Ex-negotiator stresses dialogue key to ending violent conflicts with terrorists
A vehicle that was hi-jacked burns in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast, Northern Ireland, Monday, March, 30, 2009. Northern Ireland police say suspected IRA dissidents have hijacked and burned vehicles in Catholic parts of Belfast and left suspicious objects near two of the city's police stations.
The very notion of talking to terrorists is, at first blush, morally repugnant. Moreover, it seems intuitively wrong.
Democracies shouldn't reward violence by negotiating with terrorists. Bargaining with them implicitly legitimizes their demands and validates their tactic of achieving political change by murdering and kidnapping people.
It also begs the question: What rational dialogue can you have with zealots whose modus operandi is to plant bombs in public markets, subways and schools and massacre people in churches, temples and mosques?
And yet, as veteran British negotiator Jonathan Powell points out in his arresting account-cum-primer, Western governments talk to terrorists all the time. Often as not they officially deny it, even as they're actively doing it.
And Powell makes a good case for their continuing to do so.
His credentials for writing about mediating conflicts between governments and terrorists are solid. He runs a London, England-based charity for negotiation and mediation and spent a decade as one of Britain's lead negotiators with the Irish Republican Army.
He draws heavily on his experience in achieving peace in Northern Ireland, but he also explores the dynamics of numerous successful and failed negotiations of the last several decades.
Powell's clinching argument for engaging with the likes of the Taliban, al-Qaida or Hamas is pragmatic.
"The absolute moral arguments against talking to terrorists don't really stand up, and they certainly fall away, in the face of the practical, if distasteful, need to talk to terrorists if we are to stop them killing," he writes.
He draws on and analyzes both the successes and failures of negotiations in Sri Lanka (the Sinhalese government versus the Tamil Tigers), Spain (the government versus Basque-separatist group ETA), South Africa (the apartheid regime versus Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress) and Colombia (the government versus left-wing rebel group FARC). He also presents examples (almost case studies) and lessons from negotiations in Mozambique, Angola, El Salvador and Indonesia's Aceh province.
His overarching purpose is educational. He offers this volume and his experience in Northern Ireland as lessons that "could be applied elsewhere."
"If people are going to make mistakes negotiating with terrorists, they should at least make their own, new, mistakes, rather than repeating those already made by others."
To that end he devotes several chapters on how-to topics -- how to start a negotiation, close a negotiated deal, implement a settlement, employ third-party mediators and bring the public on board with a negotiated settlement -- with illustrations drawn from recent history.
His accounts of the genesis and progress of negotiations in various geopolitical conflicts are, for the most part, deftly written.
However, he has an unfortunate tendency to pile his examples on, one on top of the other. He segues from one conflict to the next, often in the same multi-page paragraph. The result is a tedious or confusing narrative that blunts the point he's trying to make.
Often real progress in negotiations between mortal enemies occurs when the scheduled meetings are over, the parties relax and let down their guard over a bottle of scotch or even a cup of tea, and trade snippets of their personal lives.
Time and again it's these informal exchanges that forge bonds of trust critical to a negotiated end to political violence.
It seems that talk, even the seemingly most innocuous talk, remains our best remedy for violence.
Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.
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