Claire Hajaj on why talking to guys with guns is the only way

Automatically transcribed We had a meeting with Dau Su's Minister of Peace and Reconciliation, maybe 24 to 48 hours before the coup, and he was never late to a meeting, ever. We met with him on Zoom. He came flustered and late to the meeting, very apologetic: He just said "I've just come from a meeting with the military and I think there's going to be a coup". We sort of laughed slightly thinking he was joking. I couldn't believe it would be real. And then, of course, history relates. Absolutely, when we saw the tanks rolling in, We were stunned, horrified. [00:00:01.020] - Adam Cooper 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, where some of the world's leading figures in peacemaking have come to discuss resolving conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, Myanmar to DRC, Sudan, and beyond. My guest is the Executive Director of Inter Mediate, a mediation charity operating in conflict zones around the world. She began her career at the UN Security Council's counterterrorism committee and spent 15 years with the UN, contributing to humanitarian, political, and security negotiations in some of the world's most challenging areas. She is also an acclaimed novelist and has written two books inspired by her personal and professional experiences. Claire Hajaj, welcome to the Mediator's Studio. [00:00:51.680] - Claire Hajaj Thank you so much. [00:00:53.320] - Adam Cooper Let's start with your early life and the experiences that led you into mediation. In one sense, it was quite literally in your genes, you had a Palestinian father whose family lost everything in the 1948 War, the Nakba, and your British mother was from a conservative Jewish family, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Tell me about how in your early years, you became aware of these two completely different narratives and how those narratives developed as your childhood progressed. [00:01:25.640] - Claire Hajaj Well, I remember exactly the moment, that I first became aware of the conflict. My parents, they met into the consternation of their families, married in the late 1960s at Manchester University, another university romance at the height of the Six Day War. Shortly afterwards, they decided to move to the Middle East. My father, who, like many Palestinians, had come to the UK and wanted to rebuild his life. He went to Kuwait to be an accountant. He took my unbelievably Jewish-looking mother with him, but it was not a good place to be either Palestinian or Jewish. It's one of my very earliest memories, actually, maybe four or five years old, in the back of a car. My mother was telling me that my grandmother, who's named Shapiro, was going to come to visit, but I must not tell anybody her last name. I asked the obvious question, why? Then my mother tried to explain the conflict to me in very simple terms. [00:02:36.170] - Claire Hajaj I remember asking her what was the obvious question to me at that point, which was when will it end? Because that, to me, was, When will it be okay for us to just be as a family? She was quiet for a moment. I remember looking at the back of her head in the car, and then she said, Very, very soon. Clearly, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but I believed it at the time. I was waiting for it to end. At the time in Kuwait, we would watch the news as a family every single evening. Every single evening, we would see this narrative unfold in front of us in very polarised ways. [00:03:48.960] - Claire Hajaj For me, it was a personal thing. I wanted that conflict to resolve so that my family could be at peace, but I also wanted to work and be part of the solution to that conflict for the very same reason. [00:04:00.380] - Adam Cooper Unfortunately, it didn't end. As you were growing up as a teenager, how did that divide play out in your wider family? How did it feel for you being caught amongst that? [00:04:13.680] - Claire Hajaj It's certainly not easy now being either Jewish or Palestinian. I don't want to compare the experiences of my different family members because there's tremendous pain on both sides of my family. No matter what I may think about their personal views, at least that pain has to be acknowledged. But there is also something very comforting to know where you stand exactly and to really be embedded in one story and only really be able to see the world through the lens of that story. I envied my cousins on both sides for having that certainty because it was a certainty that I did not feel. I think if anybody then had said to either of my parents or any member of my family, this person is going to end up doing mediation, they would have absolutely laughed you out of town. [00:05:30.620] - Claire Hajaj But it was my instinct to listen to somebody's certainty and very much feel the other side. In a room full of people who were seeing only the Palestinian view, I felt very Jewish in a room full of people who were only seeing an Israeli Zionist view, I felt very Palestinian. That was a fascinating experience to have to live through that business. But a little bit like having two eyes that don't see at the same focal length, quite disorientating. [00:05:56.140] - Adam Cooper Do you think in some ways that planted the seed for a career later mediation, that ability to empathise? [00:06:04.460] - Claire Hajaj I wonder. As mediators, empathy is sometimes the trump card, and we talk about it a lot and how in the world of mediation, the ability to really see things from another person's point of view is important. Perhaps, for sure, it helps to be able to step out of your skin and into somebody else's. But there is something else very important, which is objectivity. Being able to be distant and separate from the emotional battle that somebody else is fighting and not be pulled in. It made very real to me the cancerous impacts of endless wars and to see how the narratives of conflict just become so deeply rooted and embedded like a blinker that makes it impossible to really count somebody else's story. But I think more than that as well, it colours everything that a person is supposed to become. It’s a huge, huge burden to carry around. [00:07:30.100] - Adam Cooper Because growing up in that setting, you can imagine that some people might have decided, I'm just going to be completely apolitical and try to, in a way, protect myself from the challenges of having to navigate that space. But you didn't do that. You started at the UN. What was it that drew you to that world? Even just the idea that it was either you felt that you could or should do something about the problem. [00:07:54.820] - Claire Hajaj Well, I'd grown up internationally. My family was living with one foot in the UK and one foot in a region that was plunged into bloody conflicts. I'd seen the Intifada on the TV. I'd watched it tear my family apart. I'd watched it really hurt people that I loved. It didn't feel like a distant thing. I never felt as if I could do anything else with my life other than somehow try and either understand it, write about it, explain it somehow. I think the other thing that really made me want to do this work was seeing how, at the time, how distant it felt to so many people in the UK when I did eventually come back, going to school, and realising I remember watching the Oslo, the famous handshake on the White House lawn, feeling like... it was a strange feeling. Maybe this is an awful thing to say, but mildly disappointed that I hadn't had the opportunity I was like, What? Job done. It's done now. It was done even before I had a chance to help. Clearly, that was also, as my mum's statement, a little bit a little bit premature, I say, but I always knew this is what I wanted to do. [00:09:35.740] - Adam Cooper Let's turn to Afghanistan. Inter Mediate's intensive engagement started in early 2019, following two turbulent decades. The US had invaded in October 2001, and two months later, the Taliban was overthrown, but immediately began an insurgency. A new administration under Hamid Karzai was formed with American and NATO support. Then in 2014, Ashraf Ghani became President, following elections, and for the first time in Afghanistan's history, power was democratically transferred. At the time that you started to become more involved in Afghanistan, give our listeners a sense of what the security situation looked like on the ground, the dynamics between the US, the Afghan government, the Taliban. [00:10:23.360] - Claire Hajaj When we started working in Afghanistan, it's actually really just a salutary lesson in in how we judge the arcs of conflict. I remember in 2001, the Taliban fled within two months. It was actually a victory, I think, that gave us a very false sense of what the war on terror was going to be like. We were like, Well, this is easy. We can just get them out. We did, and we went in, and we embarked on our first big state building effort. In those early days, the Taliban did say, We want to be part of a settlement. Every single Western power, from the US to the UK, everybody said, Absolutely no way. Your day is done. They came knocking on the door again, I think, as violence began to pick up again around 2010, 2011, and we did not respond either then because the belief was fundamentally, We can do this. [00:11:39.780] - Claire Hajaj We can rebuild this state as a fully democratic functioning institution. And by the time we came, Afghanistan was on its downward trajectory. It was clear, to everybody, and the Trump administration for sure at the time, that there was no military victory to be had in Afghanistan, and the insurgency was not going away. Whether that was clear to everybody in the country, I'm not fully sure. But the Americans, it certainly was, and things were pretty bad. [00:12:15.380] - Adam Cooper You have a situation that you described where there's clearly not a military solution. But then in the power struggle, as it were, between the US, the Taliban, and the Afghan government, where did you assess power to lie as you stepped into your work in Afghanistan? [00:12:46.200] - Claire Hajaj To be frank, the power holders of the country, and maybe this is the great tragedy of Afghanistan, was US and the Taliban. It sometimes seemed as if the Afghan Republic itself wasn't really a player or didn't really exist. Certainly from the Taliban's perspective, they weren't a relevant player. [00:13:55.400] - Adam Cooper You're, in a sense, trying to rectify that imbalance, particularly by developing a close working relationship with President Ghani. Take me to 2021 when I understand you went to the Royal Palace together with your colleagues to meet President Ghani. [00:14:13.360] - Claire Hajaj That was the first trip to Afghanistan to try and understand. I'd been there in different capacities, working with the UN and to different parts of the country. It's interesting when you've been to different parts of the country, going to the palace in Kabul, it does feel a different country. The palace was very much that. It was a beautiful rose garden, a sense of stillness, a sense of quiet. President Ghani, a man who had literally written the book on fixing failed states, an intellectual, an academic who was a patriot, wanted to help his country country, but just seemed very lonely compared to all the forces that were raging outside. We sat and spoke with him. He gave us a huge amount of time, seven or so hours, and tried to cover every single different aspect of the conflict. What was, again, a stark contrast from the very, very complex, multifaceted way that he was thinking about all aspects the conflict, to the very, let's say, much more eagle-eyed American imperative, which is we need to get our forces out. [00:15:42.300] - Claire Hajaj There was a mismatch there for sure. [00:15:44.320] - Adam Cooper You paint a picture of a man, an intellectual man, who's quite isolated. There's a critique of President Ghani, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is that he refused to see what was happening beyond the walls of the palace, hoping against hope that the Taliban's power would somehow recede. How did you deal with that? To what extent could you balance meeting him where he was psychologically while at the same time providing advice that was grounded in reality? [00:16:14.380] - Claire Hajaj That is a challenge of all peace support work. The thing about insurgencies is that even mediators can fall prey to the fog of war. If you walked into the Afghan theatre. Imagine it as a grand Shakespearean tragedy, and you've got all the actors on the stage. If you were to go and interview each ever and say for one of them, you would get a slightly different perspective on what is actually happening on the ground. The Taliban were clearly always confident that they were going to win. The Afghan armed forces were putting up a brave fight in some places. Now, how much of that brave fight was dependent on American support and also background support, support to fixing helicopters and the other military support rather than necessarily frontline support? How much of that was down to that? I don't know. But one thing that was absolutely clear is there was a very big difference between what the Taliban thought was going to be an ultimate victory if they just kept pushing. On the other hand, President Ghani did really believe that it was in the gift of the Afghan armed forces to call this insurgency. [00:17:28.200] - Claire Hajaj Everybody was pretty clear that if the Americans pulled out unconditionally and if there was no conditions-based withdrawal, and it was just an unconditional time-based withdrawal, that that was going to leave the Afghan government incredibly exposed. There was one senior member of President Ghani's team who did actually, and I think he was the only member of the team, spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the Taliban and speaking to talibs in jail. It's interesting because in conflicts, often you find there are many channels of communication between adversaries, often many more than you think at every single level. This was one conflict where actually there weren't that many, which contributed to the fog of war. This individual who did, I think he had a bit of a clearer sense that the Taliban were absolutely, could see a path a military path to victory, whereas nobody else really could. [00:18:33.280] - Adam Cooper I'm curious, though, because that fog of war that you described is inevitable to a greater or lesser extent, but you're trying to cut through it, in a sense, and to have these really frank discussions with your prime interlocutor, the President, to help him charter a way forward. Were there any difficult moments? What do you remember trying to advise him at the time? [00:18:58.500] - Claire Hajaj We had a number of priorities. So, what we tried to do was create a space where we worked on problems that we could fix. What we try to do is chart a series of reasonable steps that would put the Afghan government in a commanding position in the negotiations and build them into the negotiations in such a way that the Republic, and everything the Republic hoped to still be, could have a seat at that table. [00:20:30.420] - Adam Cooper I'm sure when you were in the midst of that, it felt worth trying. But were there moments where it also felt futile to advocate for the inclusion of the Republic and these discussions which were largely being driven by the US and the Taliban? [00:20:45.180] - Claire Hajaj The Republic was involved, and they did have a negotiating team, and they did sit down with the Taliban, and they did agree a series of principles. We worked hard with the negotiating team to come up with a negotiation strategy, and there was even a back channel at one point that, again, had some potential. But we come back to the basic reality is that, unfortunately, a negotiation to work needs to be like a story that you don't know the ending. But Afghanistan was a negotiation where we knew what was happening on the last page, and that was the Americans were going to withdraw, and that's what they did in August '21. So knowing that that was happening makes the negotiation feel rather futile, because at the end of the day, the Taliban were always just going to wait until August 2021. [00:23:10.100] - Adam Cooper We know what happened in August '21, Kabul falls, President Ghani flees. How did you feel that day and did it prompt any reflection on your part about anything that you wish you had done differently? [00:23:25.680] - Claire Hajaj It was the worst-case scenario that we'd all feared, but it was worse than the worst-case scenario to watch it happening. The desperation of Afghans, the image of people falling from planes. The frustration that this did not need to be the outcome. For us, I did sit down, we pulled ourselves together and thought, What could we have done differently? Is there something we missed? I remember a moment, actually, President Garny ran an early on in the negotiation process. Elections happen actually relatively often in negotiations. They're always very challenging inflexion point. [00:24:42.410] - Claire Hajaj How do you manage an election? A leader wants to be elected in a negotiation to get a mandate to go forward and actually make an agreement. That works well if they get a commanding mandate. But if they don't get a commanding mandate that can actually play against you. We had played around with the idea of: Could this be an election where instead of electing another five-year presidency, you open up a different set of possibilities, you create more of the reality of the end state that you're trying to reach? An election that leaves some transitional state. It's not what Ghani wanted. He ran, he won, but only after a painful, painful battle with a tiny voter turnout, it actually weakened his hand rather than strengthened it. [00:25:25.600] - Adam Cooper There's an important lesson there about how you run an election in a country, as experiencing conflict or going through any challenging transition. But for you at a personal level, watching President Ghani flee and having worked so closely with him and sat with him for hours in the palace, how did you feel at that moment watching your primary interlocutor depart the country? [00:25:52.120] - Claire Hajaj It's honestly not for me to judge his decision to leave. When we saw what was happening, I felt personally devastated. But Ghani was not our only interlocutor, and many stayed. They stayed and they continued to do what they could. They are still trying to do what they can under very difficult circumstances. [00:27:15.980] - Adam Cooper I'd like to move on to Myanmar, where we met when I was the country director for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. You had lived there in 2006, which you have described as a golden prison with no phones or internet and the government in Naypyidaw, summing you periodically to raise their concerns. But then you return in 2020 for Inter Mediate, which had been working in Myanmar since 2011, engaging the ethnic armed organisations, the military, the de facto leader of Myanmar at the time, Aung San Suu Kyi, who had taken on Inter Mediate as her peace advisors. After the elections in November 2020, there was a coup in February 2021, which we'll discuss. But Let's talk about the earlier stages of your work, and Aung San Suu Kyi in particular, because she could have drawn upon many people in the international community for advice. Why do you think she was particularly drawn to you and your colleagues? [00:28:16.320] - Claire Hajaj She had asked Jonathan to be her peace adviser. [00:28:31.970] - Adam Cooper This is Jonathan Powell [00:28:32.850] - Claire Hajaj This is Jonathan Powell. That's right. My former boss, currently the National Security Advisor of the UK. He had met her and he talked to her about the peace process, talked to her about Northern Ireland, talked to her about various things, and then later on found out that she had basically nominated him as her peace adviser in the process. At that time, we were working almost primarily with the ethnic-armed organisations. It's interesting because we We're going to talk about endless war, and that's a big topic now, endless war. I think there should be an equally big topic maybe we should start thinking about, which is endless negotiations. Myanmar was definitely an example of what felt pretty much like an endless series of negotiations. When I was there in 2006, we had ceasefire areas. Then that turned into the NCA, which is the National Ceasefire Agreement. Then this turned into the Panglong process. The Panglong process swept up a huge number of ethnic-armed organisations in a process that was trying to balance basically federalisation and democracy and democratisation in the country. Democratisation, which was Aung San Suu Kyi's goal, federalisation, that was the goal of the ethnic armed groups. [00:30:28.280] - Adam Cooper Because there is a critique of the Myanmar peace process. It was overly technocratic in a way, as you said. What does it actually look like in practise to support leaders of a country in shaping the vision for a peace process? [00:30:46.020] - Claire Hajaj It's an exercise in, it feels like, and I'm sure a lot of people are very familiar with this, being presented with a giant block of marble. And inside there somewhere is a vision of a country that people with very different perspectives can live with. Carving it out is just the most excruciating process, which is why we talk about long-termism in negotiations. It's much more frustrating for the people of the country than it is for the mediator because they're the ones that are living it on a regular basis. I always thought with the Myanmar process and trying to Part of the challenge of the process was giving people a sense that there was a next achievable step within reach, that it wasn't just all process and all unachievable, that you could actually somehow there was a next level that you could reach in the negotiations. In theory, it shouldn't have been such a stretch to imagine an end state where you would have some federal, basically a form of federated society and democratisation of the country. There are going to be elements of that that are always going to be from a technical perspective. But the main goal, you can imagine it. But there wasn't a huge amount of trust between and the leadership and these ethnic arm organisations who were coming from a very different place, who were fighters, fundamentally. Trying to get them onto the same conceptual page was pretty hard. [00:35:12.380] - Adam Cooper The fact that there were tensions between the Tatmador, the Burmese military, and Aung San Suu Kyi was obviously no secret. In light of the coup, do you think that the international community, maybe all of us in some ways, underestimated the risks that these tensions would result in something so dramatic? Do you think that there's a broader lesson in there about our ability to read countries that are not our own? [00:35:40.340] - Claire Hajaj A hundred per cent. We had a meeting with Minister Chauvin Sway, who was Dau Su's Minister of Peace and Reconciliation, maybe 24 to 48 hours before the coup, and he was never late to a meeting, ever. We We met with him on Zoom. He came flustered and late to the meeting, very apologetic: He just said "I've just come from a meeting with the military an I think there's going to be a coup". I remember we laughed slightly thinking he was joking. Then He was very serious. And afterwards, we got off the phone and I said, Really? I think he's exaggerating. Maybe. I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it would be real. And then, of course, history relates. Absolutely, when we saw the tanks rolling in, We were stunned, horrified. I think he was personally imprisoned. It was a terrible thing. So do we misread countries all the time? I think, generally speaking, just globally, we misread countries. [00:37:00.000] - Claire Hajaj We misread Russia, we misread Syria, we misread Myanmar. But our ability to invest in conflict prevention seems a lot weaker than our ability to run in with the ambulance after the crisis. [00:37:18.420] - Adam Cooper When you look at Myanmar today, it's quite hard to be optimistic, but you've also said that all mediation takes place on the bones of previous mediations. So apply that to Myanmar for me right now. What are the channels of communication that you think are important to sustain? [00:37:39.660] - Claire Hajaj It is true to say that all mediation is built on efforts that have failed or efforts that have stalled. Sometimes force decides. It's not the ideal outcome because when force decides, it brings its own set of dilemmas that countries can wrestle with for years to come. I really hope that there will be a negotiation. And there's certainly a long tradition of negotiation to build on. When and if that happens, it's in the same It's going to face the same dilemmas as the previous process in that how do you reconcile a country where you have people with very different views on what that country fundamentally needs. It's going to also need to involve now the neighbours who were not actually involved in the panglong process in the previous process. They were stakeholders, clearly, economic and also regional security stakeholders, but they weren't at the table. [00:39:51.980] - Adam Cooper Let's move on to your work in Haiti. Inter Mediate gets involved there in 2022 at a very fraught time. In July the previous year President Moïse was assassinated and replaced by an acting Prime Minister. In August 2021, the country was hit by a huge earthquake, a decade after another earthquake that had killed as many as 300,000 people. These disasters worsened an already severe economic downturn. It fuelled a rise in gang violence, which by September 2021 had escalated into full-blown gang warfare with multiple actors. As of March 2022, Haiti still had no President, no parliamentary quorum, and a dysfunctional high court. In that context, Inter Mediate got involved. What made you think there was a role for mediation, and what was it like on your first trip? [00:40:42.740] - Claire Hajaj It just seemed like such an extraordinary tragedy. The humanitarian cost was absolutely on a par with some of the world's worst conflicts, but there wasn't actually anything to fight about was the great mystery. There wasn't an ethnic conflict. It's not a resource conflict. There's no sectarian conflict. It just seemed to be a collapse of law and order and a sheer naked power struggle on the part of some of these these armed actors. [00:42:09.760] - Claire Hajaj We knew people in Haiti on the diplomatic side and some on the business side. The big political issue that was the problem that we were hoping to be able to play some role in fixing was that there was a Prime Minister who did not have the legitimacy to invite in foreign security support. International security support, it just did seem, was going to be the only possible way that the gang violence could get under control. [00:43:31.640] - Claire Hajaj That is what was then the narrative. I think the Haitian actors on the ground were looking at the Prime Minister and saying, Well, we don't want the international security support to come in. If it's just going to be to protect this guy, who was supposed to have elections after 60 days, and two years later, he's still here, no elections in sight. The challenge was to try to help in some way, and we were by far not the only actor. CARICOM played a a very important role, and we were playing a supporting role. But the challenge was to see if it was possible to build a political consensus that would then open the door to a consensus on security solutions. [00:44:12.200] - Adam Cooper And when you say CARICOM, that's the Caribbean Community, the Intergovernmental Organisation in the region. What did it look like in practice to explore that as you stepped into a very different conflict to what you had worked on before? [00:44:22.960] - Claire Hajaj There were some incredibly, incredibly capable people in Haiti. It's one of the countries that you step into and think, why is there a problem? Because people are incredibly, incredibly switched on and they love their country. But there's one major issue. There's just no trust at all between people. I think the violence and the suffering the country has been through for so long has so undermined the social contract. It's very hard for people to sit down and actually have conversations that go anywhere. That's why they wanted help to do that. [00:45:04.140] - Adam Cooper Talk me through how you went about identifying the parties that you would try to mediate between, and maybe some of your meetings with them. [00:45:15.560] - Claire Hajaj Working in Haiti because of the security situation is very different from working anywhere else. I think it's the only country on Earth I've actually driven over a body on the way to the airport. It's a really, really scary place sometimes where you have to remember that this is what Haitians are living with day in, day out. They don't know if they're going to walk out of their front door, they're going to be kidnapped. You drive into a street and it's quiet and suddenly you're afraid. [00:47:11.200] - Adam Cooper Your work, together with others, is supporting negotiation between multiple political parties, but these parties weren't actually responsible for the majority of the violence. In a way, what's the mediation strategy when solving that political dispute doesn't get at the core of a power struggle? [00:47:30.440] - Claire Hajaj This is the huge dilemma for mediation in a future where gang violence and criminal violence is going to play a much bigger role. There was a fundamental proof of concept that we wanted to try and deliver in Haiti, which is that if you reach a political consensus, it would allow the country to marshal its resources more effectively to deal with gang violence. We were able to reach a political consensus. Prime Minister had left the country, the gangs rose up. There was no government at that point. We, with CARICOM, were able to play a role in helping those political actors who were in the country to come together and form a transitional government. At the time, that was the alternative to having the gangs in the presidential palace. But what I think for us, and for all of us now in Haiti, but not just in Haiti, in the Caribbean, in parts of Latin America, increasingly in parts of the Sahel, is what do you do if the political consensus is not enough, the violence has gone so far that the gangs now are using violence for its own sake. [00:48:50.880] - Claire Hajaj What do you do with these actors who don't have necessarily a political vision, who don't have a political ask? The normal parlance negotiation would be, you have to speak to everybody. I still think that's true to a great extent. Ultimately, the only way to stop violence is to speak to the guys with the guns. That will be true with criminals as it is, with people who've got political agendas. But it's a very, very bitter pill for a country to swallow. For Haitian leaders right now to say to them, "Well, guys, look, political consensus didn't work. Now you've got to have a conversation the gangs." That is hard. For communities, some of these gangs have gone through communities and massacred women and children as a reprisal just for trying to stop them coming in or speaking to the Haitian National Police. [00:49:44.960] - Adam Cooper Today, Haiti has the broadest governing coalition in its history. What are your feelings about the prospects for the country? [00:50:01.840] - Claire Hajaj You talk to any Haitian, they would tell you that things are really, really hard and they're bleak. I remember getting, a phone call after the presidential council was formed, and one of the actors who played a key role in negotiating the council. He called and he said, I just cannot believe that we are sitting down with these people. I've never sat with these people and signed an agreement. It was a big moment. I think most Haitians would say that they are sad that the country is now still facing such a crisis. [00:51:13.380] - Adam Cooper That agreement, that was the third of April Accord. Maybe you can explain a bit for the listener who might not know. [00:51:18.240] - Claire Hajaj Yeah, so that agreement was an agreement that established the transitional government, which came to be known as the Third of April Accord. But I think, again, what's really important to say is that it's not impossible to imagine a scenario where there would be an answer to the gangs. It's just going to take different thinking to the thinking that we've employed. If there can be an answer to the gangs, and it can be as part of a political process as we've learned in a lot of other contexts. But we collectively are going to need a rethink on how do we manage the whole question of criminal groups and an increasing number of context where the armed conflict is not immediately linked to a political ask, but is driven by economics, power incentives, a narrative of its own. [00:52:32.480] - Adam Cooper Do you feel in some ways that you're trying to help mediate, even if it sounds rather bleak, the conflicts of the future in this dynamic where not just in Haiti, but in other countries, there is a political challenge, but there is primarily a criminal gangs challenge which requires a different solution? [00:52:55.700] - Claire Hajaj Yes. It sounds a bit grandiose, I think, to say that we're mediating the conflicts of the future, but I do think that this is a frontier that we haven't quite grappled with. In every era has had its particular violence challenge. You have the Separatists and the Communists, and then When you had the separatists and the communists, and then you had the Islamists. Now, increasingly, it's these armed actors. There's always been, in every single iteration, a good reason not to speak to any of them. We can always come with a long list of reasons. But for each one, we've also needed a slightly different approach. We haven't been able to just look in the toolbox and say, Right, well, this worked for the IRA, so let's just apply it to ISIS. We know that that doesn't work. We know that we're going to have to upgrade our thinking for the whole question of criminal gangs. We also know it's urgent because we're looking at it all over the place and we're looking at it increasingly interconnected in the same way that ISIS and Al Qaeda became franchises. Criminal groups are doing the same thing. [00:54:03.960] - Claire Hajaj What the solution is, I can't pretend to say, but I do believe that it's going to need to be comprehensive. It does need to be woven into the politics, even if there isn't an immediate and obvious link between dealing with the politics and stopping the violence. [00:54:22.060] - Adam Cooper I'd like to draw things to a close with some general reflections on your mediation work and ask you about the skills that you need to be a successful mediator. Because when students learn about negotiation and mediation, I'm not sure whether you ever had this experience, Claire, it's sometimes reduced to an almost technocratic exercise, analysing the interests of the parties. Identifying the common ground. But particularly in this mediation and advisory work that you do, it's deeply personal, maybe even psychological. I don't know what your reflections are on the skill set that you need to do work at that level. [00:55:05.460] - Claire Hajaj Part of it is a to live without discomfort. Part of it is being willing to really invest in getting to know people and communicating sincerity to those people and being able to do it for the long term because that's the only way that trust is eventually built. I don't think anybody wants somebody who is going to whisk into a conflict zone and say "Right, well, based on my decades of knowledge, I'll give you my five minutes on solving your conflict, and then I'll be on my way". That, I think, never works. Maybe that's also a reason why the era of big brand name mediators might have drawn to a close. Now, at least my experience has been that being willing to really invest in people in relationships with real sincerity, to try and, of course, have empathy, but also be able to take them to where you are, which is a little bit of a distance, and start allowing in a way that is non-threatening new ideas to percolate. [00:56:38.920] - Adam Cooper Perhaps continuing the psychological thread of questioning, I'd like to ask you about inclusion in a peace process, which is held up as something that can help ensure the sustainability of any agreement. But at the same time, mediation is also an exercise between those who hold power and is often marked by a desire amongst leaders to maintain control. In your experience working with senior leaders, do you think that they see inclusion as threatening? To the extent that they do, what arguments can you deploy in its favour? [00:57:17.040] - Claire Hajaj Mediation or negotiating a peace process or trying to think your way into a peace process is like walking a tight rope. It's an incredibly intimate, exposing, politically risky, lonely venture. You want to be only surrounded by the people that you know and the people that you trust or the people you have to be surrounded by. This is what I experience with senior leaders, that they keep their circles narrow because often their circle of trust is quite narrow. Part of the challenge of a negotiation is at what point do you widen that circle? Because eventually, a leader is going to realise that you need to carry people and not just the five guys that you really trust. And not even just the constituents are behind you, you're going to need to widen it out. I think it's wrong to say that people are anti-inclusion because they're threatened by the idea, but it's more a case of the very nature of negotiations is so exposing that you don't want to expose yourself anymore. [00:58:46.770] - Claire Hajaj What we find is it's about pacing and sequencing and framing it not as, you must have people at the table because the world has decided that this is the right thing to do. But it's really about framing it as being in the interest of the process and how a process can be made more broad-based, how you broaden those pillars of support and make it more sustainable. That's a question of timing and sequencing and the trust that you have built also when you bring that to the table with a senior leader. [00:59:33.940] - Adam Cooper Earlier on in our conversation, you drew a theatrical analogy to describe a piece process. If I'm not mistaken, you had a stint as a theatre critic right after your studies. When you look at the landscape of political communication today, do you think there's occasionally a necessarily theatrical element to mediation, even if much of it remains necessarily discrete? [00:59:56.510] - Claire Hajaj So all the worlds is a stage. All politics is theatre to some extent. That's why it attracts such personalities and why they tend to do so well. We love to be entertained. Sometimes we like to talk about an entire negotiation as a choreography. Actually as a storyteller as well. When I was writing novels, I had to write the one sentence version, the one paragraph version, the one page version. I found that very helpful for thinking about negotiations as well, because they also have to have an arc and they have to have a narrative. People have to know. You may not necessarily know where the story ends, but you know where you want it to end. You enter into it as an actor in that. It is really important, particularly because it is a political process, fundamentally, negotiations. It has its rituals and it It has its sequences and it has its beginning chapter and its middle reversal. It also has to have its satisfying resolution for everybody. Thinking about it in narrative terms can absolutely help. Remembering the primacy of politics in it again and again, at the end of the day, these are decisions that people make because they feel that it takes them towards their happy ending, their version of it. [01:01:32.380] - Adam Cooper We've talked about empathy at the beginning of the interview. You've said earlier that an effect of living in conflict, not just armed conflicts, but also family conflicts, is that it totally drains people out of any empathy and ability to feel what might be driving others. Growing up in a divided family and working in countries affected by conflicts all over the world, how do you maintain your empathy? [01:02:16.880] - Claire Hajaj We all have to know ourselves before we walk into a room and try and help anybody else. Empathy is not something that I struggle with. I have struggled to not have too much of it. That, I think, it's very hard to balance, incredibly hard to balance. Sometimes in negotiations, I have found that being able to take a breath and be a place where people can put down their emotion and come and think about things, have permission to think about things in a different way, because when you've been fighting for cause all your life, being able to put down the emotion is actually really hard to do. You feel like a traitor. That is sometimes a service. Other times, I found that being emotional, that cardinal sin of a mediator, getting emotional, reminds people that you too are human and you too know what it's like to live as they have lived. I can't ever actually live somebody else's experience, but I do know what it is like to feel trapped in violence that will not end and live with a family that has been shaped almost entirely by that experience. Sometimes that also helps for people who I'm working with to know that I also can feel. [01:03:53.160] - Adam Cooper Well, there we must end. Claire Hajaj, thank you so much for being my guest in the Mediator's Studio. [01:03:58.720] - Claire Hajaj You are very welcome. [01:04:37.740] - Adam Cooper That's it for this edition of the Mediator's Studio. To get more episodes as they come out, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We always love to hear from you. So if Claire's career in war zones or the mediation lessons from her family life have resonated with you, please get in touch via the listener survey in the show notes or on our website. Or do drop me a message on Twitter at Adam 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 and Eleanor Strangways. Big thanks also to Ly Buiduong for her support. Hope you'll join me for the next edition. Until then, from Losby Gods in Norway, this is Adam Cooper saying goodbye and thank you for listening.