Northern Irish Good Friday peace accord loses lustre

Even the dead cannot escape Northern Ireland's never-ending sectarian strife.

It is said that the City Cemetery in Belfast has a three-metre wall underground to divide different sections holding the coffins of Protestants and Catholics.

So what hope for their descendants? Plenty, if you listen to moderate politicians desperate for the 1998 Good Friday power-sharing peace accord to be a success. Or if you compare the bloodshed of "The Troubles" in the three decades up to 1998 with the lower-scale violence of now.

Not much, though, if you speak to residents of the brick-strewn backstreets of Belfast worst affected by this year's worrying upsurge of rioting.

"It's like Bosnia here," said Ian, a 26-year-old living on a fire-blackened, half-abandoned road behind a "peace-line" wall over which Protestant and Catholic gangs have been tossing bricks and petrol-bombs at each other most of this year.

"It would only take one policeman or soldier to get shot, and the whole peace process would go up in smoke," he added.

It may not take that before the peace accord is scuppered, if the scaremongers are to be believed.

Northern Ireland's most senior politician, First Minister David Trimble, is insinuating he may resign - and thus plunge the power-sharing assembly into uncertainty - if the British government does not rein in IRA guerilla activity.

Trimble is under pressure from hardliners in his Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to insist on the expulsion of the IRA's political ally Sinn Fein from the assembly due to evidence of continued Catholic republican paramilitary activity.

While that issue may be the catalyst, anti-agreement unionists' grievances go deeper. They believe the 1998 accord has made too many concessions by, for example, allowing Sinn Fein into power without a complete IRA disarmament and by permitting the early release of convicted IRA men.

"We're not dinosaurs, we realise progress has to be made, but Unionism at large feels there has been so much given by our community in return for very little," George Patton, a leader of the hardline Protestant Orange Order, told Reuters.

The British government, which views the Good Friday accord as one of Prime Minister Tony Blair's key achievements, is working frantically to keep its implementation going.

"For all the difficulties - and how many times have we been here with these difficulties? - this is an agreement which still has delivered an immense amount to the people of Northern Ireland," Blair said on a recent visit to Belfast.

Blair is expected to resist Unionist demands to sanction Sinn Fein for fear of jeopardising the peace process completely.

But that might further erode Trimble's power-base and mean a more hardline anti-accord party like the Rev. Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would become the dominant Protestant party at the next elections in 2003.

Sinn Fein, and Catholics in general, are also uneasy about aspects of the Good Friday accord from their point of view. Specifically, they want to see faster demilitarisation by the British military and an admission by London of collusion between security forces and Protestant paramilitaries in recent years.

But in general, the republican side is backing the agreement more wholeheartedly, probably because they see it as the first step towards their ultimate aim of folding the province of 1.6 million people into the Republic of Ireland to the south.

Sinn Fein's No. 2 Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader who is now a smart-suited politician, told Reuters he believed Irish unity was an "inevitability" via peaceful means.

The Good Friday accord, which enshrines the principle that only the people of Northern Ireland can decide their future, "is the only alternative we have," McGuinness said.

Demographic trends show Catholics may eventually overturn the traditional Protestant majority in the province. Trimble wants a referendum on Northern Ireland as soon as possible.

While the politicians may be arguing, at least they have worked together now - albeit through gritted teeth - for more than four years, a huge advance on pre-1998 Northern Ireland.

Paramilitaries on both sides, though, are worried and have stepped up their turf wars in Belfast and elsewhere.

The widely-publicised riots by both Protestants and Catholics in recent weeks - resulting in scores of police injuries - are only the tip of the iceberg. Shootings, petrol-bomb attacks, "punishment" beatings, sectarian-motivated hit-and-runs, and petty acts of hate, are a daily staple.

"This is not peace; it is only a temporary absence of hostilities... a kind of mafioso standoff," wrote newspaper columnist Bruce Anderson.

Norman Reilly, who drives tourists round Belfast's hot-spots in his black cab, is also dubious as he shows a visitor the latest extensions to Belfast's "peace-lines: "I don't understand it," he said. "There's a ceasefire on, but they're building more walls."