Clinton Near Losing Irish Achievement

If Bill Clinton finds time to look up from the debacle of NATO’s bombing of Serbia, he will find that Protestant holdouts in Northern Ireland are on the verge of denying him one of the few legitimate foreign policy triumphs he can lay claim to: the crucial role of his government, and indeed himself, in brokering a settlement in Northern Ireland.

Unless Clinton instantly flexes some muscle, the entire Good Friday agreement, joyously ratified in April 1998, is about to run off the rails, sabotaged by Protestant irreconcilables who think, maybe correctly, that once again they can impose the Unionist veto.

The instrument at hand is the issue of “decommissioning” IRA weapons. It’s a fraud, but one that is being all too easily regurgitated in the press in the U.S. Story after story has appeared telling the tale that the IRA is defaulting on a solemn agreement to hand in its guns, and that said refusal is quite reasonably prompting reluctance on the part of David Trimble and his Ulster Unionist Party to pursue the terms of the peace process to which Trimble set his name.

The Good Friday agreement set forth a route map to settlement of the border question. It involved creating various institutions, including a Northern Ireland executive in which Sinn Fein would have seats. The “decommissioning” of illegal arms was explicitly set--and this is the actual language of the agreement--”in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement.” Everyone knew then, just as everyone knows now, that the IRA will never unilaterally disarm, especially when on either side of the prescribed road to peace stand--in ascending order of organized and well-armed capacity for violence--the loyalist gangs, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British army.

Burned into the IRA’s historical consciousness is the terrible memory of 1968-69, when Catholic areas, unarmed and defenseless, faced loyalist mobs, and the bitter gibe was that IRA stood for “I ran away.” Suppose Sinn Fein made it a condition of implementation of the agreement that the RUC be disbanded, that all military barracks in the northeast six counties be closed? I’ve seen one estimate suggesting that in Northern Ireland there are 135,000 legally held weapons, 90% of them in the hands of Unionists. No one is asking for this arsenal to be decommissioned.

The decommissioning tactic now used by Trimble looks more than usually hollow, because at long last the secret history of the British dirty war in Northern Ireland, including the operation of actual death squad networks, is unraveling. The most explosive evidence of these networks now comes in the form of an affidavit by former RUC Special Branch officer John Weir. Its 29 pages lie before me, destroying forever the fundamental premise of the decommissioning ploy, which is that the British army and RUC police can be regarded as honest brokers and custodians of the Good Friday agreement, ready to protect Catholic communities in the North in the event they are menaced by loyalists after the IRA turns in its guns.

The most immediate function of Weir’s affidavit, signed in February 1999, is to lend legal support to Sean McPhilemy, whose book “The Committee,” published last year, gave an extensive account of the death squad apparatus. Now Weir lays out the chilling narrative, replete with murders committed by RUC officers and by paramilitaries controlled and protected by the RUC or instigated by British army officers. One passage shows why the IRA won’t just give up its guns: “I recall that in 1970 or 1971, while I was serving as a young [RUC] constable, aged 20, in Strandtown, there was an arms amnesty in which members of the public handed in substantial quantities of guns and ammunition of different types. Many of these guns were then given out by RUC officers to local members of a Loyalist paramilitary organization, the Ulster Defense Assn., with the knowledge of the senior officers in my RUC station.”

Weir narrates how two of the most awful bombings, in Monaghan and in Dublin (in which 33 died) were accomplished with explosives supplied by an officer in the British army’s Ulster Defense Regiment and assembled in a farmhouse owned by an RUC officer.

Weir adds, “Although these two bombings were among the worst atrocities of the Irish troubles, those responsible for them were never even questioned by the RUC, even though both the RUC and [British] army intelligence knew, within days of the bombings, the identities of the culprits.” He further adds that it is quite possible that the RUC and army intelligence knew about the attacks in advance.

Weir himself was finally convicted of a murder in which he admits minor involvement. He was released in 1992 and, in fear for his life, immigrated to Nigeria, returning to Northern Ireland last December. Weir’s affidavit should strike the decommissioning ploy stone dead. It’s the moment for Clinton to do some arm-twisting and tell his pal Tony Blair that there’s urgent business in Northern Ireland. It’s a more constructive path than bombing schools in Serbia.