Sinn Fein has stepped up its pressure on the British and Irish governments to ensure that an Assembly executive involving Sinn Fein is speedily formed ahead of IRA decommissioning.
Sinn Fein's two most senior politicians, Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness, from separate platforms again rejected Mr David Trimble's assertion that implicit in the Belfast Agreement is a demand for some prior IRA decommissioning.
The North's First Minister, Mr Trimble, in response accused the Sinn Fein leadership of using "Nazi propaganda tactics" to create a false impression that the agreement did not demand paramilitary disarmament.
The Sinn Fein president, Mr Adams, said yesterday that the agreement, including Sinn Fein holding ministerial office, was "now a matter of implementation, not interpretation, unless the two governments acquiesce to the unionist game plan and abandon the Good Friday agreement".
And the North's Deputy First Minister, Mr Seamus Mallon, adopting a position diametrically opposed to Mr Trimble's, has also stated that Sinn Fein cannot be excluded from taking its two ministerial positions on the executive.
The statements from Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness follow the IRA's New Year message which accused unionists of seeking to erode the Belfast Agreement.
In what many unionists perceived as a threat, the IRA, in an implicit reference to decommissioning, said that "old preconditions collapsed" the previous IRA ceasefire of 1994. The British government should not succumb to "a unionist veto", the IRA said.
Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness took up similar themes yesterday. ein president In an article in the Irish News, Mr Adams said the Ulster Unionist Party leader, Mr Trimble, in particular was using the decommissioning issue to delay the implementation of the agreement.
"David Trimble has skilfully exercised a veto which he has used to drive a coach and horses through the letter and spirit of the agreement," he said. Unionists were seeking to exclude Sinn Fein from "its rightful positions on the executive".
"Mr Trimble is deliberately seeking to delay the implementation of the agreement. Indeed, there is an increasing number of republicans and nationalists who are coming round to the view that he is seeking the collapse of the agreement.
"There is nothing in the agreement which requires the IRA to decommission before Sinn Fein, or the other parties with the required mandate, can take up ministerial positions, which is the entitlement of their respective electorates," added Mr Adams.
Mr Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein MP for Mid Ulster, said Mr Trimble had "lost the argument on decommissioning". The present difficulty in the political process arose because Mr Trimble had "spent the better part of last year and the beginning of this year in an attempt to renegotiate the Good Friday agreement", he said at a press conference in Dublin.
He did not believe the peace process would collapse, but there was an urgent need for the British and Irish governments to "inject a new momentum and a new dynamic into the peace process".
In an earlier interview, Mr McGuinness said Gen John de Chastelain's decommissioning body was satisfied that Sinn Fein was meeting its requirement under the agreement to use its influence to persuade the IRA to decommission by May 2000.
On yesterday's E News at One on RTE Radio 1, Mr Seamus Mallon said the executive would not be set up without Sinn Fein because it would go against the "inclusiveness" of the Belfast Agreement and "because we would not allow it to happen".
Mr Mallon said the establishment of North-South bodies and the executive was an extremely complex matter yet to be worked out, but it would not be worked out to the exclusion of Sinn Fein.
Insisting that Sinn Fein had fulfilled all its responsibilities under the agreement, Mr McGuinness said yesterday it contained a form of words which "makes it incumbent on everybody to bring about an executive and an all-Ireland ministerial council without preconditions of any description.
"Anybody who knows anything about the peace process with the exception of the Ulster Unionist leadership accepts the Sinn Fein interpretation of the spirit and the letter of the Good Friday agreement." In turn, Mr Trimble last night accused Sinn Fein of dishonouring the agreement. "It was Josef Goebbels who once said, `If you tell a big enough lie often enough, then it will be believed'. Sinn Fein/IRA are spinning the lie that there is nothing in the agreement which requires the IRA to decommission before Sinn Fein can take up ministerial positions in the Northern Ireland government. This is absolute rubbish," he said.