World

Report: Clinton Blames IRA For Crisis

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 11, 2000 / 5:52 AM EST / CBS

President Clinton has grown increasingly frustrated with setbacks in the Northern Ireland peace process and he is reportedly blaming the IRA and its political ally Sinn Fein for the latest crisis, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

The Clinton Administration was still working hard behind the scenes to help the British and Irish Republic break the impasse between Protestant and Roman Catholic politicians over guerrilla disarmament, said the newspaper, citing unidentified U.S. officials for its information.

It said the view in Washington however was that the IRA should have made a concrete move towards disarmament.

"We're frustrated and we'd like to see this go better," one U.S. official was quoted as saying.

"But right now we think it's better to express our displeasure to the parties directly."

White House spokesman Mike Hammer refused to comment on the Financial Times report but said Mr. Clinton had vowed to continue engaging with the parties in private.

"The president remains engaged and confident that the parties will be able to overcome this impasse," Hammer said.

Northern Ireland's peace process plunged deeper into crisis on Tuesday when the Irish Republican Army broke off contact with John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general heading the province's disarmament commission.

The outlawed guerrilla group was angry at Britain's decision last Friday to suspend the province's home-rule coalition of majority Protestants and minority Catholics on grounds that the IRA had failed to give a clear commitment to disarm.

"I'm not going to pretend that this is not a difficult situation, because it is," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday night after he and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern spoke to key politicians in the province's suspended Cabinet.

The two prime ministers failed to move either Sinn Fein or the province's major Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists toward compromise. The Ulster Unionists in November accepted an American-brokered deal that required them to form the four-party Cabinet in expectation that the IRA would disarm in response.

Britain, determined to forestall the Cabinet's total collapse, took powers back in order to deter the Ulster Unionists from resigning their posts, as they had threatened.

It also provoked the IRA -- which had offered a vague but promising proposal to the province's disarmament commission -- to retaliate by retracting that submission and breaking off contact with the commission.

That has left Northern Ireland's peace process in the familiar Catch-22 that blocked the Cabinet's formation for more than a year. The IRA and Ulster Unionists are both demanding the other side make the next painful concession.

Blair pledged that in the coming days of negotiations in Belfast, Dublin and London the dilemma would be untangled.

"he one thing I am sure of, having met all the parties, is that none of them really wants to see this agreement fall. All of them know it is the only way forward," Blair said.