It was on Good Friday in 1998 when a peace agreement was signed in Northern Ireland. The accord launched a new era of hope in that troubled land between Protestants and Catholics, who had been embroiled in sectarian violence for years, with lives lost on both sides.
Two British soldiers were killed over the weekend.What happened? The NYT has a closer look…
LONDON — After years of sharply reduced political violence in Northern Ireland, the gunning down of a group of British soldiers by suspected Irish Republican Army
dissidents has shaken the Protestant and Catholic communities and
challenged the still fragile cohesion of the province’s power-sharing
government.
Politicians from both communities joined on Sunday in condemning the
attack on the British soldiers and two pizza delivery men outside a
British Army base in Antrim, 15 miles northwest of Belfast. The attack,
which took place late Saturday, killed two soldiers and seriously
wounded two other soldiers and the delivery men, who somehow survived
when the attackers aimed follow-up volleys of automatic fire at the men
as they lay sprawled on the road outside the base’s main gate.
It was the first deadly assault on the British military in Northern
Ireland since an I.R.A. sniper shot a soldier in 1997, a year before
the Good Friday peace agreement, brokered by the United States, that
set out a roadmap for ending sectarian violence in the province of 1.8
million people.
Politicians in the province said the shootings had the earmarks of a
bid by dissident republicans to destabilize the power-sharing
government that took office nearly two years ago after 30 years of
violence that killed 3,700 people.
A dissident faction that has rejected power-sharing, which calls
itself the Real I.R.A. , claimed responsibility for the attack in a
telephone call to the Sunday Tribune, a Belfast newspaper. The police
said the group, up until now, had undertaken a sporadic but mostly
marginal campaign of attacks, mainly against the province’s police
force.
Outrage across the province on Sunday was compounded by the
brutality of the attackers, who were said by the police to have tracked
the delivery men to the gates of the Massareene base on Antrim’s
outskirts, then advanced on the victims, still firing, after an initial
volley as the soldiers collected their pizzas.
The attack had echoes of the harsh tactics used during the
province’s most violent years by the I.R.A., which made a policy of
killing not only soldiers and policemen but civilians whose work
supported them. That violence, and attacks by Protestant
paramilitaries, killed as many as 300 people a year at the height of
the sectarian struggle, but the advent of power sharing has made
political killings a relative rarity. Last year, only three deaths were
attributed to sectarian attacks.
But fears had grown recently that attacks by dissident republicans
were mounting. The dissidents have wounded several police officers in
15 attacks over the past 17 months, and a 250-pound bomb was defused
last month outside another army base. Sir Hugh Orde, the province’s
police chief, announced last week that concern about the attacks had
caused him to ask for help from a “small number” of troops from the
army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment, an intelligence-gathering unit.
That decision ran counter to the reduction of army units under the
peace agreement, which has trimmed the pre-1998 British garrison from a
high of 25,000 troops to barely 4,000, concentrated on 10 bases that no
longer play any active part in the province’s security.
The two men killed on Saturday, in their early 20s, were from an
engineering unit, and were days away from deploying to Afghanistan. The
army fortresses that were once a major target of I.R.A. attacks, in
urban areas that were centers of I.R.A. strength or along I.R.A.
infiltration routes from the Irish republic, have mostly been
dismantled.
On Sunday, as the police announced that they had recovered the
Antrim gunmen’s getaway vehicle at Randalstown, about five miles west
of Antrim, Protestant leaders said the attack had vindicated the police
decision to call on the army intelligence specialists. The move was
condemned last week by Martin McGuinness,
the former I.R.A. commander who is the province’s deputy first
minister, as “stupid and dangerous” for reviving memories of the role
played by army intelligence units in strikes against the I.R.A. in the
past.
But that disagreement was stilled as leaders on both sides of the
historic divide joined in condemning the attack, showing a common front
that many in Northern Ireland saw as a measure of how far the province
has come under the power-sharing accord. Mr. McGuinness and Peter
Robinson, the province’s first minister and head of the Democratic
Unionist Party, the most powerful of the mainly Protestant parties in
the province, announced they were postponing a joint
investment-promoting trip to the United States that was to have begun
on Sunday.
Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein,
the political wing of the I.R.A., described the Antrim gunmen as
“merchants of doom” and their attack as “wrong and counterproductive.”
“We support the police in the apprehension of those involved,” he said.
His tone was little different than the one adopted in London. “No
murderer will be able to derail a peace process that has the support of
the people of Northern Ireland,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown
of Britain said. Shaun Woodward, the minister responsible for Northern
Ireland, said the government would not allow anger at the Antrim
shootings to destabilize the power-sharing accord.
Despite lingering resentments and widely different prescriptions for
the province’s long-term future among leaders of the Protestant and
Catholic communities, the power-sharing arrangement has worked better
than pessimists feared when it began 22 months ago. That followed years
of delay, recrimination and back-pedaling, as well as continued
violence, that continued after the Good Friday pact was signed in 1998.
“What really matters is that we do not allow the very small number
of people who make up these groups to derail the peace process,” Mr.
Woodward said in a BBC
interview on Sunday, referring to the dissident republicans. He said
Mr. McGuinness and Mr. Robinson, with their parties, had “transformed
the politics of Northern Ireland,” and that it was up to the province’s
people, in the Catholic and Protestant communities, to help the police
by telling them anything they knew about the Antrim killers.
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