THE BELFAST Agreement cannot form a template for global conflict resolution, but many of its principles and ideas can be applied in regions such as the Middle East and Afghanistan, the Mitchell Conference at Queen's University, Belfast, heard yesterday.
The two-day conference, Moving On From Conflict, which concluded yesterday, put special emphasis on what lessons could be drawn from the peace process in Northern Ireland.
One of the key lessons that could be applied was that politicians must engage in dialogue to break free from conflict, said Michael Ancram, MP and former junior Tory direct rule minister in the early to mid-1990s.
He said in the initial stages of the peace process it was difficult speaking to Sinn Féin members, some of whom he knew were in the IRA, an organisation that had killed some of his political friends.
Yet through such contact, he said, you personally found that you shared a common humanity, and that your political adversary was "also looking for a way out of the maze" that he was in. "You can't lose by talking," said Mr Ancram.
He believed the Northern Ireland experience could be usefully applied in areas such as the Middle East and Afghanistan.
"As a senior Israeli recently told me - at this stage in his life he could make better use of his time by talking to his enemies rather than to his friends."
Applying that argument in the Middle East, he said talks should be opened up with Hamas and Hizbullah, and that in Afghanistan, Britain and the US should speak to the Taliban.
"The lesson is that no conflict is intractable, but you can't have a successful peace process unless you involve all those who need to be involved," said Mr Ancram.
Former taoiseach Albert Reynolds said this was the principle he applied in the period leading up to the IRA and loyalist ceasefires of 1994. He decided to engage in secret talks with the loyalists and the IRA.
"That was because the only people who can stop the killing are those who are doing the killing," he told the conference.
Mr Reynolds spoke of how US president Bill Clinton had assisted the moves for peace by granting a visa to Gerry Adams to visit the US in 1994.
He also repeated his assertion that two weeks before the first IRA ceasefire broke down in 1996, he "in my own handwriting" wrote to the British government warning of the imminent collapse of the cessation if action was not urgently taken, but his warning was ignored.
Former Irish Times journalist Conor O'Clery also spoke of president Clinton's important role in the peace process.
He said the seeds of this interest were planted in 1969 when, as a young Rhodes scholar, Clinton read about and observed on television how civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland were attacked by loyalists and the RUC.
Former police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan said in the area of policing there were a number of ideas from the North that could be transferred to other conflict zones.
These included the idea of a police ombudsman itself, creating a policing board and district policing partnerships at local level, and an oversight commissioner to ensure all police reforms were implemented.
