The Five Demands

Full decommissioning ‘not certain’ (NewsLetter)

The man who three times inspected the IRA’s weapons dumps prior to decommissioning has said that it is impossible to say that the IRA destroyed all its weapons.

Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland who jointly inspected the arms before their destruction between 2001 and 2005, said that any society coming out of conflict would have “so many arms” in various locations that it can never be certain that all have been put beyond use.

Mr Ahtisaari did not himself oversee the destruction of the weapons, a process which was led by the retired Canadian general John De Chastelain. However, having compiled three reports on the IRA’s weapons cache, the 75-year-old has a unique knowledge of the interior of republican arms dumps.

In recent years, there have been growing questions about the totality of IRA decommissioning as dissident republicans have had access to former Provisional IRA weapons such as Semtex.

When asked, during a brief interview with the News Letter on a visit to Belfast, whether the public can be confident that all the weapons were destroyed, Mr Ahtisaari said: “First of all, in a society that has been in a war… there are so many arms in that society that you can never have a situation anywhere in the world where all the arms will disappear.

“Because it is not only those which are possibly in the arms dumps, but people have arms at home, we know that from every country, and people have arms for hunting purposes, so there are so many arms.”

He added that in the Indonesian region of Aceh, where he was also involved in overseeing decommissioning, “quite frankly, I don’t think in Aceh every arm disappeared”.

He said the inspections of IRA weapons which he undertook were important to understand how many arms dumps there were: “We did three inspections; we inspected the same arms dumps in different ways and places and after that the IRA press statement said they were returning to the decommissioning process without any preconditions.”

He highlighted that even in other societies access to legal arms sometimes led to attacks. Mr Ahtisaari said that while there were no photographs of IRA decommissioning in Northern Ireland, there had been photos of the process in Aceh but that even where photos existed, there were likely to be suspicions about the process.

He said that “the important thing is that there has been a reliable group of people like the one which General De Chastelain led so that they can feel comfortable [that weapons have been destroyed]”.