O Washington

...Perhaps...

...The violence in a partitioned Ireland subverts law, leads governments into abominable acts, and turns economic deprivation into economic degradation...

...She said she was surprised how quickly she had fallen back into her defensive sectarian position after being "liberal" on Northern Ireland while in Britain...

...The Belfast Telegraph issued this greeting: "Northern Ireland is five times safer to stay in overnight than most major cities in the U.S...

...They were quite clear in their announced purpose: Unless Romanian authorities provided passports for their wives and children to leave Romania, they would, on June 10, set themselves afire outside the Romanian embassy...

...No reporter can go back to the office and write a story quoting someone who isn't there to be quoted...

...The Congressional Friends of Ireland, the likes of Democratic Whip Tom Foley and Tip O'Neill aide Kirk O'Donnell were also in town...

...Some people believe the British government will remain in Northern Ireland as long as there's something to cream off the top there, too...

...The Ethiopians here are not just quiet...

...Nicole Farcas had swum to Yugoslavia...

...Amnesty International estimates that some 30,000 people were summarily executed during Ethiopia's "Red Terror" (1974 to 1978...

...Then they bought a chicken, declared the hunger strike over, gave a final interview to Radio Free Europe, and drove off back to California...

...In fact, the head of the Ethiopian Committee on Immigration said he would talk only if his name wasn't mentioned...

...The 15,000 to 25,000 Ethiopians threatened with deportation under the Reagan Administration's view that things back home under the Marxist Mengistu regime are becoming jellybean-okay are scared to death—and of death...

...Brixton, London's heavily West Indian suburb, and Toxteth, Liverpool's most depressed and racially mixed area, were riots of color last summer...

...They're black...

...It's going on every day...

...It's a worry, but it's not the issue...

...Having "Liverpool 8" as the address on one's job application is a guarantee of unemployment...

...But as Father Denis Faul, the priest who persuaded the relatives of hunger strikers to have their kin call off the fast, puts it, "When it comes to putting over the British case, the British Foreign Office are the best in the world...

...Furthermore, Lantos and his wife, Annette, accompanied the five to their meeting with Romanian embassy officials...

...It was Father Wilson I was with eighteen months ago, when the troops burst in...

...The Reverend Walt Tomme of the Capitol Hill Metropolitan Baptist Church also chanced by, and took a leaflet...

...For while it is correct that the level of violence has died down, the harassment by the soldiers and Royal Ulster Constabulary is, in Wilson's words, "pretty deadly though not as obvious...

...In one way, the sun has set on the thirty-five million Ethiopians who have dictator Mengistu's foot on their necks...

...As Britain's Economist reports, "Merseyside police have always been tough...

...There have been some American and German and Dutch firms, but not in the high-unemployment areas...

...What's been happening is that the police say: 'Here's someone who's given us information...

...The idea, tried before without success, is to return some rule to Belfast (Stormont) from Westminster (Parliament...

...I told her about watching a television program on which teenagers from the six counties questioned their politicians of every hue about the land's future: The politicians took the expected no-compromise line...

...But which system...

...The British government has a plan, not taken very seriously even in Parliament, for something called "rolling devolution...

...Britain's restless children of colonial migration may take to the streets in Brixton and Toxteth, but not be killed or maimed by British soldiers firing plastic bullets...

...The price of the present is too high...

...Last year in Brixton, I'd been fascinated by a Rolls-Royce I saw parked, only days after the riot, outside the store that distributes European and American hair preparations...

...British bobbies beat up blacks in Brixton and Toxteth, but that's kid stuff compared to what goes on in Northern Ireland...

...the NAACP's Benjamin Hooks has already blasted the Reagan move against the Ethiopians, as against the Haitians, as racist...

...They won't be quoted, and they don't play the media game the way the media play it...

...Wilson lives in the Ballymurphy public housing estate...

...The Romanian demonstrators were just examining their first parking ticket when I chanced along...

...we're going to remove him for safe keeping.' Then they take the whole lot of them away, but we don't know where they've gone...

...people defend themselves as best they can...

...People are taken away regularly...

...The real subsidy has been to British government interests...

...One Liverpool sociologist called this city "the Bermuda triangle of Western capitalism...

...To discuss such things is to get the issues out of the cleft...

...Back in Washington, an Irish professor told me that Northern Ireland was too big for the South to digest without constipating itself to the end of time...

...Wilson would dearly love to see a couple of economists use Britain's Northern Ireland investment policies and practices as topics for their dissertations...

...Then the odds shift rapidly, especially for those from Ballymurphy or the Bogside...

...Naturally shy and self-effacing, the Ethiopians in the United States have several problems...

...If it works without protest, they make a procedure of it...

...The cleft stick extends to the U.S...

...There would be no one for the Romanian authorities to release their families to...

...If torture yesterday, what of today and tomorrow...

...Literally thousands of people are taken in the early hours of morning, questioned about their politics, their religion, their drinking habits, their friends in other parts of the city, and then put out again...

...The Ethiopians are afraid of going home because people "can be executed for trumped-up charges of sedition or harboring 'bourgeois sentiments.' " Very difficult for anyone who has lived in the United States for a few years not to inadvertently let slip a bourgeois sentiment or two...

...There are other European economic abysses besides Belfast...

...So I decided to do a counterpoint story...

...There's no question," adds Wilson, "of any kind of offense being committed...

...Someone commented that the Believe It or Not episode shows that the system works...

...But his committee's report contains woe and explanation enough...

...Unless, of course, one is a British soldier, a Royal Ulster constable, or an Irish Catholic...

...They began talking...

...Neither at the club, nor at the old classrooms Georgetown University lends to the Ethiopians for language and culture classes, would anyone talk on the record...

...the teenagers, before the program was over, also had pretty much fallen into sectarian line behind them...

...Among those who have gone back, many were executed and others thrown into prison," says the January 1982 report regarding Ethiopians who had thought the new regime was honorable...

...That brought them to the Cannon Building where, while the car was being ticketed for illegal parking, they set up a small, black, wooden house bedecked with votive candles and began handing out leaflets...

...At the Romanian Embassy, the ambassador promised to resolve the issue by the end of June...

...It said that Lantos had taken the pain in their hearts and placed it in his own...

...I'd actually begun planning the European Jaunt in early May, watching at the State Department for the Versailles press plane sign-up sheet and reading up on earlier summits...

...They put it over day and night...

...By this time, also, the chaplain of the Senate, Dr...

...Southern Italy and Sicily are a mess...

...As Tom Foley told me in a brief chat after his Ireland trip, the Friends of Ireland worry about "the support in recent years from Irish Americans for organizations that take a violent role" in Northern Ireland...

...By late May it had dawned on me, though, that if industrial nations' unemployment had tripled to almost thirty million since the summits started in 1975, nothing was going to be solved at this one, either...

...But there is no such Thatcherish sympathy for Northern Ireland, where successive British governments treat Ulster Catholics like Falkland Island Argentinians and coddle Ulster Protestants like Falkland Island Brits—and get away with it...

...Lawyers tried to offset the activity by going to court and asking the head of the police to produce the person who has disappeared...

...The fire was set aside in favor of a hunger strike...

...To ancient Greeks, Ethiopia was the place where the gods banqueted, the place where the sun set...

...It's a dreadful plan, everyone recognizes that," says Father Desmond Wilson, a retired Belfast priest turned full-time activist...

...O Washington...

...Alistair Cooke, writing back to Britain when the European Commission had found the British were torturing Northern Ireland Catholics, and when the European court had found the British guilty of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, said Americans responded: "Say it isn't so...

...The French may sneer at their pied noir, the French of Algerian descent, but they do not, as a rule, subject them to arbitrary arrest and detention...

...July is the riot anniversary month for Toxteth, and no one's betting it won't be repeated...

...They had escaped from Romania in various ways...

...Of course we know this was the most deadly thing that had happened yet...

...To concern oneself about the plight of prisoners in Long Kesh and Armagh jail is not to condone the petrol bombing of British soldiers...

...public refused to believe that the British, their allies battling for democracy and against Hitler, would stoop to torture...

...And a government capable of torture is capable of much else...

...Achim Barbas had dodged border-guard bullets...

...The Noisy Romanians f Robert Ripley were Romanian, this would be his favorite Believe It or Not...

...No Rolls-Royce in Liverpool, along Lodge Lane or Upper Parliament Street...

...The British government jams critics, actual and potential, in a cleft stick...

...The denial of human rights—and the present troubles began twelve years ago over civil rights—is the issue...

...that complaints about soldiers killing children with plastic bullets (euphemistically referred to as "plastic batons") ignore British soldiers shot by snipers...

...England's countryside is a riot of color this summer...

...O luck...

...He was later to find an interpreter...

...But, said Wilson, the police tell the court they cannot do that for the person's own safety, and the court has accepted that...

...At that stage we felt a chill around here," says Wilson...

...By sheer coincidence, Romania is seeking Most Favored Nation Status in its trading deals with the United States, and by even greater chance Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, was to meet on that topic the next day with five parliamentarians...

...that any suggestion of a unified Ireland is tantamount to depriving Ulster Protestants of their rights...

...The air of unreality about all this talk of subsidizing Northern Ireland evaporates when you realize the British government has been subsidizing British industries that happened to be based here—they haven't done anything to create local enterprises...

...They were at the house next door this morning...

...But all five, all Pentecostal Christians, had made their way, somehow, to California...

...The newspaper reported that 55 per cent among Catholics favored an elected assembly for Northern Ireland, while only 14 per cent were opposed...

...They're poor...

...Were they polling Ballymurphy...

...Brixton's Rolls-Royce wasn't around during my next visit—but it was holiday time...

...No television camera crew plops itself down at the Ethiopian social club at the shabby end of Massachusetts Avenue NW, for the Ethiopians won't be photographed, either...

...But Catholic Northern Ireland is special...

...O faith...

...But Representative William Dannemeyer, a California Republican, also chanced into the action, and before long the five were being interviewed for a Radio Free Europe broadcast, too...

...The global blackout of criticism about Britain's Northern Ireland behavior is a tribute to the British government's capacity for keeping everyone's nose out of Belfast's affairs...

...It was almost a survival mechanism once back in Ulster, she said...

...Meanwhile, the British occupation remains, the troops are still in the territory...

...here in Washington they tend to wait on tables and drive cabs...

...For all we know they could be at the bottom of a ditch...

...The Quiet Ethiopians They are the nation's quietest protesters...

...They'll argue that criticism of British tactics or the troops' continued presence gives succor to the IRA...

...Neither Faul nor Wilson accepts British investment policies as anything but self-serving programs for the British...

...Murder is murder whoever does it...

...They won't even talk for attribution...

...he sees the bulk of the money primarily benefitting British banks and corporations...

...The next day, the refugees wrote a speech in Romanian and delivered it to Lantos...

...On a Tuesday in June, five Romanian refugees stationed themselves outside the Cannon House Office Building...

...The security forces have got to the stage now where they can take anybody away, keep them for seven days, abduct them to places where nobody knows where they are—all in connection with 'informers.' " As Wilson describes it, the authorities have been offering large sums of money, and promises of safe housing in England or South Africa, to informers...

...The racial minorities were protesting economic deprivation and police brutality...

...Margaret Thatcher's minister for Liverpool, environment boss Michael He-seltine, known to the British press as "Tar-zan" for his long hair, calls Toxteth a case of "daunting dereliction" and Liverpool's problems "chilling...

...It reminded me that there's always something to cream off the top, even in depressed areas...

...The Ethiopian refugees in this country are aware that even a mention here by name can mean torture, displacement into refugee camps, or disappearance for their relatives...

...If an economic summit in Versailles, what of the economic abyss in Ballymurphy, where unemployment for white, adult, male heads-of-household is 50 per cent...

...That's because the informers have gone into court and said, 'I'm withdrawing all those things I was saying about all these people.' " Though British "security" practices sear the soul of many a Belfast household, British government economic measures do not so much as enter the Ballymurphy abyss...

...On the plane to England I sat next to a charming Ulster Protestant woman who told me she had lived in England for more than twenty years before returning to Northern Ireland...

...Even skeptics believe the ambassador spoke in good faith...

...Dingman told the Romanians that self-immolation would not only be non-Christian, it would be self-defeating...

...The British simply bring out another plan that keeps people occupied for two years, it fails, then they bring out another one...

...By morning, Lantos had heard of the five on the Cannon doorstep and mentioned their plight to the visiting delegation...

...Groups of relatives began picketing and protesting over the 'disappearance' business and the thing is tending to collapse...

...The U.S...

...To be present and to object to British soldiers bursting in—as happened in Whiterock Road when I was there eighteen months ago—is not to defend the IRA seizing people's houses to snipe at security forces, or hijacking cars to be used as indiscriminate bombs...

...Belgium's busted...

...While Ronald Reagan was at Versailles (pomp), the Vatican (pompier), and Windsor Castle (pompiest), I'd go to Brixton (grim) and Toxteth (grimmer) en route to Belfast (grimmest...

...The Irish Times, in a recent poll, found less support for the extremists on the Left and Right (if that's categorically correct for the Provisional Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists...

...The soldiers are around every morning...

...To deplore the suspension of human rights and habeus corpus is not to endorse the wanton slaying of some poor milkman who also happened to be a part-time Royal Ulster constable...

...they're sad...

...But it was so...

...But the attempt should be made...

...Brilliant...

...And I'd also see the Pope in Liverpool—as one of the crowd, of course...

...They won't give their names...

...The way the government and the police operate is they'll try something to see if it works...

...But nobody, no church, no trade union, no political party ever protests...

...In California, they began to learn English and bought a car...

...His word that the Ethiopians here would be equally safe there has reduced those here to near-panic...

...What should be measured about Northern Ireland is the outflow of capital...

...Richard Haverson, had heard of the Romanians and paid for their lodging...

...Dick Dingman and Jack Klenk of the Republican Study Committee, which has Cannon Building offices, had stopped...

...All Lodge Lane had was plywood sheets, riot zone memorial plaques to silently semaphore the South Bronx syndrome...

...The Germans may detest their Gastarbei-ter, the "guest workers" from North Africa or Turkey or Yugoslavia, but they don't torture them...

...I told her about my travels through Belfast, Dungannon, and En-niskillen this time around...

...And, as Father Faul told British Secretary of State James Prior, there are 122 cases of murder and more than 1,000 cases of torture for which no British soldier or Royal Ulster constable has ever stood trial...