N. Ireland Peace Frozen; Early Thaw Unlikely

Flash-freezing Northern Ireland's peace process may have been the only way to save it, but it may take months, if not years, to thaw. Britain Friday suspended the self-rule that had brought loyalists and republicans together in a joint assembly and executive, reimposing direct rule from London in order to stop an Ulster Unionist walkout in protest against the absence of IRA disarmament. "Already the recriminations have begun," says TIME London bureau chief Jef McAllister, "with both sides quick to blame the other. Now there's a real danger that positions will actually harden rather than soften, because there's no way the IRA will hand over any weapons while the self-rule institutions are suspended, but there's also no way the Unionists will agree to revive those institutions before the IRA has actually begun delivering weapons."

There was a glimmer of last-minute hope Friday as the international arbitrator ruling on arms decommissioning, Canada's General John de Chastelain, released a second secret report on prospects for disarmament, and Sinn Fein spokesman Martin McGuinness proclaimed that the IRA was about to "set out the context in which it will deal with the issue of arms." But that wouldn't have been enough to help Unionist leader David Trimble survive a Saturday meeting of his mutinous party council, which had threatened to oust him if he stayed in the peace process in the absence of progress on IRA disarmament (and keeping on board the moderate Trimble, who has risked his political future to bring the skeptical loyalist community into the peace process, was London's priority). "Of course, if De Chastelain's latest report cites real progress on disarmament, which some sources believe it does, Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Mandelson, could lift the suspension next week," says McAllister. "But it's unlikely that Mandelson would've taken the extreme step of suspending the institutions if there'd been a plausible way out." So Northern Ireland's historic eight-week interlude of self-rule is over for now, until both republicans and loyalists are sufficiently reminded that the alternative is, proverbially, too ghastly to contemplate.