Decommissioning pace forced by IRA's Colombian links - When Sinn Féin's fraternal links with Colombian drug-dealing terrorists who applauded the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington were exposed, American donations to the party dried up and the US arm-twisted the IRA so much it had no option but to decommission
From The IRISH TIMES October 27th, 2001
by Jim Cusack
The painfully slow process of moving the IRA away from its armed struggle began in earnest in the late 1980s. Gerry Adams, with the support of Martin McGuinness and a number of other IRA and Sinn Féin instigated a series of debates about the possibility of pursuing their goal of a 32-county, democratic, socialist republic - not through the gun and bomb but through the subversive use of politics.
Their object was to force the withdrawal of the British government through the tactical use of armed struggle while usurping the political institutions in the Republic and in Britain and Northern Ireland.
Leading Provisional republicans have continued to promulgate this line to IRA members and the Sinn Féin faithful up to very recently. At the beginning of this summer, senior republican figures were still telling internal audiences that there would be no IRA decommissioning and that the "movement" was still on course for taking power in Ireland.
The message was necessary to assuage their constituency that the years of "sacrifice" and "struggle" and the cause of the IRA "martyrs" were not in vain. It was particularly necessary to repeat the message in the past few years, as the 32-County Sovereignty Movement and Republican Sinn Féin were attempting to assume the mantle of the rightful successors to the "Men of 1916".
Adams and McGuinness were, according to senior Garda and Government sources, both at risk throughout this process. If they failed to prove their unarmed tactics were working they could have faced a revolt within the IRA which, for them, could have had potentially fatal consequences.
This week the two men finally reached their goal when they oversaw the first act of decommissioning in the history of the IRA and the return of two Sinn Féin ministers to government in Northern Ireland. Within the next few months the party will embark on its most ambitious electoral challenge to the political status quo in the Republic.
The key to this week's breakthrough on decommissioning on Tuesday and, the next day, the start of the dismantling of British army posts in south Armagh, lay not in protracted political negotiations here or in London, but across the Atlantic.
The crucial events which led to the choreographed announcements took place on Monday, August 6th, in Bogota, Colombia, and on September 11th in New York and Washington.
The arrests of the three republicans in Colombia marked one of the biggest disasters for the history of the republican movement. Investigations by the FBI, Colombian police and RUC Special Branch indicate that at least 10 and probably 12 IRA figures have visited Colombia since the mid-1990s. All stayed in areas in the south of the country controlled by the FARC guerrilla force.
FARC is a highly sophisticated and wealthy army with 15,000 members who are better equipped and trained than much of the Colombian army. In the past decade, while the Colombian authorities backed by the US administration were battling the country's powerful cocaine cartels in Cali and Medellin, FARC has grown rapidly in strength.
The guerrillas are responsible for bombings, murder, kidnapping, extortion, and hijacking, as well as guerrilla military action against Colombian political, military, and economic targets. It has kidnapped and executed US citizens, including three US Indian-rights activists. FARC was second only to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group on the US government's list of American terrorist enemies.
FARC is a serious threat in that it is a left-wing, insurgent army trying to overthrow -US democracy, and is a major supplier of cocaine and heroin. |
