Irish Republican Army Lets Inspectors See Its Weapons

The underground Irish Republican Army, one of the world’s most secretive organizations, has opened clandestine arms dumps to independent examination for the first time in its 81-year history, foreign inspectors said Monday.

While it is not known how much of the IRA’s weapons cache was put on display, the unprecedented access marks a milestone in the tumultuous Northern Ireland peace process, which has suffered many setbacks in the last two years over the issue of IRA disarmament.

The inspectors, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and African National Congress veteran Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, said they had seen “a substantial quantity of arms” and explosives.

“We inspected a number of arms dumps. The arms dumps held a substantial amount of military material, including explosives and related equipment, as well as weapons and other material,” the diplomats said in a report delivered to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern.

“We have ensured that the weapons and explosives cannot be used without our detection,” they said. “We plan to reinspect the arms dumps on a regular basis to ensure that the weapons have remained secure.”

The IRA issued its own announcement of the inspection. It stated that it had renewed contact in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast, with the international disarmament commission that was established by the April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement to “decommission” weapons from Roman Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups.

The IRA agreed last month to put its weapons “completely and verifiably beyond use” in exchange for the resumption of Northern Ireland’s suspended power-sharing government. It said it would allow independent arms inspections, and Ahtisaari and Ramaphosa were named to undertake the job.

But nothing can be taken for granted in Northern Ireland’s politics of mutual suspicion, and few people were willing to count on an inspection until it was carried out.

Ahtisaari and Ramaphosa said they were satisfied that the IRA was cooperating “to ensure a credible and verifiable inspection. All our requests were satisfactorily met.” The way the examination was conducted, they said, “makes us believe that this is a genuine effort by the IRA to advance the peace process.”

The inspection was undertaken as secretly as the IRA has conducted its war of attrition against British rule and Protestant dominance in Northern Ireland.

The inspectors did not reveal how many dumps they visited, whether what they saw represented some or all of the IRA weaponry, or whether the dumps are sealed. The pair apparently made their examination sometime between Wednesday and the weekend, a period when their assistants had reported that they were away from their offices and home countries.

IRA weapons are believed to be buried in underground bunkers in rural areas of the Republic of Ireland. British security officials estimate that the weapons smuggled in from Libya, the United States and continental Europe include about 1,000 rifles, 500 handguns, 50 machine guns, 40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, an array of grenades and mortars, and tons of explosives, particularly the Czech-made plastic Semtex.

Semtex was used in some of the IRA’s most devastating bombings, including the City of London attack in 1993 and one in downtown Manchester, England, in 1996.

The IRA’s decision to follow through on its pledge provided a boost to Ulster Unionist Party chief David Trimble. He forced a suspension of the power-sharing government over the weapons issue in February and then led his reluctant party back into government last month with the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, on the promise of inspections.

The Democratic Unionist Party, which opposes the power-sharing agreement, said the IRA’s consent to the inspection of “a few of their dumps” amounted to a “PR stunt.”

“This is a further attempt to gull the community and to present murderers as peacemakers,” said Peter Robinson, a Democratic Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

But the Ulster Unionists’ Reg Empey called the inspection “an important first step” toward IRA disarmament and noted that critics of the agreement have offered no alternative for getting paramilitary groups to lay down their weapons.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said the fact that the IRA allowed the inspection was “courageous and imaginative” and would be welcomed by all those who want the peace process to succeed.

The IRA began fighting for an independent Ireland in 1919. After most of the island was constituted as an independent republic in 1948, the IRA refused to abandon its weapons and continued fighting for unification with the six counties of Northern Ireland.

The battle intensified and gained widespread support during the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, when Catholics in the north began to resist domination by the province’s Protestant majority. More than 3,600 people have been killed in the last three decades of sectarian violence.

Blair also welcomed the arms inspection as an important beginning.

“This represents a very substantial step along the road to peace in Northern Ireland,” the prime minister said. “The whole process of decommissioning has to be gone through. This is a confidence-building measure. It is not decommissioning itself, it is a step on the way.”

In Washington, President Clinton said in a written statement that the inspection report “has given a tremendous boost” to the peace process.

He said the IRA’s renewed contact with the disarmament commission was equally important because it represented a tangible step toward fulfilling the group’s pledge “to put arms beyond . . . use.”

“I urge all paramilitary organizations and political parties to build on this progress,” Clinton said. “I believe all the people of Northern Ireland should take heart from these harbingers of lasting peace.”

British and Northern Irish authorities frequently emphasize the IRA’s shift from a military to a political strategy for achieving its goals. But in Belfast, Martin Ferris, a former IRA member who served 10 years in prison for gun-running, said it was the British government that had abandoned its strategy of trying to defeat the IRA militarily.

“Thankfully, they have come that distance. We still have a long way to go,” Ferris said.

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Special correspondent William Graham in Belfast and Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.