Sir, - If David Trimble had warned Gerry Adams that he was going to have to pencil in a February meeting of the UUP Council in order to get the institutions set up it might never have been perceived as the aggressive ultimatum that a susceptible republican movement took it to be. This appears to have been a genuine misunderstanding as Trimble made it clear yesterday that he had been at pains to avoid giving the impression of an ultimatum in the Mitchell accords.
The quiet mention of a January report by General de Chastelain was to have served as a timetable and, clearly, it was understood that by then the general would have more to report than the mere fact of having met the IRA. Equally, Sinn Fein could not and did not give an unequivocal guarantee. It is tragic that, with both sides having acted in good faith, poor communication of this kind should lead to the quick disintegration of the Good Friday Agreement before our very eyes. The gap between the parties has, in point of fact, never been so narrow.
Can republicans not see that Trimble's way of coping with the enormous difficulties within his own party is not a re-run of the old Stormont agenda of unionist domination? That Trimble is not just trying to humiliate them? Is not the fact that he has accepted Sinn Fein members into his Cabinet proof of his good faith?
Unionists desperately need some concrete evidence that there will ever be any decommissioning. Their perception is that they have been forced into government at the point of a gun and they will not stay there unless they feel certain that gun will at some point be removed. At the moment they have nothing whatever to go on even though we are undeniably "in the context of the implementation of the overall agreement", as laid down by the Belfast Agreement in its decommissioning section.
There is a way out that could save the institutions and allows time for nerves to settle. It requires the heroic intervention of a sick man, the Nobel prizewinner John Hume. If the SDLP were to state that if, come May, there had been no decommissioning, they would hold that the republican movement was in default of its obligations, Trimble might have enough to limp on beyond Friday. It is time for the great majority of nationalists to decisively address the small minority of traumatised extremists in their midst whose rigidity has brought us all to the brink. - Yours, etc.,
Nick Martinclark, Handsworth Road, London N17.