Making Peace: The Good Friday Agreement

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • The 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement with Ambassador Swanee Hunt and Monica McWilliams

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Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] And this is Beth Silvers. 

Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

[00:00:25] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Pantsuit Politics. We have a very special episode for you today on Good Friday. April 10th marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement. And today, we have two very special guests to help us mark this occasion, Ambassador Swanee Hunt and Monica McWilliams, who participated in the Good Friday Peace Agreement. We had a wonderful and fascinating conversation with these two women and we can't wait to share it with you in today's episode.  

Beth [00:00:56] Before we get started, we were having wonderful, fascinating conversations among ourselves about Succession over on our premium channels. It is in the more to say feed. We would love for you to join us either on Patreon or Apple Podcasts subscriptions. The show is fascinating. It speaks to so much in our current politics and media and culture, and so please join in the conversation.  

Sarah [00:01:18] Up next, our conversation around the Good Friday agreement. So, 25 years ago, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 and marked the end of a 30 year period of conflict in Northern Ireland That's often referred to as the Troubles.  

Beth [00:01:40] We want to talk about some of the history of that agreement and its continued relevance. We'll get into more detail about all of this. But if you don't know anything else, you'll want to know that this agreement was negotiated by a multi-party group. People were elected to get involved in this process. There were people brought in from other nations to help facilitate the process. And the goal was to create a sense of peace around the relationship that Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK had with each other. And that is a conflict that has endured throughout the ages. So, getting to this agreement was incredibly significant and it is incredibly significant that this agreement has held for so long.  

Sarah [00:02:26] Well, and you'll remember from our conversation about global hotspots, we talked about agreements that have and haven't held in Yemen. We have agreements in Ethiopia that need to hold. And so, looking back over 25 years, added agreement that has not been 100% successful-- Monica gets into that-- but that has lasted and has prevented violence is more important than ever.  

Beth [00:02:49] So we were very privileged to talk with Ambassador Hunt and Monica McWilliams about this. You can get a sense of the incredible lives these two have lived just by hearing how they met. Ambassador Hunt had gathered a number of women leaders at Harvard from countries all over the world.  

Ambassador Swanee Hunt [00:03:04] One of the women was from Cyprus. Her name was Katie [sp] [inaudible]. And she was looking down as we talked around my kitchen table. I have no reason to think you'll remember this. And she said, I can't keep doing this work. I can't keep doing it. I don't see my daughter. I'm a wreck. Trying to deal with the Greece and Greek Cypriot conflict. I just can't keep doing it. And her body language, Monica.  And she just folded down finally. And you said, "Have you had the death threats yet?" And Katie looked up and everyone looked at you. There were about six people around the table. And Katie said, what? And you said, "The death threats. Once they started saying they're going to kill our children, we lined the streets, we lined the sidewalk and then our kids could walk in between us and we could protect them as they went to the school." And I got Katie's body language. And as I said, she'd been all slumped over. And when she heard you, she literally came up like this. And she said, "No, we haven't had death threats." And that isn't the content. It was watching this woman be transformed by another woman who was telling terrible news, but it was that they were together. So, when we gathered this big group, it wasn't just, "Hey, listen to Harvard professors tell you all about five words to get started." We had the Harvard professors for two weeks, etc.. But people listened to Monica McWilliams and they listened to another woman from Ukraine and they listen to another woman from Israel and a Palestinian and another from Uganda. Okay. That was the magic. That was the turning point. And because it was 25 years ago, I'm close friends with so many. And one of them from Kosovo, which had just been bombed and the Serbs were lined up [inaudible]. She became ambassador to the Netherlands. She said, "You know, Swanee, when I was there, I was so traumatized I couldn't really take it in. But then over the years, as my soul calmed down and I could be open, I understood what had happened in those two weeks.".  

Monica McWilliams [00:05:40] Well, my memory of that-- and I don't remember that part which candidly you have recalled-- was that the other woman had an impact on me. And that's the importance of these exchanges. And I had learned that lesson from watching what women in other countries were doing and the different messages that they were bringing to peace negotiations. But I didn't really have a lot of skills that didn't have at least I thought that way or a lot of tools until I came to Swanee's group, which was called at the time Women Waging Peace. And I thought it was a great title, and that's what we were waging. And we may not have been seen as warriors in the sense of armed groups, but we felt that we had lived with an armed patriarchy and that we had plenty of tools to combat that.  

Sarah [00:06:30] Before we get into the peace process, let's just do a little bit of background on Irish history. It's really not a little bit of history here. There are thousands and thousands of years. England started invading Ireland in the early 1100s. England's long colonization of Ireland resulted in a split between a minority group of Protestants in Northern Ireland to align themselves with the Crown and the majority of Catholics in the rest of Ireland, now known as the Republic of Ireland, who lost land rights and suffered discrimination at the hands of the Crown. And so, this conflict has taken many forms over Ireland's history, including manifesting itself in a civil war between Irish citizens and with the central issue being whether all or part of Ireland should be independent of the UK.  

Beth [00:07:17] It's easy to shorthand this issue as being about Protestants versus Catholics. But as Monica explains, this is not a religious conflict.  

Monica McWilliams [00:07:27] It has little to do with religion because we were all Christians. And I remember President Mandela once saying to us, "You're all white, you all speak English, you're all Christians, but you truly don't get each other." And it really sunk in because we had an apartheid and it was whether you supported being part of the United Kingdom, which is where Northern Ireland is, or whether you were part of those fighting and struggling and deciding to actually shoot people into a united Ireland, which is why arms were taken up. And the Women's Coalition decided there had to be a different way.  

Sarah [00:08:07] Now, if you want to hear more about this long and storied history, Beth did a great More to Say on this topic and a link to that episode is in the show notes.  

Beth [00:08:16] Today, we want to pick up with the Troubles. The Troubles is a phrase that has been used in many contexts to describe other events. It typically refers to a war, and this time between the sixties and the Good Friday Agreement was really a low level war. It was filled with terror; it was filled with violence. It expanded into England. It turned people who had previously been on each other sides against each other over the continued future of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a time that was bitter and it was scary and it was painful for anyone who had a connection to Ireland. And we are going to spend our time today on the peace process. So, we're not going to discuss all of that violence and we're not going to discuss who was more at fault here. As the negotiations around the Good Friday Agreement demonstrate, you could spend your whole life sorting out blame and judgment. What made this agreement go forward was everyone's willingness to say, how do we get out of this? How do we move beyond it?  

Sarah [00:09:23] So we'll talk more about the peace process itself up next. So that long history that stretches back thousands of years and the previous decades that are classified as the Troubles that were filled with violence and terror, that is the context for a peace process that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement. Negotiators had to be elected for the peace process. Monica was one of those negotiators on behalf of a group called the Women's Coalition, which she played a part in forming.  

Monica McWilliams [00:09:58] We decided to form a party because you had to be a political party to get the peace talks. And people had seen the bottom up women's movement in Northern Ireland and how we worked across the peace lines, and how we broke down rumors and lies and called each other on our phones. And then later [inaudible] when they were introduced to try and stop that tension. And the people liked it. They liked what they saw in terms of women as mothers and women as feminists, and women have this expression of family feminists. They liked what we were doing, so they did elect us. All of that was important. My own boyfriend had been murdered in 1974. And as I came here this week, I just read in the newspaper that the man who had tortured him and put four bullets in his head as a student was later living a life as a football manager in a club in Wales, and he had been given an award by celebrity Ryan Giggs. And this man had done the most awful torture on my friend Michael Muller. And it was in 1974. And it's things like that that drove us to want to go a different way. And so, when I stepped on the peace table, the armed group that had killed him was sitting right beside me. So, that's what you do when you have to go into negotiations. There wasn't anybody at that peace table that hadn't been shot at. One of them, their father had been killed. Another man had 12 bullets shot and had still got the marks on his face. There were others who had owned a pub and he watched a customer being shot in front of him. So, the people that come to peace tables are quite traumatized, too. But no one in those days thought to introduce the idea of mediation or the idea of facilitation. And in many ways, us women ended up doing that as well as being negotiators. So, we play all three roles when we enter a peace process.  

Beth [00:12:07] The stakes of this conflict as you can hear just from Monica, short answer, were very high. People had to be elected to this process. It was important to have real representation of all of the communities that experienced events like Monica described. And so, the Women's Coalition formed as a political party and then ran for election to the process. So, having women at this negotiating table was novel. It was an intense situation. You'll hear a lot from Monica and Swanee about that experience. Women had to fight to be taken seriously. But research bears out that once women overcome all of the obstacles to being in the room and endure all of the insults and degrading conduct that can accompany being in the room, they are extremely effective.  

Ambassador Swanee Hunt [00:12:55] You will have all these breakthrough ideas that you brought to the table, and mind you, there were no women who were going to be there because George Mitchell, my hero, he said, "Well, we're not having just women. We're just having the heads of parties." So, women who are listening to this, take note. None of this, oh, will you be the president? I'll help you out. No, become the president because then at some point they're going to gather all the presidents of whatever you're doing. You were there and you were saying, well, what about our education? Our kids they're learning different versions. And I know because I have this on tape of you're saying-- so we said we have to have the same textbooks for our kids. And you had one idea after another. And what I've seen is there's a reason that if you have women in a substantial way, I'm not talking about majority, but if you have a few women even in a substantial way in a peace talks, instead of five years-- I mean, I bet your listeners are just shocked to hear all this work that goes into a peace agreement and the agreement lasts only five years. But if you have the women, there's a huge chance it's going to last multiple times close to 20 years because the women are bringing issues like you brought.  

Monica McWilliams [00:14:21] Yes. And that's important in that I'm constantly asked, what difference do women make? Well, in a democracy, if you're truly represented, the women should be there anyway. And we said, look, we're not just going to bring photographs of women and flaunt them on the table in terms of women never speaking, but just looking like you fill those seats. So, we prepared every night at our kitchen table the answers that we were going to bring. And George Mitchell told us afterwards that we have done more of our homework than any of the other parties. We were the only woman at the table, the two of us, one from each side of the community. So, each time you got your speaking rights, when it came to me, he would say, "And now we will have the women." And I had to say to him, "Senator, it would be good if you would call us by the name of our party, because there are other women who are taking notes in this room and there are other women who are acting as the secretariat in this room. And we are the negotiators and we have a name and we're called the Women's Coalition." But sometimes you do have to remind these people who are very serious (and he was a superb chairperson) that they too have a little bit of a gender blind lens on the [inaudible]. What we brought to the table were issues that would never have been on that table. First, we asked under a chapter called Reconciliation, that we pay attention to that word in the reconstruction of a country after a conflict. And we brought in issues of what the victims needed because many of the women in the coalition were widows or had lost their children. And we asked for reparations for those victims. We asked for a truth and justice process. And 25 years later, as I've come here to mark that agreement and celebrate that agreement, we still have not put that process in place.  

Sarah [00:16:19] And women bring a broader perspective not only to the issues at hand, but to the understanding of the peace process itself, as Monica pointed out.  

Monica McWilliams [00:16:32] Because you always broaden the agenda and that helps to get people away from what they consider to be only their issues. So, that's really important. And we broadened that agenda. [Crosstalk] it's really good. And I think women do that because in our own lives, personal lives as well, we're constantly thinking of different angles and broadening it. Or just from the terrible hurt that we're just feeling, we're trying to think, how do we come at this from a different angle? And that's what you've just made that point. Yes, it is 100 years old. But I always say our history should start from the day we reached that agreement. And it's been a successful agreement. I want every Good Friday to be a good Friday. We still don't know as we speak, and it's in the agreement that we should have a referendum on whether to remain with the consent of the people as part of the United Kingdom or whether the consent of the people is not changed and they want to be in a unified Ireland. And that probably will be in the next 10 years that we may have that referendum. So, all the time it's a roller coaster. You're constantly getting one piece settled and then you move on. We may still be an unsettled people in terms of identity, but we're at peace and that's really important. It has made a difference to my life and the life of my children.  

Sarah [00:17:55] Monica continues to dedicate her life to getting women involved in the peace process, as does Ambassador Hunt, because when you broaden the scope in one peace process, you bring that expertise to a broader scope and many peace processes. And so, what could that look like in other places around the world?  

Beth [00:18:14] The conflict between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland seemed intractable going into the Good Friday negotiation. And so, I think about conflicts that seem intractable today and wonder what would happen if you brought in elements other than just who has claim to this land? To whom does loyalty lie to whom is allegiance owed? And to allow women in particular to say, what kind of lives do we want to have on the other side of this and how can we get there?  

Ambassador Swanee Hunt [00:18:45] What we know is that the greatest predictor of a war is if the countries or inside the country have already been at war. And you have to think about how you stabilize countries after the peace agreement. And the big, big piece of that is corruption. And people think of women as less corrupt, which is a good thing because they put confidence in you. But actually, women are less corrupt. We have the data on that. And so, what I see is people are anticipating that there's going to be a new structure and the men line up. They line up before the first day of the peace talks, so you get this long line. And this is all over the world that I've seen this and the women say, I can't be pushing to be this minister of interior or whatever, because we've got these major problems. And being in the government is talk, talk, talk, talk. And I've got to get food to these children. I've got to get water to the refugee camps. And so, they don't end up in those positions.  

Monica McWilliams [00:19:57] Two things are going to happen to us, is those men who line up pat us on the back and say thank you to the women for doing a good job. Now we start the reconstruction we'll take over. And the women have to move backwards. And sometimes that's voluntary because we no longer want to be in that space. We want to get back to the groundwork that we came from. I've just come from South Sudan on Saturday, so I see the difference that it makes in terms of what is peace. Peace means feeding the women and children that I saw International Women's Day last week. And it also means that they can get to the stage where they can get education and development. And then that also makes sense that they have good governance. But we still work too much in silos. So, you have the government arrangements over there in one corner, you have us running around as humanitarian aid workers in another corner, and you have the development folk coming in another corner. And unless we get all three of those together, we won't have sustainable peace. So, although I've spent my life working on conflict resolution more at the policy and political level, I absolutely took messages away from South Sudan, as I do from Northern Ireland, as I do from Colombia, that what we have to do more now is match these pieces together.  

Beth [00:21:20] I would love to hear from both of you, if you could give one piece of advice, to women working in this space and particularly women working on the implementation of agreements that have been negotiated, what would that piece of advice be? I love the phrase sustainable peace. I'll be thinking about that a lot. How can you be an instrument of sustainable peace?  

Monica McWilliams [00:21:38] Well, a peace agreement is hard to make. And my message this week is let's not break it. But most importantly, how you do that is the word you've just used. Implementation. We are there before. We're there cheering. We need to be there after. And that comes with monitoring and oversight. The biggest mistake I made if I had to go back, would be to write in a validation committee and to have women on that committee. We thought everything would be okay after we had signed a peace agreement. And 25 years later, there are pieces that are really working and there are pieces that are not. So, again, this week I'm proposing that we establish the implementation committee and that we monitor and we put in benchmarks, we put in timetables, we put in targets so that people are focused on what needs to be done. But you learn these things. And as I have this saying, retrospect is a great person to have at the table. And that would be my message to anyone going into the negotiations.  

Ambassador Swanee Hunt [00:22:41] And one of the ways to keep going is what I was thinking of, and that is to never lose sight of the humanity of the people either that are on the opposite side of you or that you want to be working with.  

Monica McWilliams [00:22:58] It's important that we build those relationships. I call it the personal chemistry. And you remember the famous fairness statement that personal is political. I think women work harder across the table finding those relationships. Find one person on the other side that you can talk to, and then you'll get lots of information as a result of that. But also, you'll find out what things that they feel they've been most harmed by. And that's really important. But the second part of that message is also that we need to hold people accountable when they do evil things. And that's where the human rights violations come in and that's where the investigations come in. And that's all part of the reconstruction. And we're in Northern Ireland struggling with that at the minute.  

Sarah [00:23:51] I think it's easy coming out of this conversation to put that spin on it, to say, look, we found peace was intractable. But really what I found most interesting and just a different way to widen the perspective and both soften and increase our expectations around peace processes is how Monica talked about. Like, we're not done here. We didn't get everything. We talked about and the Good Friday Agreement, we we're not finished working on this because I do think it's easy to say, look, they did it, it can be done and like kind of wrap it up in a neat bow. But I think it's more honest and honestly even more empowering to say it's ongoing work. It's ongoing work. In a situation like this.  

Beth [00:24:31] There is no way for a conflict that has endured thousands of years and defined many generations experiences of one another to end with one agreement. And I resonated with the frustration in Monica's voice as she talked about all of the pieces of this agreement that haven't been executed yet, haven't come to fruition. And I do take a lot of encouragement from that. And especially as an American, this gets me to a point that we return to often here, which is that we act like our country is just done, like we have our documents and we're finished. And the document is the beginning of a new chapter, not the conclusion of one. And so, I think the relevance of the Good Friday Agreement is so predominant now as the Republic of Ireland figures out its relationship with Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. Northern Ireland left with the UK and the Republic of Ireland remained with the EU. And so, having a trade border between those two countries on an island that is the size of the state of Indiana is a difficult proposition to negotiate. And you see Prime Minister Rishi Sunak trying to negotiate it now with a framework that is incredibly controversial, but that does try to maintain the kind of respect for all the parties that the Good Friday Agreement did.  

Sarah [00:25:53] I think about how we even use the term agreement as if we agreed and then we moved on and then we were done, versus peace process. Listening to Monica reminded me a lot of the book I read, Country of My Skull, about the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, which I had painted a beautiful picture of. And that book stripped me of all that. Don't make this incredibly intense, painful, even successful process two dimensional in your head in the history writing because it is so much more complicated than that. And it continues to be complicated because of the conflict and because proportionately peace is difficult as well. It is difficult in a different way, but it is difficult. And I think understanding that and wrapping our arms around that, listening to people who have walked that journey, again, paradoxically, it makes it seem more achievable. When a conflict is intractable and we have the story about an agreement that came down from the sky and blessed us all, that's not helpful. But when we hear an intractable conflict and we hear this was the blood, sweat, and tears I poured into this peace process that I'm still not happy with, that was not a gift in every way but we still move forward, that to me is empowering. That is impactful, that is encouraging as humans wanting to just take steps forward together.  

Beth [00:27:15] It just is a reminder that whether you're talking about two states at war with each other or a civil war, or the kinds of divisions that we have in American politics every day, peace is an active live process that you walk into every single day. Peace is a verb, right? It is not a state of being that just remains. It is constantly negotiated and constantly implemented. And I just feel so grateful that we have the opportunity to talk with someone so intimately familiar with this process as we observe its 25th anniversary.  

Sarah [00:27:54] Yes. Thank you to Ambassador Hunt, and thank you to Monica McWilliams for joining us here. Thank you to all of you for listening. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday. And until then, keep it nuance y'all. 

Beth [00:28:20] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.  

Sarah [00:28:25] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.  

Beth [00:28:31] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.  

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