By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2008
BELFAST -- The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, "I'm a thief and a burglar."
For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman's house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a "walk of shame," the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland's three decades of sectarian violence.
"I would love the paramilitaries to come back," said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. "There's a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police."
Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province's divided Catholic and Protestant communities.
In interviews this past week, officials and residents in both communities said erasing generations of mistrust of police and persuading people not to take justice into their own hands are the most critical remaining steps toward cementing peace in this conflict-weary province.
"Policing is the elephant in the room -- it needs to be sorted," said Alex Maskey, a senior member of Sinn Fein, the province's largest Catholic political party, which agreed last year to officially support a predominantly Protestant police force it had long accused of anti-Catholic bias.
Northern Ireland has rebounded from its war years with some stunning successes, including an economic renaissance.
The glittering new centerpiece of a transformed Belfast opened Thursday: Victoria Square, an $800 million shopping center with a huge glass dome rising over the downtown skyline.
Once a dreary conflict zone, Northern Ireland has been spruced up with more than $6 billion in foreign investment in recent years. Economic officials said the largest chunk has come from U.S. banks and technology and aerospace firms, which have pumped in more than $1 billion over the past five years, creating 5,000 jobs.
In the waterfront area where the Titanic was built, Belfast now has a 10,000-seat sports arena, a movie set favored by Hollywood filmmakers, and a professional hockey team, the Belfast Giants.
Last year, the province established a once-unthinkable power-sharing government. It is led by Ian Paisley, a bellicose Protestant clergyman who once referred to Pope John Paul II as "the Antichrist." Serving as his deputy is Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army volunteer whom Paisley had long called a terrorist.
When Paisley announced Tuesday that he would soon step down, amid a feeling among some in his party that he had become too cozy with Sinn Fein, political analysts predicted that the government was solid enough to withstand the transition to Paisley's successor -- most likely the longtime No. 2 in the party, Peter Robinson.
In an interview, Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said the news on crime is good as well: a decline for six consecutive years. This year's rate is down nearly 14 percent from last year's. The walk of shame incident was the work of a small minority, he said. "There is a tiny group of people who are marginalized and stuck in the past. Like any cornered animal, they are lashing out. But are we going backwards? No."
Still, many people interviewed here in recent days said policing issues remain far more controversial than the statistics suggest, particularly in poor neighborhoods that suffered the worst violence from the 1960s to the 1990s.
While overt sectarian violence is increasingly rare, tensions are still high enough that officials built a new separation wall just weeks ago -- adding to the dozens of walls and fences, some of them brick, corrugated-metal and steel-mesh structures more than 25 feet high, that already separate Protestant and Catholic communities.
When a factory was built recently in a Catholic area just across the street from a Protestant neighborhood, almost no Protestants could bring themselves to walk those few feet across a historical dividing line to apply for work, said Frank McCoubrey, a Belfast City Council member and community worker.
Dissident Catholic paramilitary groups, opposed to making peace with Protestants, are suspected in the recent shooting deaths of two police officers. And a Hatfields-and-McCoys-style feud between two extended families in the Catholic Ballymurphy neighborhood has resulted in at least one killing and numerous homes being shot up and burned out in the past year.
Across the poorer, working-class sections of both communities, residents said they feel more threatened than ever by muggings, assaults and break-ins, much of the crime fueled by young drug abusers.
"There's people out there that have painted a pretty picture that things are all rosy in Northern Ireland, but they're not," said McCoubrey, who represents the Shankill area, the epicenter of Protestant paramilitary activity during the long unrest that is known here as the Troubles.
McCoubrey said that while police have vastly improved their performance in recent years, many people in the Shankill area have little faith in them. He said that police respond slowly to crime and that even persistent offenders rarely face more than a slap on the wrist from judges.
For decades, while police focused on counterinsurgency, Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups effectively enforced the law in their communities. People who stole cars or sold drugs would often be punished with a beating or a bullet in the knee.
McCoubrey said some frustrated people still call on former paramilitary fighters to seek justice, and they respond, despite their own pledges to support the police.
In August, residents of another Protestant community in Belfast punished a local drug dealer by tarring and feathering him and tying him to a lamppost wearing a sign that said, "I'm a drug-dealing scumbag."
Government officials paint a far more optimistic picture of policing and criminal justice, which is to pass from the control of London to local government officials this year. "I think huge progress has been made on policing, but we need to continue building trust," said Shaun Woodward, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, the top British government official in the province.
Liam Maskey, co-founder of Intercomm, a community development group that brings Protestants and Catholics together, said the people of Northern Ireland are being forced to learn the basics of the rule of law.
So when parking enforcement officers were sent out into the street for the first time last year, he said, people who got tickets sometimes responded by beating up the officers.
"Our job used to be to stop people getting killed on a daily basis," he said. "Now we're trying to set the groundwork for a whole new society."
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