DUBLIN, Nov. 11 (AP) — The largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland on Sunday renounced violence, officially ending the decades of terror it inflicted on the province’s Roman Catholic minority.
The group, the outlawed Ulster Defense Association, said that it was disbanding all of its armed units and would store its weapons beyond the reach of rank-and-file members, but that it was not yet willing 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 the terms of a 1998 peace accord.
Representatives of the group made the announcement in front of hundreds of supporters in a hard-line Protestant part of Belfast on Remembrance Sunday, the British holiday that honors the dead from two world wars.
