填空题
[A] Not everything has changed, of course. As often in the past, the injured policemen were soft targets. One, in Duncannon, was shot as his car was stalled in a traffic jam. The Londonderry officer was wounded as he dropped off his son at school. A friend said he had recently joined the PSNI, which is 23% Catholic, because he believed it very different from the old Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary. (He had, however, moved house.) The Real IRA answered Sinn Fein’s pleas for co-operation with the police by threatening to kill anyone who did so. And the shooting in Dungannon caused a long-delayed meeting of the policing-partnership committee there, to which Sinn Fein had at last sent nominees, to be cancelled.
[B] These events make many anxious. Others, however, note advances. The policemen were shot by men who call themselves the Real IRA, an implicit dismissal of mainstream republicans who support the peace process that six months ago put Martin McCuinness, a tormer IRA leader, at the head of the province’s devolved government along with the Live Ian Paisley, once a diehard unionist.
[C] Ulster’s miserable past refuses to go quietly. Two policemen were shot and injured by republican paramilitaries in the five days from November 8th. On November lath the Ulster Defence Association (UDA),. the largest of the loyalist paramilitary groups, said it would " stand down" from midnight but would neither destroy nor hand over its weapons. The following day the peaceprocess watchdog, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), confirmed that those who beat Paul Quinn to death last month across the border from south Armagh were IRA members "past or present, or associates". It was too soon to tell, it said, whether the IRA’s commanding " army council" had given the order.
[D] There is no loyalist equivalent of Sinn Fein, originally the IRA’s mouthpiece and now the largest party representing Catholic voters. The UDA and the smaller Ulster Volunteer Force came into being to defend the Union and Protestants against the IRA, though most of their 980 victims were innocent Catholics. As IRA violence waned, UDA figures became best known for their drug-dealing, gold jewelry and cocaine habits. Fledgling loyalist politics were damaged by association. Rivalry for the control of lucrative criminal businesses fuelled violent feuds and delayed the decommissioning of weapons.
[E] But violence is yielding diminishing returns. The Real IRA became notorious in 1998, when they tried to wreck the newly negotiated power-sharing settlement by bombing the town of Omagh, near Dungannon. The death toll of 29 was the greatest loss of life in a single Troubles bombing. But the tragedy strengthened support for the peace process. Most dissident attacks since then have been sabotaged by police infiltration and what many suspect is information from other republicans.
[F] Loyalist groups first called a much-breached ceasefire in 1994, and the UDA’s announcement this time was undermined by the refusal to hand over its guns. But a recent tragedy has underlined just why the paramilitaries must be put out of business. A fortnight ago a 16-year-old named Dean Clarke hanged himself in the down-at-heel Tigers Bay district of north Belfast. He had just come out of hospital after treatment for drug poisoning. His mother said a local UDA boss had sold the boy ketamine, a tranquilliser used to sedate horses.
[G] Twenty years ago Mr McGuinness directed the bombings that blitzed the centre of Londonderry. This time he derided those who attacked an officer in that city for seeming not to know the war was over, and called on witnesses to help the police. Mr Paisley and his troops have changed as well. In the past his Democratic Unionist Party professed to see no difference between mainstream and dissident republicans. This week he was content to seek assurances from Sir Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) , that the police had resources enough to "quash" the dissidents.
Order:
B