General handled a tricky task with patience and calmness

John de Chastelain is an unlikely figure to play such a central role in decommissioning, one of the most controversial aspects of Northern Ireland's brittle peace process.

But with the Good Friday Agreement, the Canadian general born in Scotland found himself heading the commission charged with ensuring that the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries fulfilled obligations to lay down their arms.

When first approached for the post in 1997, General de Chastelain demurred. He felt his ties with Britain, and his parents' wartime roles with the British and American intelligence services, would lead to antipathy from some quarters in Northern Ireland.

He was later to learn that both Sinn Fein and the Irish government had questioned whether he would remain impartial. But throughout the accusations and recriminations shrouding the decommissioning process in the subsequent five years, there was no personal criticism of his conduct.

The 65-year-old general, who retired early in 1995 as Canada's Chief of Defence Staff with the aim of playing a part in promoting peace and reconciliation, instead built up a reputation for patience and calmness.

He also insisted that he and his staff kept a very low profile, refusing to discuss details of his negotiations with the paramilitaries with anyone but the relevant authorities in Belfast, London and Dublin.

The IRA eventually began talks with General de Chastelain in January 2000. And he held extensive talks with the leading players on both sides, attempting, he said, to cope with the convolutions of politics and paramilitaries.

"When [Billy] Hutchinson spoke to us, we knew he was speaking to us on behalf of the UVF, when we put questions to him for the UVF, the answers, we knew, were from the UVF," he recalled.

"Martin McGuinness made the point that he represented Sinn Fein. He was very helpful in giving us, let us say, the overall republican perspective on the issues that we were talking about. But he never at any time claimed to be speaking on behalf of the IRA."

General de Chastelain laid out a basic framework of how the decommissioning process would work, with the paramilitaries either destroying their own arsenal or letting the commission do it for them. In either case, the commission had to verify the nature and quantity of the weapons destroyed.

The IRA agreed to place arms in bunkers, sealing them with concrete, a method since believed to have been used.

One line the general liked repeating was: "Nobody has been defeated. This is getting rid of arms that are no longer necessary and, in fact, the holding of which undermines the very democratic process which those ceasefires were intended to secure."

But before long the decommissioning process had become a political football in the post-Good Friday Agreement negotiations, with General de Chastelain and his commission finding themselves in a seemingly endless stop-and-start process.

Unionists accused the IRA of failing to abide by assurances they had given in the Agreement, and the Provisionals accused the Unionists of attempting to use the commission for their own political ends, stressing that the loyalist groups had not destroyed their arms.

"I think if you solve a political problem for one, you cause one somewhere else," said the general. "If I didn't like it here, I would have left a long time ago."

Decommissioning's troubled history

November 1999 IRA says it will appoint a representative to talk to General John de Chastelain's International Commission on Decommissioning.

January 2000 IRA opens talks with the commission, but General de Chastelain reports that there is no move towards decommissioning.

February 2000 Peter Mandelson, the Northern Ireland Secretary, suspends the Stormont Assembly. Four days later the IRA says it will no longer co-operate with the commission.

May 2000 IRA issues rhetorical commitment to disarm but little is forthcoming.

June 2000 Arms inspectors Cyril Ramaphosa and Martti Ahtisaari reveal they have been taken to IRA weapon dumps.

August 2001 Three members of the Provisional IRA are arrested by the police in Colombia on suspicion of training the rebel army, Farc.

October 2001 IRA undertakes first of its two historic acts of decommissioning; the second is in April the following year.

December 2001 A leading figure in the US Congress, Democrat William Delahunt, says new evidence has been uncovered linking the IRA with Farc. Colombian police find IRA training manuals.

March 2002 Break-in at the Special Branch office in the heavily guarded police complex at Castlereagh in Belfast. Republicans seen as the prime suspects.

April 2002 IRA files on senior Conservatives and others are found during searches at a house in the New Lodge area of Belfast following the Castlereagh break-in. Security sources dismiss the threat of a renewed campaign.

June 2002 The Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, attempts to intervene in sectarian fighting that has flared in east Belfast, warning that the status of ceasefires could be re-examined.

July 2002 IRA takes the unprecedented step of apologising for the murders of what it describes as "all non-combatants" during the Troubles of the past 30 years.

October 2002 Political process thrown into disarray with raids at Sinn Fein offices over an alleged spying ring at the heart of the Northern Ireland Office.

Devolved government in Northern Ireland is suspended over the alleged spy ring ­ the fourth suspension since the devolution process first started in late 1999.

Tony Blair calls for an end to the IRA saying that negotiations could not continue with them "half in, half out" of the political process.