Hopes Slim for N. Ireland Talks Minus IRA Voice

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Planners for long-awaited political negotiations on the future of divided Northern Ireland worked with resolute evenhandedness. They built a perfect square--four tables, arranged like the ropes of a boxing ring, at which identical chairs have equal status and everybody gets a view of plastic ivy cascading from the ceiling.

Trouble is, the underlying playing field for longshot talks that open this afternoon with an American chairman and the support of Britain, Ireland and the United States is tilted sharply away from peace.

Expect bombast, rhetoric, posturing and political theater today but no progress toward ending decades of sectarian slaughter in this vexed and vexing British province.

British Prime Minister John Major and his Irish counterpart, John Bruton, will be there, along with leaders of moderate Roman Catholic parties who want their province to unite with Ireland and of Protestant parties loyal to Britain.

But Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, will not be welcome at an inaugural session chaired by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, barring a last-second about-face by the intransigent IRA.

Without the presence of Sinn Fein, the mouthpiece for a main protagonist of the war, the process looks like the negotiating room--empty in the middle.

“Ultimately we need Sinn Fein at the table if we are going to get all the problems solved, including decommissioning [weapons],” Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring said.

The IRA blames Britain for the impasse. Nearly everybody else blames the IRA.

Despite fresh weekend appeals from Mitchell, Bruton and Catholic moderates, the IRA has refused to restore a 17-month cease-fire it broke in February with bombings in London.

A poll of Northern Ireland residents published by the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune showed that 97% of the respondents favor a renewed cease-fire, including 84% of Sinn Fein voters.

Bruton and Major, supported by President Clinton, have insisted on a renewal of the truce as Sinn Fein’s admission ticket to the talks.

“The demand of the republican movement has been ‘Peace Talks Now.’ ‘Now’ is next Monday [today]. Opportunities such as we all now have do not come easily. They should grasp it now,” Bruton wrote in a weekend article in the Belfast Telegraph. “The Irish government wants no empty chairs--we want all the nationalists and all the [pro-British] unionists there.”

On Sunday, Sinn Fein, which won about 15% of the vote in May 30 elections for delegates to the talks, said Britain had failed to create conditions that would have encouraged the IRA to renew the cease-fire.

“The British prime minister, more than any other party, is the person with the responsibility to convince the IRA,” said Martin McGuinness, one of 17 Sinn Fein leaders elected to the 110-member forum. Representatives from the top 10 parties--or nine, in Sinn Fein’s absence--will attend today’s talks.

Arguing that it has a mandate, Sinn Fein demands talks without any preconditions and excoriates Major for not agreeing to them.

“Unless Sinn Fein is in there, there can’t be a peace settlement,” party leader Gerry Adams told supporters at a weekend rally to demand Sinn Fein’s presence at the talks. “There can be no all-party talks unless all parties are free to attend.”

Sinn Fein will doubtless stage a for-the-cameras symbolic knock at the door today as part of its relentless publicity war with Britain. But without a cease-fire, there is little of substance that Adams has to offer, and nothing he will be allowed to say to the other parties.

*

Sinn Fein denies a common identity with the IRA and says that while it may speak for the terrorists, it does not control them.

The British government and unionist parties representing the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland say there is virtually no difference between Sinn Fein and the IRA.

The normally taciturn IRA, whispering by phone to news organizations here, made three different public statements last week: one to say a cease-fire was only a remote possibility, another to say the group would never surrender weapons until negotiations were complete and the surprising third and most recent to say it was closely reading preparatory documents for the talks.

Unionist parties, for their part, enter the talks reluctantly and with an almost total disbelief in Sinn Fein’s democratic credentials. They seek preservation of the province’s status as part of Britain.

They believe it would be foolhardy to negotiate with representatives of a group that refuses to declare an end to the bloodshed and wants to keep its guns until all is settled.

As head of an international commission that made compromise proposals earlier this year, Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader from Maine, suggested a novel way around the incendiary issue of the surrender of weapons.

Britain had long demanded at least a token surrender before talks could begin. The IRA refused. Mitchell countered with the idea of a declaration of democratic principles and an irrevocable renunciation of violence by all parties as the negotiations begin, followed by arms surrender negotiations parallel with political talks.

That is in principle how the talks are to proceed, with or without Sinn Fein. Mitchell will chair the plenary session as well as the parallel arms talks. In addition to the IRA’s potent arsenal, Protestant paramilitary groups also have stockpiles of arms.

Mitchell’s commission won the respect of both sides for its initial recommendations. But as an Irish American Catholic, Mitchell has hostilities to overcome if he is to be accepted by hard-line unionists as an impartial chairman.

That suspicion alone could torpedo the talks, but it pales in comparison with the other potentially unsurmountable challenges facing Mitchell and peace-seeking Britain and Ireland as the “some-party” talks begin today.