We had a lot of questions about what we were doing. Was it our job? The answer was nobody else was doing it. “Yes, we have to,” I said. “If it saves lives, we’ve gotta do it.” So we ended up becoming like a 911 emergency coordination team, and I think we did save lives.
Meanwhile, we worked for a quick end to the Israeli attacks. President Bush and many other world leaders called for restraint, an end to the attacks, and a withdrawal.
As the siege continued, it looked increasingly likely that Arafat himself might become a casualty, or if that didn’t happen, forcibly expelled from the region.
By then, Arafat’s Muqatta’a headquarters had been turned into Berlin in the spring of 1945. It was now surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers. Everything was blown down, the compound walls crushed, the cars in the parking lot destroyed. A pall of smoke and dust covered everything.
And nobody was talking. Sharon wanted to totally isolate Arafat. No outsider could see him. In retaliation, Arafat had refused to allow his leaders to meet with anyone until the siege was lifted or they came to see him first.
Sharon had stonewalled President Bush’s demand to end the attacks and incursions. It was therefore important for me not to sit idly by, but to keep pushing for meetings and contacts to signal our mission was not dead. I decided to break the impasse and visit Arafat, with the hope of restarting our meetings. Sharon didn’t object. So my security guys saddled up in their SWAT gear—black helmets, Kevlar, the whole deal—and off we went.
It was tense crossing the five-hundred-yard no-man’s-land between the IDF forces and the bombed-out building complex where Arafat and his security forces were barricaded. When the media heard I was going in, they came rushing out; but the Israelis shot at them and drove them off (some cameras were able to get pictures).
I walked the last yards and came to barricaded windows, the walls were blasted by tanks, Palestinian gunmen were at the doors, and I had to walk through this rubble to see Arafat.
Peace activists from the States and Europe had somehow made it in through Israeli lines. The hall- and passageways, where the activists were living, were overcrowded; there was hardly room for all of them. There was no electricity, no phone lines (and I’d noticed an IDF communications-jamming van outside to cut off calls), little water, and only sporadic food. The place smelled bad. Things were grim.
I met Arafat in a dimly lit little room; there was a semiautomatic weapon by his side. All of his aides looked like drowned rats, stressed out and beaten; but he was in his glory, upbeat and animated, more alert and fired up than I had ever seen him. The siege had brought out the fighter in him.
“I am under siege,” he announced dramatically, enjoying the hell out of the moment. This was what he lived for. This was an old revolutionary in his element.
That was okay. If he was having a great time, fine. But my aim in visiting him was to break the impasse with Sharon. Thankfully, that happened. Arafat agreed to let his people meet with me, and so I was able to keep up our contacts.
I met with some Palestinian leaders at a onetime casino in Jericho (now shut down because of the conflict). It was a somber meeting. We discussed where to go and what to do next. We made some progress. Defused some bad situations. Got some sieges lifted. Probably saved some lives but not much more.
But I knew the process was dead.
ON EASTER SUNDAY, I attended Mass with Father Peter at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher and walked in the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ had prayed before His betrayal and crucifixion. The olive trees in there—huge, gnarled, old things—went back to the time of Christ.
All this gave a much-needed spiritual boost . . . though I’ve got to say that I have a pretty good idea how Christ must have felt in the garden.
SECRETARY POWELL came to the region on the eleventh of April to try to stop the Israeli attacks. The impact of that Passover bombing had struck at the core of the Israelis’ psyche. That was when Sharon finally wrote off Arafat. There would be nothing to do with Arafat, nothing. He refused absolutely to back down from that position.
The Secretary and I met with Israeli leaders, then went out to see Arafat in his gutted compound. We worked hard to arrange a relief of the siege. The stumbling block was two men inside the compound who were wanted by the Israelis. The pair had killed the Israeli Minister of Tourism Ze’evi months before; Arafat had refused to give them up; and the Israelis were close to a decision to storm the buildings. If anything bad happened to Arafat—and it didn’t matter what, death, injury, capture, or exile—it could end up being a disaster. We worked out a deal. The pair were to be jailed in Jericho by the Palestinians, but under U.S. and U.K. monitors. We also worked with others to relieve sieges in other West Bank areas.
For the next few days, Secretary Powell, Bill Burns, and I tried to find ways to salvage our mission, but the immediate future was looking terribly grim. By the end of these meeting, I believe that Powell had also lost faith in Arafat’s will to move forward on the peace process. Soon after his return to the States, the President reached a decision that we couldn’t deal with Arafat; he was a lost cause; and the Palestinian Authority had to be re-formed. By June, the United States made that position clear. Unless the Palestinian Authority was re-formed, and somebody other than Arafat was in charge, we weren’t going to do business.
Meanwhile, one of my daughters was about to be married, and I wanted to return home for her wedding. When nobody came up with objections, I prepared to leave, promising to return if needed. I left on the fifteenth of April.
FOR THE next year, the process went nowhere. I remained under the contract with State Department; but it was clear the administration wouldn’t call on me again.
I did meet with Israelis and Palestinians on a number of occasions, especially at IGCC sessions in Brussels and Athens in the months after my departure. Each time I was asked when I would return. I had to answer, sadly, that I doubted that I would be sent back.
On March 1, 2003, I resigned my position with the State Department. It was pointless to remain under contract and keep the title of Special Advisor to the Secretary of State knowing that I wouldn’t be called upon again. By then, concerns I had voiced about the impending Iraq war made me persona non grata with the administration.
WHAT COULD we have done that was different?
For starters, there should not have been another special envoy. The expectations and media attention become a detriment to progress with a high-visibility envoy. Also, it was time to get away from personalities. We needed worker bees.
Second, and more broadly, what we were trying to do was take that very small match, light a very narrow fuse, and hope it burned evenly all the way along. We were trying to construct peace by taking sequential steps along a path. Everything hinged not only on the sequence but on each very fragile and vulnerable step. All the focus went on these steps—media, people, leaders. And it’s all too easy to disrupt. Too easy to break. Too easy to attack. And peace fails.
What we need to do instead is put a large delegation on the ground, with a political component, a security component, an economic component, and a monitoring component. The delegation should come from the United States, the Quad, and any others from the international community that we can interest in the process. We should light a thousand fires instead of one fuse with one match. We need to find small positive actions, tiny cooperative measures. We need to go into towns like Jericho, where there aren’t many problems, and start some projects. We also need to start some joint model projects—a joint economic project here, a security arrangement there. While we continue trying to build on the Tenet/Mitchell plans or the President’s “Roadmap to Peace” (which was put forward in June 2002 and covers much the same territory), we’ll have other things generating activity, and giving a sense of momentum or progress to build hope. This is all going to be slow, but it will also go forward on a broad front. It’ll get there in time.
Third, the Palestinian Authority must be re-formed.
But those that step up to the challenge like Abu Mazen and Abu Ala’a have to be given support and clout. This can only come from tangible U.S. support for them and from serious negotiations with them by the Israeli leadership.
ACEH
My involvement with the HDC as one of their Wise Men did not cease during my time in the Middle East.
During the first week of February 2002, we held a session in Geneva with representatives of the government of Indonesia and the GAM. The government of Indonesia’s chief representative was retired Ambassador Wiryono and the GAM’s chief representatives were Dr. Zaini Abdullah and Malik Haythar Mohmood. These negotiators were civil and cooperative. I did not see the kinds of theatrical outbursts I had seen in the Middle East; I had a sense that each wanted a successful and peaceful resolution to the issues.
Still, it was a tough meeting with intense negotiating periods. The two sides and the HDC mediators made considerable use of the Wise Men—in addition to me: Surin Pitsuwan, Budamir Loncur, Lord Eric Avebury. These brilliant and experienced statesmen added a great deal to the negotiations. Each negotiating party called on us to provide advice on developing issues and recommendations on constructing points for agreement. We were most effective when discussions hit an impasse and needed a “push.”
The Wise Men were also joined by an additional pair of outside experts in the art of negotiating, who provided valuable insights on procedure and processes.
This new approach (designed by the Henri Dunant Centre) of bringing in multiple parties beyond the traditional three has caused me to look hard at other nontraditional approaches to conflict resolution. This is a critical area that must have a great deal more study and development.
THE ACEH process went through several steps.
The first session was aimed at achieving an agreement to accept the political process and get a cease-fire. Though this was far from easy (for all the reasons and issues discussed earlier), we got that.
In the second session we worked with the government to persuade them to make an offer on special autonomy, and then to draft a proposal. Once that had been achieved, we worked with the GAM to get them to understand it.
The third session put together what we called a cessation of hostilities agreement, which was the mechanism through which they would turn this into a political and a peaceful process.
The February meeting ended with the parties signing an agreement titled “Points for Further Consideration.” This was an agreement to continue to meet and a commitment to a peaceful resolution to the problems in Aceh. This was progress. I had learned that signing meant commitment.
We met again in early May outside Geneva, with much larger delegations from both sides, in a beautiful Alpine Swiss estate offered to us as a venue to provide privacy (there was growing press interest). It was an environment conducive to constructive negotiations.
This session produced a more substantive agreement to cease hostilities and pursue a political process to resolve differences. We Wise Men earned our keep—struggling with precise wording of the agreement that would satisfy each party.
All was not sweetness and light, however. I sensed a major roadblock that would later on prove fatal.
The government had proposed a political process with elections; but these elections did not include independence as an option. In the government’s view, the GAM would be no more than one political organization among others that might represent the people in the context of special autonomy.
The GAM leadership could not live with that. They could not bring themselves to publicly disavow their aspirations for independence. The best they could do was accept a nonviolent political process, with elections at the end, that allowed the people to decide whether to accept the government’s offer of special autonomy or opt for independence.
This was a serious impasse, with Jakarta pressing GAM to formally disavow independence as a goal, and GAM refusing to take that step. (They could not even tacitly accept special autonomy without formally acknowledging it, knowing with certainty that independence was not in the cards.)
All that aside, the agreement for a process and a cessation of hostilities was enough to move forward. It seemed to me that if independence didn’t become an immediate issue, we might resolve the block down the road through further negotiations.
Special autonomy was itself no small matter, from the government’s point of view. It set a precedent that could cause problems with other provinces (which is why hard-liners in the government continued to want to resolve the issue with greater military force). Meanwhile, the moderates, headed by the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, worked to convince President Megawati to accept this peaceful measure.
As the session closed, the mood was upbeat and positive; and I hoped we could sidestep the independence issue until constructive actions started happening on the ground in Aceh.
IN AUGUST I traveled to Singapore and Indonesia, where I met with Minister Yudhoyono, General Sutarto (the chief of staff of the Indonesian military), and other government officials. They all expressed a strong desire to produce a comprehensive proposal on special autonomy and a process for implementing a peaceful resolution to the conflict. We agreed to work with them on this effort.
I also traveled to Aceh to get a firsthand sense of the situation there. There, I met with local government officials, GAM members, and ordinary people who were caught in the middle of the struggle. Over ten thousand of them had been killed so far, and many more had suffered from atrocities committed by both sides. They were tired of this painful conflict.
A drive through the countryside and jungle areas with HDC representatives brought on an eerie sense of déjà vu; it was like going back to Vietnam.
I had a great deal of respect for the small HDC staff on the ground in Aceh and their local employees. It took courage and commitment to work in this environment; and I could sense their determination to work for positive change.
I left the region encouraged that a peaceful resolution could be achieved there. Though I knew progress would be difficult, I felt the momentum would rapidly grow if we could get a process going on the ground.
IN SEPTEMBER, we met at Versailles to advise the government on the drafting. (The French government had offered the palace as a venue after the Indonesian government had expressed a desire to add significance to their proposal by drafting it in “a historic setting.”) Their proposal was then forwarded to the GAM, and over the next two months issues were worked out through the HDC.
In December, we convened in Geneva, where both parties signed “The Cessation of Hostilities Agreement Between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement.” The agreement laid out a detailed process, which covered disarmament, political procedures, elections, monitoring mechanisms, and many other aspects of the peaceful path to resolution of their conflict. The HDC was designated as the monitoring agency, with countries in the region contributing personnel to support the effort. Things got off to a wonderful start and everyone involved was ecstatic.
Soon after the signing, President Megawati traveled to the province to kick off the process, and expectations and hopes continued to be high.
For a few months, all went well. But when the independence issue again reared up in a series of heated exchanges in the press, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The angry words triggered violence on the ground; the HDC monitors were threatened and forced to withdraw.
The HDC tried to get the two parties back on track, but arguments over dates and venues scuttled their efforts.
With the agreement breaking apart, President Megawati, under pressure from the hard-liners, dispatched troops to the province to commence a large-scale military operation.
IN MAY 2003, I received urgent calls from both the State Department and the HDC asking me to fly immediately to Stockholm to encourage the GAM leadership to recommit to the agreement. This might possibly convince the government to call off,
or postpone, the impending military action. I took a Concorde flight to London and reached Stockholm only hours after I left Washington.
As I arrived, I learned that the U.S., European Union, and Japanese ambassadors had issued a demarche to the GAM and another to the Jakarta government, making it abundantly clear that these governments could not support independence for Aceh; the outstanding issues between GAM and Jakarta had to be resolved within the context of the Indonesian state.
My side of the mission proved successful, but the Jakarta end of things was stickier. The GAM agreed to issue a statement recommitting to the agreement and requesting the government to join them in trying to get the provisions of the agreement back on track in Aceh. But the Indonesian government was not favorably inclined to accept the GAM’s offer. President Megawati did, however, agree to postpone military action for a week to give peace one more chance.
The U.S., European Union, and Japanese governments, together with the HDC, hastily arranged a meeting in Tokyo to get the two sides together (which, regrettably, I could not attend). It collapsed almost immediately when the government insisted on a statement disavowing independence as a nonnegotiable condition. The GAM refused.
Within hours of the collapse, government forces launched a full-scale military operation. Thousands of troops were involved.
I was tremendously disappointed.
In spite of the disappointment, the HDC and the Wise Men are still committed to the effort and standing by to help. I also committed to work with the HDC on emerging peace efforts in Africa.
THE PHILIPPINES
In early June 2003, the members of HDC, the Wise Men, and the monitoring teams that had been on the ground in Aceh all gathered in Geneva to discuss lessons learned and the possibilities of reengaging. Everyone agreed to remain ready to salvage the peace agreement or to begin a new round of negotiations if the opportunity presented itself. At this session, Martin Griffiths asked me if I would be willing to participate as a Wise Man in other peace meditations that the center was considering taking on.