Challenge for North is 'to show the centre can hold'

Northern Ireland shares with South Africa a responsibility to show the world that even the most intractable conflicts can be peacefully resolved, according to a former South African president, Mr F.W. de Klerk.

Mr De Klerk told an audience including republican and loyalist ex-paramilitaries that, having negotiated peace agreements, the challenge now for both countries was to prove that "the centre can hold, and things don't always fall apart".

He was delivering the opening address at the annual Glencree Summer School in Co Wicklow, which is continuing throughout the weekend, with themes including "the need for political healing" and "taking guns out of our future".

Dismissing attempts to draw direct comparisons between the Irish and South African peace processes, Mr De Klerk said some general principles applied to all attempts at conflict resolution.

Above all, it must be realised that political change was not easy and could not be brought about by "sissies and quitters". Negotiating the agreement was only the start of a process, "and there is no point at which you can sit back and say you have solved the problem".

Another fundamental point, he said, was that "it is much easier to to reach agreement about the future than the past".

South Africa's vaunted Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in fact a failure, Mr De Klerk suggested, because it was dominated by the views of the African National Congress.

"The problem was that the truth the TRC represented was the truth of only one of the parties," he said. Chief Buthelezi refused to participate because he believed it to be unrepresentative, and while Mr De Klerk and his party did take part, they found it less than even-handed.

"The TRC's report has not been universally accepted as a good way to close the book on the past. It was as if an all-Catholic or all-Protestant commission had tried to establish the truth in Northern Ireland."

Nevertheless, the former president said forgiveness for the past was the first prerequisite for an agreement to work. This had to be followed by "meaningful reconciliation", including the identification of common goals that all parties could aspire to without surrendering their identities.

Mr De Klerk also stressed the importance of leaders communicating regularly with their constituencies, so that the parties' grassroot memberships took "co-ownership" of the process.

To this end, in South Africa, "peace committees" were set up in every town or city suburb, in which local party members worked on ways to "defuse things here". Some were mere talking shops, but many had worked well, he said. They were separate from the main negotiations, but they proved the importance of "not having everything centralised".

Mr De Klerk also stressed the importance of economic development in facilitating change. In South Africa it had been a catalyst for reform. The economic growth of the 1960s and 70s caused the first breakdown of the segregation, in employment, he said: "It wasn't enough, but it was a start."