Word: belfasters
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When the Irish Republican Army first faced demands to give up its arms and explosives almost a decade ago, an anonymous graffiti writer summed up its response on a Belfast wall: "Not a bullet, not an ounce...
...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...
...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...
...unrest kicked off after a march by the Protestant Orange Order was diverted about 100 yards to avoid a Catholic neighborhood. Marchers clashed with police who blocked their preferred route, and were joined quickly by members of two loyalist paramilitary groups. They coordinated attacks that spread to towns outside Belfast. The burning cars and rubble-strewn streets they left in their wake were a sharp reminder of just how severe this outburst had been. Earlier this year, the Police Service of Northern Ireland had congratulated itself for not having to use plastic bullets, a riot control weapon...
...rioting cast a pall over the British and Irish governments' hopes of using momentum generated by the IRA's disarmament declaration to restore a stable local government in early 2006. Mitchell Reiss, a U.S. State Department envoy, came to Belfast this week to help pave the way for a new round of talks, and ended up criticizing Unionist leaders who blamed anyone but the rioters for the unrest. The talks will probably take place anyway, but they may not be enough to revive Protestant interest in the settlement. And so, having spent more than five years bringing...