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 | Sunday, May 07, 2000, updated at 10:21(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Clinton Calls IRA's Disarming "Historic"U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Saturday that the decision by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to start disarming is "a truly historic step" and marked "a very good day for the people of Northern Ireland.""For the first time the IRA is clearly committed to decommissioning and a process to get there. I applaud that," Clinton told reporters before a trip to his home state of Arkansas. He said he believed that the agreement reached after two days of talks in Belfast between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern would last. Earlier on Saturday, Clinton said in a written statement that he welcomed the IRA's commitment to put arms "beyond use" and the its agreement to allow international inspectors into its arms dumps. "These developments offer renewed hope to the people of Northern Ireland that politics will once and for all be pursued through exclusively political means," Clinton said. The IRA agreed to begin disarming itself after the British and Irish governments announced ambitious plans to transfer power back to the province's suspended Catholic-Protestant administration by May 22 and to extend the deadline for total IRA disarmament from that day to June 2001. Clinton expressed his hope that the agreement "will be fully accepted by all parties," adding, "We never got this far on the details of implementation." An Associated Press report quoted White House spokesman Joe Lockhart as saying that aboard Air Force One, Clinton telephoned both Blair and Ahern "to congratulate them for moving the process forward." Britain suspended Northern Ireland's power-sharing administration in February after the IRA refused to begin disarming. The pro-British Unionists will decide whether to accept IRA's offer.
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