by Blair, Tony
We were discussing how he changed and reformed the ANC from a revolutionary movement to a governing party – no easy task. They used, of course, to commit specific acts of violence, called terrorism by the apartheid regime but regarded by the ANC as a legitimate means of achieving freedom. Madiba decided they had to drop the campaign of violence, and also knew that if he approached it from the point of view of principle, he would be bitterly opposed and would divide the movement, perhaps split it. So he contrived a tactical reason for suspending it. He told the ANC cadres that he was as committed as them, but that tactically they should suspend violence for a period, so that later all options would be open to them and more achievable. Of course once it was suspended, it remained suspended in perpetuity.
Such tactical manoeuvres were the warp and woof of the Northern Ireland peace process. Again at the last minute, after the negotiation over the St Andrews declaration of October 2006, up popped the issue of what oath would be sworn by those taking office in the reconstructed Assembly and Executive. All manner of permutations were gone through to find a mutually acceptable formula. Naturally the DUP wanted a very clear commitment to the police in the oath itself. Sinn Fein didn’t like the wording and wouldn’t commit until it was clear the Executive was in being, so there was a synchronising issue as well as a language problem.
In the end they agreed a timing and, roughly, a wording, but over
the following weeks it started to fall apart. Gerry Adams had agreed to call an Ard Fheis (a council meeting of Sinn Fein) to endorse it, but only if Ian Paisley had clearly stated in advance that such an endorsement would allow the institutions to be revived. For once, roles were reversed, with Gerry Adams demanding clarity and Ian Paisley producing waffle. I then had the idea that I would reinterpret the waffle and so deliver Gerry his reassurance.
I had a Christmas holiday in Miami. The sun shone, but that was about it as far as holidaying went. Because of the time difference I had to start my calls at 5 a.m. Frequently the Paisleys would be out visiting friends so calls were missed. I took horrendous chances in what I was telling each the other had agreed to – stretching the truth, I fear, on occasions past breaking point – but I could see the whole thing collapsing because of the wording of an oath of office. Somehow, with creativity pouring out of every orifice, we got through it.
The point is you need to be nimble, flexible and innovative. I often reflect on issues like settlements, Jerusalem or refugees in the Middle East peace process; in each case, ingenuity will find a way through, but ingenuity – in abundant supply – there will have to be.
5. The conflict won’t be resolved by the parties if left to themselves. If it were possible for them to resolve it on their own, they would have done so. Ergo, they need outside help.
This third-party assistance is vital in many different ways. Obviously it can produce much of the ingenuity necessary as stated above. It can also help reassure the parties of each other’s good faith. In the Middle East, talk to any Israeli and they will say, with utter sincerity, Of course I want peace.
I remember saying to the head of Israel’s military intelligence – a man with a tough assignment – that he had to understand Palestinians didn’t believe Israel was serious about creating a Palestinian state. ‘They think you want just to swallow them up,’ I said.
‘That’s not true,’ he replied. ‘I’ll tell you a story. A guy who owns a Rottweiler goes into a bar and says, “Who owns the chihuahua dog outside?” “I do,” says someone. “Then help me,” the man says, “because your chihuahua’s killing my Rottweiler.” “That’s ridiculous,” says the chihuahua’s owner, “how can a chihuahua kill a Rottweiler?” The man replies: “He’s stuck in his throat.”’
But ask an Israeli whether the Palestinians want peace and they’ll say, ‘No. Don’t talk to us about settlements and occupation. We got out of Gaza, we took our settlers with us, and we got Hamas and rockets.’ You can play the same type of conversation back, with a Palestinian about the Israelis.
The point is the outside party do not just help negotiate and mediate: they act as a buffer, a messenger and, crucially, as a persuader of good faith in a climate usually dominated by distrust. They also help define issues and indeed turning points. Northern Ireland provided a graphic example of this. In reality, there were two distinct phases to the peace process: the first was from the Good Friday Agreement up to the suspension of the Assembly and the Executive in October 2002 over the IRA failure to decommission; the second was from the fall of David Trimble in 2003 through to May 2007. The intervening period of around a year was like an intermission, though much happened.
The first phase was the period of what we might call creative ambiguity, during which people moved slowly, warily (and occasionally not at all) from very entrenched positions. No one seriously thought that the day after the Good Friday Agreement the IRA were going to disband; they were going to wait to see if the Unionists delivered their side of the bargain, and until then the IRA would hold the use of force in reserve.
On the other hand, we had to pretend this was an orderly and structured transition. So there were fudges, things said and done that had little intellectual or political consistency except that of seeing us through each set of obstacles.
This was particularly true of relations with the Republicans. They had their history, even quasi-theology, to uphold as a revolutionary movement. They had to honour their dead and imprisoned. But they had also to conform to the language of a peace agreement they couldn’t be sure would be implemented. As with the decommissioning saga, there were a series of half-steps, all clothed in fairly obscure Republican-speak, with which they were trying to convince Unionists, without destabilising their own internal politics.
Additionally, as well as being a paramilitary force fighting the British, they were also a para-police force in Republican areas. I remember telling one of my constituents in Sedgefield about how the IRA would knee-cap drug dealers and beat up rapists, and I could tell that for the first time he might warm to the Republicans. Of course, none of this was going to stop overnight; yet none of it could possibly be
reconciled with the rule of law as set out by the Good Friday Agreement.
For a time, the creative ambiguity around all this served us well. The terrorism stopped. The bombs stopped. No British soldiers died. No police officers were assassinated. But none of this was the same as saying the normal processes of law and order now ruled Northern Ireland. This was demonstrated by the murder of Robert McCartney in January 2005. He was defending a friend who was being beaten up in a bar by IRA men, who then dragged McCartney outside and stabbed him to death.
The killing was in many ways the final turning point. His family, all Republicans, refused to be silenced, and his sisters, fiancée and friends campaigned for his murderers to be brought to justice. The IRA didn’t quite get the point and issued a statement asking, in effect, if shooting the culprits would help, but it brought to the forefront the essential decision that the IRA had had to make since the suspension of the Assembly and Executive in October 2002.
And here’s where the third party can also help. After the suspension in 2002, I went to Belfast to make the most important speech I had made on Northern Ireland since May 1997. This speech came to be known as the ‘acts of completion’ speech. Essentially I said: Creative ambiguity was our friend in the initial phase; it allowed us to get the caravan moving; it helped us round the myriad impasses in the first stages. But now it is no longer our friend; it is what is holding us back, because until it is absolutely clear that violence in whatever form will be given up for good – and if it is, power will be shared – then we can’t make further progress. In place of ‘creative ambiguity’ there now had to be ‘acts of completion’ to demonstrate beyond doubt that the past was behind us.
It was a carefully worded speech, and it was also powerful because it was plain and unadorned. From then on, my constant refrain to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness was that the
IRA no longer served any purpose but that of sustaining rejectionist Unionism – they were now stymieing the very thing they said they wanted, namely power-sharing.
The same, of course, is true of the militant wing of Hamas today. They are the best friends of the ‘one-state’ Israelis. Their adherence to violence provides not the justification for negotiation, but the excuse for exclusion.
However, spotting this, defining it in a persuasive way and using that definition to move the process on is something that often comes easier from a third party than from either of the main players.
6. Realise that for both sides resolving the conflict is a journey, a process, not an event. Each side takes time to leave the past behind. A conflict is not simply a disagreement characterised by violence. It has a history and it creates a culture, with traditions, ritual and doctrine. It has a mind and soul as well as a body. It is enduring, and it is deep.
Changing all of that is an undertaking of immense ambition and intense introspection. People can change, but people are also very set in their ways. The ‘ways’ have to be ‘unset’ so that the change can progress. The first time I met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, they were not just hesitant or distrustful, they were sitting down with the enemy. For countless meetings at first, Martin would not simply want to negotiate, most of all he would want to explain his side’s purpose, its pain, its anger and its expectations. It took time before he came to regard me as a partner and even a friend. So if it was like that for him, imagine what it was like for an ordinary IRA volunteer, perhaps one personally abused by a soldier or RUC officer, or whose family had suffered and who had been born and bred to believe it was an injustice deliberately perpetrated by evil-minded people.
The two sides rarely see each other’s pain. Even the most progressive Israelis I know can seldom understand the humiliation of a middle-aged Palestinian man being searched by a young Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in front of his family (and let us assume not always with exemplary politeness). Palestinians will justly mourn the latest innocent Palestinian victims of an Israeli raid, but find it really hard to sympathise with the parent of an Israeli child blown up in a suicide attack.
Then there are attitudes which, to us, seem absurd, comic even, but to them are defining. I remember before the 1997 election a leading Orangeman describing me as unfit to be prime minister because my wife was a painted jezebel who claimed her allegiance to Rome. When I first heard it, I puzzled over it, misunderstanding Rome as the seat of the Italian government rather than the Vatican and wondering what on earth Cherie had been saying to Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister.
The notion that there is ever going to be one moment in time when peace occurs is an error. The peace has to mature, put down its own roots to displace the roots of conflict, and allow over time a different set of attitudes to take shape and make their impact.
Sometimes I used to try to describe it by this analogy: it was like a car driving away from a crash. The sight of the wreckage does not disappear straight away. It grows more faint over time. There is a constant look in the rear-view mirror even while the eyes strain to see the road in front. The passengers are shaken up, and the memory of what has happened competes for space in their minds with the hope that better times are ahead. There is no immediate release from the pain; it continues far and deep and only gradually diminishes before eventually disappearing.
What this implies for the process is that you have to work at persuading each side that the other’s faltering steps as they travel the journey are not born of a lack of good faith or a change of mind about peace, but are a natural consequence of the experience they have been through. It is an unavoidable feature of resolving the conflict.
7. The path to peace will be deliberately disrupted by those who believe the conflict must continue. Be prepared for such disruption. Do not be deflated by it. People often forget that the worst terrorist attack in the history of the Troubles came after the Good Friday Agreement, not before it. Thankfully it was also the last.
On Saturday 15 August 1998 at 3.10 p.m. a massive bomb went off in the market town of Omagh and twenty-nine people died. Many others were badly injured. Still more will bear the mental scars for life. Among the dead was a woman pregnant with twins, whose mother and daughter also died, and four youngsters from Spain and their escort who were on an exchange visit. The bomb was the work of the dissident group the Real IRA, formed in protest at Sinn Fein’s embrace of the peace process. In the event the Catholics killed outnumbered the Protestants. The terrorists had given a warning, but for the wrong place, and the police had unwittingly moved the crowd right into the path of the bomb.
I was on holiday in the south-west of France at the time, in a little village called Miradoux. We were staying with our friends Maggie and Alan, he having been secretary to the PLP and she an old friend who gave Cherie and me a billet in her house in Stoke Newington when we searched for our first home as a newly married couple.
I was informed around 3.30 p.m. By 5 p.m. the savagery of the attack was clear. I gave a short press statement on the steps of the village church in a suit borrowed from one of my security people, my emotions a mixture of shock and anxiety as to the consequences for the process.
The next morning I went to Northern Ireland and visited the injured. Even now I cannot think of it without tears. I met a girl who had lost her sight but was determined to make the best of her life, as she later proved, and I met the father of the pregnant woman. If the families had been angry or taken it out on me – ‘If you hadn’t started this, they would still be alive’, a sentiment voiced by some – I could have kept my composure; what completely broke me down was their quiet dignity, their limitless sadness for the loved ones they would never see or hold or speak to again.
Even at that point of supreme human tragedy brought about by evil beyond understanding, I had to think politically. We were faced with a choice: either to throw our hands up in horror and say, ‘These people will never make peace’, or to use the horror as the reason to go on, to say, ‘These people want this process to stop, and our response is to drive it faster and further.’
In the event, and to the great credit of all (helped by another presidential visit by Bill Clinton), the key participants in the process chose the latter course. What could have been a turning back, was a turning point. The Real IRA never recovered. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness condemned the attacks unequivocally. David Trimble rose to the occasion. And most of all, so did the people. One of the bereaved said to me, even as he mourned the loss of his wife: ‘Don’t be put off, carry on, and make my wife’s memorial a lasting peace in Northern Ireland so that no one ever again feels as I do this day.’
This attitude is in contrast to the Middle East where, unfortunately, the opposite usually happens when a terrorist attack occurs. The response there is often to clamp down in a way that alienates the peacemakers as well as the terrorists, and to see violence by a faction as showing the futility of trying to make peace with those not part of the faction. The problem is the moment such a course is taken, the keys to the process are put in the hands of the terrorists. Their purpose is to lock up the process. That’s the sick rationale behind the terror. Once you concede that terror does indeed lead to possession of the keys, they’re in charge. Keep the keys firmly in the hands of the peacemakers.
Terror is the starkest example of the extremes trying to block progress, but pressure to lock up the process also comes from perfectly respectable and democratic elements on both sides who accuse their own party of selling out. David Trimble was subject to an unrelenting barrage from those in the DUP and elsewhere who saw each concession as a betrayal, and the process as a whole as a sell-out of their community. To the outsider, this seems unreasonable and unpersuasive; not so to the insider. David, I think, took the view that I did too little to assist him; I took the view he never quite stood up for the positive, tending rather to share and sympathise with the Unionist propensity to see plots and conspir
acies against them. But he had an extraordinarily difficult hand to play, and if he didn’t always play it as I would have done, he played it with a courage that rightly won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
8. Leaders matter. Any peace process calls for political risks, even a sense of political adventure and certainly political courage, sometimes even personal courage. The quality of leadership matters; it is a sine qua non.
The point is: the easiest thing for the parties in any conflict to do is hold firm to established positions. An ideology, even a sort of theology, will have grown up around the conflict, reflecting the partisan nature of it. Everything is seen through the prism constructed by such partisan ideology. To hold to it is to tread a familiar path, which may lead nowhere, but whose surface is well worn, whose landmarks produce instant recognition, and where the leaders’ followers feel most comfortable.
By contrast, like Moses with the Israelites, striking out in a new direction whose destination is uncertain, whose obstacles are formidable and unfamiliar and when at least some of the followers will accuse the leader of betrayal, is tough; and it requires the quality that motivates the best political leadership: a desire to do good.
We were very lucky in the quality of leadership we had. David Trimble was instrumental. He began it when it seemed impossible, kept at it when it was most difficult, and paid the ultimate political price (though I have no doubt that his reputation in history is fully secure).