FRFI 153 February / March 2000
Decommissioning: a temporary crisis?
David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party, in agreeing to the Mitchell Review and the process that led to the setting up of the Northern Ireland Executive, set themselves a deadline of February for the IRA to begin decommissioning. If decommissioning has not begun by the time their leadership council meet on 12 February, then they threaten to withdraw from the executive. This deadline comes after the first report on the decommissioning process by General John de Chastelain, expected on 31 January. The Peace Agreement itself has set May as the date by which decommissioning should have been completed.
The announcement by Peter Mandelson on 19 January that the British government was going to implement almost all of Chris Patten’s recommendations on the reform of the RUC infuriated unionists. The changes, which will be introduced in the autumn, will alter the name of the RUC to the ‘Police of Northern Ireland’; do away with its crown and harp cap badge; reduce the number of police from 13,500 to 7,500; set up a new police board with two Sinn Fein members on it and attempt to recruit more Catholic members.
This perceived ‘insult’ to unionists means that IRA decommissioning assumes even greater political importance for Trimble at the Ulster Unionist Council meeting on 12 February. Trimble has said he will resign from the Executive if IRA decommissioning has not begun by then. Mandelson ‘understands’ Trimble’s position, and there is talk of the British government suspending the Executive rather than have Trimble resign. The British government has also reneged on a commitment to allow Sinn Fein MPs Adams and McGuinness to use facilities in the House of Commons. According to the UUP, they will not be allowed to use the facilities until the IRA decommission.
However, amongst all the jockeying for position and hot air and bluster, all sides know there is no going back. Trimble, talking about his possible resignation from the Executive, said: ‘Even if we do have a crisis, I think it will be a temporary one and we will be able to work our way through it in a satisfactory way.’
Sinn Fein chair Mitchel McLaughlin reiterated the organisation’s commitment to the constitutional politics and commented on the question of of decommissioning:
‘I think that decommissioning has been achieved in Republican terms, in that the IRA are not using their weapons. That is decommissioning for Sinn Fein.’
Sooner or later the IRA will have to begin a decommissioning process, but what is crucial is that ideologically the Republican Movement has already decommissioned.
While the question of IRA decommissioning has dominated bourgeois reports on Ireland, British imperialism has actually been increasing its military police in border areas. An Phoblacht reported on a document issued by Mandelson called ‘Security – return to normality’. In it figures show that since the ceasefire of 1997, the level of British army and RUC members deployed in South Armagh has increased by 75%. Helicopter activity and stop and search are both at an all- time high. £79 million has been spent in the last year on strengthening and expanding military bases in the area.
The Royal Irish Regiment (the renamed Ulster Defence Regiment) a central part of this military machine, exposed its true sectarian nature when 70 members were pictured posing with an Orange banner from Drumcree. The banner’s slogan read ‘Drumcree – Here we stand, we can do no other, for religious and civil liberty’.
The RUC, waiting to be renamed, started the new millennium as it finished the last, viciously assaulting three young nationalists from Downpatrick in the early hours of 9 January. In Tyrone, the RUC has mounted a campaign of intimidation and blackmail in an attempt to recruit local people as informers.
In Derry on 11 January the nationalist owner of a fish and chip shop narrowly escaped death when he was attacked and knocked unconscious by a loyalist gang before they set the shop on fire.
These continued acts of repression and terror directed at the nationalist working class alongside the absorption of Sinn Fein into the state structures of the Six Counties are forming a political vacuum. One result of this is a conference called for February by a new organisation, the Anti-Partition League, which sees itself as an ‘umbrella’ group, uniting all those who are against Stormont, against partition and against British rule in Ireland. The conference is in Derry and its outcome will be of interest to all those opposed to British imperialism in Ireland.
