Editorial The road to disaster

It now seems almost certain that, in the absence of any sign of the IRA decommissioning by month’s end, the British government will suspend the new power-sharing executive and put it under review. They will do so, it is assumed, in order to relieve David Trimble, the first minister, of the onerous responsibility of announcing his resignation, a step that he would be forced to take if his party executive, meeting on Feb. 12, refuses to support the party’s continued presence in government with Sinn Fein.

The Irish people will not be amused to see this experiment in democracy brought down by the machinations of small cliques of Unionists and republicans. No doubt the blame will be seen by the world to rest mainly with the latter, for failing to begin the process of disarmament. But Unionism, too, is at fault for continually changing the terms of the agreement, as it did last December when in the wake of the "successful" conclusion of the Mitchell Review, Trimble tied himself to a Feb. 12 deadline for the beginning of decommissioning. No such deadline was ever in the Good Friday agreement.

Republicans have the letter of the agreement on their side. But one thing is certain — they are not acting in its spirit. The tiny clique of the IRA’s leadership, the army council, responding apparently to the reluctance of IRA members to disarm, has been making it plain through its various mouthpieces in Sinn Fein that they will not jump through the Unionist hoop. If the Unionists had any sense. they would know that this would be the republicans’ response to their demands. It seems they never learn the obvious: you will not get decommissioning by demanding it as a precondition.

As a result, we have yet another, predictable crisis. It has inspired Sinn Fein’s president, Gerry Adams, to warn that the peace process is going down the road to disaster. Yet again.

It is a road well-traveled in the North.

Armed cliques should not dictate political developments, which they are doing at present. By their very nature they are anti-democratic. Currently, they are in defiance of the wishes of the majority of the Irish people who want the agreement to succeed. And part of that agreement is the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, which must be completed by May — a mere three months away. Sinn Fein spokesmen, official and unofficial, indulge in Jesuitical arguments about what this really means. But it is obvious to the ordinary voter. A process that has an end must have a beginning.

A recent Irish Times poll showed that 86 percent of those asked think the IRA should begin now to rid itself of its arsenal of mayhem, which its clings to with fetish-like stubbornness.

The army council may well be responding to the wishes of IRA members. But they number no more than a few hundred men. The agreement has the support of millions. Adams should address himself to that issue with the courage he is always demanding of his Unionist opponents.