The surprise talks between Iraqi factions are partly the work of a Dubliner with a record of creating dialogue, reports Joe Humphreys
When news broke earlier this week that senior representatives from Sunni and Shia factions in Iraq were holed up in a village in eastern Finland for peace talks hosted by, among others, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness and the Democratic Unionist Party's Jeffrey Donaldson, you had to check it wasn't April Fools Day.
Iraqi politicians and insurgents in the same room together. Heavy hitters from the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa doling out advice. Who could have organised this? Take a bow, Padraig O'Malley, an Irish academic and freelance peace activist whose desire to end the cycle of violence in Iraq created the most unlikely of political summits.
The initiative, which took eight months to plan, has resulted in the "Helsinki agreement", described by Mr Donaldson as a "road map" for Iraqi negotiations based on the Northern peace process.
Perhaps more importantly, it has given a number of senior figures in the Iraqi conflict first-hand experience of negotiating with sworn enemies.
"At the beginning, the atmosphere was somewhat tense, but it was very emotional when an understanding had been reached," says O'Malley. "Everyone embraced each other."
The Dublin-born historian, who is currently the Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, first mooted the idea at an academic conference in the US in January. His hope was to replicate a 1997 peace initiative on Northern Ireland that he had also helped to organise.
Two months before the IRA reinstated its ceasefire, the Harvard graduate - who had devoted several years to campaigning against apartheid in South Africa - arranged for senior unionist and nationalist politicians to meet in the remote South African fishing village of Arniston in Western Cape. There, the Northern Ireland politicians met senior figures from the South African conflict, including Nelson Mandela, who spoke about the need for compromise between foes.
Among those who travelled to Arniston in 1997 were McGuinness, David Trimble (then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party), and Peter Robinson of the DUP. While nothing of substance was agreed at the meeting, somewhat frosty relations between the parties visibly thawed in what proved to be a constructive, trust-building exercise.
"The Arniston conference took three years to organise, and that was the background model for this week's talks," says O'Malley. The delegates in Finland included former African National Congress (ANC) bigwig Mac Maharaj, former apartheid government minister Roelf Meyer, former Alliance leader in Northern Ireland Lord Alderdice, and Billy Hutchinson, a former Assembly member for the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which is linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). "They were there to act as mentors of a kind. The thinking was that these people - some of whom were practitioners of violence, and had come out of it - could offer the Iraqis insights that people from 'normal societies' could not."
Securing the attendance of the mentors was the easiest part of the process. Getting the Iraqis out of Baghdad was a whole different ball-game. O'Malley himself spent six weeks in the fractured city in July and August, meeting Iraq's two vice-presidents - Tariq al-Hashimi and Adel Abdul-Mahdi - and securing their support for the initiative on behalf of Sunni and Shia factions respectively. The Iraqi government was barred from the summit to give delegates more breathing space. But political parties in the ruling coalition were invited to attend in their own capacity.
Asked to describe life in Iraq, O'Malley says: "A prison within a prison, within a prison, within a prison. The only thing that works in Iraq is the killing. It's monumentally depressing, painful. I had eight straight days with no water, no electricity, no nothing. The only contact I had with the outside world was a mobile phone that I managed to somehow keep charged . . . and this was within the Green Zone [supposedly the safest part of the city] . . . The one thing that pervades the entire situation is fear."
He returned to Baghdad exactly a fortnight ago to "nail down" the attendees, and to chaperone them out of the city - just 24 hours ahead of a major curfew. "That was the most nightmarish part because I had to go into the Red Zone without any serious protection to get the tickets, and to get them distributed. Then, each person had to get to the airport through all the checkpoints."
A total of 20 political figures, including two representatives of the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, travelled with him to Finland through Istanbul and Moscow. O'Malley says the complete list of delegates remained confidential as "people's lives could be put at risk". However, the list is known to include proxies acting on behalf of several other insurgent groups. Among the other attendees were Akram al-Hakim, a cabinet member representing the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council; Sunni Arab politician Saleh al-Mutlaq; and a senior official from the Shia Dawa party of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.
The elected representatives among them had met before but in far more hostile circumstances, as O'Malley explains. "They said: 'We sit opposite each other in parliament every day but we have never had frank and open discussions before, like this.' "
The 64-year-old Dubliner says he had hoped to bring more representatives of the insurgents but was unable to do so because of visa, and other travel, restrictions. He stresses, however, that there had been no plans to involve al-Qaeda as "the Finns would not have hosted us, and the Americans would have closed us down".
As it was, he adds, "the US and British government put no obstacles in our way".
The Irish Government was also approached about the project with a view to possibly hosting the summit in Ireland. Finland proved to be more enthusiastic about the initiative, however, offering the support of former president Martti Ahtisaari, who once served as an independent inspector of IRA arms dumps.
Crisis Management Initiative, a lobby group headed by Ahtisaari, subsequently came on board. It acted as joint host of the talks with the John W McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, a think-tank based at O'Malley's university in Boston. Funding was largely secured through an American philanthropist called Robert Bendetson.
For O'Malley, this was just the latest in a long line of foreign adventures. In 1968, he left Dublin - where his mother and two sisters still live today - for Yale University on a Fulbright scholarship. A few years later, he was back in Northern Ireland working as a political consultant and raising money for the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday.
In the mid-1980s, he became involved in the anti-apartheid movement, and successfully made a number of covert trips to South Africa. As a result, he built up strong contacts with the ANC, and when democracy came he had access to senior government members.
It was through such contacts that he embarked on a major research project, documenting the process of South Africa's negotiated settlement, and its transition from white-only rule. The end result, Shades of Difference, was published earlier this year to wide acclaim in the "rainbow nation". He is now working on a new book on conflict in the Middle East.
Speaking to The Irish Times from Cape Town, where he spends up to six months of each year, he says that, while he had agreed to return to Baghdad to present a report on the meeting to relevant politicians, "we are out of business after that". He stresses: "We are not trying to become an NGO."
Of the substance of the talks, O'Malley says: "It was clearly understood, and hammered home, that you have to talk to men of violence. You can talk to them today, or wait 20 years to talk to them, but it has to be done.
"There was general agreement that occupation was a huge part of the problem in Iraq, but there was also general agreement that if the coalition forces moved out there would be a power vacuum which would cause a bloodbath. So the Iraqis feel caught between a rock and a hard place. It's a case of 'we want you out - but please not tomorrow'."
The historian adds that he was taken aback by the amount of publicity generated by the conference in the international media this week. He believes this was "an expression of how desperate people are to see anything that works", but warns that "there is a tendency to exaggerate what happened. There was a signed agreement on 12 principles of behaviour - the Helsinki agreement - and there was also agreement on political objectives. But these have to be brought back to the two vice-presidents who, if they see fit, will put them to their political parties and assemblies, and then go the next stage."
"This is a different order of magnitude to Northern Ireland," he adds."The Iraqis surprised themselves. They all rose above their average level . . . and left in a positive spirit. Whether, after a journey back to Iraq, that spirit will still be there, we will have to wait and see."