The Irish Republican Army (IRA) has reopened negotiations with Northern Ireland's disarmament chief, the outlawed group confirmed on Tuesday night in a brief statement.
The IRA moved hours after Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party, said the IRA was willing to resume disarming after a 13-month hiatus -- but would not accept conditions designed to inflict public humiliation on the secretive organization.
In its one-line statement, the IRA offered no hint as to whether it intends to disarm fully and disband in support of Northern Ireland's six-year-old peace accord, as the governments of the UK and Ireland expect.
"The IRA leadership confirms that our representative has been in contact with and has met" the independent disarmament chief, retired Canadian general John de Chastelain, the group said.
The British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, were to travel to Belfast yesterday to unveil a joint peace package that has taken more than a year of negotiations to produce.
But a major dispute remained firmly in place on Tuesday -- whether the IRA would allow disarmament officials to photograph the destruction of the group's remaining weapons stockpiles.
The Democratic Unionist Party, which represents most of Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority, is demanding this as a condition for forming a new administration alongside its old enemies in Sinn Fein.
Adams, a reputed IRA commander since the mid-1970s, appeared to rule this out.
"I recognize that some unionists have genuine concerns about verification of `arms beyond use,'" Adams said, using the deliberately ambiguous term used by the IRA to describe what disarmament officials are allowed to do with IRA weapons.
"But [Democratic Unionist leader] Ian Paisley has to recognize also that the IRA will not, as I said before, submit to a process of humiliation," Adams said.
The Democratic Unionists immediately accused Adams of seeking to pick the bits of the Anglo-Irish package he liked while ignoring others, such as photographed "proof" of IRA disarmament.
The governments' plans, presented confidentially to both Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists on Nov. 17, reportedly include a call on the IRA to allow photos of disarmament to be used to boost Protestant support for power-sharing.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS