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IRA, Even Disarmed, Fails to Calm Protestants; Huge Caches Gone, Inspectors Insist

Posted on: Tuesday, 27 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

By PAISLEY DODDS, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - For 12 years, the IRA resisted British and Protestant demands to disarm. But disarm is exactly what the outlawed group now says it has done - and international weapons inspectors agree.

The province's Protestant majority heaped skepticism and scorn on the inspectors' announcement Monday, saying the Irish Republican Army is probably keeping weapons in reserve.

Whether IRA disarmament will inspire a revival of Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant administration - the central goal of a 1998 peace accord - remains an open question. The agreement required the IRA to disarm by May 2000.

"In life, there are no absolutes," said the Rev. Harold Good, a Methodist minister who was one of two clergy members permitted to observe the disarmament. "But at some point, you have to trust."

John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who has been working on the issue since 1997, declared Monday that over the past week he had personally inventoried and gotten rid of a mammoth stockpile of IRA weapons, ranging from flame-throwers to surface-to- air missiles.

But the outlawed IRA barred the inspectors and the religious observers from discussing details of what had been surrendered, where it happened and the manner of its disposal.

The IRA-linked Sinn Fein hopes Monday's announcement will help the party's popularity in the neighboring Irish Republic, where it has designs on a place in the next coalition government.

The two observers - Good and the Rev. Alec Reid, a Catholic priest - declined to answer specific questions on the process conducted by officials from Canada, Finland and the United States. But they described the caches as huge.

"I would lay my life on the line that the IRA has acted in good faith, and has fully disarmed," said Reid, 74, a confidant of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. "This is a significant step in taking the gun out of Irish politics. Now it's up to the other paramilitary groups."

Crucially, de Chastelain said he would not publish a list of what the IRA surrendered until outlawed Protestant paramilitary groups, chiefly the Ulster Defense Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, also disarm. Both the UDA and UVF, politically rudderless organizations that are less well-armed than the IRA but involved in much more violence, have said they will not disarm.

The prime ministers of Britain and Ireland, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, offered fulsome praise to the IRA for belatedly delivering on an important goal of the 1998 accord.

"Successive British governments have sought final and complete decommissioning by the IRA for over 10 years," Blair said. "Failure to deliver it had become a major impediment to moving forward the peace process. Today it is finally accomplished. And we have made an important step in the transition from conflict to peace in Northern Ireland."

Ahern called de Chastelain and deputies from Finland and the United States "men of integrity. Their words are clear, and they are welcome."

But Ian Paisley, whose uncompromising Democratic Unionist Party holds veto power on whether to revive power-sharing with Sinn Fein, said the IRA probably had lied to the inspectors. He said the IRA's requirements for secrecy showed they had something to hide.

"There were no photographs, no detailed inventory, and no detail on the destruction of these arms. To describe today's statement as transparent would be the falsehood of the century," Paisley said.

The Democratic Unionists had demanded photographs, a detailed record and a Paisley-approved Protestant clergyman to serve as a witness. The IRA refused to permit photos and selected the two religious witnesses themselves: the Rev. Harold Good, a former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, and Reid, who says he has spent the past 35 years trying to coax the IRA away from violence.

Paisley, who runs his own Protestant denomination, dismissed the Protestant witness, Good, as "a man [whom] the IRA were happy to do the job."

On the streets of Belfast, Protestants also openly expressed their doubts.

"Peace doesn't happen in the dark. It has to happen while everyone is watching," said 43-year-old Jerry Chisam.

Britain first demanded IRA arms "decommissioning" - a vague term designed to give the IRA maximum flexibility - in 1993, billing it as the best practical way for the IRA to show it had renounced violence.

Most of the arsenal came from Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who shipped the IRA more than 130 tons of arms - including the IRA's favorite plastic explosive, Semtex - in the mid-1980s.

De Chastelain, who used the Libyans' own list of what that nation shipped as one base line for estimating the size of the IRA weapons supplies, said the arms and ammunition he had disposed of roughly matched those estimates.

* * *

(SIDEBAR)

About the IRA

*-Origins: Founded in Belfast in December 1969 with the aim of abolishing Northern Ireland as a predominantly Protestant corner of the United Kingdom.

*-Organization: Ruled by a seven-man council and 11-member executive. Current membership estimated at 500 to 1,000 members.

*-Death toll: Killed 638 members of the British security forces; 640 civilians, most Protestants; 273 police officers in Northern Ireland, six in the Irish Republic and five in England; 149 of its own members, either accidentally in explosions or deliberately as suspected traitors; 28 members of outlawed Protestant paramilitary groups; 23 prison officers; 12 members of rival anti-British paramilitary groups; and one Irish soldier.

* * *

Source: Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.

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