Sinn Fein Faces Expulsion From Talks After 2 Slayings

Gunmen killed suspected drug dealer Brendan Campbell as he emerged from a restaurant in Belfast on Monday night. The next day, Bobby Dougan, a prominent Protestant militant, was shot dead in his parked car while waiting to pick up a baby sitter.

Despite an avowed cease-fire, killers of the Irish Republican Army committed both crimes, police in embattled Northern Ireland told the British government Friday.

Because of the slayings, Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, faces expulsion from peace talks seeking to reconcile Protestant and Catholic communities in the bloodied British province.

Irish and British commentators caution that the entire peace process could collapse next week, bringing renewed full-scale Catholic-Protestant terror.

Frantic diplomatic maneuvering Friday presaged an edgy weekend for Belfast.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred with President Clinton and with Irish Premier Bertie Ahern, his co-sponsor of a peace process headed by American statesman George Mitchell. All three governments urgently seek to keep the talks as inclusive as possible.

Political maneuvering will continue all weekend, but there is scant room to maneuver, in the view of the commentators. As a condition for joining the talks, all parties agreed to principles established by Mitchell. The key proviso: a commitment to peaceful and democratic practices.

The small Protestant Ulster Democratic Party was expelled from the talks last month after a paramilitary group to which it is politically linked admitted to killing three Catholics.

In the view of Protestant parties that seek continued union with Britain, a similar fate must await Catholic Sinn Fein when talks resume in Dublin, Ireland, on Monday.

David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists, the largest Protestant party, said Friday that there can be “only one conclusion and one outcome”--Sinn Fein’s expulsion from the process.

“I think the time has come when we must accept they are not going to change their spots,” Trimble said.

Results of the Royal Ulster Constabulary investigations of the two killings were based on forensic analyses and the detention of IRA suspects in the Dougan case, sources in Belfast said.

Northern Ireland Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan personally briefed Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Britain’s Cabinet minister who is effectively governor of the six-county province. Meeting with reporters Friday, Mowlam promised that the police conclusions will be considered “very carefully” with all parties at the talks.

There was speculation that Britain and Ireland might banish Sinn Fein temporarily but allow it to return to the table later if there is no further violence. Under that formula, the Ulster Democratic Party banished last month would be readmitted next month.

Sinn Fein, though, was adamant that it had no connection with the violence, that it should not be expelled and that any expulsion could mean the end of the talks. Implicit was the threat that if Sinn Fein had to leave, it would not return.

“We have not broken the rules. We have not killed anybody. We are not involved with violence,” party Chairman Mitchell McLaughlin said.

He told reporters: “There is no prospect whatever, not the chance of a snowball in hell, of finding a democratic solution if our party is not part of finding that solution.”

Sinn Fein, which seeks the union of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic, says it deserves to be at the talks on the basis of its electoral mandate as the second-largest Catholic party. It says it has no links to and does not speak for the IRA, an assertion rejected by all others at the talks.

As a suspected drug dealer, the slain Campbell was well-known to police. As a Catholic maverick, he feuded with Sinn Fein, attacking its Belfast headquarters with a grenade last year. Last month, Campbell’s bulletproof vest foiled assassins of an IRA front organization.

The IRA, rejecting authority of the mostly Protestant police in Northern Ireland, has routinely punished criminals within its own community but promised to stop as part of its cease-fire.

Protestant militant Dougan was a senior member of the Ulster Defense Assn., a terrorist group that killed three Catholics earlier this year as extremists from both sides sought to short-circuit the peace process by triggering a new spiral of violence.