodgers, an official of a moderate Roman Catholic party in Lurgan, a small town near Belfast, where the officers were shot in the head as they patrolled sunny Church Walk near their headquarters.

The IRA, which opposes British rule in Northern Ireland, claimed responsibility for the attack almost immediately in a phone call to a Belfast radio station using an established code word.

Denouncing the “cynicism and hypocrisy” of the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered that there be no further contacts between his government and Sinn Fein.

“It is impossible to interpret this latest attack as anything but a signal that Sinn Fein and the IRA are not interested in peace and democracy,” Blair said.

Since Blair took office last month, two meetings have been held as part of a government initiative to draw Sinn Fein into stalled multi-party peace talks. There were no breakthroughs, and a third meeting was planned--but the government said Monday that is no longer in the cards.

“At the moment, we would not meet Sinn Fein under any circumstances,” said a visibly distraught Marjorie Mowlam, Britain’s new minister for Northern Ireland.

David Trimble, the leader of Northern Ireland’s largest pro-British political party, the Ulster Unionist Party, said Monday’s double killing should end any optimism that the IRA might be ready to lay down its arms.

“We need to realize the nature of the beast we’re dealing with,” Trimble said.

Even by the standards of a community inured to three decades of sectarian atrocity, Monday’s lunchtime attack was supremely cynical in its conception and uncompromisingly brutal in its execution, analysts said. Many now expect a long, violent summer in a divided British province where the IRA has rejected repeated cease-fire appeals from Britain, Ireland and the United States.

The White House on Monday condemned the assault as “an outrageous act of cowardice, an outrageous act of terrorism.”

Both the timing and the location of Monday’s attack were significant, in the analysts’ view. An annual summer parade season that often pits Protestant marchers against Catholic demonstrators is only a few weeks away, they noted. And the particularly contentious town of Portadown, site of a violent standoff over marching rights a year ago, is only about 10 miles from Lurgan.

Lurgan is part of Trimble’s parliamentary district. He called the attack a transparent attempt by the IRA to inflame Protestants and trigger a response from Protestant paramilitary groups, who in the past have mirrored IRA terrorism.

“I would ask loyalists not to play the IRA’s game,” Trimble said. “Now is the time to draw back from the brink.”

Judging from the police account of Monday’s attack, two killers walked up to the officers in the street and shot them at close range before either had a chance to react.

John Graham, 34, and David Andrew Johnston, 30, apparently were dead when they hit the sidewalk. Doctors sprinting to help from their office 100 feet away on the quiet side street could do nothing.

“It was one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever had to deal with, both as a doctor and as a human being,” said John McMullen. One officer was the father of three children, the other of two--all of them younger than 7, police said.

Lurgan is tensely divided between Protestants and Catholics, but the officers were not being escorted by British soldiers, as has again become customary in the most conflict-ridden parts of the province. The officers’ blanket-covered bodies remained on the residential street near the town’s main Anglican church for several hours while colleagues collected evidence.

The killers’ getaway car was found burned in Kilwilkie, Lurgan’s main Catholic district.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams says he is committed to democratic principles but has consistently refused to condemn IRA terrorism. In a variation of his customary reaction to violence, Adams told reporters Monday: “At a human level, this [attack] diminishes us all, and it has to be a challenge to all of us who want to play a productive role.”

Sinn Fein says it speaks for the IRA but is not part of it, a position rejected by the British government. Blair, Irish Prime Minister John Bruton and President Clinton all insist that before Sinn Fein can be welcome at peace talks, there must be an unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire that the IRA ended last year.

Adams says Sinn Fein, which drew 16% of the vote in recent elections in Northern Ireland, has earned the right to participate without a cease-fire.

An IRA cease-fire that began in September 1994 and was quickly echoed by Protestant extremists raised hopes for long-sought accommodation in a province where the Protestant majority wants to remain British and most members of the Roman Catholic minority look for an eventual reunion with the Irish Republic.

Violence resumed with a bang, however, when a huge IRA truck bomb exploded in the Docklands area of London in February 1996. Two men died.

Since then, despite recurring rumors of a new cease-fire, IRA violence has gradually accelerated, first on the British mainland and in Northern Ireland itself.

Protestant terrorists still nominally observe their cease-fire, but two Catholics have been killed, and arson attacks on Catholic churches have become common.