Understanding enemy is key to peace

Dr. No finally said yes in Northern Ireland. And the "terrorist" agreed to share power.

Ian Paisley, the octogenarian Protestant leader whose anti-Catholic diatribes won him the Bond villain moniker, and Gerry Adams, the Catholic whose reported Irish Republican Army ties earned him the terrorist tag from Paisley, stunned the world last month by agreeing to a joint provincial government. The deal, effective May 8, enacts the 1998 Good Friday accord, which ended three decades of Catholic-Protestant violence but had sputtered in its attempts to realize a government involving both sides.

Ironically, those who took up the gun were always the most eager for peace, says the Rev. Raymond Helmick. A Jesuit priest who is Irish on his mother's side, and professor of conflict resolution at Boston College, Helmick, 75, spent nine years trying to mediate the conflict and has worked at peacemaking in the Middle East, as well. He spoke about his work last month in an interview at St. Paul Catholic Church in Cambridge. Excerpts follow.

Q You've met Mr. Paisley and Mr. Adams. What can you tell us about them personally?

A I remember being very aware that Adams was thinking seriously in the direction of a nonviolent strategy. He was extremely difficult to reach. He talk[ed] only within a narrow circle. He did get over that. Paisley was always conscious that I was about -- there's hardly a more frightening word to Northern Irish Protestants than Jesuit. He could have been very dangerous to me and, with great deliberation, was not. I'm very grateful to him for that. He was a clever man.

Q Christianity in Northern Ireland never lived through the separation of church and state.

A Religion gets distorted and used for agendas that are no part of its agenda. When that's happening, what you need is not less religion but more, that people find out what their faith is really about. In Ireland, religion isn't all about religion. From the point that there was a difference between Catholic and Protestant [during the Reformation], it was utilized immediately as a political loyalty test. It's never ceased to be.

Q What lessons does Northern Ireland suggest for peacemaking elsewhere?

A You have to de-demonize the enemy. If you don't get around to understanding the humanity of the enemy, you don't resolve the conflict.

Q If peace is bound to be slow in coming, how can it take priority over survival for those who face violence against themselves or their children in the interim? Why wouldn't I say, "I need a gun?"

A In Northern Ireland, the people who took the initiative to make the peace were the militants on both sides. On the Protestant side, I was always finding statements [like], "We have done terrible things, and we're looking for alternatives."

On the Catholic side, there was much more of this feeling that we're in the just war. People would get shocked when they found out that their lads, their great protectors, were torturing people and things of this sort. Security means you can do anything. You keep creating more wounds, making reconciliation much more distant. [Protecting] loved ones is an absolute -- you have to do that. Does that mean find [the enemies] and blow them away? If that's what it means, you're deep into rejection of the other. There are more of them than you can eradicate.

Q The Protestants you met conceded their wrongs; the IRA did not. Surely remorse bestows some moral superiority on those humble enough to admit they're wrong?

A You have to work your way through to that, and it's not easy. People did eventually get to that. I'd talk to people who were IRA or Loyalist [Protestants] and bring up the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What I'd keep hearing from them is, "We're not ready for a truth and reconciliation commission, because nobody has admitted anything." More recently, the IRA has done so.

Q Are you saying there's no such thing as evil?

A Evil is not a thing of itself, but the absence of good. That's a fundamental you would find, say, in [St. Thomas] Aquinas. I don't believe in evil people. I believe in an awful lot of evil that is done by people. In the Irish case, clergy who got up to talk about the conflict were inclined to tell their people, you are bigots, you are evil. Of course, people would say, "He doesn't understand us." The only way that could be successful for the preacher was to find what is the best in their people and appeal to that.

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