Road map toward peace
ON SEPT. 3 in Staulinna manor, a three-hour drive north of Helsinki, 15 Iraqis, six Sunni, and nine Shia, including Akram al-Hakim, the minister of National Reconciliation, appended their names to a document. The Helsinki Agreement committed them to a set of principles that, they hope, will provide the framework for negotiations on Iraq's future, bring elements of the insurgency into the negotiating process, and enshrine inclusivity as a prerequisite for accommodation. As each signed, each solemnly prayed, "In-sha'Allah" - "if God wills."
The agreement was the outcome of four days of intensive dialogue among the Iraqis and mediators from Northern Ireland and South Africa.
The Northern Ireland delegation was led by Martin McGuiness, once chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army and now deputy first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Jeffery Donaldson, a senior negotiator for the Democratic Unionist Party, the party led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, who had spent 40 years excoriating the IRA as the embodiment of evil before agreeing to share power with Sinn Fein, its political wing, last March. The South African side included Roelf Meyer, who negotiated the apartheid government out of power, and Mac Maharaj, the ANC stalwart who was co-secretary of the peace process that led to the 1994 settlement.They had gathered at Staulinna to determine whether Iraqis could learn from the experiences of South Africa and Northern Ireland, which had stumbled to find ways to bring themselves to the negotiating table. The underlying premises were twofold. One, that divided societies are in a better position to help people in other divided societies, and, two, that despite the differences in their respective conflicts, the Northern Irish, South Africans, and Iraqis all shared certain behavioral and psychological attributes that would allow them to understand each other's problems in a way that facilitators from "normal" societies never could.
Staulinna gave sustenance to these propositions. The South African and Northern Ireland participants shared the narratives of their roads to peace, spelling out the mistakes made and how endemic distrust led to stalemate and paralysis. Viable peace processes only emerged in both countries when all parties agreed that those who adhered to violence had to be brought into negotiations, and that those parties adhering to violence had accepted that violence could never lead to accommodation. One could see Iraqi heads nod in agreement. These points of identification provided the basis for a sharing of how compromises are made.
The most remarkable impression on the Iraqis was McGuiness, once evil incarnate to Protestants, conducting a session with Jeffery Donaldson, one of Paisley's chief negotiators, the antipathy of 30 years now set aside, each addressing the other by first name, each to an extent solicitous of the other. If enemies of such intense antagonism could chip away at their differences until they found a mutually acceptable formula for sharing power, anyone could, a lesson that resonated with the Iraqis, even if they could not yet absorb its full implications.
One more conference on Iraq, one might say. Yes, but this one had a twist: the people doing the speaking were talking from a level playing field of shared experiences, a basis of equality forged in the knowledge of the horrible damage each had done. Rather than being strangers to each other, they were linked by bonds of having lived the same experiences, parties both to atrocity and excess.
The Helsinki Agreement will land on the desks of Vice Presidents Adil Abdul-Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi, the joint mentors of this initiative. They will decide whether they have found a vehicle that might work when it comes to the larger issues facing the Sunni and Shia populations.
None of the Iraqis came to Helsinki expecting to find much agreement, much less a pact that might provide a road map away from the civil war that engulfs them.
"Why do we not talk like this to each other in our own parliament?" one asked. The question hangs not just in the pristine air of the Hirvensalmi forests, but in the death-ridden air of Baghdad. For now, the ball is squarely back in the Iraqis court.
Padraig O'Malley, a convener of the Helsinki conference, is a professor at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass-Boston and a fellow at the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.
