N.Ireland Leader Wins Crunch Peace VoteThe Protestant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader, David Trimble, Saturday narrowly survived a challenge from critics within his party to his policy on power-sharing with Sinn Fein.A meeting of the UUP ruling council, held in the Northern Irish capital of Belfast, backed Trimble's position by 445 votes to 374, or 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent. However, he was forced to toughen his stance on disarmament by promising a series of phased sanctions against the Irish Republican Army's political wing of Sinn Fein, starting with moves to bar Sinn Fein ministers from participating in a cross-border ministerial group. The moves could provoke a new crisis in the peace process. Many in the UUP had wanted Trimble, the province's first minister, to pull out of the power-sharing government by November 30 in protest at the IRA's failure to give up the arms used in a 30-year guerrilla war against British rule. But after the meeting of the UUP's 860-strong ruling council, Sinn Fein Chairman Mitchel McLaughlin said there was little difference between Trimble's approach -- using sanctions against Sinn Fein ministers -- and that of his UUP critics. "Both are now mapping out a strategy for the destruction of the executive and the collapse of the assembly," he said. Trimble said, "We are only in this situation because the promises that were made by the IRA on May 6 have, on October 28, still to be delivered." His amendment to the UUP council criticized the IRA's failure to resume talks with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning on giving up their weapons -- rather than simply allowing arms dumps to be inspected. |
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