Michael Schulder:
This is Wavemaker Conversations, a podcast for the insanely curious. I’m Michael Shulder, and less than 24 hours from now, on Monday, September 26th, 2016, a peace treaty will be signed in the South American nation of Colombia, designed to end the longest and deadliest war in the Americas, 52 years of war, 220,000 people killed, five million people displaced. Joining me now on the phone from the Colombian city of Cartagena, where the treaty is expected to be signed, is a man who played an important role mediating the end of this war. It’s my guest, William Ury. William, welcome back to Wave Maker Conversations.
William Ury:
Pleasure, Michael, to be speaking with you.
Michael Schulder:
And just to reintroduce you for my audience, many, many people know you, but Bill, co-author of a seminal book on negotiation, Getting to Yes, as well as the follow-up to that, Getting Past No, the Power of a Positive No, and most recently, Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. You’re also the co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. And the first thing I want to ask you is, first of all, how long have you been involved, you and your team, how many people on your team, have been involved in the mediation effort to try to end this war that has taken so many lives in Colombia?
William Ury:
Five years.
A little more than five years ago, I made my first trip in this connection to Colombia to come down and speak with the President about helping them to open up initial talks with the FARC, which had to be, in its first phase, highly secret, because there are many adversaries of the peace talks, and the President wanted to have some assurance that there was something there, there, before he was willing to make it public.
Michael Schulder:
And so, how did you go about secretly trying to figure out if there was something there? What specifically can you tell me?
William Ury:
The government had secret contacts with the FARC, which were very difficult to arrange. It involved getting in canoes and going down rivers deep in the forest, blindfolded, and with machine guns, toting gorillas, ending up in a little camp.
We even had an initial conversation about how to set up the talks, or how to set up the possibility of talks, and then the President appointed a team consisting of his older brother and the peace commissioner and several others, kind of a small team, to begin the talks. There was a whole affair of how to extract a gorilla negotiator, someone who would represent the FARC, a gorilla commander, from the jungle and bring them to a third-party location where these serious talks could be held, and we helped the President think about where that could be, and he picked Cuba, actually, Havana, as a place where the talks could be held in relative secrecy and confidentiality, and a place that would accept the FARC and that the FARC could trust, and who could also play a role in encouraging the FARC to make a serious attempt at ending this war. And even the extrication of the gorilla commander from the jungle was just, to me, just an example of how delicate these things can be and how the very first moves can make a big difference. One of the government people rented a helicopter, and because this had to be done in total secrecy, even secret from other areas of the government, the military and so on, he came in with a Red Cross official and a Cuban official, and the Red Cross official handed the coordinates to the pilot. They flew up into the jungle and landed in a clearing.
The gorillas were suspecting a trick, and they’re very suspicious, but the helicopter lands there and is soon swarmed by hundreds of AK-47-toting gorillas all pointing at the helicopter. And my friend was sitting in the helicopter wondering what to do, and he realized the helicopter wasn’t much protection against the bullets, so he decided to get out of the helicopter, and he strode up to the commander and said, �Senor Comandante, I am now placing you under the personal protection of the President.� That’s what we call in negotiation a reframe. Here he had all these guns aimed at him, and he was putting the commander under the personal protection of the President. But in other words, treating one of the keys of negotiation is you have that power of reframing, and choosing to reframe what seemed to all eyes like a very adversarial situation into one in which they could be possible partners. And the gorilla commander, despite some of his people being highly suspicious and begging him not to, decided to get in the helicopter, trust this fellow, and they flew off to Venezuela and landed a plane to Cuba, and that was how the talks could begin.
Michael Schulder:
Really one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard, and were you there on one of those, on that helicopter?
William Ury:
I was not. That was just done by this fellow and the Red Cross official and the Cuban official. One of the amazing things is this particular President, President Santos, was open to taking on as a kind of kitchen cabinet of advisors a few people from abroad who had a lot of experience in other negotiations around the world, and we formed a kind of a team to advise him, work with his negotiation team, help them think through both an agenda and how they were going to approach this negotiation, how they were going to build relationships. I spent many days in preparation for these talks, and then periodically would come down every month or two months or three months and meet with the President again, meet with the team again, see what the latest problems were, try to help them troubleshoot them, and that’s been going on now for almost five years.
Michael Schulder:
And let me ask you something. That guerrilla leader from five years ago, is he going to be at the signing ceremony tomorrow? Is he, is his a name that you can reveal?
William Ury:
His name was El Medico, or nickname, he was a doctor, he was a park commander, he was the main negotiator in the secret phase which lasted…
Michael Schulder:
Will he be there tomorrow?
William Ury:
I hope so. I don’t know. But I hope he will be there tomorrow. He went back into the jungle after this, and the FARC appointed another team to negotiate in the public phase for the last four years.
Michael Schulder:
So let me just fast forward, because reading the New York Times account, this paragraph struck me in terms of what the deal actually says.
Under the pact, FARC, the guerrilla group, FARC members will surrender their arms to United Nations personnel and disclose the nature of their involvement in the conflict to a special tribunal that would include Colombian and international jurists. And this is what’s really fascinating to me. Those who admit to grave crimes like kidnappings and executions would be subject to periods of restricted mobility for five to eight years, during which they would be expected to perform community service. And so there is a theme here of, and the president has said it himself, of forgiveness. How do you get people who have lost relatives, who have been victims themselves, how do you get them to agree to conditions like this where there’s really not retribution, but as long as you acknowledge your crimes or your actions, we’re going to give you a second chance?
William Ury:
It’s highly controversial, actually. Not all victims, or people even who weren’t victims, like this idea. I mean, it’s hard. This is hard work. But I will say that one of the keys, which is another very significant innovation of this process, is for the first time that I know of in any peace process, the negotiators in Havana invited delegations of victims to come testify to the negotiators.
And there were at least five or six of these missions of victims who were selected by the UN, by universities, who were victims of the FARC, victims of the military, victims of the paramilitaries, a broad range of victims who came and spoke of their experiences to the negotiators just before these provisos were negotiated. And in each case, the victims released a joint statement. There was a lot of publicity back here in Colombia. And I would venture to say that the majority of victims called for an end to the war, which was surprising. It was a risk.
I remember, actually, early on in the process, I was talking with one of the negotiators who told me about how, in a previous work of negotiations back about 15, 16 years ago, during that negotiation, his own daughter was kidnapped by the FARC. She was 16 at the time, and he talked very emotionally about how excruciatingly difficult that was for his wife and for himself, passing Christmas without their daughter, wondering what had happened to her. And she was eventually released, but he said when the President called him up to be on the negotiation team, he called his daughter. And she, because his wife was very much opposed to him joining the negotiating team for obvious reasons, because of the prior experience, but his daughter, who had been kidnapped and had been a victim of the process, urged him. She said, Dad, you have to take this job, and he did.
And that kind of spirit is the kind of spirit, I hope, that will help to begin to heal the very deep and traumatic wounds that this war has left for many, many, many Colombians. I hardly know a family that hasn’t been touched in some way by this long war of 52 years.
Michael Schulder:
You’ve already given us a sense of that first foray into the peacemaking and what an important action it was for that helicopter pilot to come out and reframe things, and just everything that it took to get a rebel commander out of the jungle to peace talks with so many people opposing it. Give us a sense of the main characters and one thing you observed that either you heard them say or saw them do that you think helped turn the tide.
William Ury:
Well, I would have to start with the president himself, President Santos.
When I met with him, what impressed me and what encouraged me to start to work with him was that he was a man who was willing to stake his political career on this process, because, odd as it may seem, it’s quite unpopular to try to make peace. You’re much more popular as a president if you can announce that you’ve just attacked the guerrillas and so on, because they were widely regarded and stigmatized as terrorists for so many years. There were terrible things committed, actually, on all sides of this conflict, but the guerrillas, of course, too, very much so. But he, I must say, he said that he was going to go for it. It was a gamble.
When we started, I mean, outside observers might have thought there was a five percent or less chance of success, and he stood by it, and I can say, having seen him dozens of times, he kept steady. There were crises. There were breakdowns. There were attacks. There were violent attacks, a lot of things that tried to disrupt this process.
It was hard, hard work, but he kept going, persevering. Often he was, you know, really the most optimistic person in the room that thought this could be done. At various times, everyone else was in despair, it seemed, and he spent his political capital. His popularity went way down, in good part because of the peace process, which went on and on and on.
Michael Schulder:
That’s interesting.
His popularity went down at this moment. Has it risen again?
William Ury:
It has been rising. He had the real burden of having his predecessor, who was an extremely popular president, in part because he brought security with enormous U.S. help. He was able to attack the guerrillas and make the cities feel safe again, but the former president, who had been an ally, I mean, the current president had been the defense minister in the former president’s cabinet.
Michael Schulder:
The former president, is that Uribe?
William Ury:
Uribe, yeah, Uribe, President Uribe, for whatever reason, really felt betrayed by President Santos. Very complex, it’s almost Shakespearean in its complexity, and he remains a very popular figure, and he is calling and carrying out a campaign to try to defeat the peace agreement and the plebiscite that will be held a week from today.
Michael Schulder:
Where do things stand right now? Does it look like he, the former president, is getting traction?
I mean, could it be that after all this work, the public votes it down?
William Ury:
Well, the paradox is, the former president, Uribe, actually has higher popularity ratings right now than the current president. As things now stand, as the polls seem to suggest, it looks like the U.S. vote will win. There’s also a certain threshold of numbers of voters who have to show up. This is a one-time plebiscite, it’s not accompanying any other kind of electoral election, so one of the challenges is getting out the vote.
So, again, you have this paradox that you’d think that everyone would be in favor of peace, but after 52 years of war, a lot of people still believe that it’s impossible and that this is somehow a trick, or this won’t work, that the FARC won’t keep their end of the bargain, so one has to deal with dealing with that deep-seated distrust. And it does look like it will win, but you can’t take anything for granted.
Michael Schulder:
Given the fact that there is still, you know, a level of entrenched distrust, so I just want to read from the Associated Press story, which will trigger my next thought on that. So this is, by the way, a 297-page agreement that will trigger the gradual demobilization of FARC’s estimated 7,000 fighters, and under the terms, FARC units must deploy to 28 rural areas across the country where they will turn their weapons over to a UN-sponsored mission over a period of six months. So I guess a lot can go wrong over those six months, but clearly there needs to be a certain level of trust.
If I hand in my guns, the other side’s going to keep their word. And eventually, the question is, what does the future hold for them? Is this simply a matter now of job retraining? I mean, there are 7,000 fighters. On the one hand, it’s a lot of people, but it doesn’t sound unmanageable.
Is there a program in place to say, look, there’s a better future for you if you come over and hand in your weapons?
William Ury:
Yeah, there are lots of programs that are being put in place, programs that have been tested out in the first, some years ago, in the demobilization of the paramilitaries. And it’s not just the 7,000 that are being demobilized, but there’s far more than those who are kind of the, who are part of the organization. It may not be, there are militias, there are all the people who help them, who are also being demobilized. So it’s a big task, but it is doable.
It’s been done in other places. Colombia has experience with this. And a lot will depend on how well it’s implemented, because however difficult negotiation is, is often just as difficult, if not more difficult. So the work doesn’t end here. The same time, I’ll say, you know, it’s hugely historic what’s happening here tomorrow.
It’s the end of a 52-year war. It’s the end of the, really, it’s the end of war, not only in Latin America, but the end of war in this hemisphere. And it at least raises the possibility, it raises the question that one can ask is, is it possible for us to end war in one hemisphere? Can we at least conceive of the possibility of ending war in both hemispheres?
Michael Schulder:
Is there something specific, unique to what you experienced over the past five years in Colombia that you feel, oh, if I can take this, if we can take this to whether it’s the Israel-Palestine conflict, or any of a number of other conflicts, Russia-Ukraine, is there something you learned and you witnessed that surprised you over these past five years that gives, that makes you think, we’ve got to try this somewhere else?
William Ury:
Well, it’s a good question. One thing is, you know, an exercise that we did at the very start, in the very first preparation session that we had, you know, we went to a house down in the valley, you know, we all had to be hush-hush, and we were outside by a swimming pool, and I had a little flip chart, and we were trying to figure out, first, you know, really put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and just imagine, just start off by imagining we’d reached an agreement, and imagine that the FARC leaders had to describe this agreement, give a talk to all their people, as they’ve just done this past week, in which they described this agreement as a kind of victory for them. Not that it couldn’t be a victory for the government as well, but it’s like, it had to be something that they could sell to their own troops and explain, look, we’ve been fighting for 52 years, and we’re laying down our weapons, I can’t say it was all in vain. And so, we worked backwards from that speech, we even simulated that speech, I asked the President’s brother to give that speech to us, as if he was the leader, the guerrilla commander. Then we said, okay, so how can we make it easier for them to give that speech?
What are the key interests? What are the key needs that they have? One was, they couldn’t surrender. This needed to be an ending of the war with respect, with dignity, and we needed to find some way in which they could feel a sense of honor, and they had begun this war on the issue of land, and which there was a lot of injustice around the distribution of land in this country, where it was held by a very small number of families, and social injustice. So, we said, okay, let’s begin with that issue of land reform, because this government, they recognized, too, that there needed to be land reform, and they were prepared, they were about to introduce proposals, in fact, in the legislature about land reform.
So, we decided to start there, where actually it would be an easier win, but it would be something… So, we started with that, but we also, they were also, we knew that they wanted to shape the politics, and even though they manifestly unfailed in their attempt to overthrow the government violently, we needed to find some way to give them a chance to compete democratically. So, we made political participation, and we built an agenda with about five things that became a kind of formula, and then that agenda was basically agreed upon in that secret phase, and then has become the formula, through all the difficulties of the last four years, that’s become like the constitution of this negotiation, all starting from working backwards from speech of how they could justify to their troops laying down their weapons and coming into the political process.
Michael Schulder:
I would think that that was a very useful exercise for even the government to do. What kind of speech, what kind of conditions do we need, if we’re the government from FARC, that will enable us to give that victory speech?
Was the same exercise done on that side?
William Ury:
Absolutely. We did it on both sides, and in fact, a large part of the negotiation, of course, is the internal negotiation, and so the government, and the president in particular, needed to build a constituency within this country, a constituency that would support a peace agreement, starting with the military, the business sector, large-scale interests, and then also build what Romney called a winning coalition for peace, including players reaching out to Chavez, who was not exactly friendly towards Colombia, reaching out to the Castros, and as well as involving other players like Chile, and Norway, and then ultimately the United States and Europe, but actually building a coalition, both external and internal, that could be a coalition for peace that could be stronger than any attempt to spoil the peace process.
Michael Schulder:
Well, it’s fascinating bookends that you’ve given us from that first journey that you took us through, through the jungle, that first leap of faith, that risk. Something’s got to start the process.
That’s what started it in Colombia, and then what seems to have maybe tipped the balance was that exercise you just described of imagining the victory speech of the side that is currently your adversary. Really, really fascinating to me. William Ury, thank you so much again for joining me on Wavemaker Conversations, a podcast for the insanely curious, and good luck tomorrow in Cartagena, and thank you so much for your time, Bill.
William Ury:
My pleasure, Michael.
Michael Schulder:
You’ve been listening to Wavemaker Conversations, a podcast for the insanely curious.
If you find this podcast enriching, I hope you’ll subscribe for free on iTunes, or you can go to my website, wavemaker.me. Once you subscribe for free, the weekly episodes are delivered automatically to your phone or computer, and then every traffic jam, every train ride, every flight becomes an opportunity to get smarter. Thanks to my editor, Brian Morris. I’m Michael Shoulder. Thank you for listening to Wavemaker Conversations, a podcast for the insanely curious.