Britain Begins to Cut Military in N. Ireland
By Adi Bloom
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A26
LONDON, Oct. 24 -- Responding quickly to Tuesday's news that the Irish Republican Army had disposed of some of its weapons, the British government said today that it had begun demolishing two military observation towers in its province of Northern Ireland and will reduce its troops there as well.
"We will undertake a . . . program of security normalization, reducing levels of troops and installations in Northern Ireland, as the security situation improves," Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, told Parliament.
The steps are intended to build trust and signal that as the 1998 Good Friday agreement gets back on track, the British government will match concessions made by the IRA, analysts here said.
The peace deal, which provides for power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants in a provincial government, had been near breakdown until Tuesday's announcement that, for the first time in three decades of conflict, the IRA had started to disarm.
The IRA, an outlawed paramilitary group that has been observing a cease-fire, says its role is to defend Northern Ireland's Catholic minority from its Protestant majority. The group favors merging Northern Ireland with the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland to the south.
"The word 'historic' tends to be overused about the Northern Ireland political process," Reid told the House of Commons. "But yesterday's move by the IRA is, in my view, unprecedented and genuinely historic. It takes the peace process on to a new level."
The two watchtowers that began coming down today are located in the district of South Armagh. Set up to monitor the border with Ireland, they have long been a cause of resentment in the community they overlook, where many people sympathize with the IRA.
British officials said work would begin Thursday to dismantle two more military facilities, the Magherafelt army base in County Derry and security installations at Newtownhamilton.
The withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland has been a longtime demand of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political affiliate.
Meanwhile, David Trimble, head of Northern Ireland's largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, said he would renominate three ministers who resigned last week from the Northern Ireland Assembly's power-sharing executive in protest over IRA's refusal to begin disarming. This must be done before midnight Thursday to avoid suspension of the assembly.
Trimble has called a meeting of his party Saturday and will seek its support in his bid for reelection as Northern Ireland's first minister, the top political job.
Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, today praised the IRA's move. Quoting the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in a statement, he said this was "a time when hope and history have come together."
But he also reiterated his demand that pro-British paramilitary groups follow the example of the IRA and begin getting rid of their arsenals.
Adams denied that the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11 had any impact on the IRA's decision to dispose of weapons. While those attacks "shocked and affected us all," he said, the IRA "was impervious to external pressure."
Sinn Fein and the IRA have come under increasing pressure from the U.S. government since Sept. 11.
President Bush's special envoy for Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, was in Belfast for meetings on Sept. 10 and, like many Americans, was stranded when transatlantic flights were suspended after the attacks. British and U.S. officials involved in the peace process say that during the subsequent five days he met repeatedly with key figures in the negotiations, stressing that continued U.S. support would depend on their ability to reach a compromise.
Since then, the British, Irish and U.S. governments have consistently increased pressure on Adams, telling him that the Sept. 11 attacks reduced sympathy for armed organizations in general, according to sources here.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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