 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Saturday, September 08, 2001
When young children become the targets of harassment in the name of some cause, the revulsion can have political consequences. That was the case where African-American schoolchildren were terrorized in the American South, galvanizing support for the civil rights movement, and it likewise could be true of the shocking scenes from Belfast in recent days.
With the world watching, Protestant thugs have been taunting Catholic schoolgirls in that city as they made their way to their primary school. On Wednesday the homemade bomb was thrown at the girls and their police escorts, injuring four officers.
The harassment of the Catholic children -- supposedly a tit-for-tat for Catholic harassment of Protestants -- indeed teaches a lesson to the adults of Northern Ireland, but not the one some Catholics are tempted to draw: that this ugly outcropping of hatred somehow justifies the refusal of the Irish Republican Army to make definitive moves toward disarmament.
The IRA's guns, many of which are stored in the Irish Republic, did not protect the students at the Holy Cross Girls Primary School. And by equivocating on disarmament, the IRA has put in jeopardy a peace process that is designed not only to end violence but also to deal with the legacy of discrimination against the province's Catholics.
A Protestant-Catholic power-sharing government in Belfast has been on the brink of collapse because the IRA has procrastinated in delivering on its promise to put its guns and explosives verifiably beyond use. Never mind that the premise of admitting Sinn Fein to government was that its paramilitary allies would not retain a military veto over political decisions.
After driving the international disarmament commission to distraction with its delaying tactics, the IRA last month finally presented a (secret) disarmament plan that the commission found promising. But the gesture was too little and too late for David Trimble, the Protestant politician who is "first minister" of the coalition government in Belfast. When Mr. Trimble rejected the latest IRA disarmament proposal, the paramilitary group ostentatiously rescinded it.
Now Britain and the Irish Republic are scrambling to salvage the coalition, and the IRA cease-fire that made it possible. Several confidence-building measures have been announced, including a plan for reform of a Northern Ireland Constabulary that Catholics view, with some justice, as a Protestant police force. The reform plan has been praised by the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which is urging Catholics to join a restructured force.
The bestial bigotry evident in the harassment of the Belfast schoolgirls will not go away overnight. To an extent that Americans and other outsiders find mystifying, the tiny province of Northern Ireland is still polarized along religious and tribal lines. But the best hope to heal such divisions is the peace process launched on Good Friday 1998. For that process to prevail, the guns must go.