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From the Irish World
The political wing of the INLA has formally challenged loyalist paramilitaries to sign up to a non-agression pact. The proposal has been put to the UVF and the UDA following months of informal contacts through mediators and will also be submitted to the Provisional Republican Movement and to trade unions and community groups. The document 'A Charter for Non-Aggression' was announced at the unveiling of a monument to INLA hunger strikers in Derry on Sunday. An IRSP statement said: "the charter for non-aggression has the sole aim of minimising the chances of a return to conflict and empowering working class communities to have control over their own peace." The charter adds that disarmament can only be achieved through dialogue and explicitly avoids any timescale for decommissioning. The IRSP's spokesman in Britain, Terry Harkin said of the initiative: "We've been talking about it in abstract for a few months. The signs were encouraging, and we've taken the decision to announce it formally in Willie Gallagher's speech today. It's now a firm offer. So it's up to them to get back to us." The announcement of the charter was overshadowed by controversy surrounding the hunger strike monument, unveiled before a crowd of several hundred people by Peggy O'Hara, the mother of INLA hunger striker Patsy O'Hara. The statue, based on a photograph of a masked paramilitary taken at a funeral during the 1981 hunger strikes, was condemned by DUP security spokesman Gregory Campbell as "the glorification of violence." The memorial was defended by the O'Hara family in a statement which said: "We view with dismay the attempt to criminalise Patsy and his comrades. These men died during a war, a war of liberation, and as combatants in that war they are entitled to such a monument." The IRSP initiative comes amid growing signs of republican disillusionment with the current state of the peace process. In an article published last week, Brendan Hughes, the leader of the IRA in the Maze Prison during the blanket protests of the late 1970s accused the Sinn Fein leadership of ditching republican ideals, and of having been out-manoeuvred by unionists. The deal offered in the Good Friday Agreement was available twenty-five years ago, he claimed. Speaking in an interview for the first edition of Fourthwrite, a new magazine run by former republican prisoners, he said: "Think of all the lives that could have been saved had we accepted the 1975 truce. That alone justified acceptance. From a nationalist perspective what we have now we could have had at any time in the last 25 years." |