English - BICC

ief 22
reintegrate former combatants, has
customarily been treated as an
important issue, but the heightened
status it has received in Northern
Ireland, where it became the core issue
of dispute between rival sectarian
groups during an eight-year period, is
virtually unprecedented. “The success
of any decommissioning scheme, as
evident from examples of conflict
resolution in Angola, Cambodia, El
Salvador, Lebanon, Mozambique,
Nicaragua and Panama, depends on a
variety of factors, including the
recognition that debates on
disarmament and demobilisation
should be prevented from becoming
too highly politicised” (Schulze and
Smith, 2000, p.83).
The missing link of
decommissioning
mindsets
How can the specific problems of
Northern Ireland, relating to the issue
of taking guns out of politics, be
explained? One may indeed argue that
the discussions about decommissioning
in Northern Ireland have been heavily
politicised. But what does this imply?
Protagonists on both sides of the
sectarian divide tended to overload the
issue of weaponry with the political
Almost three hours after the IRA had
announced that it had put some arms
beyond use, the Independent International
Commission on
Decommissioning (IICD) issued a
short statement confirming the IRA’s
move:
1) On 6 August 2001 the Commission
reported that agreement had been
reached with the IRA on a method
to put IRA arms completely and
verifiably beyond use. This would be
done in such a way as to involve no
symbolism of the thirty years of
suffering and tumult that comprised
the Troubles, thereby making it more
difficult to disarm. Partisan attitudes
towards both perceptions of security
and the legitimacy of political change
have been reflected through the arms
issue. For the Unionists it functioned
as a scapegoat issue that they exploited
to apply pressure on the Republicans
and to compensate for political
setbacks and failures incurred on other
issues; for Republicans, it served as a
bargaining tool to press for political
concessions. Since the inauguration of
the peace process in 1994, the
positions on decommissioning
espoused by the two main conflicting
parties clearly conveyed their deep
rooted mutual distrust: Unionists held
decommissioning as the essential factor
underpinning their resentment of a
power-sharing government in which
they were forced to legislate alongside a
party linked to private army;
Republicans argued with great
vehemence that arms had never been
handed over in the long history of the
Irish armed struggle. “The issue
became a metaphor for basic positions
on the peace process and attitudes
towards political opponents…a symbol
for the limits of surrender of both
sides” (Mac Ginty and Darby, 2002, p.
105).
risk to the public and avoid the
possibility of misappropriation by
others.
2) We have now witnessed an event
which we regard as significant in
which the IRA has put a quantity of
arms completely beyond use. The
material in question includes arms,
ammunition and explosives.
3) We are satisfied that the arms in
question have been dealt with in
accordance with the scheme and
regulations. We are also satisfied that
52 B·I·C·C
Making the well being of the whole
process dependent on the success of
decommissioning did not contribute to
the central overall requirement of
building a stable peace. For the
Unionists, staking everything on that
one card which they could not properly
play, and thereby pushing the
Republicans in the most painful corner,
may in retrospect not have been a very
wise tactic. We agree though with the
assumption made by Mac Ginty and
Darby (ibid.) that if decommissioning
had been resolved other issues of
security concern such as policing
reform or demilitarisation would have
likely assumed an air of intractability
and created a new impasse. Why, in an
attempt to break the deadlock of
decommissioning, issues of similar
security concern became more closely
linked, will be discussed among the
themes below.
Behind the debate about how and
when to disarm the “hardware” of civil
strife, much more complex problems
of how to decommission the mindsets
of the main players come to light.
Decommissioning efforts in Northern
Ireland became almost
indistinguishable from efforts to
discover ways out of the historically
deep-rooted sectarianism that remains
the main obstacle to non-violent
Box F: Report of the International Independent Commission on
Decommissioning, 23 October 2001
it would not further the process of
putting all arms beyond use were we
to provide further details of this
event.
4) We will continue our contact with
the IRA representative in pursuit of
our mandate.
Source: BBC News, 23 October 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/
northern_ireland/newsid_1615000/
1615957.stm.