After the long and rocky road to peace in Northern Ireland, the killings of two soldiers and a police officer in the space of a few days have heightened fears of a return of terrorist violence to the British province, according to dpa. Following the shooting of two young soldiers at a British army barracks near Belfast on Saturday, politicians and security chiefs had been holding their breath in the hope the attack would remain a one-off. But just 48 hours later, when dissidents struck again to gun down a police officer - the first to be killed by terrorists in Northern Ireland since 1998 - the nightmare scenario came true and a sense of "deja vu" set in, a BBC analyst in Belfast said. Again, politicians across the political and religious divide stood together to condemn the attacks and vowed that the "provocation" would not bring down the peace process launched 11 years ago. The unity displayed by the formerly deeply-antagonistic Protestant and Catholic camps is remarkable in itself. But it has gained additional significance in the present crisis with the explicit support given to the police by the Republican party of Sinn Fein, the former political associates of the terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) from which the dissidents spring. "The people responsible for these murders hope that we will lose our nerve," said Martin McGuinness, the deputy Sinn Fein leader and former member of the IRA Army Council, who is now second-in-command in the power-sharing regional government in Belfast. "But although they are dangerous in what they can do, their actions are utterly futile and will not succeed," he added, describing the dissidents as "traitors." It was his responsibility as the chief Sinn Fein representative in government to "lead from the front" by backing the newly-established cross-party Police Service of Northern Ireland against the terrorist threat, McGuinness said Tuesday. His words are remarkable given the decades of suspicion and mistrust of Catholics in the formerly Protestant-dominated police force of Northern Ireland during the 30 years of the Troubles. To the dissidents of the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, the two splinter groups who split from the mainstream IRA in protest against Sinn Fein's embrace of the peace process in the late 1980s and 1990s, his words must come as confirmation of their rejection of Sinn Fein's move. The two groups believe that the "armed struggle" must be continued to achieve Irish unity, which in their logic includes an end to the British presence in Northern Ireland. Intelligence experts say the two groups, with a maximum of 1,000 members between them, have little popular support, but are dangerous because of their potential ability to undermine the peace process with targeted attacks. "They are a provocation," said the BBC's security analyst Frank Gardner. The groups wanted to prompt an "over-reaction" from the authorities that would "bring British soldiers back on to the streets of Northern Ireland," he said. According to intelligence sources, the dissident groups "helped themselves" to IRA arms dumps before IRA weapons were decommissioned, and recently stocked up with "sophisticated weapons and explosives from an active black market" fuelled by supplies from eastern Europe.
