IRA Completes Disarmament, Panel Reports

It happened in secret, details of what was destroyed have not been made public, and the initial reaction of Protestant unionists showed that huge elements of doubt and distrust remain.

But an independent international commission and two clergymen certified Monday that the Irish Republican Army had turned over the bullets, guns, blasting caps, bombs and plastic explosives that kept much of Britain on edge for more than 35 years.

The chairman of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, said the eight-year process of putting the last of the IRA’s weapons “beyond use” was completed Saturday. “This can be the end of the use of the gun in Irish politics,” he said at a news conference in Belfast.

The commission considers the file closed on IRA arms, and gave its report containing that conclusion to the governments of Ireland and Britain.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for whom progress in the Northern Ireland peace process has been one of the top achievements of his eight years in office, hailed the development as “a step of unparalleled magnitude.”

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern called it a “landmark development of historical significance.”

Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA-linked political party Sinn Fein, who had urged the IRA to abandon its armed struggle, called the announcement an unprecedented step toward building “a new Ireland.”

Urging the unionists to re-form a joint government that collapsed in 2002, Adams said the IRA’s move was not a tactical maneuver.

“I understand and appreciate that unionists need space to absorb what all this means,” Adams said. “I would ask them to reflect upon the potential which is now created, and to see it as an opportunity.”

But the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the most popular party in the Protestant unionist community, was having none of it.

Paisley, who supports keeping Northern Ireland in a union with Britain, insisted that neither the commission nor the Roman Catholic and Methodist clergymen who participated in the decommissioning had anything more to go on than the IRA’s word.

“This afternoon the people of Northern Ireland watched a program which illustrates more than ever the duplicity and the dishonesty of the two governments [British and Irish] and the IRA,” said Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. “Instead of openness, it was the cunning tactics of a cover-up.”

Claiming that he spoke on behalf of the majority of Northern Ireland’s 1.7 million residents, of whom about 55% are Protestant, Paisley said he was not convinced that the IRA intended to end all paramilitary and criminal activity. He hinted it would be years before his party would give in to pressure to join Sinn Fein in a joint government for Northern Ireland -- if ever.

“To describe today’s act as being transparent would be the falsehood of the century,” Paisley thundered. “The people of Ulster are not going to be forced ... along the pathway of deceit.... Ulster is not for sale and will not be sold.”

Paisley’s objections seemed certain to strike a chord among working-class Protestants in Belfast, the provincial capital.

Paul Bew, a political historian at the city’s Queen’s University, observed that for years, unionists have been less worried about a full-scale military assault by the mainly Catholic republicans than about the shadowy grip on many Catholic neighborhoods exercised by the secretive IRA, an extralegal presence that would be corrosive to any real democracy. “It’s the fear of a mafia state, not a return to the old war, which is the negative impulse in our current politics,” Bew said Monday.

Adams said Sinn Fein would continue to argue for a joint provincial government in Northern Ireland, in keeping with the 1998 Good Friday agreement. A joint government was created in 2000, but fell apart two years later amid mutual recrimination and charges that the IRA had not disarmed and that republicans had mounted spy operations against unionists inside Stormont, the government seat in Northern Ireland.

At a news conference with American and Finnish members of the commission, De Chastelain said the arms turned over included ammunition, rifles, machine guns, handguns, missiles and explosives.

De Chastelain said he believed the IRA’s assurances that they had turned in all of their weapons because the arms they presented were consistent with the confidential estimates that the commission had been given by British security services.

Some ammunition was still in sealed boxes, he said, while other munitions were loose or in gun belts, and looked like they had been retrieved by the IRA from field units.

De Chastelain noted that the commission, which began its work in 1997, had been meeting with IRA representatives since 1999, and that this was the fourth and most significant act of decommissioning. But he acknowledged that some people might distrust the panel’s conclusions.

“We have no way of knowing for certain that the IRA hasn’t retained arms, but ... it is our belief that they were sincere,” he said. “They have told us that they have given everything they have, and we believe them.”

Pressed by reporters about why they could not see even a photograph of the decommissioning, De Chastelain said that the IRA had made it clear long ago that it did not want the humiliation of being photographed, and that the commission believed that abiding by the condition was the only way for the decommissioning to take place.

The Rev. Harold Good, past president of the Methodist Church in Northern Ireland, and Father Alex Reid, a Redemptorist priest, said they observed the process “minute by minute” and were convinced it was genuine.

Although De Chastelain said he hoped other armed groups would follow suit, a unionist close to one of the main Protestant-based militias said they wouldn’t imitate the IRA’s example because they still consider the IRA too much of a threat.

De Chastelain, “should he live to be 208, he’ll never see it. He is living in cloud cuckoo land if he thinks loyalists are going to decommission,” Sammy Duddy of the Ulster Political Research Group told the BBC.

Times staff writer Janet Stobart contributed to this report.