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Mandelson berates Unionists for making peace harder to achieve

LONDON: Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson on Sunday berated the province's largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, for "dragging the police into politics" and making peace harder to achieve.

Mandelson said Northern Ireland's peace process was not made any easier by the Ulster Unionists' vote on Saturday to narrowly back their leader, David Trimble, and said progress was being blocked by hardliners on both sides of the sectarian divide.

But he had especially sharp words for the Unionists' decision not to return to a power-sharing government with the Roman Catholics unless the "Royal" tag of the province's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was retained.

"I regret the decision of the Ulster Unionist party council yesterday. I think it was quite inappropriate to hijack the RUC's name that way, to drag the police into politics," Mandelson said on BBC television's Breakfast with Frost.

The reform of the RUC was part of the 1998 Good Friday agreement on which the peace process in the British province is based, Mandelson said. The force should not be aligned with any political party, he added.

Under the reforms, Britain plans to rename the predominantly Protestant police force as the Northern Ireland Police Service, a name more acceptable to the Catholic minority in the province.

But unionists say that is an insult to the 300 officers killed in sectarian violence which claimed 3,600 lives in Northern Ireland over the last 30 years.

Mandelson said he would resist the "hardliners among the unionists who are trying to introduce another precondition to their going into government, effectively another veto," adding that he hoped the unionists would "think twice before going along that path".

"It is hardliners on both sides who have got to back away and allow politics to work," Mandelson said, adding that the British and Irish governments would intensify their efforts with the parties in the coming weeks to try and break the stalemate.

On the republican side, hardliners were preventing the Irish Republican Army "from making any move on arms, which is necessary if people are going to have confidence to move forward," he said.

On another programme on Sky television, Mandelson urged the IRA to make a clear statement "that their guns, now silent, are going to remain silent, that they are not going to be used in the future, and in the longer term, talk about how those arms are going to be disposed of".

"That's the contribution, the flexibility, that the republicans could and should offer in my view to help David Trimble out of a difficult situation for him, created by elements of his own party."

The result of Saturday's meeting of the UUP's 800 strong-policy-making council was that Trimble, a Nobel peace laureate, found himself with even less room to manoeuvre in negotiations with Catholic Sinn Fein, political ally of the Irish Republican Army.

Trimble won 56 percent of the vote to 43 percent for the Reverend Martin Smyth, who wants to scrap the Good Friday accord because he thinks it contains to many concessions to the IRA.-Reuters