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CNN Sunday Morning
Northern Ireland Struggles Toward Peace
Aired June 24, 2001 - 10:10 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: In Northern Ireland, hopes for peace hinge on the Irish Republican Army at the moment. Pressure is mounting for the group to begin the disarmament process. David Trimble won an uncontested reelection yesterday as the leader of the other side of things, the Protestant Ulster Unionists. But, he says, he will resign the provincial government next Sunday, July 1, if the weapons impasse is not resolved by then.
All this after the worst week of violence to rock the streets of Belfast in three years. Sixty police officers were injured in street clashes between Protestant and Catholic youths. On Friday, the British government ordered an extra 1,600 troops into Northern Ireland to bolster the 1,500 soldiers already deployed there.
Now, on the issue of IRA disarmament, talks are underway and likely to intensify in an effort to convince the IRA to make concessions on its guns.
Tonight on "CNN PRESENTS," CNN's Nic Robertson takes an in-depth look at the issue and the challenges facing IRA leader Martin McGuinness.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Behind doors normally barred to journalists, a top level Sinn Fein meeting is underway and there is little debate on handing over weapon. Despite the agreement, most here would consider that tantamount to surrender.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Irish guns are quiet. I think Republicans have made a huge contribution, a mighty contribution, to the search for peace in Ireland.
ROBERTSON: The future of IRA weapons like these, captured by Irish police, is proving dangerously divisive for Republicans.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'BRIEN: Nic Robertson, who is on assignment, joining us now from The Hague for, we anticipate, the extradition of Slobodan Milosevic, totally unrelated to this story. Nic, thanks for being with us and talking about your effort.
I had a chance to see it last night. Really excellent work. I'm just curious, you decided Martin McGuinness was going to be your focus. Why him? Why not, say, Jerry Adams or perhaps somebody else inside that particular realm?
ROBERTSON: Well, Martin McGuinness has really been key in driving this peace process along, because he helped convince the IRA hard-liners to go into the peace process. Jerry Adams, within the Republican movement, is more sort of seen as a politician, whereas Martin McGuinness has been much more involved in the hands-on Republican struggle, if you will, particularly in the early days, at one stage Chief of Staff of the IRA.
He is seen by his supporters as being an honorable man, a man of his word, a man of strict discipline. And so, when he says to the hard-liners in the IRA, "Look, this is a good peace deal. Look, we can go along with it. It's going in the direction we want it to go in," they'll trust him, and he's been able with Jerry Adams sort of at the political head, if you will, to bring the IRA along, To get them to the negotiating table and to get them thus far.
O'BRIEN: I want to ask you a little bit more about him in just a moment, but I want to give people a flavor of the kind of inside access that you got, quite literally. We've seen for years these armored personnel carriers rolling through the streets of Belfast and Derry. You actually got inside. Let's take a little look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: These guys will throw stones at the vehicles now.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): Actually, it's a bicycle that bounces off the windshield.
On the mean streets of Belfast, the Army and police are despised. Taunting them is child's play.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'BRIEN: Alright, Nic, you had the misfortune, I guess, or fortune, as a reporter, to be inside and witness that. What was that like for you? And what is it like for those soldiers and the policemen they're protecting on a daily basis to endure that?
ROBERTSON: Well, on a personal level, it's a real eye-opener to see the level of animosity aimed at these soldiers, and from such young children. These are the children who grow up in a few years, we have seen, witnessed rioting just last week in Belfast. And these same children, a few years older, that are out there throwing petrol bombs, blast bombs and such like at the Army.
For the soldiers, it's a very, very, if I can say, real experience. They are in real danger. Before they go out on every patrol, they get a really intense briefing reminding them of all their training and skills. To look in the shadows, to cover each other, how they deploy on the street, their job there to protect the policemen. Sometimes it takes as many as 12 soldiers to protect one policeman who might just be manning a checkpoint on a road.
So, for the soldiers, it's a very, very real experience and the animosity in some of the neighborhoods in Belfast is really quite extreme. A real eye-opener to see children throwing bicycles at the Army trucks.
O'BRIEN: Now, let's go back to Martin McGuinness, who you've spent a lot of time with -- excuse me -- it's a very revealing kind of access to him. What is interesting about him is, when you learn a little bit about his history, you understand why he has so much credibility within that group. Let's, first of all, look at some of the history that you uncovered and talk about in the hour.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTSON (voice-over): '71 ended with McGuinness second in command of Derry's small but resurgent IRA. Within weeks, he would be a Republican hero.
On Sunday, the 30th of January, 1972, British paratroopers shot 27 unarmed Catholics in Derry's Bogside during a civil rights march.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do not fire back on anyone unless you identify a positive target.
ROBERTSON: Fourteen were killed. The British Army claimed the IRA fired first; the IRA denied it. Bloody Sunday, as it was to become known, was to prove a watershed in the history of Irish Republicanism.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'BRIEN: A watershed moment, Martin McGuinness right at the center of it, and now he is the education minister, part of this government that exists there, at least for now. And that is a subject, sort of a lightening rod for controversy to this moment, isn't it?
ROBERTSON: Oh, absolutely. How he went from being the deputy commander, if you will, in Derry of that day, of the IRA, to being a politician, to being now education minister, is one of the hardest things for many people on the other side of the religious divide in the Protestant Unionists community to swallow.
There are many Unionists politicians. One just stood up in the Northern Ireland government, parliament, just a couple of weeks ago, and said Martin McGuinness was still at the helm of the IRA. It is a real thorny issue, and one of the issues that makes the IRA guns so difficult for the Unionists community to swallow. They really want to believe that Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, has put the idea of using weapons once and for all beyond use. They want to be convinced that that's the case.
So, the fact that Martin McGuinness' pedigree has allowed him to bring the IRA to the table; on the other side of the equation, they still see him as somebody who has very much been involved in hands-on terrorism.
O'BRIEN: You know, the hour gave me the sense of how difficult it is to be a journalist and try to cover this. You've got people who are not necessarily willing to be forthcoming, for some obvious reasons, on both sides of the conflict.
Let's take a look at a little segment which I think is a bit telling on that front.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTSON (voice-over): I'm on the trail of a British undercover agent who says he infiltrated the IRA for 15 years, reaching its senior ranks as an expert bomb maker. He says a death threat letter he received from the IRA backs up his claim his cover was recently blown.
He is as close to IRA current thinking as a journalist can find. He says McGuinness is still at the helm.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He holds the power of life and death, and that is it. He is God. To me, he scared the (EXPLETIVE DELETED) out of me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'BRIEN: That must have been a very revealing interview. Give us a sense of how difficult it was to try to pin these types of people down, get them to talk to you, get them to give you some sort of candid comment like that.
ROBERTSON: Well, the key is finding them. Very few people that have been so close to Martin McGuinness would actually want to speak out against him. What gave us access to this gentleman was weeks and weeks and weeks of hard work, through a lot of secret contacts, and he spoke very, very passionately and emotionally about Martin McGuinness, also about his experiences in the IRA.
He was a British former soldier who was recruited by the British Army more than 20 years ago to go back to Northern Ireland, where he was born, and penetrate the IRA. He did that. For 20 years, he was deep inside the IRA. That's what gave him these insights. But to this day, he's very, very scared that his identity should be revealed after making such comments.
O'BRIEN: Nic, you didn't have the benefit of working in anonymity. You were out there presenting yourself to both sides. At any time, did you feel as if you were threatened in any way? Were you scared, as a journalist, trying to do this story?
ROBERTSON: I think as a journalist, one always feels when one is pushing the boundaries, one may come across things that people really don't want to be told. And we talked to people who didn't want to go on camera, who had very passionate stories to tell about their feelings about Martin McGuinness. So, there are people there who have to live with it day by day. We are fortunate. We're able to walk in and walk out. Some people still live with those concerns and fears.
O'BRIEN: CNN's Nic Robertson. Thanks for spending a little bit of time with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING, helping preview what is a fascinating hour of television. "CNN PRESENTS: Northern Ireland: Dying For Peace," airs tonight at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time, 7:00 Pacific. And for more on the story, we invite you to click on to CNN interactive, CNN.com. We have an in-depth special on tracking the troubles, as they are called there. The address is CNN.com/PRESENTS, to be specific.
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