IRA end armed campaign!

[bigc]

well at least there is one piece of good news in regards to terrorism in the UK.

back in the 70s,80s,and 90s, many people died due to the IRA bombs and attacks.

I know this isnt specifically in regards to the war against terror, but they WERE terrorists,and now they've called an end to it. I guess thats one battle won, at last

:)

[steve]

so...
if 15 million people take 30 years to fight in a terror "war", that means...

1.5 BILLION people will take only 3000 more years. But really, it's only 150 more score if you think about it.

[FORD]

http://www.showbizireland.com/images/stars/bono-clinton04.jpg
BONO: See, Mr. President. I told you that we could pull this off in Ireland. That bloody chimpanzee Bush would have never been able to bring our people together like you did.

BILL: Well of course not, Bono. Your biggest export is Guinness, not oil. He wouldn't have been the least bit interested. Now speaking of Guinness, my friend, you said you were buying...... Hey does Sinead O'Connor still live around here??

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by steve
so...
if 15 million people take 30 years to fight in a terror "war", that means...

1.5 BILLION people will take only 3000 more years. But really, it's only 150 more score if you think about it.

There were about 300 people in the IRA. The community that backed them(apart from the US money for bombs) were mainly the catholics in the North say 600 000.

[Nickdfresh]

Upstaged really...I guess they can't match suicide bombings designed to especially kill civilians...

IRA vows to end armed campaign

Thursday, July 28, 2005; Posted: 11:08 a.m. EDT (15:08 GMT)

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The IRA has announced that it will resume disarmament and that it has ordered its members to end its armed campaign to end British rule.

The order took effect at 1500 GMT on Thursday.

But the IRA, which has observed a cease-fire since 1997, did not say it would formally disband.

British Prime Minister called the statement a "step of unparalleled magnitude", but unionists said they wanted proof the IRA was serious.

In a lengthy statement, the outlawed group appealed to Britain and Northern Ireland's Protestant majority to accept its new position as sufficient to renew negotiations on power-sharing, the core goal of the 1998 peace accord for the British territory.

"The leadership has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign," the statement said. (Full statement)

"All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means."

It added that "volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever," a phrase which is being interpreted as referring to alleged criminal activity.

The statement said the IRA had authorised a representative to work with the Independent International Commission of Decommissioning (IIDC) to complete the process of putting weapons beyond use.

There was "very strong support" among IRA volunteers for Sinn Fein's peace strategy, the statement said, but added there was widespread concern about the "failure" of the British and Irish governments and unionists to "fully engage in the peace process".

It said the majority of people in Ireland wanted to see the full implementation of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, and it now accepted its goals could be achieved by political means.

"We reiterate our view that the armed struggle was entirely legitimate," it said.

But the statement stopped short of issuing an apology for the killings that took place during the armed campaign, saying instead: "We are conscious that many people suffered in the conflict."

CNN's Europe political editor Robin Oakley said the statement gave no timetable of the IRA's disarmament, or whether it would agree to supplying photographic proof.

"We have got the words here, which indicate an act of closure from the IRA. But the issue now is whether the IRA lives up to that promise on the ground," he said.

He said it was also unclear whether republican splinter groups would fill the void left by the IRA's move.
Decommissioning

Welcoming the statement, Blair said decommissioning must take place as soon as possible.

"This may be the day when finally, after all the false dawns and dashed hopes, peace replaced war, politics replaces terror," he said.

"This is in a different order to anything before. This is what we have striven for in the last eight years since the Good Friday Peace Agreement."

Irish taoiseach Berie Ahern said the statement heralded the end of the IRA as a paramilitary organization.

"If the IRA's words are borne out by verified actions, it will be a momentous and historic development," he said.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams called the statement "courageous".

"There is an enormous responsibility on us to seize this moment," he said.

"There is now no possible excuse for the British and Irish governments to not fully and faithfully implement the Good Friday Agreement."

But the Democratic Unionists, the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, said the statement did not go far enough.

"They have failed to explicitly declare an end to their multi-million-pound criminal activity and have failed to provide the level of transparency that would be necessary to truly build confidence that the guns had gone in their entirety," a DUP statement said.

Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey said: "I can't take any statement from the Republican movement at face value because we've had that many of them in the past," he said. "Let's see what happens to the weapons. Let's see what happens on the ground."

John Hume, a moderate Catholic politician in Northern Ireland, said: "The real duty now, if we want to have a totally peaceful and stable country, is for all true democrats to implement the will of the people."

Speaking on CNN, the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss, said he was hopeful of a major act of decommissioning in the next few weeks, "if not sooner".

Speculation that a statement was imminent had intensified on Wednesday night after the British government released from jail one of the IRA's most infamous bombers, Sean Kelly.

Kelly was once sentenced to life imprisonment for killing nine civilians in a fish shop bomb in Belfast in 1993.

Hopes of restoring power sharing in Northern Ireland fell apart in December when the IRA refused to allow its disarmament to be publicly recorded.

The IRA was supposed to have disarmed fully by mid-2000, but did not start the process until October 2001 and has insisted that any details of its partial disarmament be kept secret.

www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/28/ira.statement/index.html

Copyright 2005 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

[bigc]

i just meant its at least one piece of positive news.

[Nickdfresh]

July 29, 2005

The men who tamed the IRA
By Niall O'Dowd, Niall O'Dowd is publisher of the Irish Voice newspaper in New York.

If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken, as James Joyce said, then the people of Ireland finally woke up from troubled slumber Thursday.

The announcement that the Irish Republican Army was abandoning its more than 30 years of violence signaled an epochal event unlike any other in modern Irish history. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "a step of unparalleled magnitude; Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern called it "a momentous … development."

But the IRA did not lay down its arms on the spur of the moment. Rather, its statement was the result of decades of painstaking work by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. They took on one of the immutable forces in Irish life and changed it from within.

It's been a delicate, often dangerous walk for Adams and McGuinness as they sought to win support for peace without moving too far ahead of their core constituency. There are many around the world who distrust Adams and see him as an unrepentant terrorist putting a moderate front on the IRA, while some partisans of the Republican cause believe that he has gone soft.

Under the circumstances, it is remarkable that Adams and McGuinness have accomplished as much as they have.

The name of the IRA has been writ large in Irish history for more than a century. It fought a war of independence, which was followed by the British partition of Ireland in 1921, which in turn was followed by another vicious civil war after an IRA split. Then, successive IRA campaigns to end the partition ensued.

In the latest burst of violence, which started in 1969, more than 3,600 lives were sacrificed as the consequences of partition came home to roost. The nightmare was in full flood.

Now, the IRA's statement has changed everything. How Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, and McGuinness, his chief negotiator, succeeded in taking an armed revolutionary movement and placing it on a road to peaceful political activism is an extraordinary story.

Many times in the past, Irish leaders have tried and failed. Michael Collins, who in many ways created the IRA's revolutionary tradition, lost his life attempting to turn it against violence during the civil war in 1922. Adams and McGuinness came of age four decades later, as young partisans of the Republican cause in the 1960s. But they recognized very early on that the war was not winnable, that the British army and the IRA had essentially fought each other to a standstill.

Imperceptibly at first, the two men began to change the fundamental premise on which the movement was based — that an armed campaign was the only solution. In 1972, shortly after 23-year-old Adams was released from internment on a British prison ship (where he'd been held as a suspected IRA member), he and McGuinness convened a secret dialogue with an influential Northern Ireland politician, John Hume, then leader of the province's major Roman Catholic party. They formulated what became the Hume-Adams document — essentially a wish list for nationalists.

Adams and McGuinness approached the Irish and British governments in discussions based on that document, which argued for power-sharing and a greater involvement in Northern Ireland by the Irish government. After initial deep suspicion, both governments agreed to talk.

The first public indication that a new era was arriving came during the most inflammatory episode of recent Irish history, when 10 IRA men died during hunger strikes at the Maze prison in the early 1980s. On his deathbed, hunger-strike leader Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament. The incredible groundswell of support showed the political potential for the movement. The significance was something that Adams and McGuinness immediately grasped.

In the 1990s, another factor emerged. Irish American supporters of President Clinton convinced him that major change was stirring in Ireland and that the U.S. could help. Thus, a powerful outside force was brought to bear on the peace process.

Most vital, however, was the internal debate within Sinn Fein and the IRA. Adams worked slowly and deliberatively, never moving too far in front of the rank and file. Sometimes he had to perform tasks that won him harsh international criticism, such as carrying the coffin of an IRA bomber who had killed many innocent people. It was the price he had to pay to retain leadership over a group notoriously suspicious of politics.

By increments, the strategy began to work. The new peace policy led to significant electoral support. Soon a party that had started with less than 2% popular support became the second-largest party in Northern Ireland.

It was within that framework that Adams and McGuinness persuaded the IRA to carry out the 1994 cease-fire. A few years later the Good Friday agreement, including many of the original Hume-Adams proposals, was adopted. Adams now had a fair wind behind him. His colleagues saw him working the grass roots, being welcomed at the White House, meeting the British and Irish prime ministers.

In the end, he and McGuinness simply outworked, outthought and outmaneuvered their opponents, both internal and external. Sinn Fein's spectacular election success, and the appointment of McGuinness as Northern Ireland's education minister had a dramatic psychological effect on those citizens who had been locked out of power for so long.

The IRA decision to abandon its armed campaign was an inevitable outgrowth of the long-held plans of Adams and McGuinness. They had replaced the nightmare with a dream.

Link (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-odowd29jul29,0,6168810.story)