Word: chastelain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Today, the same slogan might be more appropriate as an inventory of the IRA's arsenal - at least, according to the international panel appointed to oversee IRA disarmament. On Monday in Belfast, retired Canadian General John de Chastelain finally delivered the report he'd been waiting eight years to make: his international panel had spent the previous week observing the IRA decommission a vast array of weaponry, everything from a World War II-vintage machine gun to surface-to-air missiles. Using British and Irish intelligence reports on IRA arms as a guide, the general concluded that he had witnessed...
...Irish republicans have turned to politics as the path to pursuing their goal of a united Ireland. ?We are closing the curtain on 700 years of Irish history,? said Father Alec Reid, a Catholic priest who had been invited, alongside a Protestant cleric, to witness the decommissioning with de Chastelain...
...General De Chastelain's announcement ought to mean the removal of a huge obstacle to a lasting settlement in Northern Ireland. But unionists aren't sure whether to believe him. Under their own slogan - "No guns, no government" - they have pulled out of successive power-sharing governments in Belfast on the grounds that the IRA's guns would always be an unspoken threat to democracy. The comparatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party, long dominant in Protestant politics, was pushed into a humiliating second place in elections last year by Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists, who have focused...
...Still, the decommissioning announcement was not without its lighter side: "I'm just waiting for the starting gun," General de Chastelain told reporters before he began delivering his report to a press conference. Then he paused, and added, "Perhaps I should rephrase that...
Even as the I.R.A. was making history, its enemies were repeating it. Hours after De Chastelain?s report was released, Protestant paramilitaries continued their attacks on Catholic homes. The weapons of choice, pipe bombs built from parts in any hardware shop, are too easy to make for them ever to be effectively decommissioned. For Northern Ireland, it was a sober reminder that taking away arms may not remove the will to kill...