BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Irish Republican Army (IRA) announced 28 July, that it had ordered its forces to stop their violent resistance against Britain. This could have important implications for the quest for peace and stability throughout the Middle East, which in turn would help reduce the global terror problem.
I’ve spent my whole life hearing “Belfast to Beirut” used as a synonym for the senseless, destructive political violence that plagued both regions, and a symbol of our common inhumanity. So it’s nice, for a change, to sit in Beirut and hear good news again from Belfast.
It would be equally nice if all concerned in the West and the Middle East would muster the courage, humility and determination to apply some of the same principles of peace-making in Northern Ireland to the confrontations and conflicts in this region. This could apply in at least three important areas in the Middle East: domestic military conflicts or political tensions within countries (Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, and others); the Palestinian-Israeli and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; and the standoff between the U.S., U.K. and some other Western states and leading Arab Islamist political and/or resistance groups (Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others).
I see three broad areas where Northern Ireland holds lessons for achieving a permanent, durable negotiated peace in the Middle East, based on my discussions with individuals who have engaged in negotiations in both areas. These are the need for: a) an honest, patient, fair third party mediator (the U.S. is the only option); b) decisive, courageous, self-confident leadership among the principal warring parties and mediators (we’re all graded in the D+/C- range on that one); and, c) an inclusive negotiating process that allows all legitimate parties to sit at the table and help craft a permanent peace accord (nowhere in sight on most counts).
Yet, occupation, subjugation, resistance, and terror are ending in Northern Ireland. This suggests — once again — that terror and political violence are sparked by historical realities, and they can be stopped by other acts of sensible history and wise diplomacy. In Northern Ireland, the violence is ending thanks to a sensible, patient, equitable and inclusive negotiation that has brought out the best in all the key players, including the republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland, and the British and American governments. They all deserve a tip of the cap to acknowledge their brave, sensible policies, after many years of obdurate violence and short-sighted stupidity.
To find out more about how the Northern Ireland experience could help us resolve conflicts in the Middle East, I consulted this week with a British expert in psychology, conflict resolution and group political dynamics who has worked in depth on such issues in both regions. Gabrielle Rifkind, a British group analyst, psychotherapist and specialist in conflict resolution, is founder of the Middle East Policy Initiative Forum in London and a human security consultant to the respected Oxford Research Group. What did she think was the main message that we should grasp from the happy turn of events in Northern Ireland?
“The most important message of Northern Ireland, and it was learned through bitter experience, is that you must include all the parties in the process — whether you like it or not, whatever their faith — you must get them all around the table and hear the different voices. You have to listen to begin with, and keep listening for as long as it takes. It’s a very long-term process before you can sign an agreement. The Good Friday Agreement took one day to sign, but it required a huge amount of preparation that involved groups of people that were all deaf, who didn’t know how to listen to each other. They had to learn about ways of engaging.”
This lesson has not been learned in the Middle East, she says, citing how the Palestinian-Israeli Camp David summit in 2000 tried to solve the conflict in a week or two, with a glaring “asymmetry of power that denies the process of seriously engaging in something much more complex, something that takes account of all the different groups.”
Even if we magically reach an agreement today in Israel and Palestine, she says, that would only be conflict management, not conflict resolution. All those groups who have been excluded and have not been part of the process will actually work in the end to undermine it. “It’s only by finding a way to give voice to all these groups, because they have a legitimacy and represent huge numbers of people; and, until we take them on board we are unlikely to resolve the conflict,” she argues.
Why did the British government finally engage politically with all the groups in Northern Ireland, including the IRA, whom it had fought for decades and branded as terrorists?
“Failure,” she replied quickly, “the failure of this whole idea in human nature that you can impose a solution on others. You have to engage people to reach a solution. We tried violence and it failed. We had Bloody Sunday, we used violence and repression, and we only got more violence. When (mediator and former U.S. Senator) George Mitchell was first invited into the process he quickly found out that the only way to advance was to include all the voices, and ultimately the British government engaged the IRA and the others.
“You have to engage people in the end. Even if your ideas are good, as may be the case with the United States today, trying to impose democracy and promote peace in the Middle East. Unless she engages people on the ground and listens to them and makes them feel like it’s their idea, and that it organically emerged from them, people won’t sign up for it. When there’s an asymmetry of power, telling other people about how they should behave will not succeed.”
The Northern Ireland experience, among others, she says, points the way to successful conflict resolution through patient, inclusive negotiations rather than a stronger party dictating demands or making threats.
“If you’re really serious about resolving conflicts, you do not come with solutions. You create conditions in which you can discuss the ideas you have about where you want to get. You create the environment in which people take ownership for the ideas themselves. This is antithetical to American and even many British government policies. There is a profound belief that Western society is more civilized and understands these things better, and therefore can tell other people how to be and how to behave, without owning up to the hypocrisy in all of that, or to how you in the Middle East see it in terms of the double dealing that is going on,” she says.
After 36 years of recent violent conflict, more than 3500 dead, and tens of thousands of others injured and stressed by the war in Northern Ireland, wisdom, realism and humility have prevailed over stupidity, romanticism, and arrogance.
Anybody in the Middle East watching all this?
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 31 July 2005
Word Count: 1,170
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