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N. Ireland loyalist paramilitary renounces violence
UVF says it is assuming a 'non-military, civilianized role,' though critics note it is not disarming.
The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), one of the most violent paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, has announced that the group is disarming and assuming a 'non-military, civilianized role.'
The Times of London reports that Thursday's official statement was made by Gusty Spence, one of the founders of the modern UVF, at the Fernhill House Museum in Belfast.
The statement said that the decision was taken after a three-year consultation process with "all units and departments of our organisation" and against a background in which mainstream republican violence had ended and the United Kingdom was safe.
"Commensurate with these developments, as of twelve midnight the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando will assume a nonmilitary, civilianised role," it said. "All recruitment has ceased. Military training has ceased. Targeting has ceased and all intelligence rendered obsolete. All active service units have been deactivated. All ordnance has been put beyond reach."
The UVF said that the measures were taken "in an earnest attempt to augment the return of accountable democracy to the people of Northern Ireland and to engender confidence that the constitutional question has now been firmly settled. In doing so we reaffirm the legitimacy of our tactical response to violent Nationalism yet reiterate the sincere expression of abject and true remorse to all innocent victims of the conflict."
The UVF was founded in 1966 to fight the Irish nationalist movement in Northern Ireland, taking the name and symbols of a defunct 1912 group with similar motives. The BBC writes that the terrorist group and the Red Hand Commando, a paramilitary closely associated with the UVF, are thought to be responsible for more than 500 murders since 1966.
The Guardian notes that the UVF's statement stopped short of promising to decommission its weapons. Billy Hutchinson, a member of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party who served 16 years for UVF murders, said that the group's weapons were put where "volunteers can't get at them" and that the "decommissioning mindsets" of the statement were the important piece of the announcement.
The Irish Independent writes that though British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern said that the UVF should begin decommissioning, they both welcomed the group's announcement.
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