Decommissioning in Northern Ireland

The decommissioning of illegal paramilitary weapons was an issue that threaded through the Northern [Page 155]Ireland peace process, highlighting the potential political difficulties in dealing with the question of weaponry held by insurgent or terrorist groups. Decommissioning in this context refers to the verified disarmament or disposal of paramilitary weapons, and it became a substantive blockage at various points in an attenuated process of peacemaking.

Unionists in Northern Ireland were insistent in keeping the issue of the disarmament of paramilitary terrorist groups high up on the political agenda, because for them it constituted a key test of Irish Republican bona fides and peaceful intent following the cease-fire of 1994. At various stages the issue of decommissioning prevented all-party negotiations from taking place, and even after the Belfast Agreement (or Good Friday Agreement) of 1998, the decommissioning question served to undermine the functioning of the power-sharing institutions. In contrast, Irish Republicans felt that the question of decommissioning was an artificially inflated precondition that had been dropped into the developing peace process in order to prevent Republicans from engaging in political negotiations. In the early period of the peace process they felt that disarmament could be addressed only after a formalized political settlement. After the Belfast Agreement had put institutions in place, they argued that the issue should be left to the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), rather than acting as a cause for the suspension of the workings of the agreement. In their perception, the insistence on a process of decommissioning often represented foot dragging and obstructionism by Unionists. But for Unionists, the reluctance of Republicans to even begin disarmament smacked of bad faith.

Throughout the decades-long conflict between Nationalists and Unionists in Northern Ireland, the British government had repeatedly stated that it would not talk to groups involved in, or supportive of, terrorism, although contact did in fact take place on a number of occasions. After the IRA called a cease-fire in August 1994, there was an expectation among Republicans that its political wing, Sinn Féin, would enter into negotiations. In the initial weeks of the cease-fire, British and Unionist skepticism over Republican good faith centered around a demand that Republicans clarify whether their cessation was permanent. The notion that Republicans should disarm in order to prove their democratic credentials quickly became an assumed part of the process. For Republicans, this was a belated and purely arbitrary precondition, designed either to stymie the peace process or induce Republican surrender rather than accommodation. There is considerable documentary evidence that both the Irish government and the British government had flagged the issue of disarmament in the period 1993 to 1994, but the question of whether it was ever a precondition to negotiations is contested. By March 1995 the British government had laid down what became known as the “Washington three” test, which called for a willingness in principle to disarm, an understanding on the modalities of decommissioning, and the actual decommissioning of some weaponry as a first step toward building confidence. The result was political deadlock.

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