IRA Says It Will Disarm Soon

Shawn Pogatchnik

Saturday, May 6, 2000 | 8:08 a.m.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The Irish Republican Army announced today that it will soon begin disarming a hugely significant and long-awaited breakthrough in the effort to revive the Northern Ireland peace process.

The outlawed IRA gave its unprecedented commitment a day after the British and Irish governments announced ambitious plans to transfer power back to the province's suspended Catholic-Protestant administration on May 22 and, controversially, to extend the deadline for total IRA disarmament from that date to June 2001.

"In that context, the IRA leadership will initiate a process that will completely and verifiably put IRA arms beyond use," the IRA said in a statement issued to journalists in Belfast. "We will do it in such a way as to avoid risk to the public and misappropriation by others to ensure maximum public confidence."

Before calling a 1997 truce, the IRA killed about 300 officers as part of its 27-year campaign to abolish Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state linked to Britain. But its refusal to disarm has been a major stumbling block in the peace process.

Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland welcomed the breakthrough. They said they had appointed two senior international statesmen, former African National Congress chairman Cyril Ramaphosa and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, to serve as their official arms dumps inspectors.

Ramaphosa and Ahtisaari are both senior members of a London-based peacemaking organization, the International Crisis Group. The IRA said they would be escorted soon after May 22 to inspect "the contents of a number of our arms dumps."

Previously, the IRA had rejected the whole concept of disarmament as equivalent to surrender. The kind of disarmament now being offered wouldn't require the IRA to hand over weapons publicly, only to identify the locations of its secret stockpiles.

Revealing these hidden stockpiles, the IRA said, should reassure the province's British Protestant community that the IRA cease-fire of 1997 is designed to last forever.

"The dumps will be reinspected regularly to ensure that the weapons have remained silent," the statement said.

Attention immediately turned to the Ulster Unionists, the major Protestant party in Northern Ireland. The party had demanded a clear IRA pledge to disarm before it would resume any power-sharing arrangements in the province alongside the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party.

"I have to say that the statement is very interesting. It does appear to break new ground," Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble said. "There are some quite positive elements in it."

Trimble, the Nobel laureate who holds the top post in Northern Ireland's suspended power-sharing administration, spoke after a private strategy meeting with his party's bloc of lawmakers. The meeting ended without any decisions being reached.

"There are of course some questions that it raises. And there are some points we want to tease out the meaning of," Trimble said of the IRA statement. His words indicated that any Ulster Unionist decision on restoring the suspended four-party administration would be days away.

Torn by violence, Northern Ireland was under direct rule from Britain for 27 years. Then, in December, the now-suspended coalition Cabinet was formed, giving the province a measure of local control. The Cabinet was first proposed as part of the Good Friday peace accord of 1998.

Trimble agreed to form the historic coalition alongside Sinn Fein only on the condition that the IRA begin scrapping weapons in response. When the IRA refused, Britain reimposed direct rule in February. The IRA in turn broke off all contact with an international disarmament commission.

Today's IRA statement confirmed that a senior representative would resume talks with that commission.

Trimble's apparent willingness to resume work alongside Sinn Fein before any IRA weapons are discarded has made him a target for Protestant critics both inside and outside his party. These critics, who represent nearly half of Protestant opinion, have long demanded that the IRA totally disarm and disband before Sinn Fein is given a slice of power.

Trimble has already been politically weakened by an unexpectedly strong party leadership challenge in March. He also is vulnerable to criticism from his hard-line rivals for Protestant votes, the Democratic Unionists. Like Sinn Fein, that party is entitled to two posts within the suspended Cabinet even though it opposes sharing power with Sinn Fein under any circumstances.

"I don't trust IRA murderers. I don't care what they say," Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley said in response to the IRA statement.

Speaking before the IRA proclamation, President Clinton appealed to both sides to achieve both power-sharing and disarmament as soon as possible.

"I urge the parties and paramilitary organizations to seize this opportunity to realize these goals in order to restore lasting peace to the people of Northern Ireland," Clinton said in Lancaster, Va.