Talks may be doomed without Mitchell role

AFTER yesterday's churlish responses to John Major's article in The Irish Times, ere will be many who would fervently wish to lock Mr Gerry Adams and Mr David Trimble - in a small room together and leave them there until they either harangue each other to death or become reduced, mercifully, to speechlessness.

Mr Trimble wants to use Senator George Mitchell for his own purposes but doesn't want to give him any real involvement. Mr Adams, as usual, wants to use parts of Mr Major's text as a lever but berates the whole package as inadequate.

Both men, on whom the success or failure of all party negotiations depends, are already negotiating zealously on their own terms and by their own rules - flagrantly exploiting the absence of any procedural codes or restrictions.

They are seeking, quite plainly, to secure key objectives before they ever have to sit down and deal with each other directly. Mr Trimble wants to compel decommissioning without conceding anything politically; Mr Adams wants to exact political concessions without conceding decommissioning.

It is a no win game, and the outlook is not propitious. The main players are skating on thin ice and the temperature is rising.

Ironically, they both concurred yesterday in complaining that parts of Mr Major's comments were ambiguous. Neither had the grace to acknowledge that a degree of ambiguity might have been necessary if the British prime minister was to avoid conceding outright, in advance of negotiations, the demands of one side or the other.

BOTH men have perfectly formed preconceptions of each other's secret game plan. Each perceives that the other does not really want to play ball in accordance with set rules. So their pre match dispute is really over the rules of the game.

Mr Trimble, with the luxury of not having to meet any ceasefire deadline, can gaily juggle the decommissioning issue as a free penalty shot to produce whenever the going gets tough. The beauty of it is that he can refine and adapt it freely as it suits him.

Who is to say - except Mr Trimble - how much decommissioning actually constitutes decommissioning, when it should be demanded, and what, if anything, should be traded for it? In the absence of a referee, it is a free shot which can be requisitioned repeatedly on the basis that the goalkeeper moved too soon or had Semtex concealed in his boots.

Mr Trimble perceives that Mr Adams wants to argue the constitutional case and all other matters while the IRA remains potent in the background, untrammelled by any formal commitment to disarm or desist from future military actions.

He could, without risking any consequences which would not be on the cards anyway, call Mr Adams's bluff. He could, statesmanlike, sit down with Mr Adams, open negotiations and explore even the most delicate constitutional issues with confidence - secure in the knowledge that any attempt at coercion could be exposed and would, cause massive damage to the republican case.

But Mr Trimble is no statesman, and he will not take this course, simply because he does not have to. He is comfortable and complacent that the moral pressure is on Sinn Fein for the moment, and he will wring every ounce of advantage out of it while he can, without moving a millimetre to meet his opponent.

Mr Adams clearly perceives Mr Trimble's manoeuvres as spoiling tactics, designed to avoid engagement. He said, in some frustration, to an interviewer yesterday: "Mr Trimble knows as well as you do, and as well as I do, that those who have arms aren't going to surrender them or decommission them outside of a negotiated settlement, so what the Unionists are doing, quite patently, is using this as a pretext for their refusal, or failure, or fear of being involved in meaningful negotiations."

Mr Adams, who has to duck and weave twice as hard as his opponent, because of his party's IRA appendage, is increasingly forced to resort to his fallback position of declaring it "absurd" that he cannot enter talks without an IRA ceasefire.

On the face of it, he has a good case. The stated purpose of the elections is to demonstrate that those parties wishing to enter negotiations have a democratic mandate - not to establish conclusively that they will never become war mongers.

But everybody knows, including Mr Adams, that the two governments, cast in the role, one might say, of team managers, have set an additional condition for the fixture: that it will take place only in the circumstances of a renewal of the IRA cessation. There is no possibility of their lifting that clause in advance of June 10th.

The Sinn Fein leader washes his hands of responsibility for IRA policy, refusing yesterday to speculate on what the IRA might do. He has begun to behave like Mr Trimble demanding that Mr Major should "spell out" exactly how the decommissioning issue will be prevented from becoming an obstacle in the negotiations.

HE, too, appears to fear a situation where negotiations might demonstrably advance to a point where an actual gesture of decommissioning might realistically be called for, in line with Senator Mitchell's concept of a sequenced, step by step, quid pro quo process of dismantling the military machine in parallel with assembling a structure of political agreement.

There is no hope of a resolution of this new stand off situation without independent outside intervention. The hoped for commencement of all party talks on June 10th is already beginning to unravel and crumble before our eyes.

The shadow boxing, posturing and negotiation by proxy is merely sapping confidence, feeding short term electoral ambitions and strengthening the hands of those who favour extremism and a return to war.

There is an untested recourse. Senator Mitchell devised the original formula of parallel decommissioning. His concept has been interpreted and distorted, manipulated and exploited a score or more ways by others, and it continues to be.

The only interpretation that matters, however, is Senator Mitchell's own. If he is not called back and given the authority and means to attempt the implementation of his plan, the June 10th peace conclave appears doomed before it even begins.