The largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland renounced violence Sunday, officially ending the decades of terror it inflicted on the province's Catholic minority.The outlawed Ulster Defense Association said it was disbanding all of its armed units and would store its weapons beyond the reach of rank-and-file members, but was not willing yet to hand over its arsenal to international disarmament officials.
"The Ulster Defense Association believes that the war is over, and we are now in a new democratic dispensation that will lead to permanent political stability," the group said, referring to the Catholic-Protestant administration established in May under terms of a 1998 peace accord.
UDA representatives made the announcement in front of hundreds of supporters in a hard-line Protestant part of Belfast on Remembrance Sunday, the solemn British holiday that honors the dead from two world wars.
It followed months of pressure on the UDA to catch up to Northern Ireland's other two big paramilitary groups — the Catholics of the Irish Republican Army and the Protestants of the Ulster Volunteer Force — which had already renounced violence.
The British and Irish governments welcomed the UDA declaration, but said Protestant extremists needed to match the position of the IRA, which disarmed in 2005 and pledged never to resume its failed campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.
Sunday's UDA statement renounced violence — but made this conditional on the IRA's own good behavior. It said all UDA intelligence files on potential targets would be destroyed "and, as a consequence of this, all weaponry will be put beyond use."
But the UDA's most prominent commander, Jackie McDonald, emphasized that the UDA was not ready to hand even a single gun or bullet to disarmament officials — a key objective of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.
McDonald said the vast majority of people in the poorest Protestant districts of Belfast don't want the UDA to disarm because they remain fearful that a new IRA generation could rearm and resume bloodshed. UDA guns "are the people's guns," he said.
Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, the senior British government official in the province, said the test of the UDA's commitment to peace would be whether they disarm in a credible, independently verified fashion.
"They will be judged by their actions, not their words," Woodward said.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said he expected the UDA to begin cooperating soon with John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who has tried since 1997 to persuade Northern Ireland's myriad underground armies to surrender their arms.
"It is important that we remember at this time the victims and survivors of UDA violence, an organization which carried out appalling atrocities," Ahern said, adding, "It is my enduring hope that those days are gone and that the era of paramilitarism is now being left behind forever."
So far only the IRA — by far the most formidably armed group — has surrendered its weapons stockpiles to de Chastelain's commission. Protestant groups argue they shouldn't disarm as long as dissident IRA groups continue to mount occasional attacks.
On Thursday, in the most recent dissident attack, an off-duty policeman was struck in the face and arm by a shotgun blast but survived.
The IRA killed about 1,775 people, including more than 900 British soldiers and police, from 1970 to 1997.
The UDA, founded in 1971, killed more than 400 people, mostly Catholic civilians, before calling a 1994 cease-fire.
UDA members often shot lone Catholics as they walked home or worked in Protestant areas, but sometimes the victims would be abducted first and tortured.
The group also committed massacres by raking Catholic-frequented pubs or shops with gunfire.
Since its 1994 cease-fire, the feud-prone UDA frequently has turned its guns on its own members in power struggles over control of criminal rackets.
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