Hard-Liners Are Winning in Northern Ireland

It's not Gerry Adams or David Trimble who has imperiled Northern Ireland's peace deal; it is their supporters. Britain has given the IRA until Friday to provide a "credible commitment" to disarm, failing which it will suspend the territory's historic joint assembly and executive. That would flash-freeze the peace process, which London considers preferable to allowing the total collapse that would result if Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble carries out his threat to resign by February 12 in the absence of any disarmament. The crisis reflects the mood of the hard-liners on both sides unconvinced by the compromises struck by their leaders. "For a long time Adams complained that Trimble hadn't prepared his followers to sit in an assembly with the very people they'd decried as terrorists," says former TIME London bureau chief Barry Hillenbrand. "But now the tables are turned, and it's Adams who's failed to deliver the 'hard men.'"

Although the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 requires that disarmament be completed only by May 22 of this year, Trimble faced down an internal revolt last October by a narrow margin, and managed to stay in the process only by vowing to walk out if the IRA hadn't at least begun disarming by the end of January. Although Adams agreed in December to press for some movement on this front, he's been unable to sell accelerated disarmament to a movement that sees its weapons as the only reason Britain and the Unionists ever bothered to talk to the Republicans. "Pressure from Trimble and London has made it harder for Adams to persuade the IRA's hard men that decommissioning now would be a voluntary gesture from a position of strength rather than a humiliation extracted by the enemy," says TIME London bureau chief Jef McAllister. But the IRA's reluctance to part with its Semtex may now be hurting its own cause as it faces mounting pressure to disarm from quarters as diverse as the U.S., the Irish Republic and the moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party, which represents the majority of Northern Ireland's Catholics. They may complain that the goalposts have been shifted, but right now the IRA has more to lose by giving up the game.