Hardline Ulster Unionists will be giving the IRA an excuse to further delay weapons decommissioning if they succeed in imposing a deadline for the completion of disarmament, Mr David Trimble warned today.
In a last-minute appeal for party unity just 24 hours before a crucial meeting of the 860-member Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast, Mr Trimble urged his critics to end their "self-destructive displays of division".
The First Minister stressed his determination to secure "further decommissioning and an absolute end to the politics of latent threat".
But he warned the British government and republicans that unionists would not tolerate the endless extension of the remit of the international disarmament commission.
Mr Trimble insisted his tactics to secure decommissioning had worked, forcing republicans to do the unthinkable. His said his plan now was to "create a situation in which the republican movement completes the process it has been forced to begin".
Mr Trimble told anti-Belfast Agreement unionists who are trying to commit the party to a withdrawal from the Stormont Government in February if decommissioning is not completed by then that they were playing into the hands of republicans who had "deliberately set out to split unionists".
"A divided unionism has punched below its weight," he argued in an article in the Belfast Telegraph.
"At a time when Mr [Gerry] Adams is bleating about the pain and the ‘little earthquakes' in republicanism caused by the decision to decommission, a united and self-confident unionism could transform the political situation here in a positive way".
PA