British negotiator turned mediator Jonathan Powell reveals the ebb and flow of the world’s major peace processes. He takes us through secret negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the following decade of talks on its implementation. He drew on this experience to support the dialogue with ETA in Spain, as well as the negotiation between the Colombian government and the FARC to end Latin America’s longest civil war. Jonathan Powell shares insights from meeting conflict parties in their hideouts, as well as the lessons learned from advising leaders in Afghanistan and Myanmar.

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The first meeting I remember that Mirko and I had was right at the top of the mountains, and we'd gone all the way up there. And we sat down to talk to him. And then a huge hailstorm started, and the hail on this canvas meant it's almost impossible to know what he was saying, but we had to pretend. We gradually managed to build a bit of trust between the two sides. We managed to bring them together to actually meet in person, which was difficult, of course. And we did it in a former camp where he'd been based in the bush. And they had me sit outside in a deck chair, in the sun getting sunburned for 3 hours. And they invited me in, and they said, well, we're going to dictate you what we've agreed.

Welcome to The Mediator's Studio, a podcast about peacemakers, bringing you stories from behind the scenes. I'm your host, Adam Cooper. I'm at the Oslo Forum, which started out as a small gathering in 2003 and is now entering its third decade, bringing together some of the world's leading figures in peacemaking. Participants from around the world are here to discuss the major conflicts of our day, from Gaza to Myanmar, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. My guest today is CEO of Inter Mediate, a charity he founded in 2011, which has worked to resolve some of the world's longest running and most intractable conflicts. He was asked by Tony Blair to be his Chief of Staff in 1994 and served in that role throughout the Blair premiership from 1997 to 2007. And as chief British negotiator on Northern Irelan, he was one of the key architects of the Good Friday Agreement. Jonathan Powell, welcome to The Mediator's Studio.

Thank you.

Let's start with your family. Your grandfather had been Winston Churchill's private secretary. Your father was in the air force, and your brother Charles worked closely with two British prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major. Growing up, did you feel that a life of public service was inevitable?

No. If anything, I was trying to react against it. I was certainly very clear I wasn't going to go into the military. And having seen my brother go into the foreign service, I was going to try and avoid that as well. I started off trying to be a journalist. I went to work for the BBC when I came back from university in America, and then I went to work for Granada in Manchester. And by accident, I ended up moving over to the Foreign Office, mainly because my parents didn't think journalism was a proper job and being in the Foreign Office meant I had a pension. So, they were very keen I go and do that. And that's why I ended up in the Foreign Office by mistake, really. So, I hadn’t intended to be a public servant. But as you say, the gene was quite deep. My grandfather was Churchill's private secretary when he was Home Secretary. There's a lovely picture of him in the War Office Museum, standing next to Churchill holding his coat at the time of the Sidney Street Siege where they were taking on the anarchists. Churchill was a real show off in these things. He loved to go where the action was. So, he turned up when this gang of anarchists were being shot at by the police that ended up in the mall being killed.

Well, so you do end up as a sort of accidental diplomat. And you joined the Foreign Office in 1979 and as a young diplomat, you worked on three massive sets of negotiations. The return of Hong Kong to China, arms control talks with the Soviet bloc in the mid-1980s, and the so called two plus four talks on German reunification in the late eighties. How did they prepare you for what was to come?

As you say, it was by accident that I ended up doing negotiation. Most diplomats in the British system now very rarely actually get involved in that sort of negotiation. But the Hong Kong negotiation was, if you like, leftover from history, decolonisation had largely been finished by the time I joined the Foreign Office. But the Hong Kong issue was there. And actually, I learned almost everything I know about negotiation from that. The leader of the negotiation was Percy Cradock, who'd been the British ambassador in Beijing. So, he's a real China expert, a real intellectual and a brilliant negotiator. And the way he approached the Hong Kong negotiations was incredibly impressive. I mean, he really thought it through. And one of the difficulties he had there, of course, was it was a three-way negotiation, if you like. On the one hand, you had the Chinese, who were being extremely unreasonable, Deng Xiaoping setting very clear conditions. But on the other side, he had to negotiate with Mrs Thatcher and with the executive council in Hong Kong. So, trying to balance these things off was a very, very difficult exercise. And most of all, the problem was that the Chinese were pretty recalcitrant on the whole issue.

Mrs Thatcher was determined to start the negotiations by hanging on to sovereignty. And we had to keep trying at that. And then eventually it became clear we weren't going to get anywhere. And he managed to persuade Mrs Thatcher of what he called the first finesse. And the first finesse was saying, well, if we let you have sovereignty back, will you let us carry on with administration? And that didn't work. And then we went to the second finesse, which was saying, well, if we gave you administration, what rights would you give Hong Kong? So, it was a fascinating negotiation and quite a stressful one in terms of a young diplomat staying in the base, providing the instructions for the negotiators. And those days, it was done on very old-fashioned machinery. In about lunchtime, we get the report from Beijing of the day before his negotiations. Then we'd get Hong Kong's reactions to them by mid to late afternoon. I then had to prepare a submission to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister of what we should say in the negotiations the next day. But then, when they'd all been approved, we then had to type them up on these very old-fashioned telegram forms in the Foreign Office that if you made one mistake in a 20-page telegram, you had to start again. So, it was till midnight every day for one and a half years really.

So, it clearly taught you a few things about negotiations and had a big impact on your life. Later at the Foreign Office, you were posted to the British embassy in Washington in 1991, and one of your responsibilities was to follow opposition politicians in the US on the presidential campaign trail. And at that time, President George Bush Sr. was high in the polls after the Gulf War. And you chose to follow Bill Clinton because he went to your college in Oxford. So, what did you make of Clinton on the campaign trail? And did you ever imagine that he would later play peacemaker in the Middle East and Northern Ireland?

There's a long tradition of this position in the embassy, which actually goes all the way back to Isaiah Berlin during the Second World War. And the task is to get to know the opposition in the United States during the election campaign. Because, you know the government, we knew George Bush Sr. very well, but we didn't know who might be his rival. So, it still happens. Now there's a young British diplomat following Trump around to see what happens in the US elections now. And there were seven democratic candidates at that stage. They were known as the seven dwarfs because they were all waiting for Mario Cuomo to come in. And George Bush was at 75% plus popularity, so no one thought they had any chance of winning. I suspect Bill Clinton had gone in to try out to see what would happen at the next election, just to go around the course one time. And it was quite hard to attach yourself, I spent some time with Bob Kerrey, who was candidate at that stage, with Harkin and Tsongas. But Bill Clinton was the easiest because he had been in my college at Oxford a few years before me.

So, I basically ended up attached to his campaign for a year. That's where I learned most of the things I know about politics, watching that happening. And I got a reputation completely undeserved for being a political genius, for predicting his victory when no one else thought he would win. It was simply because he was the only person I could get on the plane with and spend a year following him around.

And it was a very fortunate connection you made. Later on, you would help to provide the connections between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And that relationship between yourself and Mr Blair is something which would define, in many ways, your career. Tell me about your first meetings with him and your first impressions.

Of Tony Blair?

Yes.

Well, after Clinton was elected, the Labour Party was very interested in making contact with him and particularly these two young politicians, the up-and-coming politicians in the Labour party, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. And actually, Gordon Brown came out first. He came out for the Democratic Convention, autumn 1991, and I squired him around, got him a pass to go on the floor and so on. But after the election, the two of them wanted to come out together to see what the New Democrats, what this new president was like. And they flew in, and I took them all around the city and introduced them to all Clinton's people and they got to know them, and they were fascinated by the concept of New Democrats. And Gordon Brown in particular took armfuls of documents from the New Democrats headquarters. And of course, the idea of New Labour essentially came from that New Democrats approach. And Tony was very much the still junior partner to Gordon Brown at that stage. And while they were traveling around in Washington, they were attacked by John Prescott, representing old Labour. He called them “the bright young things” as a term of insult. And they quite liked and fed on because they had a TV crew with them the whole time they were there. But it was clear to me that Tony Blair was very much not just a charming person, but a very ruthless and effective politician who was determined to move the Labour Party and determined to win.

And that interested you. And in 1994, three years before the 97 election that would bring him to power, he asked you to be his Chief of Staff. And terrifyingly perhaps, he tells you he also wants you to broker a peace deal in Northern Ireland within a year of coming to office. Do you remember that conversation and what was going through your head?

Firstly, I wanted to be a Labour MP. My ambition was to leave the Foreign Office and become an MP. But that's really quite hard to do in the British system because you have to cultivate a particular constituency and it’s very hard to do from abroad. So, when Tony asked me to be his Chief of Staff, I was slightly taken aback, but pleased because he was going to create an American style Chief of Staff. And then he did start talking about Northern Ireland. And it was interesting because Tony had spent his summer holidays as a young child going to Northern Ireland. His grandmother lived in Donegal, actually in the Republic of Ireland, but she was an orange woman, she was a unionist Protestant. And so, he used to go there every year. So, he had this sort of Northern Ireland thing in his blood. In fact, his grandmother told him on her deathbed: “Whatever you do, promise you won't marry a Catholic”. And of course, he went away and married a Catholic.

So, he was fascinated by Northern Ireland, and he had changed the policy of the Labour Party as soon as he became leader. The position of the Labour Party had been to be a persuader for United Ireland, being always very green, very much on the republican and nationalist side. He came in and said, we will support John Major in his efforts at peace, regardless of what he does. And we did that regardless of, sometimes we thought what John Major was doing was wrong. And John Major deserves a lot of credit for doing this politically because there was no mileage in it for him. He did it out of a sense of duty. So, Tony was determined to make this work. And we spent some time meeting with the Permanent Secretary from the Northern Ireland Office and with Mo Mowlam, of course, our own shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, coming up with a sort of a plan, not a very detailed plan, but it was to try and rush the issue. The idea was to use the political capital he had when he came in. To try and make progress.

But did it feel a sort of crazily ambitious undertaking from the off? What was your instinctive reaction?

That it was optimistic. But one of the things that was attractive about Tony was his self-belief. Tony says in his autobiography that I told him the reason he succeeded in Northern Ireland was he had a messiah complex. In fact, it was Mo Mowlam, our very colourful Northern Ireland Secretary, who used to use expletives quite regularly, who told me “Tony thought he was f*ing Jesus”. Now, that's not quite the same as a messiah complex, but it's closely related. Mrs Thatcher believed you couldn't make peace in Northern Ireland. John Major believed you could make peace in Northern Ireland, but he couldn't do it. Tony believed it could be made and he could do it. He actually had that self-belief. And so, yes, it was a bit shocking to hear this as set out as an objective, but knowing him, I could believe that he could believe. From then on, I appointed myself the official optimist. So even when he started giving up hope, I stayed optimistic. We could get there.

By that point in the conflict, it had reached what some in the mediation community call a perceived mutually hurting stalemate. But for listeners who might not be familiar with Northern Ireland, can you just give us a thumbnail sketch of what the situation was in 1997?

I think the British army had realised by the late seventies, very early eighties, that they could contain the IRA forever. The IRA was never going to be a threat to the existence of the British state, but they couldn't actually stop the violence. They couldn't defeat the IRA by military means, they understood that. What they saw their task from then on was actually framing the conflict for a political negotiation. I think Adams and McGuinness, who joined the republican movement very young, Gerry Adams was the leader of Sinn Féin and reputedly the leader of the IRA, although he's always denied it. Martin McGuinness confessed to being a member of the IRA and had been chair of the Provisional Army Council, which directed the work of the IRA in Northern Ireland, the terrorist campaign. So, they were the two leaders of this provisional IRA. They had broken away from the IRA in the late sixties, early seventies. One a more hard line, more committed to violence. And most people thought there would never be a peace agreement on this. They conducted some horrific crimes in killing lots of innocent people, including children and women and so on, sometimes killing them in horrific manners.

And tell me about your first meetings with the parties in December 1997. And you mentioned Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness just now. Martin McGuinness, associated with the IRA, which had shot and injured your own father, put your brother, Charles, who had worked for Mrs Thatcher, on a death list. How did that history play out in your interactions?

I didn't feel very warm and cuddly about terrorists, as you say, because they'd injured my father. They put my brother on death list. And I just spent a year in Washington trying to stop Gerry Adams getting a visa to go there and fundraise. And I thought I'd succeeded. So, the first time we met them was actually in October 1997. We deliberately met them in a room with no windows in castle buildings in Stormont, just outside Belfast. And Alastair Campbell and I refused to shake hands with them. Tony Blair, who's much more sensible, shook hands with them. And in retrospect, it was a mistake on my part not to do so, although one that repeats itself often in many of these negotiations. It was a pretty awkward meeting. We didn't get very far. I remember Gerry Adams gave a little sculpture in Irish bogwood to Tony Blair and said he hoped that was the only bit of Ireland he'll hold on to.

First of many, perhaps. You mentioned your interactions with Gerry Adams and the awkwardness at the beginning, but you did build a relationship of trust. And at one point he tells you that he could bring some of the IRA over to the side of peace, but not all of them. Tell me about that conversation, what it taught you, how you overcame that problem.

You're right, to emphasize trust, because that, that really came home to me, actually. Shortly after that first meeting I mentioned before of October, I got a call from Martin McGuinness out of the blue, sitting at my desk in Number Ten Downing Street saying, will I come to Northern Ireland incognito and not tell the securocrats, not tell the police, not tell the army. And I said, “Well, let me ask Tony.” And I went and asked Tony and he said: “You're dispensable, sure, well, go ahead, try it out and see how you get on.” So, I flew to Belfast, took a taxi to Derry and stood on a street corner feeling very foolish, like a Le Carré character. And two guys with shaved heads turned up and pushed me into the back of a cab saying, “Martin sent us”. They drove me around the town for about an hour till I was completely lost and pushed me outside just by a little modern building on the edge of an estate. I went and knocked on the door and Martin McGuinness came to the door on crutches and made a very unfunny joke about kneecapping, which is the IRA way of punishing people by shooting or drilling holes in their knees, their ankles, and their elbows.

And we spent 3 hours sitting there in the house. The woman of the house had gone away, left a fire and some sandwiches. And we made no breakthroughs. But something came home to me that if we are going to actually make peace with these people, we're going to need to build trust with them. That means that we're going to have shared risks. We can't just demand they come to Downing Street or come to Stormont. I have to go and see them on their turf. And then for the next ten years I spent an enormous amount of time flying across the Irish Sea to meet them in safe houses in Dublin and Belfast and Derry and elsewhere, just to try and build that trust and make progress on it. In terms of the conversation with Gerry Adams that took place at the end of that meeting in December of 97 in Downing Street. The cabinet room is quite a long room and there's some pillars at the far end separating off in almost a separate room. And Adams took Tony Blair and me to the end of the room, leaving everyone else further back, and said, “Look, I could maybe take part of the IRA into an agreement now, but I'd like to try and take the whole movement. We want to end this once and for all. So, if you're going to give me time and space, and you give me time and space, I think I can lead the whole movement”. And the essential gamble we made was to give them that time and space. Traditionally, the British government had tried to split the republican movement. We tried to divide it into smaller and smaller groups. But this time we decided we want to make peace once, not lots of times. So, we're going to give them that time and space. Now we're much criticised for that by David Trimble later, and say, you shouldn't have given them time, you should have forced the issue. But I think it was the right thing to do. We didn't get all of the IRA. There was a breakthrough, but it did mean we only had to make peace once and not to keep having to do it.

I want to ask about the role of the Americans, particularly Senator George Mitchell, architect of the so-called Mitchell principles in 1996, who was instrumental in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Tell me how you worked with the Americans to bring strategic pressure at key moments.

The history of American involvement, of course, goes back to the 19th century on Ireland and then Northern Ireland later. George Mitchell originally came over as an economic envoy for Bill Clinton. He would not have been accepted by the parties or by the British Tory government as an envoy for political issues, but he won people's confidence. He was asked to do the report on how we got round the issue of weapons, because weapons have become a blockage. John Major got a ceasefire from the IRA, but it wasn't a permanent ceasefire, and he didn't want to negotiate under the threat of violence. So, he said, you've got to give up all your weapons before you can come to the negotiating table. And the IRA said no, and he was completely stuck. It's an interesting example of how preconditions can really track people. If you make a precondition to go into a negotiation, the other side may just say no and then what are you going to do? What he had to do was then keep shifting his position. He said they had to get most of their weapons. They said no. He said, give up a token amount of their weapons. They still said no.

So, he's looking for a way, a surrogate, to show that he wasn't negotiating under the threat of violence. And they asked George Mitchell to come up with a report. In fact, I know that John Major didn't really like the report he came up with because he sorts of split the difference and said they should give up their weapons in parallel to the negotiations, but they should sign up for the principles of nonviolence. And he had, I think there were seven principles he set out and they were actually crucially important. Because Sinn Féin could sign up for those. The IRA, obviously, as a paramilitary movement, couldn't. Their existence was about violence. But it was the thing that helped us to unblock the issue. Now, George then became the chairman of the talks because we needed someone independent. Initially, the British government, like many other governments, refused to have a third party from abroad. They insisted we could do it ourselves. It had to be national. But that didn't really work. We had to have someone who was neutral. We started with an Australian, Sir Ninian Stephen, very establishment figure. And then George took over and did a brilliant job of keeping people happy. He was the referee who allowed things to progress, and he was the one who shepherded the talks up to when we started the Good Friday negotiations.

And so, just before Good Friday, Tony Blair flew in with me and his team. Bertie Ahern didn't actually come initially because his mother had just died, and he had to be there for the wake. And then he came up to the beginning of negotiations, went back for a funeral, and to his credit came back again. So, George Mitchell handed it over to us. And when Tony Blair landed, Tony says, he said to him “I don't know why you've come. There's no chance of agreeing this”. But we'd set this deadline. We said, we're going to finish this within a year. And this was a year, more or less, since the election. And we thought one of the mistakes that John Major had made was letting this run on and on and on. That's why the IRA had gone back to violence after the ceasefire under John Major. We were determined to bring this to a conclusion, and we managed to do it for three days and three nights, keeping them all up, putting pressure on them to negotiate.

And we managed to get over the line. Many ups and downs, and we nearly missed it a number of times. But we actually managed to get there. And that was no small part to the part played by Bill Clinton, who had a great interest in Northern Ireland, who'd taken this risk of giving a visa to Gerry Adams against the wishes of John Major and breaking British relations for a short while. But he stayed up all night and all day. It wasn't a hardship for him. He liked staying up all night. But he called Adams in particular, which was crucial. Adams owed him for the visa, and he was able to put pressure on him. And he also called David Trimble. I remember rushing down to the office where David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party MPs were sitting to tell them about to get a call from the US president to see David Trimble standing up because he thought taking a call from the president, it was only protocol to stand up to receive the call.

Well, I want to ask about David Trimble because we talked a bit about the need for inclusion and unity on the republican side in terms of ensuring that on the unionist side, that lack of unity, I understand, reduced him to tears. At one point in February 1998, he was the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, later to become the inaugural First Minister of Northern Ireland. What happened that generated that emotional reaction in this part?

Well, David was elected unexpectedly as leader of the Ulster Unionist party, when his predecessor stood down. And he was seen as the hardline candidate, he presented himself as this. He'd been in a movement, quasi paramilitary movement, as a young politician, and he was definitely seen on the rough end of politics. But he was a fascinating man to work with, very unlike a normal politician. Sometimes he'd be sitting negotiating with me, and Number Ten and he'd suddenly pick up a book and start reading. It was quite disconcerting. Or answer a phone call from a journalist. It made it quite hard.

And you just sat patiently there.

I just had to sit patiently and wait till he'd finished doing it and then reconnect, because you had to, again, build trust and carry him with you. The problem with David was that Sinn Féin was a very rigid movement. Sinn Féin, IRA, they had telephone trees to communicate what had been agreed in negotiations. It was a Stalinist organisation. They could agree things and carry people with them. It wasn't totally easy. They had to carry the whole Provisional Army Council, but it wasn't impossible. Unionists, on the other hand, were completely. It's like negotiating with a focus group. They all had different views. That case in February, it was actually an interesting example because we had to narrow down the subjects that were being negotiated to a manageable amount. All negotiations start with a people putting everything on the table. That in February was the so-called heads of agreement. It was a very short document, two pages, isolating the things we were going to negotiate about. So, we weren't going to negotiate about United Ireland. It wasn't on the list, but we were going to negotiate about weapons, we were going to negotiate about power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants. We were going to negotiate about North-South bodies between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

So, there was a crucial negotiation. And Tony Blair was in Japan, so he couldn't conduct it. I had to sort of do it by phone from London and amazing number of phone calls. And my job in particular, because David Trimble trusted me, was to try and gradually deliver him to sign up for this document. And we finished. I think it was a Monday night and we finally, midnight, I got him to agree to this final document, went to bed thinking, thank goodness we finally got it done. And I got a call early next morning from David Trimble in tears, saying that he presented this to the other leaders of the party, and they rejected it. So, he's going to have to go out and reject this document. He just agreed to the night before. So, it made it incredibly difficult to negotiate. But he did deserve his Nobel Prize in the end. He risked not just his political position, he lost his job as leader of the party. He actually effectively lost his party because it has become a minority party ever since. It's a big ask for someone to make peace.

How did you rescue the deal at that point?

The February deal? We had to go back and negotiate it again. We had to speak to John Taylor, who was his deputy, and then he had talk to the other MPs, make a series more concessions. And then we had to get the Irish to accept those concessions, which was not easy. Once you've closed the document, reopening it for one person is not an easy thing to do.

An issue which took you by surprise is that of prisoner releases. Mo Mowlam, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, made it clear to you that you needed to deal with terrorists who'd killed people being released after just a year in prison. How did you deal with that?

Well, we hadn't. This story against. Against me and against actually, Tony and I had really focused on this prisoner issue and the lead ups and negotiations. We've been focused on issues that were on the table, like power-sharing and these North-South bodies, which were very controversial with the unionists, because it looked as if the Republic of Ireland was taking over Northern Ireland and focused on the issues of prisoners, which is one of the issues, of course, for the republicans and also for the loyalists. So, when we get into the last stages of negotiations, all a bit exhausted, Mo comes in and tells us that we're going to have to make this concession, sort of thinking, how the hell do we sell this to the British public? Let alone the Northern Irish public. And then Gerry Adams comes in subsequently and says, you know, you've gonna be agreeing to all prisoners will be released after two years as part of this deal. I need you to say, be after one year. And we're thinking, “Can't do that”. And so, Tony said to me, “We can't do that. But come back to us later if this really is becoming an overwhelming issue.”

He did come back once after we signed the agreement. Basically, he never really pushed it. But even agreeing to two years was a major problem with the unionist community, particularly when they released the so called Balcombe Street Gang, this gang that had been holed up in London eventually and caught by the police in a shootout, who killed a large number of people in the UK and obviously in Northern Ireland too, when they were released and they went to the Sinn Féin, the political party conference and punched the air in victory. This obviously reduced the support amongst unionists for the agreement and for the referendum that was coming up. So, it was a very hard price to pay. If you look back at it, it's effectively a form of amnesty. If everyone gets out after two years, that is a sort of amnesty that would not be allowed under the ICC and traditional justice rules.

Another thorny issue was weapons. David Trimble didn't want to share power with an organisation with a private army. That didn't quite come up substantively until a draft agreement had been circulating for a while. How did you deal with that problem?

Well, that had been a fundamental problem since the beginning of the John Major process. Long history of negotiations in Ireland, centuries of it. And normally what happened was you got to an agreement, there was an amnesty for everyone, and the rebels put their pikes in the thatch. So in other words, they hid their weapons rather than handing their weapons in. It just wasn't an issue. John Major managed to make it an issue, as I described, because he wanted it to be a surrogate for a permanent ceasefire, to make it clear the violence was over and the IRA were clear they weren't going to agree it. So, the positions when we got to the Good Friday negotiations were on the one side, the unionists said that we're not going to share power with any political party that has a private army behind it. Perfectly reasonable position. On the republican side, the position was, we're not giving up our weapons until it's clear the unionists are going to share power, because they never have before in the last hundred years. On the face of it, a reasonable position. And we just couldn't square that in the Good Friday negotiations. We couldn't get language that would actually make that work.

So, what we did was we allowed constructive ambiguity in the agreement. So, we allowed what was put in the agreement to be read in two different ways by the two different sides. In fact, an embarrassing story that we got the whole agreement on the morning of Good Friday was finalised. George Mitchell had it all printed up and all ready to go. And then David Trimble came to see Tony Blair and said “I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to sign. I can't take people for this because it’s not clear enough about weapons”. Tony said “I can't reopen it now. It's all printed. We can't sort of start again”. And so, we sent Trimble off and then Tony said, well, let's send him a side letter assuring him of what we're going to do. And I had a laptop, very unusual in those days, and he dictated to me what the letter was, and I typed it away on my laptop, pushed print, rushed downstairs and I couldn't actually get into the room where Trimble was meeting with the whole Ulster Unionist Party. So, I stuck the letter under the door and a young MP let me in, rushed up to the table and gave it to David Trimble and John Taylor, his deputy, who was sitting next to him, read it over his shoulder and said, yes, we'll go with that.

So, I knew we got a deal, rushed back up to Tony. We immediately called to plenary before anyone could change their minds, went in there, announced it was all agreed and left and did a press conference. What I hadn't done was saved a copy of the letter and David Trimble went out to his press conference afterwards and it was pouring with rain. And so, this letter was gradually disintegrating in the rain and we were left with no record of what we'd actually put in this side letter. I had to try and reconstruct it later to make it work, but that's the sort of serendipity, but also the sort of problems you create for yourself in a peace agreement.

It's quite a sort of radical act of empathy.

It is. But that's the kind of empathy you need to have. Sometimes you can take empathy too far. Sometimes you see a sort of Stockholm syndrome where people, negotiators, become sort of besotted with the shabby chic of terrorists and sort of side with the underdog. That's a mistake. If you are a mediator negotiator, you have to understand the other side, but you don't have to actually agree with it.

Let's talk for a minute about implementation. You and Tony Blair really stayed with the Good Friday Agreement for almost a decade afterwards. Do you think mediators have a tendency to forget the importance of implementation and the sustained political attention that's required to turn an agreement into a reality?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the breakthrough agreements that we've had in history, the trouble happens when people sign an agreement, celebrate and move on, because then it collapses. Think of the Oslo Accords, very much in our minds at the moment. When the Oslo Accords were published, huge celebration, particularly on the Palestinian side, but also on the Israeli side, amongst the majority of Israelis. But then it wasn't implemented and it collapsed back into the Second Intifada with worst violence. In Northern Ireland, if we thought when we took off on our helicopters on Good Friday 1998, we solved the problem of Northern Ireland, we were sadly mistaken. It was nine more years of negotiating because we were trying to negotiate to get them to put it into practice. When I was doing it, I think, for God's sake, why are we doing this? This is terrible. We finished it. We shouldn't be doing this. But actually, if you think about it, when two sides sign an accord, sign a piece of paper, it doesn't make them trust each other. They have to have the piece of paper because they don't trust each other. They only trust each other if they take the steps they promised to take. And that was the problem.

Tony Blair was going to go in 2007, they knew he was going to go. We legislated to disband all of the institutions in Northern Ireland, the Parliament, the government and everything. And so that really focused minds. And that's when we managed to get Ian Paisley, who by then was leading the unionists, the more radical, more extreme DUP leader, and Sinn Féin, who become the dominant party on the catholic side. We got them to sign up for an agreement and actually share power together. So, you really have to work on implementation. And when I go around working on negotiations now, I always insist that people should put implementation into the agreement that they write. You want to have details of what the implementation is going to look like.

Let's move on from Northern Ireland. In 2006, Martin Griffiths, the first director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, or HD, came to London and asked Tony Blair for help in dealing with the Basque separatist organisation ETA, who'd been waging war with the Spanish government since the late fifties. HD was involved in resolving the conflict and the negotiations weren't going very well. And so Tony Blair agreed that you could help despite your other duties. And you worked with both sides. Peace eventually came and ETA was finally disbanded in May 2018. Tell me about how important those contacts between ETA and the IRA were and what it taught you for your future mediation work.

Well, we had been talking to the Spanish government about the ETA conflict. We talked to Zapatero and to Rubalcaba's predecessor as Interior Minister about their negotiations as the British government, but only in a very sort of generalised way. Here are our lessons and so on. So, Martin Griffiths contacted me through a British diplomat, Kieran Prendergast. He'd asked if he could come to see me, and I said yes, of course. In 2006 he came to Number Ten, and we had a talk and he said, look, we're running these talks between ETA and the Spanish government and we're stuck. It's going to fail, and we need some help. Could you come and talk to ETA and talk to the Spanish government and maybe bring some IRA members to meet them too? So, first time I went out and met with some of the ETA people and then I went and met with Rubalcaba and his team. And then we brought some quite hardline IRA people out to see, to see the ETA people.

I remember Martin picked us up and he drove us, and these guys were a little bit apprehensive about this, they've not done this sort of thing before.

On the IRA side?

The two IRA guys in the back of the car. And Martin drove us and then turned into underground car park below a hotel quite fast and brought the car to a juddering halt by a staircase in the middle of the car park. Not parking, just dumped it, got out, ran up the staircase and I could see these two guys in the back of the car looking at each other thinking, okay, so this is where it starts then. And it’s just Martin's fashion. He was just wanted to make sure everything was ready for the meeting. And 3 hours later they came out and they had quite a good discussion.

You weren't in the room, so you weren't quite sure what they were going to share between them.

I wasn't sure what they were going to say. And of course, there had been a working relationship between ETA and the IRA in terms of terrorism in the past. They didn't know each other in general. It was individuals who could talk about the peace process I think was the key point. Of course, the talks still did fail then regardless. We had this rather awful meeting. I was still in government at the time, in 2006, I guess. So, it could have been early 2007. The talks collapsed. But it was interesting, the people who were there on the more political side of ETA, watching the negotiations, actually in disgust with what these guys were doing. Despite the failure of the process, effectively, they went back and spent the next year or so persuading the base 150,000 old ETA supporters in the Basque country to take a longer-term political view, to follow the Northern Irish example. And they use that quite a lot. And they got Adams and McGuinness and others to come out and talk to people.

And that did influence people in the Basque country. In fact, sometimes I think they were almost too literal in thinking they could just take the Northern Ireland agreement and apply it in the Basque country. And it was very, very different, but it certainly helped inspire them get to it. And all credit to their leaders in Batasuna, the political wing, that they did manage to persuade people and gradually move the movement into a negotiation that ended in a rather odd way, because negotiations normally are bilateral all the way to the finish. In this case, they were bilateral most of the way, and then the government in Spain changed and it had to be unilateral.

Your work with Martin Griffiths clearly inspired you, and in 2011 you set up Inter Mediate. How did the idea come about and what were your ambitions for the organisation at that time?

I carried on working on ETA with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and all credit to HD in bringing about that remarkable success. And there's no dissident ETA, it's over and done. But I carried on working on a number of other projects with Martin and HD, in various countries I won't mention. And then Martin left HD in 2011 and was sort of a loose end. I had, as you say, been totally inspired by Martin's work on this stuff to try and do more of this. I'd been working in the private sector, not really enjoying that very much. So, when Martin stood down, I thought, well, let's set up an organisation for Martin as a vehicle and I'll participate in it part time, but carry on in the private sector so, I'm making an income. And set it up. Unfortunately, Martin got sick and couldn't fully participate in it. And so, the chairman, I set it up as a British charity, not as a sort of registered charity in Britain, said to me, either you're going to close this or you're going to have to quit your private sector stuff and come and do this full time. So, I quit all the private sector stuff and started doing it full time.

The objective was to be what Martin had set up HD originally to do, to try and do negotiations between armed groups and governments. So basically, from my point of view, to learn the lessons from Northern Ireland and see if those could be useful to people working in other conflicts, but to focus particularly on the sort of high-level contacts. So Prime Ministers, Presidents, Foreign Ministers and leaders of armed groups, not to do track two, but specifically to do that. So, a very small organisation focused specifically on that.

Well, we'll talk about the promise and perils of that approach in a bit, but first, Colombia. And rather like Tony Blair saying he wanted a peace deal in Northern Ireland within a year of assuming office, so President Santos came to power in 2010 declaring he wanted to end Latin America's longest running civil war between the Colombian government and FARC rebels. And I understand President Santos had sought you out and you went to meet him in Colombia in 2010. Tell me about those first meetings and what President Santos wanted you to do.

Well, initially, actually, I went out to help President Santos set up his office when he'd been elected, the chief of staff and all that kind of thing. But he'd been based in the UK as representative of the coffee trade for a long time. And on one occasion he'd been blown up by an IRA bomb together with his ambassador. They were walking along Piccadilly and there was a bomb in the In & Out club. Both of them were knocked to the ground. So, he was fascinated by Northern Ireland and he started talking about Northern Ireland. And then he revealed to me that he had a secret back channel to the FARC. There was a businessman who went from him into the bush, into the jungle, see the leader of the FARC and come back. The only people who knew about this were him, leader of the FARC, the man who did it, and his national security adviser at the time, Sergio Jaramillo. And he said that he wanted to try and start a successful peace process, building on some of the failures in Colombia in the past.

And so, you'd provided some advice in country, in Colombia together with a team and also, as I understand it, in London as well. When President Santos flew over for an official visit in November 2011. And you organised a quiet meeting in a posh part of the city called Mayfair and a house there. Who was there and what was the purpose of that meeting?

Santos was on official visit. He was staying in the Ritz. My offices then, I was still in the private sector, my offices were in Mayfair. And we were using, as Inter Mediate just set up and we hadn't got offices for another think tank that had very grand offices also in Mayfair. And so, we persuaded Santos to take a break from his official visit and come over. He was going on to the opera, I think, or something like that. So, we had the gap between him finishing his official program and going to the opera in which to go through with him some lessons. And I can't remember all the people we had there. We had about three or four of this team I was talking about. I think we probably didn't have Shlomo. We sat down with him and tried to work out. This was even before we got to that week in the Magdalena's. This is more general concepts. And one of the things we talked about in particular was the approach to Venezuela because Uribe, his predecessor, had come quite close to war with Venezuela. The FARC and the ELN were both based in Venezuela and attacked Colombia from Venezuela. And he wanted to go in hot pursuit after them. Santos was interested in the idea of trying to flip that and try and reach out to Chávez and persuade Chávez to support a piece of process and to push the FARC into negotiating and we encouraged him to do that, and he went ahead and did it. That bold move made a big difference. He invited Chávez to Colombia. He took him to a special place in Colombia associated with Venezuelan and Colombian history. And there he persuaded Chávez to join in this pursuit of peace. And Chávez was flattered and interested and did so and was crucial in delivering the FARC to the negotiating table and then keeping pressure on them to make concessions and get to an agreement. So, it was one of the first fundamental steps that Santos took.

One of the key things you worked on was advising on the design of the process. Talk me through what that was like.

We wanted to look at what had gone wrong before. And at Caguán, there are a number of very obvious mistakes made right at the beginning. They agreed the negotiations would take place in public. So, the FARC turned up for the negotiations in their uniforms, in a clearing in the jungle with their weapons. And they insisted that all of the sessions were televised, so everything was filmed. And in that sort of negotiations, you know it's not going to be serious. So, one of the first things we wanted was confidential negotiations, indeed, to start with, completely secret negotiations, and even later, keeping the content of the negotiations confidential. In the Caguán process, they'd agreed an agenda of 100 points, including the end of capitalism. That's not a serious agenda for a negotiation. We decided to go for a very short five-point agenda. And as we were just discussing, I insisted that one of those points should be implementation, because what had happened before had been agreements that had never been implemented. So, they needed to have that, as well as questions like weapons, like human rights, like drugs and agricultural reform. Then you had the question of what's legitimate to discuss with an armed group?

Why should a democratic government be talking to an armed group about anything political at all? That surely should be for Congress. And that's why we had a long debate about what was legitimate and what wasn't. And the conclusion was that the agricultural reform, which was the issue on which the FARC had been formed, because it was about the way that peasants were treated, should be on the table. Not least because the government intended to bring about agricultural reform anyway, so it was playing to the grain. But we were going to rule out any other issues they might ask which would be more political. So, we were trying to learn those lessons from the failure of previous processes and processes elsewhere.

You mentioned just now the need to keep the early stages of the talks secret. Talk to me about your broader reflections on the different phases in a process and how to balance that need for a secrecy and building trust with the legitimacy that's required to make a deal successful ultimately.

What I've observed is that any of the successful negotiations I've seen have all started with a secret backchannel. And that's because democratic governments find it very hard to justify talking to armed groups who are killing their people. You know, John Major had this secret backchannel to the IRA, which had existed since 1972 and continued, and he used it to send letters to Martin McGuinness and letters back from Martin McGuinness. And he got one of those letters just before a particularly horrible bomb in Britain. It was a bomb in Warrington, and what they did was the IRA put a bomb at one end of the shopping street in this town in the northwest and it blew up. And all the shoppers on a Saturday ran away from that bomb and they put a bomb at the other end of the high street, and they all ran straight into that bomb and two children were killed. John Major was obviously completely horrified. And he had in front of him a reply to Martin McGuinness saying, responding to his previous letter. And he thought about not sending it because of this bomb. Actually, he went ahead and sent that letter, thank goodness, because that allowed the process to continue and for us to get to a peace process.

But had that all been happening in public, had we been talking to the IRA and they weren't on ceasefire, they were killing people, then the talks would have ended there and then it would have been the effect of a spoiler, essentially, you would have not had a process. So, while the armed campaign is going on, you need some sort of secret back channel to make this work, and it needs to be completely deniable. In the ETA case, the Spanish government didn't appoint a government official to the negotiations. They had a politician, a president of the Socialist Party in the Basque country, but not a government official. So, they could deny that the talks were official. That later caused problem with ETA: “You haven't got a government person here. How do we know to trust you?” But it worked for a deniable process. So that first stage in a democracy, you need to have complete secrecy and be completely deniable. You then need negotiations that could be fairly undisturbed. So, in Colombia, what we had was talks on the so-called framework talks, where we actually had these six months of secret talks in Havana, where the FARC were exfiltrated from the jungle by the ICRC, brought to Havana. And then the government delegation went to Havana and sat with them to try and work out what the framework agreement on which the negotiations would take place should be. And that needed to be secret, too.

It leaked just at the end, just the last couple of days before it was going to be announced, and then they had to move in public. But even then, we had a rule that both sides would not reveal the contents of negotiations. Sometimes that was breached, but basically it was observed. And there's this difficult trade-off in negotiations between the need for secrecy, because people will not make concessions in public. They really won't. You've got to carry people with you. So, at some stage, you need to be able to communicate with people what you're agreeing. There's also the problem that if you're making concessions in specific areas, you may not be able to sell them politically unless there are countervailing offers from the other side. So, you don't want to reveal it till you've got the whole thing agreed. And that can be a problem, and was a problem in Colombia, when some bits of the agreement were leaked before others.

I want to move forward to 2016. And the referendum called in October to ratify the final peace agreement, it failed by the tiniest of margins. What in Colombia do you think could have been done differently to bring people along with the deal?

Well, I have to confess, I was the person who suggested this particular referendum. And the reason I did so was because this problem of public consent, I was talking about that if you're doing a negotiation, one way to defend yourself for attacks, that you're making all sorts of concessions behind closed doors is to say, look, you'll all have your say about this in the end. And so, in Northern Ireland, what we'd had was a referendum on the Good Friday agreement. We had mistakenly thought a referendum on the Good Friday agreement would be dead easy because who's going to vote against peace? But actually, we started off the campaign with the majority of unionists against the peace agreement. We had to work like hell to get to the stage where a majority supported it, and we won it. So, I suggested this to President Santos. It was different from. There had been previous ideas about a very specific sort of constitutional referendum in Colombia, which allowed things not to go have two thirds majority. That was separate. That didn't happen. There wasn't the time for it. This was just a popular plebiscite, if you like, on the agreement. So, I had suggested it. So, I felt a bit sick when it lost. And we just had the referendum in Britain on the Brexit.

And despite that, you were still recommending a referendum?

No, but I recommended it before the Brexit referendum.

I see.

But after the Brexit referendum, Alastair Campbell, I took with me to go to Colombia to talk to President Santos and his team. And we said to him “You may think you're going to win this referendum, as we thought we're going to win the British referendum, but you are not necessarily going to do so. You're really going to have to work at this”. And they said “No, you don't understand. This is very straightforward. We know where all the votes are. We can mobilize it on the day. It's nothing going to be a problem. Look, the polls show us 60% ahead”. I said “No, please, please listen to us. It's not going to be this easy”. And then there were two accidents. There was a hurricane in the north of the country where a lot of the votes for this agreement were, a million people didn't turn out, so they lost them. And then for various complicated reasons, evangelicals had come to believe the agreement was allowed, LGBTQ issues to be part of the future of Colombia, nothing to do with it. But they'd been convinced of this and so they voted against. So, they lost it by accident, which was a disaster and didn't need to happen. They could have won the referendum if it had been properly managed.

I want to move to your work on Mozambique. Just to give the listeners some background, following a fresh outbreak of violence in 2012 between RENAMO rebels and the Mozambique army, there were several failed mediation attempts. And in 2016, President Nyusi and the RENAMO leader Afonso Dhlakama initiate a process. And you're brought in amongst a large group of mediators, which include the EU, the Sant’Egidio catholic organisation, the African National Congress, Swiss ambassador, colleague from HD. Sounds like there were quite a few cooks in the kitchen. What was your first impression?

Again, my first visit to Mozambique was I went out Tony Blair's request to meet with President Nyusi to talk about the need for a Chief of Staff. He didn't have a Chief of Staff, and I was supposed to sort of suggest ways he could construct a structure and choose a person to do this. And then he started talking to me about the peace process. And obviously I had Inter Mediate and was working on Inter Mediate then. So, we started talking about it and he suggested various ideas to me. So, I wrote a paper for him and sent it to him that night before we met again the next day. And he said “Oh, you're one of these people who doesn't just indulge in blah, blah, blah. You actually do some work”. And I said, “Well, we try to”. Anyway, he took some of those ideas, but he also took some other ideas. And then I got a call from him, I can't remember how much later, a few weeks later. And he'd established this forum for negotiations with six different organisations as mediators, which is about five too many. It was a disaster. We had, it's called the Avenida Process, named after this hotel where it took place, the Avenida.

And if you have six organisations and most of them bring three people, then you've already got too many people in the room before the parties come. And then people were tweeting live from the room, there's no chance it was going to get anywhere. And it actually became an obstruction. So, we had to persuade President Nyusi to collapse it. And then what we did was the Swiss ambassador, Mirko Manzoni, supported by your colleague from HD Neha, had good relations with Dhlakama, because Dhlakama, the leader of the opposition, had lived next to the Swiss embassy in Maputo and then had withdrawn to the bush when his life was under threat, or he felt his life was under threat.

And so, what Mirko, Neha and I managed to do was to persuade, Nyusi, that we should cross the frontline and go and see Dhlakama up in the mountains. And we started making these arduous journeys where we had to climb up the mountain first, cross the frontline through the FRELIMO forces, then meet the RENAMO forces, climb up the mountains and meet Dhlakama. The first meeting I remember that Mirko and I had was right at the top of the mountains, and we'd gone all the way up there and then stretched a tarpaulin between some trees and a sort of bearish sort of field right at the top. And we sat down to talk to him. And then a huge hailstorm started, and the hail on this canvas meant it's almost impossible to know what he was saying, but we had to pretend.

Anyway. And then Mirko and Neha in particular took the process on and turned it into a successful process. It's only recently finalised, with pensions for all the RENAMO fighters who are out of the bush now. Unfortunately, there's another terrorist conflict in Mozambique. But that one is done and gone, and thank goodness for that.

I'd like to turn to some reflections and draw out some lessons, acknowledging that failure can often be a richer source of analysis than success.

Agreed.

In that vein, I'd like to ask about Afghanistan. You were working with President Ghani between March 2019 and April 2021, around the time of the Doha Accord in February 2020, between the US and the Taliban. That deal led to a reduction in US military support for the Afghan army, ultimately the Taliban take over Kabul. In parallel, you're supporting talks between President Ghani's government and the Taliban. But once President Biden announced he'd withdraw US forces regardless of the result of those talks, the process struggled because the Taliban had no more incentive to negotiate. What lessons do you draw from that and more generally about how the process was managed?

Actually, the lessons from failure can be more revealing. We'd had an interest in Afghanistan going back quite a long way. Martin Griffiths and I, Martin himself, had made some contacts with Taliban members, and we tried to use interest, western governments in those back in, I think, about 2010. Or even earlier, because it was David Miliband as Foreign Secretary, must have been 2008-2009, but not managed to get Western governments interested in talking. So, I think one of the first mistakes we made was not being inclusive and starting too late on this stuff. Looking back at it, clearly, what we should have done in 2001 is including the Taliban in the negotiations we had there. We had the opportunity. The Taliban did reach out to Karzai and say they wanted to be included. They didn't want to be chased out of the country. And then you could have done something. Probably, but we didn't do it. And then there were opportunities, as I say, in 2008, when we could have negotiated, when the Taliban were not back in such a strong position as they came to be later. But we missed that opportunity, too. And then when we finally did start negotiating, we started with a very transactional issue about Sergent Bowe Bergdahl and getting him out, rather than talking about political issues.

Then we had a negotiation between the Americans and the Taliban without including the government of the Republic. So, you were actually setting the terms of the negotiation between the American government and the Taliban, which was confirming their view that the Americans were really the ones in charge, making the Republic irrelevant. So, this is the sort of context in which we came to be working with Ghani and the Republic negotiating team more generally. Again, I don't blame the Americans for that approach, because Taliban were very clear they weren't going to negotiate with the Republic. They were only going to negotiate with the Americans. And rejecting it altogether would also have been a mistake. But I think in the negotiations, they should have been more cognisant of the need to carry the Republic with them, and they didn't.

Some of the first work we had to do in working with Ghani was try and deconflict or reduce the tension between Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American negotiator, and President Ghani, who went back a long way, back to university together. So, they had a relationship for some time. And when we got there, that relationship was very tense. So, we had to at least try and reduce that so there could be some cooperation.

Then the second thing that was pretty obvious was the failure of the Republic side to have cohesion. And if you were as divided as the Republic leadership were politically, economically, in terms of trying to grab the gains, it was, again obvious you weren't going to be very successful in a negotiation with a cohesive force like the Taliban. And then you actually had the different forces within the Republic leadership fighting each other and trying to make side deals and so on. And Zal managed to make that worse, too, by reaching out to different members of the republican opposition to Ghani, to try and favour them. And that made tensions even greater. But the main failure was on the Republic side to be cohesive, unless they didn't really believe that they would hang separately if they didn't stick together, and they let that happen.

The actual negotiating team, to their credit, headed by Stanekzai and by Rahimi, did take a very serious approach, negotiation, and it wasn't certain that it would fail even then. They did, at some stages, manage to get to real progress at the negotiating table, writing down propositions that could have worked. But the trouble was Trump, of course, being in government then kept undermining the talks. He suddenly tweeted something that would sort of make the Taliban walk away from the table, because why would they need to negotiate in these circumstances. That made it incredibly difficult for Zal as well as for the Republic negotiating team.

But some people would argue that it was impossible to negotiate with Islamists. It was never going to work. I just don't accept that. I think even to the later stages it could have done. When President Biden came in, he initially said that it would be a conditions-based withdrawal with the US, not just to a strict timetable. But he changed his mind and later on announced there was going to be withdrawal. No conditions, just a timeline. At that stage, the Taliban walked away and of course wouldn't negotiate. So, I think there were a number of opportunities and I think it is worth learning from those opportunities, particularly in negotiating with Islamist groups, which happens all over the world at the moment, and make sure we don't make the same mistakes.

Well, I want to ask about whether we've learned those lessons. You mentioned your view that we should have engaged the Taliban earlier and you've written a lot about talking to terrorists and making the argument that governments tend to reject it at first and only belatedly appreciate its necessity. But it's a persistent view amongst, within some governments that they can destroy an armed group militarily. So, what arguments can be marshalled to persuade them otherwise?

Well, the main lesson is that of history and of experience, that it is very hard to find examples in democracies of facing an armed group that has political support, terrorist group that has political support, and just defeating them by purely military and security means. The examples that are put forward are things like in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers, where there was a lengthy negotiation and then the Rajapaksa brothers decided to go all out for war and did succeed. They wiped out the Tigers and they haven't reappeared as a serious factor. But you wouldn't be able to do that in a western democracy very easily because firstly, what happened was the leader of the Tamil Tigers, Prabhakaran, who'd been considered this military genius, decided that he would fight not a terrorist campaign, not a guerrilla campaign, but a fixed formed army campaign against the Sri Lankan army. And obviously he wasn't going to win that. Indeed, he lost it. He could still be out in the bush now if he hadn't made that mistake. And then the Sri Lankan government at Nandikadal Lagoon carried out a bombardment that killed so many civilians as well as Tamil Tiger members, again, that in a western democracy it would be very hard to imagine doing that, to bring a campaign to the end. And then lastly, they didn't actually engage politically with the Tamils after the agreement which would have been the sensible thing to do, which is why you still have continuing political trouble.

The other example sometimes given by people is decapitation, if you kill the leader of an armed group. And in the case of the Shining Path in Peru, it is true that when the leader Guzmán was locked up, the Shining Path campaign went right down. Although I'd say it's coming back up again now, sadly. So, it didn't go away entirely, but it did reduce it. But normally, if you kill the leader of the armed group, that didn't stop the problem at all. So being able to do it by security means in a democracy, there are not many good examples of it working. So, the obvious thing would be to somehow find a way of including them in a negotiation. You may find them horrific, as we found the IRA horrific, or ETA horrific. They may have conducted horrific acts, but if you can find a way of stopping them fighting without talking to them, fine. But if you can't, then you need to think about how you mix the security measures and the measures of talking to them.

You've been very successful in building trust with senior leaders, and you describe that as Inter Mediate's operating model. One example would be Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, or Daw Su, Myanmar's state councillor in the past, and the de facto head of government, where you and I also crossed paths, as I was based in Yangon. You provided her and others in Myanmar with advice on the peace process with ethnic armed groups, on relations with the military. In light of the coup in Myanmar in 2021, do you think you and others, in the international community, underestimated how hard it would be to bring democracy and peace?

We started with the armed groups. We first went in, and we were talking to the ethnic armed organisations, because that was still the military government in place. And although we spoke quite a lot to Aung Min, who was the military negotiator, and someone who deserves a lot of credit, I think, in retrospect, for what he did. And then when Aung San Suu Kyi, she came in, she asked us, she appointed us as her peace advisors, and we tried to work between her and the ethnic armed organisations. I think a number of mistakes were made. But I think the fundamental one, which is kind of ironic, is we all criticized Aung San Suu Kyi for not standing up harder to the army. We say, why didn't she push them further? Why didn't she make reform go faster? Well, turns out that even the pace of reform that she was proposing, which was fairly slow, where she was supporting them on the Rohingyas, and where she was letting them carry on with their political role, even that was too fast for them, and they reversed it. So had we sort of persuaded her to move faster, we'd have been to blame for bringing about that coup even sooner perhaps.

The other thing I regret is that the Panglong process, the so-called Panglong process of negotiations, which was looking at a new constitution, a new structure, was also very slow in moving, mainly because of the army. If one could have made that move a bit faster by Aung San Suu Kyi being ready to make more concessions, but also the EAOs being readier to move, maybe that would have made it harder for the army to have a coup, but maybe it would have brought it about faster. So, I'm not sure, but I think it's true that we made mistakes. She clearly made mistakes. But in the end, it's the coup leader, Min Aung Hlaing, who's made the mistake and who's now actually suffering the consequences of it, along with the poor people of Burma in general.

In the context of the war in Ukraine, you've made the distinction between the negotiations themselves and needing to prepare for future negotiations. How do you go about persuading a government or armed group that they need to prepare for something which they might be disinclined to do?

By trying to persuade them that if they don't, they're going to face some very severe consequences later on. We were asked to go and work with President Porochenko of Ukraine after the two agreements by chancellor Merkel in Germany. And we tried to help them because there was a real problem in the Ukrainian approach to the Minsk negotiations. The elements of the Minsk negotiation in terms of the actual individual steps, like referenda in the contested territories, were perfectly reasonable, but they allowed themselves to be trapped by Surkov of the Kremlin into a sequence they could never implement. On the Ukrainian side, they hadn't thought enough about what they were signing up to when they signed up to it.

So, it's crucial that people really think about negotiations. There's this sort of concept that if you were doing a political campaign or a military campaign, you'd plan, you'd have a strategy. But people seem to think if it's a negotiation, you just turn up on the night and it'll be okay, and it isn't. The people who turn up on the night unprepared will lose the negotiation. So, I think it's really important that people do prepare. Even if you don't think it's going to happen, even if you don't want a negotiation, you want total victory, you would still be sensible to start thinking now about, if I'm going to have a negotiation, what's the agenda going to be? What are the trade-offs we'd have to make? What are our red lines from that point of view? They have to bear some semblance to the reality on the ground. But the actual framing of the negotiation doesn't necessarily.

We know there's going to be a negotiation to end the conflict in Ukraine because it's not going to end in total victory for Ukraine, because they're not going to be able to march on Moscow and dictate terms from Moscow. And it looks like the Russians are not going to be able to take over Ukraine. So there have to be a negotiation. So, let's start now thinking about what the elements are, how to structure it, how it might happen in the best possible way to prevent aggression in future.

We're recording this at the Oslo Forum, a gathering of the mediation community. We amongst us take it as a given that it's needed in today's world more than ever. But do you think mediation's going out of fashion?

I think it's going out of fashion, but what I do see is more and more government leaders unwilling to use mediators. They hate losing control. That's always been the case, that governments are unwilling to have third parties come in and tell them what to do. But even more, I think that's happening. And certainly, the role of the UN has been quite constricted. At the end of the cold war, the UN had this flourishing of roles where it was able to take on negotiations in El Salvador, in Guatemala and Namibia, Angola and so on. It looked like the UN had finally come into its own in terms. But that's gradually gone down, so that now mainly it's in failed states the UN is able to play this role and not in states that can keep strong enough to keep them out. So how are we going to actually do this mediation? First it went to smaller governments, governments like Norway that has a good history of working on these sorts of conflicts. But now countries are pretty apprehensive about having governments as mediators. In Colombia, for example, there was no mediator. Norway and Cuba were facilitators or witnesses. They weren't allowed to speak in the room. They were not allowed to put forward compromise proposals.

So, governments are very keen to restrict that role. And even individuals now, as Martti Ahtisaari did or Martin Griffiths did, through an NGO, is more and more difficult. So, I think we have to think imaginatively about how you structure mediation going forward, because the function is still necessary. We need someone who can convene the parties or some way of convening the parties. We need some way of driving the process forward. We need some way of coming up with compromise proposals, and people can't have compromise proposals coming from one side or the other.

In Northern Ireland, the Irish government used to describe the papers that we would discuss as “angel papers” because they weren't drafted by other side. They descended from heaven, fully formed. In the Colombian negotiations, they did it on whiteboards. They'd have a conversation and write things up on a whiteboard as they went along and then try and type it up as the basis for an agreement. In Colombia, we had on the very difficult issue of transitional justice, where we got completely stuck at the negotiating table. We just couldn't make progress. I suggested appointing three lawyers on each side. So, we had an American lawyer and two government Colombian lawyers. We had one Spanish radical lawyer and two FARC affiliated lawyers on the other side. They went away for ten days. They came up with a 70-page proposal, which was not the answer on transitional justice, but it unblocked the negotiations at the table. So, I think we're going to have to be a whole lot more imaginative about how mediation happens. It's not just one big figure, Martti Ahtisaari sitting at the table managing everything, lots of different parts. And the work that you're doing on technology and issues like that, those are going to change the way we do these things as well.

I want to ask about the baggage that you carry, being a Brit, given Britain's long colonial history and the conflicts that that's led to, has it helped or hindered you, your nationality?

It's interesting, we were discussing here last night impartiality and whether that was going out of fashion. I kind of think that impartiality was never quite the issue. What I've experienced, particularly with armed groups, actually, is they're more interested in talking to someone who can influence big great Satan, the Americans or the Europeans, whatever it might be. They don't necessarily want someone who is powerless but completely neutral. Now, you do need to be independent. You can't be acting for a government. You can't bring in a third agenda. You're trying to find a way for the two parties to agree. So, I don't think it's that big a change. I don't think impartiality was ever the issue.

From my point of view, doing this, what people are interested in really is talking about successes. Why did Northern Ireland work? Why did Colombia work? There aren't that many, sadly successful peace agreements around. Now they're going to tell you that their agreement, their conflict is different. It's much harder than anyone else's conflict. It's... So, you have to be careful in how you do this. And they are right. It's not as if you could take a model from Northern Ireland and plonk it down on Gaza. It's not going to work. But what's interesting is there are process questions, what do you do about deadlines? Is it important to be inclusive? Things like that, that have worked in some places and led to failure in other places. So, you can try and draw those lessons, because if you're going to make some mistakes in negotiation, you might at least make some new ones and not repeat mistakes other people already made.

Jonathan Powell, thank you so much for being my guest in The Mediator’s Studio.

Thank you very much.

And there we end this edition of The Mediator’s Studio. To get more episodes as they come out, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We always love to hear from you. So, if Jonathan's career has inspired any thoughts or questions, please get in touch via the listener survey in the show notes on our website or do drop me a message on Twitter @adamtalkspeace. The Mediator’s Studio is an Oslo Forum podcast brought to you by the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our managing editor is Christina Buchhold, and the producer is Chris Gunness. Research for this episode was by Oscar Eschenbrenner. Big thanks also to Giles Pitts and Ly Buiduong for their support. Hope you'll join me for the next edition. Until then, from Losby Gods in Norway, this is Adam Cooper saying goodbye and thanks for listening.