Monitor to Report IRA Has Disarmed

Seven years after Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement was signed, an independent monitor prepared to announce today that the Irish Republican Army has at last turned in its secret weapons stores.

Retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain scheduled a news conference in Belfast, the provincial capital, for this afternoon, and news services and political leaders said he would make his formal report to the governments of Britain and Ireland that the total decommissioning promised by the IRA on July 28 has now been completed.

Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator for Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, said Sunday that today’s report would be a “historic” turning point.

“I am confident that tomorrow will bring the final chapter on the issue of IRA arms. Of course, this is about more than arms. It is about reviving the peace process. It is about the future of Ireland,” he told Britain’s Press Assn. news agency.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams had signaled Friday that such an announcement was forthcoming, and a Protestant political leader, David Ervine, said Friday that he had been told that “the IRA are about to move on their weapons.”

Decommissioning of paramilitary weapons was supposed to take place by May 2000. Protestant politicians who favor Northern Ireland’s continued union with Britain have accused the mainly Catholic IRA and its allies of foot-dragging and bad faith for not keeping that pledge.

For the IRA, which has considered itself a resistance army whose goal is to unite Northern Ireland with Ireland, the abandoning of weapons would mean its goal could not be achieved militarily. The nationalist movement is still hoping demographic changes may one day lead to a Roman Catholic majority in Northern Ireland that would vote for union with Ireland, but if trends continue, that shift seems decades away.

Many of Northern Ireland’s British loyalists, meanwhile, fear that officials in London will sell out their interests to ensure peace with the IRA.

The IRA’s failure to give up its arsenal was one of the main reasons that Northern Ireland’s provincial assembly -- which included both unionists and republicans -- collapsed in 2002.

If the monitors agree that the IRA has fulfilled its promise to turn in its weapons, Protestant politicians say they expect to come under renewed pressure from both Britain and Ireland to restore joint governance.

But the leader of the dominant Democratic Unionist Party, the Rev. Ian Paisley, has said that his group will not rush back into such a government because of its continuing distrust of the IRA, which it accuses of organized criminal activity, including a bank robbery in December.

Conducted in secrecy, the turnover of arms was witnessed by a Protestant and a Catholic clergyman, as well as by officials of De Chastelain’s three-member commission. The weapons were believed to have been buried in several rural areas of Ireland.

Many tons of IRA arms have been scrapped, an unidentified De Chastelain aide told Associated Press. Catholic priest Alex Reid and the Rev. Harold Good of the Methodist Church would provide accounts, the aide said.

The IRA had permitted the commission to view three separate acts of arms “decommissioning” prior to this year, but each time refused to let the commission reveal any details.

The lack of transparency has angered Paisley and other unionists. In December, Paisley said the IRA should allow photographs of the decommissioning because it deserved to be humiliated for its part in the political violence that claimed about 3,600 lives from the late 1960s until the IRA’s 1997 cease-fire.

The monitors have said that they will issue a list this year of all the weapons destroyed.