Peace in Northern Ireland is still elusive, but it's edging closer after one of two main Roman Catholic parties and the church's bishops threw their support behind police reforms designed to give the British-ruled province a more Catholic-friendly force.
Previously, Catholics who enlisted in the predominantly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary were targeted as traitors by the Irish Republican Army — and that may still happen if the IRA and its militant offshoots continue to oppose British proposals to change the name of the force and make it more balanced.
But the Primate of Ireland, Archbishop Sean Brady, put the gunmen on notice that anyone who tried to prevent young Catholics from joining "a noble vocation in the service of the common good" would be guilty of "a profound contravention of their human rights."
The moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party also urged its Catholic members to "take the chance."
Asked party leader John Hume, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Good Friday Accord in 1998: "How can any democrat be opposed to a police service whose membership is drawn from the whole community?"
But, as always in Northern Ireland, some are opposed.
Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, said the SDLP was "wrong" to back police reforms that do not go far enough to satisfy Catholic grievances. And Protestant hard-liners say an RUC name change would insult the memory of its 300 officers killed by the IRA. Trying to belittle the Catholic move, the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party ridiculed the SDLP as a "poodle of the Roman Catholic Church."
However, the larger Ulster Unionist Party hailed the development as "a major concession."
A party spokesman said: "It should now be clear to everyone that Sinn Fein is isolated on policing, isolated on decommissioning and isolated on Colombia. Sinn Fein is out of touch."
The IRA's refusal to disarm — "decommissioning" in British parlance — remains the main stumbling block to true peace in the troubled province, where three decades of sectarian warfare have killed more than 3,600 people. Even Catholics who support the peace process are hesitant about disarmament, saying the IRA's guns are their only protection from Protestant extremists.
No one knows how large the arsenal really is. But the IRA is believed to have more than 100 tons of weapons stored in hidden bunkers all over Northern Ireland and the southern Irish Republic. They include AK-47 assault rifles, Semtex explosives, machine guns, .50-caliber anti-aircraft guns, Barrett sniper rifles, pistols, mortars, RPG rocket launchers and shoulder-fired SAM missiles.
Much of this firepower came from Libya in the 1970s and 1980s.
Colombian authorities said three IRA "engineers" had been training the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in the use of explosives. FARC, as it is known by its Spanish initials, is heavily involved in Colombia's lucrative drug trade and was presumably paying for the IRA's bomb-making expertise with weapons or cocaine.
The IRA has been observing a cease-fire since 1997 and has twice offered to put its arms "verifiably beyond use." But the latest offer was rescinded after its rejection by Protestant politicians who said they "cannot trust in rust."
The Protestants point out that a breakaway faction of the IRA, calling itself the Real IRA, is not observing the cease-fire and still has access to IRA arms caches. Also, the main IRA has never agreed to surrender its arms or destroy them, suggesting that it wants to keep them for future use. Protestants, a 55 percent majority among Northern Ireland's 15 million people, are determined to preserve their union with Britain. But the British public does not value it as highly as they do. An opinion poll in a national newspaper, the Guardian, showed that only 26 percent of Britons want the province to remain British while 41 percent thought it should join the Irish Republic.
The latter, of course, is precisely what the Catholics want and may eventually achieve when they outnumber the Protestants. The Good Friday Accord stipulates that Northern Ireland will "remain part of the United Kingdom unless majorities north and south of the border choose unity."
Holger Jensen is International Editor of the Rocky Mountain News. E-mail: hjens@aol.com.