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N. Ireland Rebels: 'War Is Over'

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By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, The Associated Press

Published: November 12, 2007

DUBLIN, Ireland - The largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland renounced violence Sunday, officially ending the decades of terror it inflicted on the province's Catholic minority.

The outlawed Ulster Defense Association said it was disbanding all of its armed units and would store its weapons beyond the reach of rank-and-file members, but was not willing yet to hand over its arsenal to international disarmament officials.

"The Ulster Defense Association believes that the war is over, and we are now in a new democratic dispensation that will lead to permanent political stability," the group said, referring to the Catholic-Protestant administration established in May under terms of a 1998 peace accord.

UDA representatives made the announcement in front of hundreds of supporters in a hard-line Protestant part of Belfast on Remembrance Sunday, the solemn British holiday that honors the dead from two world wars.

It came after months of pressure on the UDA to catch up to Northern Ireland's other two big paramilitary groups - the Catholics of the Irish Republican Army and the Protestants of the Ulster Volunteer Force - which had already renounced violence.

The British and Irish governments welcomed the UDA declaration, but said Protestant extremists needed to match the IRA, which disarmed in 2005 and pledged never to resume its failed campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.

Sunday's UDA statement renounced violence - but made this conditional on the IRA's own good behavior. It said all UDA intelligence files on potential targets would be destroyed "and, as a consequence of this, all weaponry will be put beyond use."

But the UDA's most prominent commander, Jackie McDonald, emphasized that the UDA was not ready to hand even a single gun or bullet to disarmament officials - a key objective of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

McDonald said the vast majority of people in the poorest Protestant districts of Belfast don't want the UDA to disarm because they remain fearful that a new IRA generation could rearm and resume bloodshed. UDA guns "are the people's guns," he said.

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