Special to the Town Crier
Byron Bland, associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, told the members of the Morning Forum Dec. 7 that the current situation in Northern Ireland, despite recent breakthroughs, is extremely shaky and unstable.
Saying that "everything in Ireland is contentious," Bland warned that the IRA refuses to disarm until an accord is reached, and the Unionists refuse to negotiate until the IRA disarms.
Noting that the IRA sees weapons as its only leverage in the situation and the Unionists say they cannot negotiate "with a gun under the table," Bland predicts that unless some progress is made by late January, Trimble the Unionist leader will resign, to be replaced by a more hard-line representative, and the disagreement will again escalate.
Bland, who is currently teaching the politics of reconciliation at Stanford University, said that the 3,500 who have died in the Irish conflict, is the equivalent of 200,000 dead in the United States. The wounded would equate to 500,000 in the U.S. He noted virtually everyone in the country has been touched in a very personal way by the violence.
Asking "How do you unite a country that has been divided by killing?" Bland said that peace is not the absence of conflict, which is everywhere, but the absence of violent conflict.
Noting that in every conflict, there are things important to one side that are not important to the other, and vice versa. It is with those issues that negotiation can begin, he said.
Negotiation transforms enemies, whose very existence threaten each other, into adversaries, who may disagree, but do not threaten the other's way of life, Bland said. One way to focus negotiations is to ask each side to envision how their grandchildren and their adversaries' grandchildren will fit into their vision of peace, he said.
Saying that forgiveness leads to healing, Bland announced that The Center on Conflict and Negotiation plans to bring eight women from Northern Ireland, all of whom have lost sons in the conflict, to Stanford to work on how to heal and forgive. Bland said that societies don't forgive - only individuals can forgive.
The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.