ANALYSIS:DECOMMISSIONING WAS the key issue that hampered political progress since the IRA and loyalist ceasefires of the 1990s and the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
The promise of transparency over weapons disposed of by the paramilitaries was one of the means of breaking the deadlock, with the Ulster Unionists and later the DUP coming on board the political train.
Remember how the absence of pictorial evidence of IRA disarmament in 2004 ostensibly dissuaded the Rev Ian Paisley from accepting Sinn Féin’s bona fides, and how the IRA’s reluctance to decommission resulted in a stop-start Northern Executive and Assembly in the early to mid-noughties, with David Trimble pushing for more and more movement from republicans.
So, it’s lucky we have a surprisingly stable Executive and Assembly because if we were back to that time of political uncertainty yesterday’s final decommissioning body report would have almost certainly collapsed the hard-won Stormont political structures.
Gen John de Chastelain, head of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning was unavailable to comment yesterday, which is a pity because it might have been worthwhile to hear how he squared the absence of an arms inventory with his comments that one would be published.
In September 2005 he told reporters the governments would get the arms lists once the decommissioning process was completed. “But they will be made available eventually and you can see for yourself,” he said.
Despite the commitment, there is no publication of what was decommissioned by the IRA, UVF, UDA and other paramilitaries. The British and Irish governments appear to be comfortable with the decommissioning body’s decision not to present them with inventories, but rather to hand them over to the US state department for safe keeping.
DUP and Ulster Unionist leaders Peter Robinson and Tom Elliott demanded that they be published while Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister complained of a “decommissioning con job”.
Gen de Chastelain’s defence was that it could lead to attacks on those who had decommissioned, discourage future decommissioning and deter groups who decommissioned from handing over arms that subsequently came to light.
As one political insider said, right now publication of inventories “would have the anoraks comparing Jane’s [arms information] lists with what is on the IICD list and lead to arcane arguments about obsolete weapons and something that is now part of history – much better to move forwards than backwards”.
That won’t satisfy unionists but it seems to be the reality. Politics is fairly steady now. Publication of arms lists would only shake that solidity.
