Peace Effort in N. Ireland Bedeviled by Militia Arms

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — As a British army trooper checked her driver’s license in a violence-racked rural district of South Armagh near the Irish border, Lorraine McElroy, 35, saw a flash and heard a sharp crack.

Blood suddenly spurted from her forehead, and she saw Stephen Restorick, 23, of the Royal Horse Artillery, collapse in a heap outside the car. He had been fatally shot in the back by an Irish Republican Army sniper, and the bullet, exiting his body, hit his rifle and split in two; one fragment of the bullet grazed McElroy’s head. She needed seven stitches.

The guerrilla sniper, it is now believed, was armed with a sophisticated U.S.-made Barrett hunting rifle, equipped with a night scope. It fired a huge, .50-caliber bullet powerful enough to penetrate Restorick’s flak jacket or helmet.

“He was killed, and for what?” McElroy, a Roman Catholic, now asks. “So many people have been hurt, so many lives wrecked, and at the end of the day, it has achieved nothing.”

Nearly 3,200 people have been killed and more than 37,000 wounded since Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” began in 1968-69. The numbers of active combatants blamed for causing this carnage at first seems harmlessly low: 500 to 600 for the IRA, British government sources say, and half that for the IRA enemies and colleagues in terrorism, the Protestant paramilitaries.

But over the past three decades, these extremists have bought, built and stockpiled impressive war chests of weapons to wage their communal blood feud. The IRA alone is believed to hold more arms than any other insurgent or terrorist group in Europe: tommy guns like those carried by Eliott Ness’ “Untouchables.” Plastic explosives. Soviet armor-piercing machine guns. Homemade mortar bombs and pressure-sensitive land mines.

Now these arsenals--used by the IRA in its struggle to oust the British from this Connecticut-sized province, home to 1.6 million people, and unite it with the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic to the south--are bedeviling efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland, and may doom them.

On July 20, the IRA guns fell silent, in a cease-fire meant to enable the group’s political wing, Sinn Fein, to participate in groundbreaking peace talks, brokered by the British and Irish governments. Those talks are supposed to begin in earnest next month.

“I don’t want to be unrealistic about it--it’s going to be tough,” said George J. Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate majority leader who has been chairing an international panel trying to find common ground among Northern Ireland’s political parties. “This is a situation where these people have never sat together and talked.”

Negotiators have called for parallel “decommissioning,” or the hand-over of some of the paramilitaries’ weapons once substantive peace negotiations are under way. But no one knows yet how, or if, decommissioning can work and whether it will genuinely reduce the threat of violence.

The IRA, caution officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or provincial police, has proved extraordinarily versatile over the decades in supplying itself with weaponry from abroad as well as in crafting sophisticated munitions in its own clandestine workshops.

According to one published British source, a total of 15,000 weapons may have crossed the ocean from the United States for the IRA. Police in Belfast, the provincial capital, say that among the many American-made arms seized are M-16s, a revolver that belonged to a New York City police officer, and seven belt-fed M-60 machine guns stolen from a National Guard armory in Danvers, Mass.

But unquestionably, the IRA’s greatest coup was securing a large quantity of potent munitions in the mid-1980s from Col. Moammar Kadafi, the radical Libyan leader who then saw the nationalists as an ally in fighting Western imperialism.

The Garda, the police in the Irish Republic, have estimated the arsenal delivered by sea at 109 to 130 tons. Another 150 tons, aboard a Panamanian-registered freighter, were seized by French authorities in 1987.

According to “Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism,” a reference work to be published next month, the IRA now has about 600 AK-47 assault rifles, 60 Armalite assault rifles, 600 detonators, six Soviet-made flamethrowers, a SAM antiaircraft missile, 40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 12 Belgian-made machine guns, 20 Soviet-made heavy armor-piercing machine guns, 40 Webley revolvers and assorted other weapons.

They also are believed to still possess three tons of Libyan-supplied Semtex H, a plastic explosive manufactured in the former Soviet satellite nation of Czechoslovakia that is so powerful that as little as 6 to 8 ounces may have destroyed Pan American Airways Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people.

Irish and Northern Ireland police believe that the bulk of the IRA arms are stockpiled in the west and southwest of the island in secret dumps and moved northward to British territory in small quantities of a ton or so as needed.

As well as the imports, the IRA has been able to churn out a large number of pressure-sensitive mines, fertilizer bombs, radio-controlled and booby-trapped car bombs, multi-barreled mortars, incendiary devices, electrical and mechanical timers, mercury fulminate detonators and other munitions.

Some specialists say this means that whatever the IRA might give up, it would probably be able to replace quickly.

“Given that so many of the IRA’s weapons are off the shelf, improved devices and explosives they make themselves, is it really going to be possible to disarm Northern Ireland?” asked Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland.

Another, much smaller republican paramilitary group, the Irish National Liberation Army, is thought to have obtained small shipments of arms from left-wing groups in Europe and from sources in the Middle East.

A second splinter group, the Continuity Army Council, is opposed to peace talks and is believed to have been behind the car bomb containing up to half a ton of explosives found last week outside a hotel in the district of Fermanagh in Northern Ireland’s southwest.

Much less heavily armed, and estimated at about half the nationalists’ numerical strength, are fighters from anti-Catholic unionist factions, including the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Assn. They boast sufficiently proficient craftsmen to have manufactured their own submachine guns, based on the design of the Israeli Uzi, and other firearms.

“The unionists are self-sufficient in guns, and they make some beauties,” one member of the Northern Ireland police said.

In past years, loyalists have also received weapons from sympathizers in England, Scotland and Canada; one shipment in 1988 included 200 Czechoslovakian-made VZ-58 assault rifles, about two-thirds of which have been recovered by police, and a load of Browning pistols and Soviet-made hand grenades.

One breakaway unionist group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, has refused to call a cease-fire during the talks.

For 14 months, preliminary negotiations have foundered on the question of what to do about all these guns and bombs.

The IRA had observed an earlier cease-fire for 17 months but ended it spectacularly with a massive blast in the Canary Wharf district of London on Feb. 9, 1996, that killed two people and injured 100 others. The Conservative British government then in power had been insisting that the IRA agree to some gesture of disarmament before peace talks could begin.

The election in May of Labor Party leader Tony Blair transformed the equation. The next month, Britain’s new prime minister proposed a calendar for the talks, to which Sinn Fein will now be admitted if the IRA ceases hostilities for six weeks, and said he will not allow the ongoing dispute on decommissioning to hold things up.

This has been wholly unacceptable for two of the smaller pro-British parties, the Democratic Unionists and United Kingdom Unionists, which quit the talks because the IRA will not be compelled to hand over weapons first.

The province’s largest party, the Ulster Unionists, the main voice of the majority Protestant community, is still mulling things over.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, has said the IRA will not surrender a single bullet in advance.

The talks are meant to define a devolution of power to the province, which was been directly ruled from London since 1972, safeguards for the Catholic minority, relations between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and British-Irish ties. Some predict they will go nowhere.

On one of the walls dividing the West Belfast Catholic enclave from Protestant neighborhoods, anonymous republican graffiti artists have gone public with their doubts about the intentions of Blair and his party: “New Labor, New P.M., Same Policy.”

However, many ordinary people, even if they admit to feeling dubious about chances for peace, hope and pray the talks will staunch the bloodshed and hatred.

Alan McBride, 41, lost his wife and father-in-law when IRA bombers placed a bomb on the counter of the older man’s fish store in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast. A total of 10 people died, including one of the bombers, in the October 1993 attack.

McBride, a Protestant, was left to raise his daughter Zoe, now 5, alone. He thoroughly distrusts the IRA, believes its latest cease-fire is a mere ploy but says there must be negotiations with Sinn Fein, whether IRA weapons are decommissioned or not.

“Do we want to bring these people to peace talks, or have 25 years more of what we’ve had?” asks McBride. “I know what I’d choose for my child.”