Karabakh peace mission for Tony Blair's right-hand-man
Fri 25 February 2011 10:33 GMT | 12:33 Local Time
News.Az interviews Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1994 to 2007.
What is the main purpose of your upcoming visit to Baku?
I am coming to Baku with other experts and political figures who have been involved in peace building in Northern Ireland and in Cyprus. We have been invited by International Alert, the Centre for Strategic Studies under the President of Azerbaijan and the Society for Humanitarian Research to take part in a series of round tables to discuss our experiences in trying to end armed conflicts and to create the conditions for peaceful co-existence of communities.
During the round tables international and Azerbaijani experts will discuss the factors that have contributed to breakthroughs in peace processes, the main challenges on the way to reaching an agreement and ways to address them, the role of civil society initiatives and the media in peace building and the various approaches to building relationships and conditions that will allow peaceful co-existence of communities.
What is the British experience of addressing separatist aspirations? What is the British recipe?
There is no one magic recipe or formula to end conflict and in any case all conflicts are sui generis. So I do not believe that one can transfer the solution to one conflict to another, completely different, situation. That said, there are some things you learn from negotiating peace in one context that can be helpful elsewhere. When I wrote my book on the Northern Ireland peace process, the government allowed me to go back through the official files of my 10 years at No 10 Downing Street and one thing jumped out at me from their pages above all else and that was how essential it is to have a process in place.
Without a process there is no hope of peace, but with one there is at least the prospect of making progress. In the Middle East everyone knows more or less what the eventual outcome between the Israelis and the Palestinians will be, but there is no process so progress cannot be made. This was best summed up by the Israeli President Shimon Peres, who said "the good news is there is light at the end of a tunnel. The bad news is there is no tunnel."
Once you have the process in place you must not let it falter. This is what I call the bicycle theory. You must not let the bicycle fall over or you will find it incredibly difficult to pick up again. So you must be prepared to absorb political pain along the way to keep moving, however slowly.
In the end it is important to understand that peace is not an event but a process.
What are the parallels or similarities between Northern Ireland and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts?
I am coming to Baku and going to Yerevan and to Nagorno-Karabakh to learn about the conflict and the prospects of peace. Until I have done so I am in no position to comment on the parallels, or even whether there are any.
Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan is offering a high level of autonomy to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. How do you see the final settlement of this problem?
In my experience these issues of sovereignty and self determination are amongst the most difficult in the world. In the case of Northern Ireland the Nationalists and Republicans argued that a decision on the future of Northern Ireland belonged to the whole of the island of Ireland.
But the majority Unionist population in Northern Ireland argued that the decision should be for the people of Northern Ireland alone. In the end we reached an agreement based on the primacy of the consent of the people of Northern Ireland who should be able to decide on their future themselves, coupled with a devolved government and a power sharing executive so that the two communities could work together and ensure their interests were protected. We put the agreement to a referendum in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland simultaneously and it achieved majorities in both. But as I have said, this was a model for Northern Ireland which may or may not apply elsewhere.
What role can public diplomacy play between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
The problem with most conflicts is that there is a sort of zero sum politics that dominates. If one side comes out of a negotiation claiming it has won, the other side feels that it has lost.
This was most obvious in Northern Ireland at the time of the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, when it was the IRA supporters who were driving round Belfast honking their horns and waving their flags in victory and the Unionists who were sunk in depression even though an IRA ceasefire was what they had been demanding for nearly 30 years. It is only when you break through this zero sum thinking that you can arrive at a lasting settlement. Both sides need to come away feeling they have won, and both sides have to think about how any agreement is seen by the constituency of the other side, not just their own.
Jonathan Powell was chief of staff to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1994, when Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party, until 2007, when he stood down as prime minister. He was the only member of the senior staff to serve with Blair throughout that period. From 1997 to 2007 Jonathan Powell was the chief negotiator on Northern Ireland, representing the Office of the Prime Minister and helping to bring peace there.
Leyla Tagiyeva
News.Az