"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 81

In this episode: How Do You End An Endless War?

December 17, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 81

Episode 81: How Do You End an Endless War?

In the annals of violent conflict, the decades of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland seemed especially intractable. As the long-running strife flares violently again between Israelis and Palestinians, two negotiators of the astonishing and lasting peace agreement in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, Monica McWilliams and John Alderdice, explain what it takes to get people to sit down with their enemies and whether the path to peace in Northern Ireland offers a way forward for the Middle East.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: [BREAKING NEWS MUSIC] Good evening. Within the last few minutes, the parties involved in the Northern Ireland peace talks have reached an agreement.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: After two years of talks and after a generation of bloodshed and decades of division and acrimony, a historic day ushers in what the whole island hopes will be a new era of peace.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

After years of bloody conflict, on the Friday before Easter, April 10th, 1998, the Good Friday agreement was signed in Northern Ireland.

ARCHIVAL David Trimble: I look forward to the future. I see a great opportunity for us to start a healing process here in Northern Ireland.

ARCHIVAL Bertie Ahern: We must all seize the opportunity. We've put in place arrangements which will allow us to work together in harmony and in mutual respect for our common good.

The political agreement brought an end to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland — known as the Troubles. A conflict marked by mob violence, military crackdowns, and brutal terrorist campaigns, where more than 3,500 people were killed, most of whom were civilians. Thousands more were injured in a place with just one and a half million people — in bombings, targeted killings, or at the hands of British troops who were sent in to stop the fighting.

Monica McWilliams was one of the political leaders that helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the Troubles.

Monica McWilliams: This phrase, the Troubles, it sounds too cozy to describe what I lived through for 30 years. And for someone who experienced it first hand from the years of 14, when the first bombs started to go off, until the day I signed the agreement when I was 44, it certainly was a war.

The final agreement had been years in the making. McWilliams remembers that moment when the deal was finally struck.

Monica McWilliams: That whole week had been a roller coaster. One minute we were on board, the next minute it was down in the depths of despair.

[SOUND OF A CLOCK TICKING]

Monica McWilliams: Then we were back up again thinking, yes, with a further push and we might get it over the line. Then next minute, we wondered, would this be another failure?

Then all of sudden she got a phone call to come gather in the meeting room.

[SOUND OF A PHONE RINGING]

Monica McWilliams: I'll never forget that moment, because up until about five minutes before it, we did not know that we would be called to the room to sign it. And it was quarter past five on Good Friday.

The room was packed full of longtime enemies. Former paramilitary leaders and people who'd lost friends and family members to the violence stood next to each other.

Monica McWilliams: And each one of us was asked — the leaders of each party — to put up their hand or to aﬃrm that they were in agreement, and I remember putting my hand up and saying I am in favor of this agreement.

At that moment she remembers feeling a sense of total relief.

Monica McWilliams: But more importantly. This enormous sense of could this be it? Have we finally done this? Will we have peace in the country now? I remember saying to the women as we walked up, we should hold back the tears, don't cry because the cameras will be on us women and that's what they're expecting. So everyone held back the tears and then when the agreement was finally agreed, we stood up and clapped. And I looked around the room and there was… the men were crying. So it was an incredibly poignant moment.

[MUSIC FADES]

Monica McWilliams: I went out to say a few words to the press.

ARCHIVAL Monica McWilliams: Today, we have done it. We have interrupted the culture of failure in Northern Ireland. There is no going back. We have reached a peace agreement today as parties. And now we must go to the people and make this agreement work.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Up to that point there’d not only been the 30 years of the Troubles but centuries of off-and-on conflict in the region: a conflict that had been considered intractable — one that could not be fixed.

Today, as in the 1990s, Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom, but it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south. A border that used to be dotted with military installations and manned by armed soldiers. And the Troubles were largely about that border: one side was determined to erase the border and join the Republic of Ireland. The other side fought to keep the boundary, and remain part of the United Kingdom. One side was largely Catholic and the other was largely Protestant.

[MUSIC FADES]

John Alderdice: The moral dilemma is this, if I reach an agreement with the person who is my traditional enemy, then have I betrayed all of those who suffered and died from my community in the struggle?

Lord John Alderdice also helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement.

John Alderdice: On the other hand, if I leave this talks table with no agreement, I will be betraying my children and grandchildren and handing on to them not the problem that was handed to me, but a worse problem because we have failed.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

So how did they get there? How do you engage in negotiations with people who you consider your enemy? With people who’ve killed your neighbors or even your family members?

John Alderdice: You'd be walking down the street and you would see somebody walking up the other side and you knew that they had planted the bomb that killed your brother, or that they had shot your sister.

And does the hard-won achievement in Northern Ireland give us any hope — and a path forward — for peace in the Middle East?

Monica McWilliams: There's not a conflict that hasn't got similarities, even though they are very different.

We get answers from John Alderdice and Monica McWilliams, both of whom helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement and now work on conflict resolution all around the world.

I’m Peter Bergen. That's next on In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES. NEW MUSIC PICKS UP]

You may be familiar with this term the Troubles, which refers to the period of time from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. During the Troubles, bombings and targeted killings were a regular part of life in Northern Ireland. And the violence sometimes spread: with terrorist attacks regularly targeting the center of British power, in London, where I grew up. One time, a bomb went off at the police station not far from where we lived. I remember hearing it.

Monica McWilliams and John Alderdice lived in Belfast during the Troubles. The city was at the center of the violence.

Monica McWilliams: Young 18 year olds and 17 year olds felt that their only alternative was to take up a weapon or a gun in order to resolve their problems. And it was another 30 years before that mindset changed and saw that the only way to resolve conflict was through political means only.

John Alderdice: Many people in other places would have rather more robust words for it, but with a typical Irish understatement and sense of humor, it gets called the Troubles. It's typical of the way Northern Irish people will address issues. I remember there was a lady who, it’s said she heard this terrible noise and she said, “What's that?” And the woman said, “Oh, I think it's a bomb.” “Oh, she says, thank goodness. I thought it was thunder. And I really can't stand thunder.” [PETER LAUGHS] Well, that's fairly typical of Northern Irish humor.

A sense of humor that’s endured a conflict whose roots go back much further than the 1960s. As far back as when the British first colonized the majority Catholic island of Ireland and were trying to keep control of it.

John Alderdice: For all sorts of reasons, political reasons, colonization, security reasons, people were coming across to the north of Ireland and back again, or were sent over. So when England was trying to colonize and control Ireland, one of the things that was done was to send people over from England, and from Scotland, and they were Protestants. And that was the way to try to control the island.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

After centuries as a British colony, in 1921 the Irish won a short, bloody war for independence. But it was a peace that set the stage for more conflict.

Britain conceded defeat — but with a big condition: the new Irish state would not include six counties in the north of the island, which were mainly Protestant. There, in northern Ireland, most people didn’t want independence: this Protestant majority were unionists — loyal to the union with Great Britain. But these six counties also had a large and growing Catholic minority who remained fervent Irish nationalists. They wanted out of the UK, and wanted to join with the rest of the island.

John Alderdice: When the southern part of the island became independent and then became a republic, that left a minority of Catholic nationalists in the North, who did not feel that they were being properly treated and the majority of mostly Protestants who were always feeling that there was a danger, that they would be separated off from Britain and would be a minority and that would not be in their interests.

The Catholic minority in the north faced discrimination in public housing and employment. There was also blatant gerrymandering meant to lock them out of political power. In the 1960s, Catholics in Northern Ireland launched a civil rights movement, inspired in part by the civil rights marches in the United States led by Martin Luther King. The Catholic activists wanted to address the discrimination through peaceful protests.

John Alderdice: Protesting that Catholics should have the same rights as Protestants. And of course it was a political Catholic and political Protestant, more than religious Catholic and religious Protestant issue. The civil rights marches ended up in violence. That was, uh, responded to with violence on the other side of the community, and we almost fell into a civil war. And at that point, the British army was called in to try to hold the line. But as often is the case, when security forces enter in they don't actually resolve the problem.

[EERIE MUSIC PICKS UP]

ARCHIVAL 1970s Irish Newscaster: The presence here of the British Army is deeply resented.

ARCHIVAL 1970s American Newscaster 1: For almost eight months, 11,000 British soldiers have been here in Belfast. But even under semi-occupation, the situation has deteriorated.

John Alderdice: And it all got worse.

ARCHIVAL 1970s American Newscaster 2: Tonight, Catholic leaders in Northern Ireland have accused the British of mass murder. In Londonderry, at least 13 people, civilians, were killed, shot to death by British soldiers.

In Catholic communities, nationalist paramilitary groups like the Irish Republican Army — or IRA — had emerged. They launched an armed campaign to end British control and unify the island of Ireland by force. Protestant areas backed paramilitaries of their own, who were determined to defend the link with Britain. The two sides traded bombings and assassinations for decades.

John Alderdice: That’s how we ended up with this violent and what proved for many years to be intractably violent political conflict between those who were pro-British and wanted to stay within the UK, those who were pro-Irish and wanted to leave and be part of an all-island republic.

Monica McWilliams: I thought this is going to go on and on and on because one side is refusing to ever say that they are going to be beaten. And when you take the might of the British Army on and then you have a very strong guerrilla movement as some would have seen it in terms of the IRA who had quite a lot of community support in the areas they came from, because of the way both sides felt that they could take the other side on. Maybe it was a case of an eye for an eye until we were all blind.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF RIOTING, ARMORED VEHICLES, SHOUTING]

People got used to the sounds of the sirens and explosions…

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF RIOTING, ARMORED VEHICLES, SHOUTING, EXPLOSION]

And the sounds of people mourning the dead…

ARCHIVAL Northern Irish Woman 1: I've lost one son. There's no justice. None.

They got used to living with the fear that at any moment… a bomb might go off… in the supermarket, at the pub, or just down the street.

ARCHIVAL Northern Irish Woman 2: You're even afraid to go out to the shops. You’re afraid to go outside. Because if you went out that back door, you're liable to get a bullet coming down that avenue.

[SOUNDS FADE, MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: As a teenager, you witnessed some of the conflict in Northern Ireland firsthand. What was that like?

Monica McWilliams: It was something that no teenager should ever describe as ordinary, and that's what it became. It just became ordinary. My own home had been bombed three times. One of the largest bombs went off in the village. And I remember thinking, oh dear, the dance will not be on in the parish hall on Friday night. That's what teenagers think about. Because you recovered very quickly from the broken windows and the slates being blown off the roof and the damage that was done. But then it became much more serious when I came up to the university in Belfast. You know, hearing about friends being murdered. No teenager and no university student or any student should ever have to see that as normal. What was and should have been extraordinary had become very ordinary. And I find that when I go to other places, and see how a war that goes on for years, people become accustomed to it. It was only when I went to the States that I began to realize that even myself, I had been affected. If a car backfired, I would jump into a doorway. Or if fireworks were going off, I'd dive under the bed. But you didn't realize that was the impact that it was having on you until you got out of it.

[MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

John Alderdice was involved in the negotiation process for more than a decade and was a key negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement. He became the first speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was the new government of Northern Ireland that was created as part of the Agreement. But he'd actually trained as a psychiatrist.

John Alderdice: I looked around me, everybody was suffering. Nobody was benefiting. The violence was going on decade after decade. And I thought, I need to find another way of understanding this. So I thought, well, if I think people are behaving in a self damaging way as communities, are there any people who understand that sort of behavior? And I thought, well, that's what psychiatrists do. And so going into psychiatry was an intentional move to try to understand and then hopefully find ways of intervening in situations of conflict. And of course, particularly, the situation of my own community, uh, which was in conflict.

And his study of psychiatry would help shape his thinking about conflict and conflict resolution as he entered the political process that would eventually reach the peace agreement in Northern Ireland. Alderdice decided to join the Alliance political party. The party was started in 1970, and while mostly Protestant, it became a haven for people sick of the hardline politics of the unionists or the nationalists.

John Alderdice: The Alliance Party, is a cross-community party, people from both Protestant and nationalist backgrounds for whom the key issue was that they wanted the violence to end and they wanted people to be able to live with their differences in a society which operated peacefully.

He eventually became the leader of the party and in that role, would engage in talks with the leaders of different factions and groups. The British government had been trying to negotiate an end to the conflict from the start, talking to the various factions. These talks failed over and over.

Then, in the late 1980s, a new series of talks started, including talks between the IRA and the British government. The talks involved men like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, key leaders of the IRA — men who many considered were terrorists with much blood on their hands. Gerry Adams has never admitted to being a leader of the IRA. But both men are believed to have approved many of the targeting killings and bombings that the IRA carried out. They also led its political wing. Alderdice remembers it wasn’t easy to get to this place.

Peter Bergen: At a certain point, you are sitting down with groups that are armed, perhaps on both sides for Catholics and Protestants. Were you criticized at the time for doing that?

John Alderdice: It took a very, very long time to get to that position, because although it was quite possible to sit down with the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, and to sit down with those political leaders uh, who did not espouse violence, at least not in an open kind of way, anyway. It was not possible politically to meet with somebody like Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, the leaders of the IRA, or indeed to meet with leaders of the loyalist paramilitaries on the other side. That was outside of what was acceptable in political life for a very long time. And the view when I came into politics was that you would never get agreement with these people. These people were committed to use violence. They weren't interested in any kind of negotiation or anything of that kind. And therefore, you just had to try to get an agreement between the more moderate people on both sides. And I can remember the day really in which I began to seriously question that.

That day, the leader of a more moderate Irish nationalist party — which was determined to unite Ireland by peaceful means — decided to do something different. His name was John Hume.

John Alderdice: John Hume, the main nationalist leader, said, look, we're not getting anywhere. Every time we get to a point where we might be coming close together, people on either side can always do something that literally blows everything apart. They'll plant bombs and shoot people and so on. We're not getting anywhere with, with this. I'm going to have to talk to the IRA. And I remember looking round and the main unionist leader was sitting to my right hand side and he just went completely white. And he said, well, that's it. There's no hope then. And it wasn't said in an angry tone of voice. He, he wasn't angry about it. He was just kind of deeply sad because he felt — and I think it would have been the feeling of most people — John, if you go off and talk to them, I'm not sure we can continue talking with you, but in any case, there's absolutely nothing that you could reach agreement with, with them, that I and my people could accept.

John Alderdice: Now, I knew John pretty well by this stage, and I knew that he wasn't going to be persuadable to not do this. And the only way of changing that was if John went down that road and discovered it simply didn't work. but I felt that we would have to test it to destruction if you like.

So John Hume went to speak with Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA’ s political wing. It was a big deal to meet with Adams. The British government had designated the IRA as a terrorist organization. John Hume himself had spent decades denouncing the group for its violence.

John Alderdice: There were talks. They stopped for a bit. They started again as well, but eventually, those conversations went on and John continued to talk with the rest of us and the British government and the Irish government. And actually both the British and Irish prime ministers also became quite supportive of all of this. And this is really very important because one of the things that I learned from the psychiatry experience was that the problems are problems of relationships. And if you were going to deal with those relationships, you had to have the representatives of those relationships engaged in whatever talks process there was.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Monica McWilliams got involved in the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland through her work on women’ s rights issues, particularly around domestic violence. That was an issue that affected women on all sides of the conflict. That work eventually led her to co-found a grassroots political party that would take part in the peace talks. It was called the Women’s Coalition.

Monica McWilliams: We had no money, no oﬃces, no resources, but we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in. And it was like an army of, of women and good men across the country deciding this was the way to go, that we should form a coalition, that we should get registered as a political party, that we would get our message out in terms of the kind of process that we wanted to see, which would be an inclusive one.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

McWilliams approached the peace talks with the lessons she’d learned working with women from different backgrounds on domestic violence and the lessons she learned as a girl growing up on a farm.

Monica McWilliams: Well my father was a cattle dealer and as a young girl, it was very unusual for me to go to cattle markets with my father, but I loved it and I loved watching the auctioneer watching how they dealt with the sale of the cattle. And I remember my father spitting on his hand and slapping the hand of the man that he would have sold the cattle to or vice versa. And I thought, that's an interesting symbolic moment in which, you know, my word is my honor, my hand is my honor, and we will see this through. But I was also brought up in a neighborhood where people were helping each other a lot, through good times and bad times and through crises.

Monica McWilliams: And so that kind of value system probably stayed with me. And maybe that's what helped me to reach out to those who nobody would talk to. And unfortunately, as a result, people put a label on you. And saying that she's a woman in love with murderers by engaging with those individuals who had, some of them did have a terrible past, um, but had made a promise that they were going to work hard to make sure that no one followed that path again.

[MUSIC FADES]

Monica McWilliams: And I had to find a way of figuring out whether I was being blindsided or whether I could believe them. And that's about building relationships. And relationships are everything and I watched that at the cattle market through my father.

Peter Bergen: You know, the academic kind of construction here is, uh, by an American academic you may be familiar with called William Zartman.

Monica McWilliams: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: And he said the way to peace is when both sides recognize that they're in a mutually hurting stalemate, and as unpalatable as it might be, everybody's gonna have to give something up. The deal is usually known, but the time for the deal is only ripe when both sides recognize this is a mutually hurting stalemate. Is that kind of what happened here?

Monica McWilliams: Yes, I remember writing about Hartman's description of the mutually hurting stalemate. But I think there were many factors. It wasn't just that there'd been a stalemate. I mean, we were very much in this kind of frozen conflict, this intractable conflict. But I also think that sometimes it takes a tragedy, or a number of tragedies to bring people to their senses. I also think that some of the combatants got older,

Peter Bergen: Mmm.

Monica McWilliams: and became grandparents and saw this going on into a third generation, where people were standing at too many funerals. And the legacy of the pain of all of that just being transmitted from generation to generation. It also takes, I think, a number of circumstances to come together. Those peace talks had been going on quietly from the mid 80s, in terms of backchannels, reaching out to people, which is a lesson for the current global conflicts. Reaching out to people that no one else would talk to, to try and get inside their heads and try to think of the way they were thinking.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Monica McWilliams: And that began in the ‘80s and the church played a role in that. Churches played a role in that, quietly and under the radar, which is also important. And later on we did the same, as Women's Coalition, when we came together. So there had been a decade of that, and there had been many ceasefires, and many failed negotiations before that, and many talks about talks. And then suddenly in the ‘90s — well it wasn't so sudden, but it was terrible — were these absolute shocking atrocities, one after the other.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Monica McWilliams: There had been a Shankill bomb.

ARCHIVAL 1990s Northern Irish Newscaster: The Shankill Road was crowded with the usual Saturday lunchtime shoppers. The bomb exploded without warning. Many passers by were caught up in the blast.

Monica McWilliams: It killed a number of Protestant people on a very famous road in Belfast.

ARCHIVAL 1990s Northern Irish Newscaster: The bodies started to come out. There are children among the casualties.

Monica McWilliams: And there also had been shocking murders of people sitting in a pub, enjoying their Halloween festival. And in came gunmen and shot all around them.

ARCHIVAL 1990s American Newscaster: Masked gunmen burst in, yelled “trick or treat,” and opened fire, pausing only briefly to reload and then fire some more.

Monica McWilliams: And it was shocking. And I began to think, if this goes on, we're in seriously such terrible trouble that we won't be able to pull back. And both sides realized and began to talk, in terms of the paramilitaries, that they needed to take this seriously. And they had stared at the precipice. And so in ‘94, both sides declared a ceasefire.

[MUSIC FADES]

ARCHIVAL 1990s English Newscaster 1: The IRA has announced a complete secession of all military action from midnight tonight.

ARCHIVAL 1990s English Newscaster 2: Six weeks after the IRA ceasefire, the loyalists call theirs.

Monica McWilliams: It's actually the 30th anniversary this year. And I recall that as one of those transitional moments, hoping that this would lead to peace talks and hoping that those peace talks would finally be successful. If the ingredients were in place, if the chemistry was in place, if the leadership was in place, if the political will was in place, and if the ceasefires held. And the people themselves were exhausted and thirsting for a different way forward. And so, I think all of those circumstances came together.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

The Good Friday Agreement was signed on April 10, 1998. The agreement aﬃrmed that Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom but set out that in the future it could unite with the rest of Ireland if a majority in both the north and the south supported the move. Paramilitary organizations would disarm and destroy their weapons. Members of the paramilitary organizations who'd been in prison for crimes they'd committed — including acts of terrorism — would be released. The agreement also established a new power-sharing government. In a referendum, a majority of voters in Northern Ireland voted in favor of this agreement.

[MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: What lessons did you take away from this? And, obviously the agreement is signed, but, the conflict doesn't necessarily completely disappear magically. There was the bombing in Omagh after the Good Friday agreement where 29 people were killed and 200 injured, for instance. So are there universal principles you feel that come out of this?

John Alderdice: I think there are universal principles, yes, but they're not the ones that people usually pick up on. Usually when people look at agreements of this kind, they look at the structure of the agreement, what was the political settlement, what happened about prisoners, what happened about weapons, all of these kinds of things. People focus on those sorts of things. But those aren't the fundamental principles. For me, the fundamental things are that these conflicts, our conflict, and any of the others — I've gone to, conflicts all around the world, and every one of them has had a number of features. First of all, they're always about disturbed historic relationships between communities. They're not something that has just suddenly sprung out of nowhere at all. If you sit down with people and you listen to them and you explore it, you discover that there are profound historical disturbances of relationship between communities, and they've often gone back a very, very long way.

John Alderdice: What kind of disturbances? Well, one of the things that I find in every one of these is that one community, and sometimes both communities, feel humiliation and disrespect. I remember Martin McGuinness describing a situation of him as a young boy, early teens, and he said, the thing I wanted to be more than anything else was a motor mechanic. And so I went along to a garage, not very far from my home, and I said to the guy that ran the garage, I would like to be an apprentice motor mechanic. That's what I want to be, more than anything else. And the guy said, ‘I've no jobs.’ And he says, ‘Well, no I completely understand you don't have any jobs at the moment, but you know, if and when a job comes up, would you keep me in mind?’ And he said, ‘Look, son, you don't get it, do you? You will never get a job here because you're a Catholic.’ And then Martin McGuinness said, and this was the most devastating part of all, he said, ‘I sometimes ask myself if I'd got a job from that guy, would I ever have gone on to do the things I did subsequently?’

John Alderdice: You have a picture of this guy in this little garage somewhere or other who bears a degree of responsibility for all that Martin McGuinness did subsequently as a terrorist. So that question of humiliation and disrespect, and also, of course, that sense of unfairness, deep unfairness. And when people feel deeply unfairly treated, then that creates a context where those emotions can break out into horrible violence.

And Alderdice says there's one more thing he's observed: people start to believe that peaceful democratic ways have been tried and just haven't worked.

John Alderdice: And eventually people get to the point of saying, well, what else do we do? What are we supposed to do? We've tried. We've tried all of these ways. We can't address these things. And we feel — and that's the really important thing — we feel incredibly angry about what has happened. And I often hear my colleagues talking about how it's all because they have beliefs which are misguided or wrong or whatever. And I often say to them, look, you can believe all sorts of things, but not do anything about it. You know? If I ask somebody, ‘Do you believe in heaven?’ They say yes. I say, ‘Would you like to go there this afternoon?’ They say, ‘Well, actually, I'm not in any rush.’ You know, how you feel about things is much more powerful in terms of driving you to do things that risk your life or somebody else's, far more powerful than the ideas in your head. Not that they're not important, but it's the feelings that are incredibly powerful, especially feelings of humiliation, deep unfairness, and the hopelessness of not being able to change things in a peaceful and democratic way.

What he’s learned about negotiations is that the way you deal with this is the complete inverse. Instead of treating people with disrespect, you treat them with respect, with fairness and of course you must invite them into the democratic process.

John Alderdice: And we did all of those things and they were not easy. And there seem to be great ethical and moral problems about it, but we got through it, and the result is that the killing has ended a long time ago now, more than 25 years ago, and there's no, nobody expects us to go back to that. We'll continue our political disagreements, of course. Politics is about having disagreements. People say, ‘Great, you reached an agreement, John.’ I say, yeah, but you, we agreed to disagree without killing each other. That's the key thing. It isn't that we agreed. We agreed to disagree, but not to kill each other anymore.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

The road to peace in Northern Ireland was a very long one. While McWilliams and Alderdice will tell you that every conflict is unique, they also say there are always similarities. And when I think about the conflict in Northern Ireland, it’ s hard not to ask the question: how might some of those lessons learned be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? A conflict, like the one in Northern Ireland, that just doesn’t appear to have any solution.

John Alderdice: The problem I found in the Middle East was that when I first started to go there in a serious way, and I did it right away back about 2005 or so. And for me, the read across was, well, if I had to talk to the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries, then I need to talk to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Jewish settlers and so on. So I did that. And when I met with Hamas, I said if there was another way, rather than violence, would you be prepared to adopt that? And they said, absolutely, but nobody will talk to us. And at that point, Hezbollah were under a lot of international pressures to decommission their weapons. And I said, are you interested? And they said, yes.

John Alderdice: But then it wasn't very long after that that the Lebanon War happened. And of course, the problem is that people are not going to give up their weapons if they feel that they're going to need them to defend themselves. So the problem that I found, and I found it repeatedly over those years when I was involved, was that while in the case of Northern Ireland, both the British government and the Irish government were prepared to take a kind of hands off position emotionally and say, whatever brings peace, we are happy with and we will engage with those who've been involved in the violence.

At the time Tony Blair was the British prime minister.

John Alderdice: Tony Blair knew exactly what was going on. He knew I was having these meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah because he asked me to come and brief him in No. 10 Downing Street. And I did, repeatedly. And there was a lot of talk about whether or not there would be any preparedness to engage. And there was an election, as you will recall, coming up at that time. And I remember meeting with some of the Hamas people in Beirut. And I said, ‘Well, how's it going to go?’ And they said, ‘Well, we think we'll do quite well, but it's important we don't win.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, we know that if, if, we win, the, the West will not talk to us. The Americans, the British won't talk to us.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’

Peter Bergen: And of course they, they did win.

John Alderdice: And they did win. And I had talked to the British government, to Blair, about what would happen.

To a lot of people’s surprise, Hamas won the election in Gaza in 2006. Alderdice thought that if Hamas was part of a coalition government with other Palestinian factions, then the British would be willing to engage in talks with them.

John Alderdice: That isn't what happened, because the truth was the British government and the American government were not prepared to engage with them in the same way that they had engaged with the IRA. That for me is the fundamental problem. It's not just the problem between those who are on the ground. It is the external stakeholders who themselves play a massively important role, including a massively important negative role, effectively being prepared to back one side against another. And, you know, we saw that after October the 7th. Whenever something happens Britain and the United States come in to back one side against the other. And that's the problem.

John Alderdice: You cannot bring an outcome in a divided society and a conflict if you come in to back one side against the other. I understand why, I'm not blaming anybody in particular for it. I'm making the observation that you can't do it. And it's very diﬃcult. When I come into a situation of conflict, I have to be aware that I will likely emotionally feel more identification with one side or the other. And if I deal with that, if I hold back from that, if I try to understand how that might have come about, then I can be useful. If on the other hand, I simply follow that emotional identification to back one side against the other, it may be perfectly legitimate, but I'm absolutely no use as a conflict resolution person.

Which is why Alderdice says there is a real opportunity for President Trump to do things differently in the Middle East.

John Alderdice: I absolutely do not carry a standard for Mr. Trump, au contraire. But if he comes into a situation and decides that he is not interested in forever wars, that he has no particular attachment to one side or the other and he is prepared to do whatever is necessary to end the conflict. Well, who knows what will happen? Then none of these things are absolutely without hope.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

In Northern Ireland it took decades, with lots of stalled talks and broken ceasefires, before they reached a peace agreement where, as Alderdice put it, they agreed to disagree, but not to kill each other anymore.

Monica McWilliams: You need to go to a crisis, to-, you need to go to the precipice, before you pull back and say there has to be a different way.

Monica McWilliams will tell you that as she headed into the negotiations process her mother gave her some very sound advice.

Monica McWilliams: The advice was that you have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that proportion.

And it’s something she tried to execute. So did Alderdice. Negotiations are about listening. Truly listening. Especially to those you disagree with.

[MUSIC SURGES]

And of course once you reach an agreement, that doesn’t mean that the work is done.

Monica McWilliams: The peace process, that work never stops. That's an unfinished business. And that's maybe why I still have people on the street saying to me, what did that agreement do for me? But I constantly have to remind people what difference peace did make, and it does make all the difference in the world.

###

If you want to learn more about the stories and issues we discussed in this episode, I recommend Speak Up, Speak Out by Monica McWilliams and Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Jonathan Powell.

I also recommend Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, which you can find on Audible.

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon and Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Holly DeMuth, Nathan Ray, and Sandy Melara.

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