Transcript: Q&A Negotiating with Terrorists Jonathan Powell CEO, Inter Mediate; Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair (1995-2007); Chief Negotiator on Northern Ireland (1997-2007); Author, Talking to Terrorists Chair: Gordon Corera Security Correspondent, BBC 23 April 2015 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/ speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chairman: Stuart Popham QC Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 Negotiating with Terrorists Q&A Gordon Corera Jonathan, thank you very much. I’ve already got quite a few hands up, so catch my eye. Question 1 Thank you. My name is Mike Harvey. What is likely to be, or what could cause this mutually hurting stalemate in Israel? How long can it take to reach that? Jonathan Powell It seems to me the problem in Israel is that there isn’t now a mutually hurting stalemate. Effectively, the war has worked. It has stopped suicide bombs inside Israel proper. So one side is not hurting. If you look at Cyprus, for example, if you’re a Greek Cypriot, why would you want to make peace? It’s perfectly comfortable living as you are now. There’s not a mutually hurting stalemate. It’s a stalemate, but it doesn’t hurt. When I first went to Libya about a year ago, I thought, oh good, there’s a mutually hurting stalemate here. There isn’t. There’s a stalemate, but it’s not mutually hurting and both sides can gain a little bit more on each side. So first thing to remember is that a stalemate is not the same as a mutually hurting stalemate. The second thing is they’re not permanent phenomena. In Sri Lanka, there was briefly a mutually hurting stalemate. The Tigers couldn’t win; the government couldn’t win. At that stage, the Norwegian peace process succeeded. It got to a ceasefire. It started a political process. But Colonel Karuna in the east and his faction of the Tigers defected to the government, and the balance of power changed. So a mutually hurting stalemate is not a permanent situation. It can go away again as fast as it comes. It seems to me there clearly isn’t a mutually hurting stalemate in the Middle East, nor is there strong leadership. I can’t predict when that would come about again, nor do I particularly want to see people dying so that people have to talk. I’d like to think people would talk even when people aren’t dying. Question 2 Thank you, Jonathan. Very interesting presentation. I’m a Japanese freelance journalist. My question is about globalization, digitalization, and transnational terrorist organization. In ISIS, there are a lot of players, over 10 players in the region. And also, which government can talk, can negotiate with which terrorist organization? It is very difficult to figure out these days. Terrorist organizations will be more and more transnational, and also it is very difficult to find out where their centre is. How do you [indiscernible] such a kind of transformation? Jonathan Powell Very good question. The first thing to say is that it’s interesting that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon. If you look back at the time around the First World War, there was a similar period of very rapid globalization. Terrorists made use of that. They used the 3 Negotiating with Terrorists Q&A telegraph. The same slogans were shouted in Chicago by anarchist terrorists as were in Milan. They used the same sorts of attacks. They communicated in the same sort of way. So we have seen this global phenomenon in terrorism before. It’s not necessarily new. Secondly, it seems to me you have to deal with terrorism at the root. In other words, if you were trying to solve the ISIS problem by talking to people in London or Bradford who are attacking people, then you wouldn’t solve the problem. You need to go and address it at its root, which is in the Middle East in that case. The third point is about global organizations, as Al Qaeda is, and ISIL appears to be becoming. Again, the point about a global group like that is it is both global and national at the same time. If you look at Al Shabaab or you look at Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, they all have very different wishes and demands. You can actually sit with those groups and talk transactional business, whereas that may be more difficult with Al Qaeda central, as far as it still has survived in the bad lands of Afghanistan. My answer would be that globalization is not new, that you have to find your way to the root of the problem and that if you were starting to talk to groups like this, you would start on a transactional basis in the individual countries where their franchises are. Question 3 David Blair, Daily Telegraph. Would you talk to ISIS? If you would, could you explain how you would negotiate with a group which, unlike all the other examples you’ve cited today, has no rational or achievable objective? Jonathan Powell Yes, I would. The thing we’ve done throughout history is said every time we meet a new terrorist group, that it is completely different from the last one we met. So far, we’ve had four waves of terrorism: the anarchists, the nationalists, the new left and now the religious terrorists. Every time we say they’re completely different. Of course, they are completely different. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the way that you deal with them is always different. You may find different ways of addressing them. Certainly up until now, we’ve always said every group we’ve met is irrational. Once we’ve talked to them, then we say they are rational, but before we talk to them, we say they are irrational. Actually, they all have a rationality, you just have to find a way of understanding it. When I left government in 2008, I said we should, on the basis of my experience in government talking to the IRA, we should be talking to Hamas, to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda, three religious groups. Not surprisingly, my colleagues left in the government said this was ridiculous, and while it was fine to talk to good people like the PLO and the IRA, it was terrible to think about talking to these three groups. Since then, since 2008, the Israeli government has negotiated a ceasefire with Hamas. The American government has negotiated the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl with the 4 Negotiating with Terrorists Q&A Taliban. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, has said we should be talking to Al Qaeda. So attitudes change. These absolute views we take, ‘These people are irrational, we’ll never deal with them,’ changes over time. In the case of ISIL, I do not for a moment suggest we should be negotiating with ISIL now. As I say, I distinguish between talking and negotiating. The circumstances for a negotiation require a mutually hurting stalemate, and some strong leadership. However, what’s also true looking back over history is unless you open some of these channels early on, you could spend a very long time fighting and get to a conclusion much later on, with many more people dying entirely unnecessarily. So if I was in charge of policy, I would certainly use bombing but I would not think that bombing was a strategy that was going to solve the problem of ISIL. It patently won’t. Even if you have boots on the ground, it is not obvious how you would solve the problem of ISIL. That is because ISIL appears to enjoy political support. It is not possible to take the city of Mosul, with 1,000 fighters, unless the population of Mosul thinks you’re probably rather better than the Maliki Shiite sectarian government that they were suffering under before. Then people say to me, ‘What would you talk to ISIL about?’ Just as I wouldn’t talk to the IRA about united Ireland, but I did talk to them about power sharing, about Irish language, about human rights, in the case of ISIL, when eventually we have a negotiation, the issue we’ll have to address is going to be that role of the Sunnis. If the Sunnis are disenfranchised in Iraq, if they are suppressed, humiliated and exploited, then we will have a very major problem. The same is true in Syria. There is a real political issue that needs to be addressed. In the end, the reason we were talking to Sinn Féin was not only because they had weapons.