Northern Ireland's Ulster Defense Association renounces violence

The major Northern Ireland Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Defense Association, announced Sunday it was formally renouncing violence, but offered no immediate pledge to surrender its weapons to international disarmament officials.

The UDA, which has an estimated 3,000 members across hardline parts of Northern Ireland, has loosely observed a cease-fire since 1994, but until now has refused to surrender a single bullet or bomb _ a major objective of a 1998 peace accord.

The group said in a statement that at midnight Sunday it would "stand down with all military intelligence destroyed and, as a consequence of this, all weaponry will be put beyond use."

However, the UDA's south Belfast commander, Jackie McDonald, confirmed the group would not surrender its weapons to international disarmament officials.

"Ninety percent of people in the loyalist community don't want decommissioning. They are the people's guns," McDonald said. "The people don't want to give them up because they don't trust people yet."

The UDA appeared to be following the Ulster Volunteer Force _ the other major Protestant underground army _ which said in May that it had placed its weapons under the custody of senior members and "beyond the reach" of rank-and-file members. The UVF did not surrender any to John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who since 1997 has been trying to oversee paramilitary disarmament in Northern Ireland.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern welcomed the UDA's move, but said it now must cooperate with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning and surrender its weapons.

Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward, the senior British government official in the province, said the UDA statement was important but it needed to lead on to decommissioning of the group's weapons.

"They will be judged by their actions, not their words," Woodward said.

The UDA is the last of Northern Ireland's paramilitary groups to make such a commitment. The major Catholic-based group, the Irish Republican Army, renounced violence and disarmed in 2005, but also refused to hand over its weapons to international officials.

Intelligence officials have said the Protestant paramilitary groups were relatively poorly armed compared with the IRA's sophisticated arsenal, having only firearms, ammunition, grenades and small supplies of explosives.