A Farewell to arms? Decommissioning and the peace process
by Colin McInnes
At the end of 1997 the assassination of Billy Wright, the leader of the loyalist paramilitary group the LVF (Loyalist Volunteer Force), by the Republican INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) in the Maze prison threatened to spark a series of 'tit-for-tat' killings between republican and loyalist paramilitaries, undermining the peace process. With David Trimble at times appearing isolated both within unionism and even within his own party, hopes for an agreement were not high. But with the direct intervention of the prime minister and the Taoiseach, and the influence of the White House (not least through the continuing efforts of George Mitchell), an agreement was finally reached at Stormont on Good Friday 1998. A key move in securing republican support for the Agreement was London's willingness to downplay the decommissioning issue. Sinn Fein repeatedly expressed it concerns that for the IRA to hand in weapons before an Agreement would be seen as surrender and was politically impossible. London therefore moved from parallel decommissioning being a requirement of the negotiating process to its being 'aspirational'. This in turn required a considerable compromise by the Unionists who had already moved from the favoured position of prior decommissioning to one of negotiating with Sinn Fein while the IRA still possessed its full military capability. To enter into an Agreement without decommissioning was an even greater step and one which many Unionists were unwilling to take - even in David Trimble's more moderate UUP. Pressure from within Northern Ireland, from London and from Washington, a sense that this was the best that would be available and the commitment in the Agreement to decommissioning all helped to allay Unionist fears, though these fears were not removed.
NOTES
4 For a more detailed account of the relationship between decommissioning and the peace process, see Colin McInnes, 'The decommissioning of terrorist weapons and the peace process in Northern Ireland, Contemporary Security Policy, vol.18, no.3 (December 1997), pp83-103; Roger MacGinty, 'Issue hierarchies in peace processes: the decommissioning of paramilitary arms and the Northern Ireland peace process', Journal of Civil Wars, vol.1, no.3 (Autumn 1998) pp. 24-45. See also Michael von Tangen Page, 'Arms decommissioning and the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement', Security Dialogue, vol.29, no.4 (1998) pp.219-30. Some of the arguments in this chapter first appeared in my 'The Decommissioning of Terrorist Weapons and the Peace Process'. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of Contemporary Security Policy for permission to reproduce these here.
5 Mitchell Report, para 34.
6 Mitchell Report, para 29.
7 Mitchell Report, para 20.
8 Address by Secretary of State at Resumption of Multi-Party Negotiations, Northern Ireland Information Service, 3 June 1997. This was reiterated in the Joint Statement by the British and Irish Governments, 23 July 1997. Available at: hppt://www.nio.gov.uk/press/970723d.htm, August 1997
9 Resolving the Address to Decommissioning, Northern Ireland Information Service 25 June 1997. See in particular the annex 'Possible Conclusions to Item 2 (a)-(c) of the Agenda for the Remainder of the Opening Plenary'. See also 16 July explanatory comments made by Paul Murphy, Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office. Resolving Decommissioning: Speaking Notes Explaining the Two Governments' Positions, Northern Ireland Information Service, 16 July 1997.
10 Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Republic of Ireland Establishing
the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, Northern Ireland
Information Service, 26 August 1997. |
