Posted on 06/05/2002 11:52:46 AM PDT by Dallas
BELFAST, Northern Ireland --
Former President Clinton returned Wednesday to Northern Ireland to open a new peace center named in his honor, but street fights that erupted showed the 1998 political pact he encouraged hasn't soothed traditional hatreds.
Clinton visited the center dedicated to Catholic-Protestant reconciliation while Protestants, some of them masked and armed with clubs, blocked a major Belfast highway and hijacked several vehicles.
They said they were protesting earlier attacks by Catholics on pedestrians in the same Belfast neighborhood where repeated rioting since last Thursday has left more than two dozen people wounded.
Catholics accused Protestants of starting the latest confrontation by attacking Catholics trying to collect their welfare checks from a post office, then stoning mourners at an isolated Catholic church nearby.
"How sick can this society get?" said Joe O'Donnell, a Catholic member of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army-linked party who said he was hit by a brick. "We can't shop, we can't bury our dead, we can't do nothing."
But Sammy Wilson, a Protestant politician, defended the stone-throwing at the grounds of the Catholic Church.
"They attacked defenseless Protestant women, then they retreated into the chapel grounds like the cowards they are and hid behind the funeral," he said.
Some 110 miles away in the southwest town of Enniskillen, community activists and other residents met a beaming Clinton, whose unprecedented interest in getting America involved in Northern Ireland encouraged the Good Friday peace pact four years ago.
Enniskillen's new Clinton Center is designed to be a base for Catholic-Protestant reconciliation work and international study of the conflict. It was built on the spot where an IRA bomb in killed 11 Protestants in 1987.
"The grievous loss you have suffered in Enniskillen, and what you have done with it in making this peace center, can be a model and a shining beacon to the entire world," Clinton said.
Referring to ongoing sectarian violence in Belfast, Clinton called such clashes "the last gasp of an old order -- and old habits die hard."
The Good Friday agreement, achieved after 22 months of negotiations led by U.S. envoy George Mitchell, paved the way for this British territory's joint Catholic-Protestant government and scores of other initiatives. But many Protestants oppose the pact, and Sinn Fein has refused to promote Catholic support for key police reforms.
While Clinton's three visits to Northern Ireland as president brought tens of thousands onto the streets, the latest trip attracted much less public attention.
The Protestant leader of the Northern Ireland government, First Minister David Trimble, abandoned plans to meet Clinton because of the renewed Belfast violence.
Before traveling to London for hastily organized talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair, Trimble accused the IRA of fomenting the Belfast rioting and "planning to escalate right through the summer."
"Don't retaliate. Leave it to the police," he said in an appeal to the area's Protestant rioters. And he said Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness "must get a grip of the violence."
Adams met with David Ervine, the senior representative of the armed Ulster Volunteer Force, which Sinn Fein accuses of provoking the riots.
"It is in everybody's interests to stop the awfulness before it spreads and degenerates," said Ervine, whose group, like the IRA, is supposed to be observing a cease-fire.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
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The Irish? How about the stupid Americans that elected him twice?
Second pic: Notice where he is looking. That's our beelzabubba!
He's got more than his eyes on her. I never saw anyone pat a woman on the shoulder with the heel of his hand agains her chest. Anything for a free feel.
I think I can safely say that with a hint of sarcasm now that the disgusting bastard is no longer our President, right?
Like he gives a d*mn if they kill each other! They put his name on something and he's in the limelight. That's what motivates him. He is still groping for that legacy (as well as Irish lassies) that outshines all others.
"Bill... my face is up here...."
Pray for GW and the Truth
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