In N. Ireland, Clinton Will Find Progress and Posturing

As President Clinton prepared Monday for his farewell trip to Northern Ireland, Protestant and Roman Catholic legislators hammered out bills on dangerous dogs, drunk driving and e-mail, and accused each other of reneging on the Good Friday peace agreement.

The routine, almost mundane, work by former blood enemies underlined the gains of the April 1998 peace accord that Clinton is coming to celebrate, while the mutual recriminations illustrated the enormous hurdles he will prod them to overcome.

Political leaders sought to dampen expectations that Clinton would achieve a breakthrough in the hobbled peace process during talks with the region’s pro-peace political leaders.

“Bill Clinton does not wave a magic wand, and he doesn’t pretend to. He can’t solve our problems,” said Peter Mandelson, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary. “But sometimes it takes a big player to remind people of the big picture.”

Before leaving Washington to shore up one of his few foreign policy achievements, Clinton said the unresolved issues of Irish Republican Army disarmament and the establishment of a bipartisan police force in the region are “lingering demons of the past” that still could undermine the peace process.

“Those are the two things that could still threaten the progress that we are making,” Clinton said. “If there is something I can do before I leave to make one more shot to resolve this, I will do it.”

The president was scheduled to arrive in Dublin, the Irish capital, today on his way to the Irish border town of Dundalk, long a refuge for anti-British republican extremists, and then to Belfast, the provincial capital of Northern Ireland, for two days of speeches and meetings. He is to overnight Wednesday at Chequers, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s country residence, before giving a foreign policy speech at Warwick University and meeting Queen Elizabeth II for tea at Buckingham Palace on Thursday.

Clinton’s involvement in the effort to end three decades of sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland has been extensive and deeply personal. His first major step was to grant a U.S. visa to Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, who had been banned from the United States as a terrorist.

That move in 1994 lent legitimacy and support to Sinn Fein leaders who were arguing that the IRA should engage in politics rather than violence to achieve its goal of a united Ireland.

Clinton named former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell first as an economic envoy to Northern Ireland, then as the peace negotiator who brokered the Good Friday accord. The president has made two previous trips here and has spent countless hours on the telephone and in White House meetings trying to resolve repeated crises.

“He has been emotionally and intellectually engaged,” Adams said in an interview Monday. “He has put a peace policy in place that works. We are having difficulties now, but I don’t see us going back to violence and exclusivity.”

In fact, two people have been killed and two others critically wounded in a sudden spate of sectarian violence in the last week. Although the attacks, which targeted both Catholics and Protestants--the first sectarian killings in 18 months--have heightened tensions, political leaders do not expect them to derail the peace process.

More threatening to the region’s new economic development and Christmastime optimism, they say, are the impasses over IRA disarmament and Northern Ireland policing, as well as over the heavy deployment of British troops in the region.

Protestant leaders say the IRA has failed to keep its commitment to negotiate with an independent disarmament commission to get rid of its guns.

Sinn Fein leaders, meanwhile, charged that the British government has backed away from proposed policing reforms.

Mandelson said that while republican attacks on Protestants have diminished, “we have not seen a significant reduction in the capability of terrorist organizations.”

The IRA appears to be maintaining a cease-fire announced in July 1997, although it has not relinquished or destroyed any of its weapons. It has allowed two independent inspections of arms depots.

Dissident republicans, however, have launched several attacks in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain in the last couple of years, including a 1998 bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland, that left 29 dead.

Under pressure from Protestant hard-liners in his own Ulster Unionist Party, Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble insists that the IRA must move forward with disarmament if Sinn Fein is to remain in the power-sharing government reestablished in May. Two months ago, Trimble barred Sinn Fein from representing Northern Ireland in policymaking meetings with the Irish government--a feature of the peace accord that is particularly important to Sinn Fein--until disarmament talks resume.

In an article in the Belfast Telegraph newspaper Monday, Trimble wrote that it was wrong for republicans to see disarmament as “some unionist demand.”

“Paramilitary decommissioning is the desire of the overwhelming number of people on the island of Ireland of whatever political tradition,” he wrote.

Sinn Fein’s Adams responded that Trimble is behind the emasculation of police and military reforms. And he grimly added that “there’s very little happening, folks,” to break the deadlock.

Yet, in a further demonstration of Northern Ireland’s progress, Sinn Fein is challenging Trimble not in the streets but in court.