Sinn Fein Vote Puts Peace Back On Track

Sinn Fein members overwhelmingly voted Sunday to begin cooperating with the Northern Ireland police, a long-unthinkable commitment that could spur the return of a Catholic-Protestant administration for the British territory.

The result — confirmed by a sea of raised hands but no formally recorded vote — meant Sinn Fein, once a hard-left party committed to a socialist revolution, has abandoned its decades-old hostility to law and order.

The vote, taken after daylong debate among 2,000 Sinn Fein stalwarts, represented a stunning triumph for Sinn Fein chief Gerry Adams, the former Irish Republican Army commander who has spent 24 years edging his IRA-linked party away from terror and towards compromise.

It strongly improved the chances of reviving power-sharing, the long-elusive goal of the 1998 Good Friday peace pact, by Britain's deadline of March 26.

"The decision we have taken today is truly historic," Adams told the conference after receiving a thunderous standing ovation at the Royal Dublin Society conference center. "Its significance will be in how we use this decision to move our struggle forward. Today you have created the potential to change the political landscape on this island forever."

Earlier, many speakers said for decades they had dreamed of defeating the province's mostly Protestant police force and forcing Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic.

Some IRA veterans recalled beatings inflicted on them by detectives during interrogations. Others noted they had served long prison sentences for attacks on police, more than 300 of whom were killed during the IRA's failed 1970-1997 campaign.

Particularly striking about today's vote was that it came within a week of the release of a 3-year probe into the conduct of the police, which revealed that police intelligence officers covered up at least 10 killings and other crimes committed by Protestant outlaws who were on the payroll as informants.

According to Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan, former officers in the Special Branch paid informants in the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force who were permitted to pursue killings, bombings, drug dealing and extortion.

Her report called for police to reopen dozens of cases from the 1990s and investigate ex-officers involved in cover-ups of their informants' crimes. But O'Loan conceded that British state prosecutors were unlikely to try any of the retired agents because they had deliberately failed to keep — or kept but later destroyed — documentary evidence on how they protected their informers.

The commander of the predominantly Protestant police force, Chief Constable Hugh Orde, said he accepted O'Loan's conclusions and recommendations in full. In the report, both he and O'Loan noted that the police force's intelligence-gathering arm had been overhauled since 2003.

Britain's secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, said the report illuminated "a very dark corner of behavior by a limited number of Special Branch officers in the 1990s." He said both UVF veterans and former police officers should stand trial.

Adams, whose Irish Republican Army-linked party was frequently targeted by Protestant paramilitary groups, said Special Branch had orchestrated or helped to cover up hundreds of other killings by anti-Catholic extremists since the conflict over Northern Ireland erupted in 1969.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," said Adams, whose own survival in a 1984 assassination bid is being investigated by O'Loan as a potential case of police collusion.

One of the former detectives questioned by O'Loan's investigators, Johnston Brown, said many rank-and-file detectives were prevented from doing their jobs by a Special Branch elite that hoarded information.

Brown, who was a detective in the police's Criminal Investigations Division, said Special Branch colleagues repeatedly stymied his efforts to solve crimes involving members of the UVF and another outlawed Protestant group, the Ulster Defense Association.

The UVF, Northern Ireland's oldest paramilitary group, killed more than 500 people, chiefly Catholic civilians, before calling a 1994 cease-fire. But the group has refused to disarm in line with the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, and its members continue to run criminal rackets and use violence to defend its turf from other criminals.

An Invitation To Earn Their Trust

Nearly all speakers said they were voting, however reluctantly, to dump their party's anti-police position for the sake of peace.

"This shows that the war is over. And if the war is over, we have to build the peace," Adams said in an interview during an earlier break in debate.

Other Sinn Fein leaders sought to cloak their historic U-turn in bellicose terms, arguing that their position as the major Catholic-backed party in Northern Ireland meant they would be able to tell police commanders what to do.

"We have to boss policing, because we are the bosses," said Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness, who according to police and the Irish government was an IRA commander from the early 1970s until last year.

McGuinness said the expected strong "yes" vote to policing wouldn't mean people in Sinn Fein power bases should be expected to welcome police into their communities.

"They're going to have to earn our trust. And we will let them know that they are going to be the servants of the people, not the other way around," McGuinness said.

At stake is the revival of power-sharing, the central goal of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord of 1998. A previous coalition collapsed in 2002 amid chronic Protestant-Sinn Fein infighting over the IRA's future.

Since then the Democratic Unionists, who represent most of the province's British Protestant majority, have insisted they will form a Cabinet alongside Sinn Fein only if Adams' party demonstrates support for law and order in areas where, from 1970 to 2005, justice often was administered with IRA bullets to the legs of petty criminals.

Crucially, however, the party motion approved Sunday commits Sinn Fein to begin supporting the police only after power-sharing is revived — and only if the Democratic Unionists agree to transfer control of Northern Ireland's justice system, including the police, from Britain to local hands by May 2008.

Such conditions are likely to mean further protracted arguments with the Democratic Unionists, who are refusing to make either commitment until they see Sinn Fein's behavior to the police change.

Nonetheless, Sunday represented the first time since 1998, following the Good Friday pact, that Sinn Fein's grass-roots members were even asked to approve the next stage of painful compromise. By contrast, other key commitments — particularly the IRA's 1994 and 1997 cease-fires, and its 2005 decisions to declare the truce permanent and to surrender its weapons stockpiles — were products of years of secret diplomacy.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sinn Fein's policing shift would be only the start of a critical period in peacemaking.

"The next few weeks will be as important as the negotiation of the original Good Friday agreement," Blair said.

"We will determine whether we have a basis for the future in Northern Ireland, that allows us to have power-sharing ... on a solid basis for the first time ever," said Blair, who has made brokering compromise with Sinn Fein a major goal since rising to power a decade ago.

Chief Constable Hugh Orde, commander of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said IRA supporters no longer had any valid reason to withhold support for his force, which is midway through a mammoth 10-year reform program as part of the Good Friday deal.

The reform effort, which already has boosted Catholic officers from 8 percent to 20 percent of the force, meant people in Sinn Fein strongholds should feel free to telephone police when they see crimes happening. Orde said he also expected people to cooperate when police come into Catholic areas to investigate.

"We have a right to say that, if this vote goes in the right direction, we need to see some tangible outcome," he said.