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Issue 16: May 2002

Disarmament impasse about 
politics not guns – report

A new report on the protracted negotiations over decommissioning armaments in Northern Ireland suggests that the wrangling was about attitudes and political positioning and not about guns and explosives.

The report, Burying the Hatchet: The Decommissioning of Paramilitary Arms in Northern Ireland, by Corinna Hauswedell and Kris Brown, was produced by the collaborative research project Demilitarisation in Northern Ireland – The Role of Decommissioning and Normalisation of Security in the Peace Process (DINI), undertaken by the Bonn International Center of Conversion (BICC) in co-operation with UNU Institute for Conflict Resolution (UNU/INCORE), based at the University of Ulster.

In the first such study since the decommissioning breakthrough of last October, the authors point out that most of the parties slipped easily into the constitutional clothes of the new political structures. This was in sharp contrast to their handling of the disarmament issue, which became "a nagging irritant for Republicans and a useful stick for the anti-agreement Unionists to beat their counterparts". 

The findings of the report suggest that for Ulster Unionists decommissioning became a visible symbol of Republican intentions to move beyond violence, providing the concrete proof needed to prevent pro-Agreement Unionism from being undermined by the continuous buffeting from those within the wider Unionist ranks who were opposed to the Agreement and any cooperation with Republicans. 

For Republicans, the problem was not the actual loss of the military potential of the guns but, as with the Unionists, their symbolic value. As the Republicans made new and previously unthinkable agreements in the political sphere, these major ideological concessions required a counterbalance. Their refusal to decommission helped to reassure the grass roots that the struggle was not being sold out. The refusal to decommission served as political ballast to steady the Republican movement while it jettisoned much of its traditional ideology. 

The report suggests that while the creation of an Independent International Commission on Decommissioning was an imaginative step, its limited mandate may have made it harder to deliver on its task. However, the introduction of independent inspections of arms dumps appears to have been a successful confidence-building measure which helped to ease an armed group into actual disarmament.

Looking towards the future, the report points to the fact that while for Sinn Fein, political inclusion, electoral advancement and constitutional participation have provided the space in which disarmament could take place more easily, for many Loyalists the lack of such inclusion may make their eventual disarmament more difficult.

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