A Journey (34 page)

So the small things matter because in the minds of the key parties, they often loom large with a perspective we can’t always grasp.

4. Be creative. Use the big or small things, singly or in combination, and if necessary invent a few more, to unblock progress. Here is where Jonathan particularly was brilliantly inventive. At times the impasse seemed insurmountable. Right at the end we had set a deadline for reconstituting the Executive on 26 March 2007. So many deadlines had come and gone that they were a devalued currency. They were better than no currency, however, and although they were always rejected by the parties, to my mind they always served some sort of purpose; but this time the Irish side put their foot down in unison. No budging from this deadline. We had been three years or more trying to get Ian Paisley into a deal and it was now or never, do or die, etc. So 26 March had to be it. At the last minute, as I had suspected might happen, Ian Paisley told me he couldn’t carry his party for March. It had to be May. The Irish were sceptical. Sinn Fein were furious. Everything teetered on the brink.

I thought it crazy to bring the whole thing down for the sake of two months. Jonathan came up with the idea of giving the DUP their two months, but asking them in return to agree to a face-to-face meeting between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, who had never met before. We made the offer. The DUP accepted and then Gerry Adams went along with it.

Then – and yes, it really does come to this – we had to negotiate not just the choreography of the actual meeting but its furniture. It came down to the shape of the table. The DUP wanted the sides to sit opposite each other to show they were still adversaries. Sinn Fein wanted everyone to sit next to each other to show they were partners and therefore now equals. Robert Hannigan, a great young official who had taken over as the main Number 10 person, then supplied the final piece of creativity: he suggested a diamond-shaped table so they could sit both opposite and with each other. The deal was done.

In the creativity, you cannot always think of everything, but you should be wary of doing anything that forfeits trust.

By the way, trust, as a political concept, is multilayered. At one level no one trusts politicians, and politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand it be done. Of course, where the line is drawn is crucial, and is not in any way an exact science. (And don’t get too affronted by it; we all make these decisions every day in our business and personal lives.) Without operating with some subtlety at this level, the job would be well-nigh impossible.

But the public are quite discerning, and discriminate between politicians they don’t trust at a superficial level, i.e. pretty much all of them, and those they don’t trust at a more profound level. This level of trust is about whether the public believe that the political leader is trying to do his or her best for them, with whatever mistakes or compromises, Machiavellian or otherwise, are made. This is the level of trust that really matters.

I heard an interesting example of this once from, of all people, Nelson Mandela. Mandela – or Madiba as he is also called (his clan name) – is a fascinating study, not because he’s a saint but because he isn’t. Or rather he is, but not in the sense that he can’t be as fly as hell when the occasion demands. I bet Gandhi was the same.

I always got on well with Madiba, partly I think because I treated him as a political leader and not a saint. He knew exactly how he was used by people – including me – to boost their credibility at certain points, and provided he liked you, he was totally prepared to do it. The most fascinating thing about him was his shrewdness. He was wily, clever as in the French word
habile
, smart and completely capable of manipulating a situation when it suited his higher purpose.

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.