Welcoming The Sounds Of Silence

On the eve of St. Patrick's Day, as many Irish leaders descend on Washington, CBS Correspondent Mark Phillips writes that while the peace process in Northern Ireland seems to be proceeding at a slow crawl, the current silence is perhaps welcome. He recalls some not-so-quiet times, which he personally witnessed, that most would probably not like to revisit.

First, a little primer on where things stand. The peace process, including all its power sharing arrangements, is on hold, suspended by the government in London. Why this was done is a matter of profound disagreement.

The deadline for decommissioning was set as May 22 of this year, but Unionists said there was an backroom deal that the process would at least begin before that as a sign of good faith.

The Republicans, on the other hand, argued that the Good Friday Agreement demanded no interim decommissioning and that the arms handover had to be seen in a broader context of other provisions of the deal, which were also delayed. With not a single gun having been handed over and a Unionist revolt in the offing, London blew the whistle.

The recriminations followed.

It was a risky strategy.

The game all along in this chapter of Northern Ireland's frequently bloody history has been to keep the agenda in the hands of the moderate politicians (Gerry Adams' Sinn Fein and David Trimble's Ulster Unionists) and out of the hands of the volatile paramilitaries (the IRA and the Unionists UVF).

In order for this to happen, the bomb makers - particularly the IRA - had to be brought along gently, convinced that their interests were best served by the peace. Breakaway republican groups like the Real IRA were never convinced. (The discovery by police this week of 500 pounds of explosive that they say belonged to the Real IRA is just another sign of just how precarious this peace is.)

With the IRA, whose declared goal has always been the political reunification of the six northern provinces with the rest of the Irish Republic, keeping it involved was always going to be difficult. The Good Friday agreement does not offer unification, just power sharing.

David Trimble is equally troubled by the hard wing of his party. London's suspension of the executive is widely interpreted as having been largely motivated by the need to keep Trimble in office in the face of the decommissioning demands within his own party.

The problem is that suspending the agreement has unraveled more than was first feared. Rather than freezing the deal where it was, the process has been moving backward. The IRA's first act was to announce it was withdrawing its representative who had been dealing with the international body overseeing decommissioning.

Just this week, Gerry Adams announced the May 22 deadline was no longer active, as there was no longer any deal. And decommissioning itself is being redefined, the republicans saying it really means "demilitarization," implying that the British army should be pulled out to parallel any downgrading of the IRA's capacity for violence.

Not for the first time the Clinton administration is being looked to for a way through this thicket of conflicting interpretations and expectations. George Mitchell's capacity for patience and diplomacy is not available this time. The Good Friday accord owes much to Mitchell, who has already saved it once.

It also owes much to President Clinton, who has kept the process on his foreign policy agenda. But the president's influence may not be enough this time around.

Aside from the silence, there's one other cause for optimism even now: All parties are still playing by the Good Friday rules. And rules matter in Northern Ireland.

I'm often reminded of an experience I had in the early stages of "The Troubles" about 20 years ago. This was during the time of the IRA hunger strikers who were starving themselves to death in the Maze prison. The streets were running battle zones, with vehicles set on fire, Molotov cocktails being thrown at British troops, and the toops firing back with rubber bullets.

I was in a car with a driver trying to get from one riot to another. We turned up one street to be met by a charging mob. Reversing around the corner, we tried another route to be blocked by a line of British armored cars. A third street was impassable because of a row of burning buses.

"Try that street!" I shouted to the driver, desperate to get out of an intersection that was about to become the latest ground zero.

"Oh, we can't go up there," he said. "It's a one way."

Even in the midst of anarchy and chaos, rules still apply here.

The strategy now - in Washington, London and Dublin - is to keep the parties engaged, to keep them talking. If their voices go silent, the fear is, that another silence - the silence of the guns - will end.