N. Ireland group laying down arms

The outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force, whose gunmen killed hundreds of people during the sectarian conflict that ravaged this province for decades, said Thursday that it was renouncing violence and would disarm its members.

Gusty Spence, a 73-year-old founding member of the UVF, said the loyalist group would assume a “nonmilitary, civilianized role.”

“All recruitment has ceased. Military training has ceased, targeting has ceased and all intelligence rendered obsolete. All active service units have been deactivated. All ordnance has been put beyond reach,” Spence said in a statement read in Belfast’s Shankill district, a staunchly Protestant working-class neighborhood.

The UVF also instructed its members to not engage in criminal activity and to cooperate with police.

However, the group did not offer to turn over its guns to authorities, saying only that it would store the weapons at secret sites under the control of its leadership and not accessible to members. It ruled out a role for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, which oversaw the destruction of the arms belonging to the rival Irish Republican Army.

The UVF, saying it accepted that “the IRA’s war is over,” said it was taking the action because it was satisfied that Northern Ireland would remain part of Britain.

The UVF is one of the key loyalist groups the Irish and British governments sought to bring into the political mainstream before next week’s formation of a power-sharing government in the province.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Thursday that the group’s decision to end its paramilitary role underscored the success of the Northern Ireland peace process.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern welcomed the move while expressing sympathy for the UVF’s victims. He said he looked forward to the full disarmament of the group.

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Decades-long fight

The UVF, which is thought to have as many as 5,000 members, for decades battled republicans seeking to break Northern Ireland away from Britain. From 1966 to 2005, authorities say, it killed 569 people, many of them noncombatants and most of them Roman Catholics.

In 1974, the group carried out a one-day wave of bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland, killing 33 people. It spawned the notorious Shankill Butchers gang, which tortured victims before killing them with knives or cleavers.

The group called a cease-fire in 1994. But since then it has become increasingly involved in criminal activities such as extortion and counterfeiting, according to the Independent Monitoring Commission, which was set up by Britain and Ireland to analyze paramilitary activity in the province. The UVF is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and British governments.

Spence went to prison for the 1966 murder of Peter Ward, 18, a Catholic slain after drinking in a Shankill pub. The UVF leader always denied involvement in the slaying, and in later years he encouraged loyalists to take a political way forward.

Despite the group’s unwillingness to immediately turn over its weapons, Spence’s statement fed optimism about the new power-sharing government that will be launched next week in Belfast. The executive will be made up of former bitter enemies from the loyalist Democratic Unionist Party and the republican Sinn Fein.

Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP and the first minister of the new government, said he hoped the announcement was a signal that full peace would be coming to Northern Ireland.

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‘There is a momentum’

Peter Hain, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, also welcomed Thursday’s statement, but added, “Of course, everyone is judged on what they do as well as what they say. There must be delivery, there must be [arms] decommissioning.

“But there is a momentum carrying Northern Ireland forward, and loyalism needs to be part of that,” he said.

Raymond McCord, whose 22-year-old son was beaten to death in 1997 in what authorities believe was a drug dispute involving loyalists, has campaigned for the prosecution of UVF members in the case and vowed Thursday that the issue of justice for the group’s victims would not go away.

“We want to see the guns destroyed and any information about the killing of my son to be handed over to the police,” he said on a radio call-in show.