IRA Disarms Suspicion About Its Desire for Peace

The Irish Republican Army’s move to disarm may have been late, reluctant and incomplete, but it offers the clearest signal yet that the militants’ war against British rule in this troubled province is over.

Although the IRA had honored a cease-fire for more than four years and supported the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, as long as it refused to give up even a single bullet, its political enemies had suspected that republican gunmen intended to use their vast arsenal again.

Now, by allowing international inspectors to verify that it has put a significant quantity of weapons “beyond use,” the IRA has demonstrated that it means to stick with democratic politics in Northern Ireland.

No one familiar with Northern Ireland’s bloody history and sectarian hatred assumes that the road to peace will be problem-free. There are many difficult issues to be resolved--and extremists on both sides who are desperate to wreck the peace process, some of whom still wield guns and pipe bombs.

But the extremists are increasingly marginalized, and the IRA is moving into the mainstream--pushed by its political successes at home and by the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that turned anyone associated with political violence into a pariah.

As one republican militant said to political analyst Denis Bradley shortly after the attacks, “This is no time to be a terrorist.”

The British government Wednesday hastened to match the IRA’s start to disarmament with the first in a series of military pullbacks. Workers began to dismantle two British army watchtowers in South Armagh, an IRA stronghold region along the border with the Irish Republic.

Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid said that the demolition of two other military installations would begin this week and that the government would continue to pull British troops out of the province.

“Our aim is to secure as early a return as possible to normal security arrangements,” Reid said.

The pro-British Ulster Unionist Party, meanwhile, announced that it will return to a power-sharing government in the province with Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political ally.

Party Chief David Trimble resigned as first minister of Northern Ireland this year over the IRA’s refusal to disarm, and the other three Ulster Unionist members of the Cabinet followed suit last week. If the Protestant members had not declared their intention to return by today, the government would have collapsed.

Trimble has indicated that he will seek reelection as first minister alongside a Roman Catholic deputy next week. He needs majority support from both blocs in the Northern Ireland Assembly but could face a challenge from Protestant lawmakers opposed to the peace process or dissatisfied with its slow progress.

Undoubtedly, Trimble will argue that his strategy of patience, pushing and finally drawing the line has helped to bring about the start of IRA disarmament.

Other factors contributed to the IRA’s move from a steadfast refusal to disarm after the Good Friday accord was signed in 1998 to the stunning announcement Tuesday that it had put guns beyond use “to save the peace process and to persuade others of our genuine intentions.”

One reason for the turnaround is that democratic politics have worked well for Sinn Fein. The party won two Cabinet seats in the 1998 elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, catapulting former IRA leader and Sinn Fein negotiator Martin McGuinness into the post of education minister.

In elections for members of the British Parliament in June, Sinn Fein increased its vote from 16% to 22%, doubling its seats there from two to four and becoming the largest Catholic nationalist party in Northern Ireland. It was a vote of confidence for Sinn Fein’s strategy of pursuing a united Ireland through peaceful means.

Sinn Fein, which also holds one seat in Ireland’s lower house of Parliament, the Dail, hopes to increase its representation there in Irish elections next spring and to become a coalition partner in the Dublin government. But Ireland’s other political parties have made it clear that they wouldn’t sit in government with Sinn Fein as long as the IRA kept its guns.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern deserves credit for his patience and firmness on this point, Bradley said.

“He told Sinn Fein that there will be just one army in Ireland,” Bradley said.

The IRA kept its cease-fire, agreed to address the weapons issue with the international disarmament commission and, under pressure last year, agreed to let monitors inspect its secret caches to verify that the weapons were not being used. It extracted promises from the British government on policing reforms and demilitarization and won an amnesty for accused IRA men on the lam.

But the IRA held on to its guns. Trimble vowed to bring down the power-sharing government that was working well for Sinn Fein, and still the IRA refused to disarm.

The group dragged its feet, says University of Ulster professor Henry Patterson, in large part because the IRA already had given up so many of its fundamental principles: It had abandoned armed struggle and had accepted Sinn Fein’s participation in a partitionist government under British rule.

“Possession of a secret army remained the only available comfort blanket for their more skeptical supporters,” Patterson wrote in the Times of London.

The IRA wanted to avoid the humiliation of disarmament, and, for doubters and hard-liners in the militant group, the guns offered a fallback position. If politics failed and Protestant paramilitary groups or the British army turned their guns on Catholics, the IRA could defend them.

That was before Sept. 11.

The IRA was presented with a new world after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one that President Bush said was divided into “them and us.”

Senior State Department official Richard Haass made it clear to Sinn Fein that armed groups were “them.” The British government, co-sponsor of the peace process, became Bush’s No. 1 ally in the so-called war on terrorism. And, with a close-up view of terror in the United States, the party’s American supporters said they too could no longer tolerate the threat of violence.

The wave of terrorism Sept. 11, which left more than 5,200 people dead or missing, made another major IRA attack impossible, political analysts said.

So, as Trimble prepared to make good on his threat to topple the power-sharing government, the IRA made its move. Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain’s disarmament commission did not say how many weapons were eliminated or even how. But the panel members said that guns, ammunition and explosives were put “beyond use” and that the unprecedented step was enough to get the peace process back on track.

“The decision to take this step is much more important and significant than the amount of materiel actually affected by the decision,” said Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s police force. “Therefore, we are certainly the closest yet, in my estimation, to saying that the war waged by the Provisional IRA [the mainstream branch] is over.”