IRA Pledges to Begin Talks With Disarmament Panel

BELFAST, Northern Ireland â€”  The Irish Republican Army pledged Wednesday to open negotiations soon with a disarmament commission, taking a key first step toward surrendering its weapons in support of Northern Ireland’s peace accord.

In a statement, the IRA promised to send a negotiator to the commission if the British province’s major Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, first forms the Protestant-Roman Catholic administration envisaged in last year’s Good Friday pact.

The policy turnaround came after Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, in a crucial concession Tuesday, said such an IRA statement would be sufficient for him to accept the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party within a new Cabinet, long the stumbling block to progress.

These back-to-back compromises were carefully scripted as part of U.S. mediator George J. Mitchell’s 10-week-old mission to save the accord.

Peter Mandelson, Britain’s secretary for Northern Ireland, called the IRA pledge “welcome and stronger in certain respects than some expected.�

The IRA statement offered no explicit guarantee that gradual disarmament would follow. But until now, the outlawed movement had rejected any direct contact with the disarmament commission, formed in 1997 during peace negotiations.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams praised the IRA and said, “No one should underestimate the effort that this initiative involved.�

Adams’ predecessor as Sinn Fein leader, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, predicted that a new generation would take up arms to fight for the abolition of Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state linked with Britain.

Trimble faces a far more serious challenge in the immediate future. His decision to soften his “no IRA guns, no government� policy needs approval by a majority of the Ulster Unionists’ ruling council, which has more than 800 members. The vote is expected Nov. 27.