Hailing Northern Ireland's 15-month cease-fire, President Clinton on Thursday challenged Protestants and Roman Catholics to stand firm against those who would allow "old habits and hard grudges" to destroy their chance for peace.
Hundreds of well-wishers on both sides of Northern Ireland's sectarian divide turned out to greet Clinton as he became the first American president to visit the war-scarred British province."Clinton Fever Grips Belfast," trumpeted a headline in the Belfast Telegraph.
Seeking to maintain an evenhanded approach, Clinton visited both Catholic and Protestant neigh-borhoods in Belfast. In the Catholic Falls Road, where the reception was particularly enthusiastic, he plunged into the crowd, shaking hands with dozens of people.
Outside a Belfast bakery, Clinton was greeted by Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party, who has criticized an 11th-hour Anglo-Irish agreement aimed at getting peace talks back on track. Clinton and Adams shook hands and spoke briefly out of reporters' earshot.
Afterward, Adams told a reporter he had extended "a thousand welcomes" to Clinton in Gaelic.
In Londonderry, among the faces in the crowd, rocking on tiptoes to see if Clinton had arrived yet, was Martin McGuinness, reputed former IRA leader in Londonderry and the second-ranking leader of Sinn Fein.
McGuinness has led Sinn Fein's team in the stalled negotiations with the British government about the terms for entering all-party talks.
In a speech to Belfast factory workers, Clinton said that attempts to end a quarter-century of sectarian conflict were certain to be assailed by "people who, deep down inside, will never be able to give up the past."
He urged them not to succumb to those pressures.
"Just as peace has its pioneers, peace will always have its rivals," Clinton said. "Protestant and Catholic alike must not allow the ship of peace to sink on the rocks of old habits and hard grudges."
Clinton echoed that theme in Londonderry, the province's second-largest city, encouraging a cheering audience "to believe the future can be better than the past, to work together because you have so much more to gain by working together than by drifting apart."
Clinton hopes his presence in Northern Ireland alone generates confidence in the peace process and builds on a breakthrough agreement that opened his five-day European trip. He flew to Belfast from London and carefully split his time in Northern Ireland between Protestant and Catholic factions.
In his speech at the Mackie Plant, which assembles textile machinery, Clinton said the truce transformed a land once gripped by terrorism into a place where gunfire is a rarity and children play without fear. The region will continue to prosper "as the shroud of terror melts away," Clinton said, because so many people are focused on reconciliation.
"Now is the time to sustain that momentum and lock in the gains of peace," Clinton said. "Long-suffering people are moving closer to normal lives. All have labored to realize the promise of peace. . . . Here, the will for peace is now stronger than the weapons of war."
Britain and Ireland have agreed to ask an international commission to tackle the sensitive issue of disarming guerrillas. The two governments pledged to continue talkswith individual parties in hopes of eventually moving into all-party negotiations.
While the president praised the agreement, friends and foes of the outlawed Irish Republican Army called it "a fudge."
Adams, a longtime voice of the IRA, said, "If we cannot have all-party talks, we cannot have a peace settlement."
David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party, a pro-British Protestant group, suggested that the Anglo-Irish accord was staged to protect Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major from embarrassment.
Even with the cease-fire, Clinton can't claim that the violence has ended. The IRA and pro-British "loyalists" have intensified attacks against their own people in attempts to maintain power bases and keep the policy from undermining their authority.
Clinton was trying to remain above the fray, saying he would not take sides on the dispute over the guerrilla arsenals. But providing a grim reminder of a quarter-century of violence, 18 "peace lines" of brick, steel and barbed wire still separate Protestants and Catholics.
The factory where Clinton spoke has separate gates - one convenient to Catholic neighborhoods, the other to Protestants.
Clinton travels to Dublin on Friday. The five-day trip also is taking him to Germany, to visit U.S. troops preparing for deployment in Bosnia, and to Spain, for a meeting with European leaders.