Thank you very much. I'm here to introduce our speaker for the evening and I guess actually given the theme, the pursuit of peace,
it is somewhat appropriate to have the Lester Pearson chair introduce because, as I recall, he was interested in peace.
Now I have several things to say. I would be brief.
First of all, I'd like to congratulate the organisers of this event in behalf of myself, but also my department.
The focus of Oxford, rightly or wrongly, in the general area facing conflict over the last eight hundred years or so,
has been more on conflict than resolution.
More on war than on peace. More on states.
Ban on people. And looking at my discipline, which is international relations,
that focuses quite consistent with what I'm used to, the traditions of international relations.
And by the way, I'm not contesting the fact those traditions embody worthwhile purposes in their own right.
But there remains the question,
thinking about this concept of whether the university is contributing as much as it might to the other side of the conversation.
Why do we have to say about peace resolution and people?
So this meeting is a very good thing. Not only in itself, but as the beginning.
Well, not necessarily the beginning, but shall we say, an acceleration of a more serious exploration of peace.
Now, by this time, you may have the impression that I may have chosen to speak for myself rather than to introduce the speaker.
I know that is not true. I'm not here to decline.
I'm merely here. It is my honour to be here to introduce our distinguished, distinguished speaker, Jonathan Karl.
What can I say about this? Would bore him, but it may not for you.
He was an accomplished career as a diplomat,
including responsibility in a lot of delicate negotiations related to conflict prevention and and the management processes
to force the resolution of potential conflict responsibility in negotiations leading to the handover of Hong Kong.
I think going back to my on my previous career,
when I used to do Soviet foreign policy negotiations in UCSC contract context on human rights negotiations with that animal that no longer exists.
But soon, again, the Soviet Union. I'm sorry.
The reunification of Germany and then later.
Not that this is necessarily a contractual relationship, a major role in U.K. diplomacy with respect to the United States.
But all of those things, while very impressive and I mean that are not, I think why we asked him to be here.
He also served as chief of staff to Prime Minister Blair for the full ten years of Mr. Blair's tenure in office as prime minister.
I have to say, looking at it from the outside has to be a remarkable achievement in its own right.
But that is also not, in my view, why he is here.
I think what brought him to us. In addition to his prior history in Oxford, of course,
was his role as principal negotiator on Northern Ireland for the same period where he guided a seemingly endless and apparently hopeless conflict to,
one hopes, an enduring peace embraced by the parties to that process.
He has written eloquently about this process in a book.
Am I allowed to advertise? OK, great hatred.
Little Room in Peace in Northern Ireland, published in 2008.
I'm sure it is available at Blackwells in paperback.
OK. We are. Very young.
In other words. And to cut it short. And moving on.
He is a distinguished practitioner of these serious pursuit of peace, which is, as you know, the theme of our conference.
It is a great honour to meet him and to have him with us.
And please join me, join me in welcoming Jonathan.
Well, thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And it's a pleasure to be at the college of my former boss, Stabler, who's here and indeed this.
He got here richer and he's now pursuing through his Santa Fe Foundation.
First, I've come to praise you for this initiative because I don't think it really is worth
bringing together different disciplines to try and work at conflict resolution.
When I joined the Foreign Office three decades ago, we were given absolutely no training at all in negotiation or conflict resolution,
and I didn't spend a great part of my career trying to do it. We wrote to each other lots of papers after the event on negotiation with the Russians,
on negotiating with the Chinese and did negotiate with Americans, which was the worst of all.
They were the most difficult. But we never really studied it.
And I think it's interesting that around the world, people are trying to bring together disciplines to look at this.
If you look at the Harvard Negotiation Project, for example, that brought together psychologists,
lawyers, people, international relations, it's a really very interesting initiative.
I'm part of a small group of pretentiously called the Global Leadership Council on Conflict Resolution, organised by the WEF in Davos.
And we had a rather interesting meeting which had people you'd expect, like Bertie Ahern and the secretary of the Nobel Peace PRISE Committee,
but had trouble adjusting to a Japanese academic and a psychologist, New York, who specialised in hostage negotiations for the police.
What was interesting to me was how so many of the skills that are required in this sort of thing that I used to
do still do a bit applied equally if you can't get a hostage out of the embrace of a criminal in New York City.
It's also interesting because conflict resolution has become privatised like so much else in life
as the U.S. gets weaker and as conflicts are increasingly intra country rather than into country.
There's been a whole growth of private diplomacy bodies that try and deal with conflict resolution and sending video to Rome,
of course, that played such a role. Mozambicans, too, has roles across the world.
Toledo, the sorry group in Helsinki, and there's a group in Geneva called the Humanitarian Dialogue Centre that I work with,
you know, used to work with, which is really a very distinguished an amnesty, which is very effective.
But it's not, as you told us, which is very effective at getting into these complex in finding the insurgent group,
getting their confidence and then getting them to talk to governments.
And what it does need is some theoretical underpinning because it does and it could do it.
And people who did some thinking about the lessons you can learn from some conflicts, but other conflicts.
But my experience, which may be relevant to you or interesting to you, is in Northern Ireland,
which I spent 10 years wrestling with, and I say those paperbacks for sale on a three, four, two or four.
So I I urge you to go and buy it nice and cheap, even students who can afford it.
And one of the first things to take care to me, dealing with northern islands from a interdisciplinary nature was the importance of history.
The place seemed to be drowning in it. And I started dealing with Northern Ireland and I used to joke detainees that if
you ended up meeting with any of the Northern Irish parties after only 30 minutes,
you'd have only got to 60 in 89 and would still be three more centuries of complaints and worries to get through before you got to the current day.
But the incident that really brought home to me the importance of history and the potential
misunderstanding of it was the first time we had Atomism McGuinness come to Number 10 Downing Street.
And it was it was a big event. No more TV cameras in the street than they had been when we won the election in May of that year.
We tried to put off the meeting as long as we could because it wasn't a very attractive political proposition.
And Alistair Campbell, I remember it sent me a memo saying we should move the Christmas tree because it's just before
Christmas because it looked much too festive to terrorists in front of the Christmas tree.
But we left that and that was McGuinness came in and they were there and they were nervous.
They walked down the long corridor in No.10 and into the cabinet room at the end.
And Adams made a rather feeble joke about the portraits and all the prime ministers who failed to solve the Irish question.
And they stood their chairs on the other side of the cabinet table from us, touching the backs of them,
the windows over the garden behind them, and began to try and break the I said.
So this was where the damage was done then? And we were aghast.
And I said, yes, you do. Mortars landed just behind you. The windows came in.
My brother happened to be sitting there with John Major meeting about Iraq.
Paul Domeij under the table. Four of overweight policemen came in waving their pistols.
And he looked absolutely horrified. So, no, I didn't mean that. And this is where the treaty was signed between Collins and Lloyd George.
Well, the trouble started. So we're just on a completely different historical page.
She's white, working interdisciplinary. I want to talk a little bit about not the Northern Ireland negotiations themselves so much as
whether there are lessons from the Northern Ireland negotiations for other conflict resolution.
The first thing to say, I think, is that the conflicts in Northern Ireland for sui generous,
the agreement we reached, the Good Friday Agreement was also to be generous. You couldn't take a Good Friday agreement and apply somewhere else.
Even the power sharing advice would not really work in another situation.
And the agreement in Northern Ireland, if you look at it carefully, is really an agreement to disagree.
The unionist still wants the United Kingdom and the nationalists and Republicans still want a united Ireland.
They didn't agree on the substance. They agreed they pursue their aims by political means and not by other means.
If you dig away at the debate what the real bargain in the end was,
was nationalists or Republicans accepting consent that it was the people of Northern Ireland who decide its future.
And the Republicans nationalists gaining the ending of the Union speech to the orange car can no longer be safe to stop change that.
No one on come common warm hands. The Catholics, in David Campbell's words, in his Nobel Peace prise speech rather than a Congress.
But I do think there are lessons. Have a super generous note on this rather complex from the cul de sacs.
We went down the mistakes we made and from our successes in negotiating.
It is interesting to see people now from as far away as the Philippines or Pakistan going
to Northern Ireland to see what lessons they can learn and experience that in the same
way that people from Northern Ireland went to South Africa to see what they could learn
from the South African peace negotiation when they were trying to reach their own peace.
And I think it does matter because people tend to get very bound up in their own conflict and they can't see outside it.
They get very depressed. I never saw that. Good for them to go and see.
There are other conflicts that have been resolved and other people who have been in the same sort of tunnel and broken out of it.
So I think there are lessons that can be learnt from Northern Ireland. When I read it to my book, after I left number 10,
I went back through my diaries for the period and they very kindly allowed
me to read all the government papers for the ten years we've been in office.
There's one thing that jumped out to the pages, too, in terms of the lesson to learn from Northern Ireland.
That was the importance of process. You have no process at all.
You have a vacuum and the vacuum is soon filled by violence. We do have a process.
There's reason to hope. I would say the process is people can believe at some stage he'll be a resolution.
So I think above all else, what you have to do in a conflict and get a process in place.
The Middle East is an interesting example. There's actually this problem most of us could probably write on a piece of paper what
the outcome of an eventual peace agreement in the Middle East will be in terms of land,
certainly, probably in terms of refugees and even in terms of Jerusalem itself.
So we have a solution. The trouble is, there's no process to get us from here to a solution lies.
And Shimon Peres is always the master of the one liner, summed it up rather nicely in saying the good news is there's light at the end of the tunnel.
And the bad news is there's no tunnel. And it is actually a problem of patience.
My second general lesson, I think, would be what I call the bicycle theory.
Once you got a process going, for goodness sake, then let the thing fall over.
Just keep that bicycle rolling along, however slow it is, how painful it is.
Always keep the bicycle moving. It doesn't mean you have to do political pain as you go along.
For us, the release of the terrorist prisoners in Northern Ireland was a very painful thing to do.
We were highly criticised for it by the Conservative Party and of course, by unions in Northern Ireland.
But I know that if we hadn't done it, the peace process would have unravelled and collapsed.
We had to absorb that pain later on.
And very personally for me was the northern bank robbery in 2004.
I'd actually arrived in Belfast that morning for talks of Adams McGuinness in the monastery.
I got off the plane.
The Northern Ireland office official took me to one side and said that the biggest ever bank robbery in British history had happened.
The dogs on the street knew was the IRA that had done it.
We couldn't tell anyone because the police haven't announced that he wouldn't announce it to later.
And I personally thought, like getting back on the plane and going straight back to London.
And I decided that actually the only sensible thing to do was to carry on with the talks, to proceed, not to let that bicycle stop.
So you have to put aside your personal concerns, your personal frustrations and keep that bicycle moving.
My third lesson, I think, is about breakthrough agreements.
You get a breakthrough agreement like the Good Friday Agreement, you're exhausted and three days nights, no sleep.
You have a feeling before you finally got to agreement new lead. The danger is that no one does anything.
And that agreement collapses because agreements on the answer to the problem.
Agreement is a piece of paper. It doesn't actually build the trust between unreconciled peoples.
The real work should actually stop. Once you've got a breakthrough agreement, people shouldn't go away and deserted and leave it alone.
Nine years after the Good Friday Agreement until we got the parties into government together and overnight.
And you see the same sort of thing happening, for example, with Oslo, those where you had a breakthrough on Middle East.
Everyone had euphoria.
Palestinians were celebrating on the streets, but they were made any effort to sell it to the Israeli people, try to implement it.
Vaughn gave up on that stage and you said on level two, went back into intifada.
And the rest is history. You see the same also in Spain, actually, with the Spanish ceasefire.
ETA about five years ago. We go now.
Everything that fantastic was going to work. But having got the agreement there, having that State Farm minister having made his statement,
no one did anything a big agenda that was really going to be enforced.
The to bomb and things began to unravel again. So for me.
The important thing to understand is peace is not some event. It's not a piece of paper. It's process.
And it takes time to build that trust to make it really work.
There are lots of lessons, I think, in terms of just techniques of managing conflict resolution in Northern Ireland.
We had to resort to what I would call constructive ambiguity.
That is where you can't make a agreement quite reach where the two sides are too far apart to bridge that gap.
And you come up with words that mean one thing to one side. Another thing to another, which we did on the decommissioning.
For example, we put in words that meant different things, the unionists than the Republicans.
And that was because we could have sat there for another 10 years and they still wouldn't have agreed on that point.
But the trouble with constructive ambiguity is that it begins to unravel. People begin to question it.
People begin to say the reason we agreed to X or Y and we tried from 1998 right
through to 2003 to make this thing work on the basis of constructive ambiguity.
And we lost your support. And of course, the support for the agreement fell from just over half to less than a third.
In the end, we decided we had to force the issue. We couldn't let that constructive ambiguity go on any longer.
And Tony Blair went to make a speech at the Belfast Harbour Commissioner's office in which he called on the IRA for acts of completion.
He said they had to choose between the Armalite and the ballot box. You couldn't have the ambiguity anymore.
We were nervous because we were worried, even at that stage,
that the IRA would go back to violence, that this would force them out of the peace process.
We sat I sat nervously by my telephone about three days later and called me saying it's a good speech.
Would I drop to apply for it? It struck me as a bit later. But the so I did it by Republicans speaking.
I was absolutely amazed when he delivered it word for word, including saying he could envisage the end of the IRA.
But actually was a very brave and wise thing of him to do because what he managed to do are responding in that way is to get over that
difficult moment where you have to make take the ambiguity out of it with the ambiguities become destructive and make the thing clear.
The similar problem in Cyprus, incidentally, in the last negotiation in terms of constructive ambiguity,
that got very damaging indeed, technically also as the deadlines can be crucial.
Overstate the John Major made it, by the way, John Major deserves considerable credit for the effort he put into Northern Ireland peace
process when the IRA tried to kill him only two months into his prime ministership.
He really did, for no political gain, make a big effort.
So I think he made a mistake in terms of trying to drag the thing out. He would never quite get the peace process going off the ceasefire.
And the IRA began to believe there was never going to be a process in which they could join.
So we very deliberately, when we came in in 97, said a clear deadline after a ceasefire by which they could enter into the talks.
Mean a very classic deadline for the end of the talks, which is the talks the last one year from when we come into Panopto be concluded by Easter 98,
as you might imagine, as we came closer and closer to Easter 98. There was no agreement.
People called on us to break the deadline to give up on the deadline. We fought very hard about it.
We decided you had to insist on a deadline or the talks to just go on forever. You'd lose the Republicans.
They would feel that they messed around forever, had to force the issue to make people reach agreement.
And it worked in that case because they came to an agreement because of the deadline.
We then tried to use deadlines repeatedly afterwards from 99 onwards.
And as we sailed through each of the deadlines about achieving anything, we lost. Ability.
But we came back to it again in two thousand and six.
It's an andrews' agreement. We actually try to make people believe we really would drive that car off the wall.
We passed a law. Made it clear everything would collapse. Certain days in November.
And that's to be in agreement. And they actually believed us again about the deadline. And it worked to bring about an agreement.
And the unions in particular decided to pay him like mad about what we call they called forcing house talks.
We took him on a tour of pretty much all of the state, the homes of England, Wales and Scotland,
to try and take them away from their constituencies and force them to focus on reaching an agreement.
And it can work quite effectively if you make them.
Well, they always do when they come to these talks as they come and they actually come back and hopeful positions been taken before.
So, for example, when they came to Western Paku, they came to Leeds Castle.
They pulled back from that quite forward and positions that look quite close to each other as we went into the talks.
But once you've got them in that building, you can build up momentum.
You can build a sort of psychology that gets people into trying to reach agreement.
And it's really worth trying to do it.
The most successful example, I guess, was George Mitchell, who took part in '99 after the agreement had happened, hadn't been enforced.
He took me to Winfield House, the American ambassador's residence in London,
locked them up there with none of their supporters, just the leaders I managed to get them to into agreement.
So that's tricky. They're taking people away is worth worth trying.
A lot of what we tried to do in Northern Ireland's local choreography or sequencing, and neither side wanted to go first.
The unions didn't want to go into government with the IRA still existing with the Republicans having an army behind them.
The Republicans didn't want to give up that card of having the IRA.
And as they were sure the unions were going to share a knife across the government, go first.
So we tried to break the process down into a series of small steps so they could build confidence by one side,
maybe a little bit in the next slide moving and so on. It sometimes worked.
We had one disastrous experience in 2003. It was the end of dangerous time,
partly resulting in the end of David Trimble's time where we deal the complicated
choreography which was blown apart by the IRA taking John Detasseling,
the Canadian head of the ICG of the body that verified decommissioning, basically taking him hostage for a day and not releasing him.
Once we got him back, the whole choreography was supposed to start and we started our bit by announcing that the elections.
We've got to Josslyn up to Hillsborough, the the stadium in which the secular state of an honour resides.
And he told us you couldn't say anything about decommissioning, can say what weapons have been decommissioned in any shape or form.
And the whole thing had relied on him being clear about it. So David Trimble could move forward.
And we had a press conference which I watched by with David Trimble screaming at me on the telephone,
particularly when Thomas asked him and asked what he could say anything about weapons.
So why do you suppose you could say there were no tanks or heavy artillery equipment, which wasn't enormously helpful at the time?
Another trick that works or trick is the wrong way of putting it, a tool that works quite well.
It's embarrassment that you can try and make either side feel they'll be blamed if they will cast the talks in Northern Ireland.
Neither side wanted to lead. They always wanted Dallasite to be the one that broke, broken, and they make it as difficult as possible.
The other side, they might out. They'd never want to work out themselves.
I mean, to waste time and make them believe that we blame them if they did walk out.
In fact, we did blame either side because you need we need to pick the process up again after you failed on that occasion.
So we never actually pointed the finger at either side the whole way through the nine years.
But even so, that figure of the threat of pointing the finger at them could be quite effective.
There is one occasion when he went slightly wrong, we're not going to John Major had in Paisley in the cabinet room with a domeij,
used to work in the cabinet room in no time rather than in office.
And Paisley came to see it particularly difficult and particularly insulting comments got so angry that he walked out of the meeting.
Now, that's a mistake because you will go to your own office and you can't get back in,
never walk out of your own office security because I could go on endlessly,
although it doesn't extend to one point of technique about ingenuity sometimes requires an almost ludicrous degree is ingenuity to resolve problems.
The very last stages of the peace process of trying to get Paisley and Adams to agree to meet, to have a meeting that was going to be televised.
And we got them to agree to principle that we had to negotiate how long it would be.
What they would say at the very last issue was where they would sit.
Eunice wanted to sit opposite Sinn Fein, say look like combatants and enemies.
And the Sinn Fein wanted to sit next to Ian Paisley so that my colleagues and we couldn't get them to agree.
So we did in the end was to design a special table that was dominie shaped so I could sit next to each other and opposite each other, so to speak.
So in conflict resolution, you have to be prepared even to be a cop just to.
One of the things I learnt from the Northern Ireland peace process that I've seen
elsewhere in terms of conflict resolution is the danger of setting preconditions.
John, Major, again, made mistakes in these terms of decommissioning in after the ceasefire.
I can see exactly why he did it. He wanted he couldn't.
He felt negotiate with a temporary ceasefire. He felt he had to have a permanent end of violence.
He wanted the IRA to say that violence was over for good. They wouldn't do that.
So as a surrogate for that, he looked to them to begin decommissioning their weapons.
And first, he demanded a decommission all their weapons before they be allowed into talks.
And naturally, being a terrorist movement in those circumstances dictated to the public,
you say no, you certainly are not going to decommissioning weapons.
He then reduced that to decommissioning most of their weapons before they could come into talks.
They wouldn't agree that then did, reducing what was called Washington full and his secretary.
They went to to to Washington, to Tolkan decommissioning. And they wouldn't agree to that.
Gordy left this way. There was a problem that we spent the best part of 10 years time like our work, our way round, which didn't need to be a problem.
Decommissioning gives you nothing. If you think about it,
this terrorist could easily done by new weapons as soon as they get rid of them is their intention as you're trying to decommission,
not their weapons. And that's why did the items in most instances at the end of the process rather than the beginning?
This problem of preconditions, I think, is equally obvious in the Middle East.
If you think of Hamas here in the West or the courts actually demanding what strikes me as a fairly reasonable precondition,
which is they give up violence, they should be prepared to sign up to something like the Mitchell Principles of Non-Violence in Northern Ireland.
What seems less reasonable to me is to demand that they sign up for exceptions to the state of Israel.
They'll be rather like having asked the IRA to sign up to accepting the existence of a separate state in Northern Ireland,
separate from the rest of Ireland before the process began. Robin as part of the process.
So it be incredibly careful on the government side as much as on the other side for setting preconditions.
They can leave you the place where you simply can't get out of the bind you created for yourself.
International involvement is, in my view, a crucial part of trying to solve intrastate difficulties.
We in Britain refuse to allow international row in Northern Ireland for decades and decades.
We kept on rejecting any U.N. role when it was suggested. You see the same thing, of course, with India in the case of Kashmir.
I think that's a mistake. I don't see what you lose by having international involvement.
It doesn't actually surrender any of your sovereignty or limit any of your options. I had George Mitchell as a facilites I said was actually crucial.
Having someone that both sides trusted and where they wouldn't have trusted the British government was a facilitator,
really helped to bring about peace. I hope that will the Middle East can also have the role of international figures as sort of referees.
We had the International Commission on Decommissioning,
but we also had the International Monitoring Commission monitoring the ending of terrorist activity by the IAEA and by the known as paramilitaries,
and also the steps taken by the British army to reduce its presence in Northern Ireland.
So that sort of guarantor can be really, really very useful indeed.
I had earlier sorry I'm sorry, came in when we saw our opposer to inspect the weapons dumps when we couldn't quite get to decommissioning.
Who offers told us some wonderful stories about the hospitality of the IRA as they looked after them,
driving them around and that type vans in the republic, including providing them with pyjamas and toothpaste in their faces.
They were kept a particular case. Much of society you don't see much of so is absolutely like a proverbial outhouse.
And he provided his overalls but hadn't quite got the dimensions right.
So I tried to squeeze today in all kinds of various holes around the French republic.
And there's also the role of the facilitation, the strongest of the so in the case of Northern Ireland.
We were a strong facilitator. We regarded ourselves as neutral from the speech by Beaverbrook in 91,
on which way he said Britain had no selfish strategic or economic interest in Organon.
We will have to live with it. Both sides can accept themselves. We have no particular direction.
We wanted the peace negotiations to go, but we could control what happened economically and what happened in security terms.
So we were strong forces that we could push things in a particular direction.
And I remember a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in Hillsborough just after the Iraq invasion,
where it's a long time standing at the gate to the flag of Hillsborough talking about Middle East.
And afterwards, George Bush gave a press conference in which you said you would devote as much time
and much effort solving the Middle East as Tony Blair had to Northern Ireland.
That's actually what's really required in Middle East,
is an American president who can be a strong facilitator because they can control what happens in terms of security and the economy.
They can deliver both sides and only that kind of road will ever actually crack.
Least in my view. And one thing we suffered from endlessly.
And again, I've seen this across the world in other conflicts is what I call zero sum politics.
If one side comes out of negotiation, smiling, whatever the substantial and substantial nature of it, the other side thinks it's lost.
And the Republicans are much cleverer coming out of negotiations, smiling. And unions will always feel that they've lost when the bizarre things.
And overnight, autumn was the first cease fire in 94.
Where is the Republicans driving around West Belfast as they want to football game honking on everyone's waving scarves.
And the unionists who went into terminal depression even know what I always wanted had happened.
There was a ceasefire in place and that that going through that zero sum politics is crucially important.
One of the interesting things in overall them was that the IRA never surrendered to the Brits and never
surrender to unionists when they actually did that decommissioning in the end when they actually stood down.
It was in response to a speech by Gerry Adams is much easier for them to do it on their own terms,
their own leader, than it was to look as if you'd done it anyway as a surrender to others.
I don't think we'd ever be able to sell the agreement if the Republicans hadn't finally learnt that it wasn't all that clever,
actually, to look like they've won in every negotiation. You're only going to get a lasting peace, one that people can liberate.
If both sides feel they've been winners, you have to have both sides.
Think about constituency the other and how they're going to set up their constituency and to their credit.
Atomism McGuinness did think about that with the DPP and did think about how they could go about making it easier for GOP to claim that they,
too, had won in peace negotiations. Mike knows what point he must be getting pretty fed up.
No. I think one of the most important things I learnt from that negotiation and again, I was I've been peripherally involved in since,
is that you would only ever get a lasting peace if both sides believe they can't win militarily.
And nobody on the British army had a fairly disastrous start with Bloody Sunday with Internments Siege West Belfast got off to a bad start.
And they just got out pretty early on that the only way things could be won would be politically.
They understood that they could keep security at a sufficient level indefinitely.
They could stop the IRA breaking out further, but they could never actually defeat Yahaya altogether.
They never be able to suppress it. And they understood they had to be a political solution.
They understood you had to win hearts and minds to make the thing work.
So by about the early 80s, they were actually involved, the politicians, in seeing the need to have a political solution.
The IRA had a similar sort of a welfare system along the way.
In the late 80s, Atomism McGuinness both joined the Provisionals at a very young age.
But by the mid 80s, they were no longer fighting age.
They could see their nephews and nieces, sons, daughters getting arrested and killed because he was he going further.
They knew they couldn't be defeated. They knew they can never win.
They don't be able to drive the bricks out by violence and they, too, start to kind of reach out for a political solution.
They started to talk to John Q. There are a series of so much in speeches by British Secretary of State and Adams
and McGuinness that both sides came to the conclusion they couldn't win militarily.
They had to find a political solution. And then you have a durable basis on which to try and pursue peace.
Unfortunately, someone like Sri Lanka, that isn't the case. Sri Lanka, we had the ceasefire.
It looked as if we had a lasting peace. Both sides finally off the fighting were reconciled, looking for a political solution.
And then it fell apart because one side decided they could win militarily and under pressure from the armed forces and from the defence minister,
they believe they could win. Now they are going to win in terms of territory. They will very soon take all the territory in Sri Lanka.
But they were sold precisely nothing because the problem will come back and haunt them as a terrorist campaign,
not as a military campaign to in any way be bloodier and more horrible.
If they had any sense,
what they would do is immediately announce a political solution for a position of strength to try and build peace in that position.
I feel that they worked. If you have one side thinking women, Tony, you won't get two lasting peace.
And finally, I guess the biggest lesson I learnt from a certain negotiation is funny enough because I'm not sure I understood this in government,
but from watching my book and thinking about it a bit more is the need to talk to enemies.
I didn't find it all that easy to talk to Republicans when we were in government.
My father being shot at by the IRA in 1940. My brother Charles, who grew up for me, just actually been on a definite strain is the IRA.
I didn't shake that Ms. McGuinness hands the first time when I met them, which is a bit pathetic, but it was important to me at the time.
So I didn't understand the point to talking to families.
On the other hand, when I got a call from Martin McGuinness in September 1997, he asked me to come to Derry,
not to tell you when I'd gone there and taking on Social Security authorities.
So I got on a plane and got a taxi to Derry and I stood on a street corner until a couple of guys with shaved heads came up to me and said,
Martin Centres bungled me in the back of that cab. We ran around in circles and they're completely confused.
Then I got outside the sort of model I put out to the.
The housing estate knocked on the door. And that was Martin McGuinness with a broken leg inside, making jokes about kneecapping.
And it wasn't particularly important meeting.
We didn't break through on anything, but I then had a series of similar meetings and houses dotted around with Belfast and in Derry.
And I think the importance of that sort of approach is to try and build trust,
to get to someone else's territory where they can think aloud if you want,
about what they want to do, rather than to force them to come to your territory or have a formal negotiation with a particular issue.
Well, we had to find a way fairly early on in 2000, I guess it was on decommissioning.
We weren't going to get decommissioning, but we wanted to have some progress.
And I talked to a couple of generals who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, and they've suggested the idea of sealing the dumps and monitoring the dumps.
So I went to one of these houses and I still passed the suggested items.
McGuinness and they immediately said it is completely unacceptable and then asked questions for an hour or so.
At about three weeks later, I went to a formal meeting. They proposed the idea to ask, is there a way forward on this?
So you can actually find a way of building building trust in those circumstances, of course.
And you go so far in building trust. I remember one particular session with Adama's McGuinness in the card ministry in West Belfast,
where I was worried about catching the last plane amongst a very kind of ugly defeater somewhere in the refectory having dinner.
And I was sitting eating and I try to cheque my watch to see if I was going to be too late for play I kept.
And the minute hand come loose and was swinging around. What time was Martin McGuinness said today?
Well, I have a watch menders in my street. Let me take that and I'll get it fixed for you.
I said I want to stay really at the ICAC.
Then they were held on the contract and then I insist to my work to a very kindly gave it back to me at least,
cos although we met negotiation sticks and I of course had to give it to the security authorities to have a cheque for bugs and tracking.
Ravaging that broken minute and I have to say thanks to the audience to see how far you can go and building trust.
But I think I learnt in writing the book was I hadn't really understood the length and depth of the British government's dialogue with the IRA.
Irish government had a casualty IRA from 1974 onwards. It sort of channel before the channel.
It was continuous 1974 on the destroyed intelligence agent.
And I was quite right, my uncle, Brendan Duff Duffy, who did Kandari, and she was just like many times to try and keep the building open.
And if that link had Peter Porter on certain cases, he's fine.
574 the end of the first hunger strike in 1980. Would it be dormant for long periods, too?
But if it hadn't existed in 1993 1994, it's hard to see how you got the ceasefire.
You're talking the IRA. Privately.
I don't see how when the Warrington bomb is going off, for example, when they're exchanging messages, they've been talking formally.
The British government could possibly talk to my two young children were blown to pieces.
So it provided the way in which the British government could reassure Republicans that if they gave up violence,
they would be able to find a political track on a way forward, even though violence was still going on.
Rich Galen couldn't have done that publicly in talks. He could only do it secretly.
Nah, I wouldn't have given up violence if they hadn't had that way of communicating with the British government.
You have to have that kind of thing. If you're going to find a way out of violence in the end and reassure the terrorist group that there
is a political perspective for a political way forward and there's no community that was ready,
you do need to find a way of talking to Hamas, to the Taliban, and even actually, in my view, to al-Qaida, Hamas.
I thought about what I thought the conditions would be for that. The Taliban, it seems bizarre to me.
We're prepared to talk to the Taliban tactically in terms of local commanders, but we're not prepared to talk them strategically.
She's the only find a solution in Afghanistan.
If you are prepared to find a way of talking to them, trying to press their fiscal demands in a coherent way,
find a political role for them, they simply not disappear.
If you just try and deal with them in a military way, al-Qaida, I think this is a little bit harder.
First, you'd have to find something other than it had to want to talk to you,
and then you have to actually have some demands that you could possibly relate to the real world, which will be difficult.
But even in that case, actually, I think having some sort of link at some stage when they get to cohering demands provides a way out.
Is the only way that you can seriously try and tackle peace. This proposal gets misunderstood, quite lost.
George Bush made a speech in Israel in the last day of his presidency in which he talked about appeasement and talking to your enemies.
It strikes me as a pretty big misunderstanding of appeasement because the mistake that Chamberlain made was not in talking to Hitler, talking Hitler.
It was a very good idea. Mistake of thinking that if I didn't chunks of the Czech Republic as much as it then was, he was somehow by mob.
You don't buy letters. You don't give in to terrorists. You do talk to them. Talking to is not appeasement.
Talking to them is trying to find a solution. I've concluded two words, if you would.
But nine months ago, the chief constable in Northern Ireland who said accurately that there is no way in history that a
terrorist problem has been police that is only actually can ever be concluded by political means.
Thank you very much.