 |
| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 2 |
| |
ABSTRACT
Dancing with Wolves: The Importance Of Talking to Your Enemies
|
| |
| Michael Ancram |
| |
The following is an excerpt of the text of a lecture by the Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram, a member of the British Parliament and a former shadow foreign secretary, presented at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, April 2007.
It is often a better use of time to talk to your enemies than your friends. So said a wise, experienced and senior Israeli to me a few weeks ago. In a similar vein last summer, following the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, I wrote in The Independent, It is time to start dancing with wolves, to start talking to terrorists.
We live in an age where there has never been a greater failure by the West to engage in dialogue. The result is an increasing incidence of standoff, fear and violence. Nowhere is this more the case today than in the Middle East.
I am neither a pacifist nor a liberal appeaser. As deputy leader of the British Conservative party I called on my colleagues in Parliament to vote for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, without which vote Tony Blair would have had no mandate to join the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein.
I come from what might be described as the Northern Ireland school of conflict resolution. I was sent there as political minister in 1993, after years of troubles and 3,000 dead out of a population of 1.5 million, with many more injured and traumatized.1 It was as bad and intractable a conflict as any.
While drawing too close an analogy between different conflicts is dangerous, there are lessons in common which can be shared.
I want, therefore, to set out my experiences in Northern Ireland, from which I believe some lessons can be learned, particularly as the process we developed in pursuit of peace had largely to be constructed as I went along.
|
| |
|
