RECONCILIATION
Five political lessons for the path forward
Just for the record, no, I am not being paid; I am here because you invited me. I am here also because I believe in the process of reconciliation.
In many areas of the world that I have worked in, reconciliation is a huge challenge _ a difficult challenge. It's one that's worth engaging in, and because I know that colours are very politicised here in Thailand, I have got a blue tie on, so I will be safe. In my country by the way, I wouldn't be.
Something we should just get out of the way at the very beginning _ in the end Thailand's problems will be solved by Thais, not by outsiders.
So we are here not to give lectures but to share experience and in the end how these problems are resolved are going to be issues that you are going to have to tackle over here.
What I am about to talk to you about today are the lessons I can take from my own experience. I am going to put before you five principles of what I learned from engaging in peace process reconciliation over the years.
And the first is this _ reconciliation happened when the sense of shared opportunity is greater than the separate sense of grievance.
And here for Thailand, this is a country of extraordinary potential. Its economy is growing in an amazing way in these last few decades. It's a world leader in many aspects of industry and services, automobiles, hard disks, tourism. In terms of population, around 67 million, it is one of the largest countries in the world today.
It is a country that is rich in culture and history. And the challenges are very obvious _ challenges to do with inequality, poverty, particularly rural poverty, challenges that we all have on education systems and health care, and of course the challenge of how the country reaches the next stage of development.
It is a country that could and should become a regional and even a global power, so I would say that the shared sense of opportunity and potential is extraordinarily large.
What it needs is a united determination to overcome the strong feelings about the past in order to develop and exploit that shared sense of opportunity.
For example, in Northern Ireland what we found was that one of the ways in which we brought about reconciliation was that people started to understand that the North of Ireland and the South of Ireland, they can actually do an immense amount together economically within the European Union.
That is the first thing _ there's got to be a galvanising sense of shared opportunity that overcomes the separate sense of grievance.
The second principle that I learned from my experience is that the past can be honestly examined, but it can never be judged in a way that is going to be to the satisfaction of everyone. And so you have to accept there are going to remain two sides with their own narrative about the past. However, you can honestly examine the past in a way that allows you to move forward for the future.
Reconciliation is never going to be about people changing their mind about the past. It is really going to be about changing the mind about the future.
When I was prime minister, we brought about the Good Friday Agreement, which was the peace deal that allow us then to move forward. One of the items of that agreement was the release of IRA prisoners.
When it happened, it very nearly destroyed the deal. Because if you were the victim of an act of terrorism, then you see these people who were responsible for it, especially if you lost a member of your family and you see these people walking free, celebrating, you are going to feel angry about it.
Now, some of those families actually said to me: "You've got to carry on going for peace, because I don't want this happening to someone else."
The third thing is that if it is impossible to banish the sense of past injustice, in order for there to be reconciliation, there has to be a future framework that people will accept as just.
In other words, whatever argument is carried on about what happened in the past and who was to blame, the essence of reconciliation is at least to be able to establish a framework for future cooperation that people regard as just and objective, and where the root causes of the dispute or the conflict can be addressed, and this is enormously difficult but of fundamental importance.
The essential thing about the Good Friday Agreement was that it provided a way in which two communities with irreconcilable past grievances were able, nonetheless, to see there was a future way forward that was fair.
So we had to develop a framework in which power was shared, so you had the principle from the Republican side conceded that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK for as long as people wanted it to, and on the other side, but whilst that happened, there was going to be some sharing of power so that the Nationalist Community did not feel shut out or excluded.
You can only create peace if people see, whatever the disputes about the past, the future has a framework that is seen to be fair and just, and one that also is capable of dealing with the root causes.
Because usually with any conflict, there are issues around which the conflict revolves. They could be issues to do with the constitution, or issues to do with who took power and how. Those are the issues that are on the surface but usually there's underneath some root causes, some things that have given rise to these deep differences.
And the Truth for Reconciliation Commission here discussed some of those causes and what they might be and how they might be dealt with. My point is very simple: that if you want the reconciliation process to work, you've got to have a framework going forward that allows those root causes to be dealt with in a way that is fair and which balances the situation in such a way that whatever people say about the past and the future, they think there's a better chance of doing it in a way that is accepted.
The fourth principle is this: that the purpose of what is being created as a future framework is anchored in democracy. And a genuine democracy involves both the substance and the form of democracy together.
Countries are often divided by factions, by class, by religion, by race, by colour, so it's not uncommon for countries to be one territory but within that territory for there to be deep divisions of one sort or another _ so in a sense here in Thailand the divisions, you can analyse why they come about, but it's not unusual that you will have such divisions.
Each situation is unique but there are often common characteristics in those divisions.
Democracy is not just a way of voting but a way of thinking.
Democracy is not just about how the majority takes power. It is crucially about how the majority then relates to the minority.
Part of the trouble is when democracy is seen as a kind of winner takes all. Then you get the situation in which the majority comes to power and the minority feels as if they are kind of shut out and excluded.
So democracy in my view works only as a concept that is pluralistic in nature. It's not about domination by one party.
It's about a sense that you have a majority that comes to power in a democratic system but there's still a shared space in which people cooperate and work together and actually share certain basic values.
Alongside this idea that democracy is a way of thinking and not just a way of voting is the idea that the rule of law is independently and impartially administered. And this is important for society, for citizens to believe that if they go in front of a court, the court will decide objectively. It's important economically because if people are going to come invest in your country they need to know that there is a rule of law that will be applied in an objective way.
It's also important politically because in any system you're going to get checks and balances, and one of the important checks and balances is an independent judiciary. And this by the way can be very difficult for political leaders.
But it only works on the basis that justice will be independently and impartially administered.
So the fourth principle is this _ that democracy works and works best as a source of reconciliation when it is clear that it is genuine democracy based on a pluralistic concept of society, a way of voting and thinking together, and based on genuine adherence to the rule of law.
The fifth principle that reconciliation is easier to achieve if the politics of a country as a whole is seen to be effective in delivering improvement to the people. Government has a challenge of honesty and a challenge of transparency and these are very important issues.
But very often the biggest challenge for government is not just the challenge of transparency but the challenge of efficacy; can it get things delivered for the people?
One basic lesson is that you deliver most when you reach out and try to build bridges in a non-partisan way.
Reconciliation will be easier to achieve if the government itself is operating effectively to deliver change for the people and so they feel their lives are getting better.
One of the biggest problems in the Middle East right now is the disparity between living standards in Israel and living standards in the Palestinian territory. Unless people feel that the peace process is actually gonna bring benefit to them _ and Palestinians in particular feel that they are going a rise in their living standard and additional prosperity along with the justice of the state _ they are far less inclined to put aside the differences and go for reconciliation.
So this issue to do with how you reach out and become more inclusive is very, very important.
And by the way, I think one huge challenge for Western democracy today is how to get out of a paralysis of policymaking where parties engage in issues in such a partisan way that they can't build any common bridges with each other and therefore the country can't move forward.
These issues with delivery for the people change and reform are of huge importance, and sometime they can help when you reach out beyond the partisan divide and you start cooperating in areas of policy, then it's easier for the people to see that it is sensible to cooperate also on the basic process of the reconciliation.
The important thing about reconciliation is also never to give up on it.
The people themselves have also got to play a role. You never get reconciliation without that strong popular support pushing and enabling and empowering the leader to lead.
So don't give up, however difficult it is. Carry on, because there is ahuge shared opportunity for Thailand and it would be a shame to waste it.
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*Excerpts from a speech by Tony Blair, former prime minister of Great Britain, at the 'Uniting for the Future: Learning from Each Other's Experiences' forum, co-organised by Chulalongkorn University's Institute of Security and International Studies and the Devawongse Vorapakarn Institute of Foreign Affairs.*
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