Editorial Guns, not government, remain

February 2-8. 2000

The responsibility for the sorry mess that the North now finds itself in thanks to yet another decommissioning crisis must be apportioned fairly. There is no doubt that the IRA and Sinn Fein are at fault. The IRA could not tell General John de Chastelain, the chairman of the International Commission on Decommissioning, that it had begun, or would begin any time soon, to get rid of its weapons.

But if republicans are to be blamed for refusing to offer up arms now, it is only right to remember that the current deadline was set by the Ulster Unionist Party and is not within the terms of the Good Friday agreement, to which Sinn Fein and the Unionists are signatories.

The new deadline is about preserving the leadership of UUP leader David Trimble as much as it is about advancing the political process.

It is an unfortunate repetition of a Unionist bad habit — one that has bedeviled the peace process for years. First, Trimble reaches an agreement with all parties. Then he demands an additional assurance outside the terms of the original agreement. He did this in 1998, after the signing of the Good Friday agreement, when he asked for and received assurances from the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that the expectation was that the IRA would begin decommissioning as soon as possible. There was nothing in the actual agreement stipulating that.

With the conclusion of the Mitchell Review last November, the Unionist leader went before his party’s governing body, which proceeded to impose terms for the continuation of the new government that were not mentioned in the review. These are that absent decommissioning before the next meeting of the Unionist body, Trimble will resign. Yet the deadline for decommissioning in the Good Friday agreement is not Feb. 12 but May 22.

Sinn Fein and the IRA see this as effectively reducing the political process to a decommissioning process. This has been a Unionist tick since the fall of 1994. It is, in fact, more than a nervous habit. It is more like a full-blown obsession, the cost of which has been to delay, frustrate and eventually undermine efforts at resolving the conflict. And, in the meantime, it has not produced one gun.

Of course, fair-minded people who believe in democracy sympathize with the basic objective of removing weapons from the North’s conflict and can share Unionist frustration at the fact that the paramilitaries, after years of politicking and concessions, still sit on huge intact arsenals. But those who do so should hearken to the example of the successful South African peace process. A negotiator for the then governing National Party told the BBC this week that had it demanded that the ANC decommission before a settlement, there would have been no settlement.

Disarmament there came about as a result of the political process, not because it was made the aim of that process. It is the change of circumstances that remove the use of guns from the situation, not unilateral demands.

The North has once more found that out, to its cost.