IRAQ LATEST CRUCIBLE FOR HARVARD MEDIATION: NEGOTIATIONS SOLVE TRIBAL DISPUTES
by James F Smith
Boston Globe
Nov 9 2009
MA
CAMBRIDGE – No longer locked in one big war, Iraq has become a land
of a hundred little wars. And this promised to be one more of them,
as two well-armed tribes clashed over a coveted swath of land.
One tribe brandished a promise to 2,000 acres from the current Iraqi
government. The other pointed to a like promise from the regime of
Saddam Hussein. Guns were raised, shots fired. There seemed no ground
for compromise, beyond the familiar local remedy: blood.
But then something extraordinary happened. The tribes agreed to
negotiate and, with the help of the local mayor and others, crafted
a deal giving both sides enough land to meet their needs.
"They began thinking of their relationship instead of thinking about
revenge upon each other," said Sa’ad Al-Khalidy, one of those who
arranged the intervention.
If it sounds like a chapter ripped right out of a dispute mediation
manual, well, it was. And the book was written in Cambridge.
The blood not spilled in central Iraq was another victory for the
mediation movement spawned by Harvard Law School guru Roger Fisher,
coauthor of the 1981 book "Getting to Yes." The Boston area has become
a global hub for teaching conflict resolution theory and practice
for uses in law, diplomacy, and business in farflung places.
The mediators in the Iraqi tribes’ dispute had all been recently
trained in methods developed by Fisher, whose landmark work in the
1960s and 1970s lives on in the many graduate school programs and
companies that he and his students have forged.
Dispute resolution programs now offer master’s and even doctoral
degrees at some campuses, among them the University of Massachusetts
at Boston, MIT, Tufts, and Brandeis. The Program on Negotiation at
Harvard Law School is a renowned source of expertise in the field.
Conflict management experts from the Boston area also helped tackle
vexing international stalemates, from Northern Ireland to South Africa,
Kosovo to China.
No wonder that when the State Department wanted to encourage Iraq
to move toward a culture of mediation and away from war, it turned
to Conflict Management Group, or CMG, the nonprofit consulting firm
launched by Fisher in Cambridge in 1984 that is now part of the
international development and relief group Mercy Corps.
A total of 73 municipal officials and tribal sheiks from across
Iraq underwent intensive training by CMG staffers in May and June in
mediation and negotiation skills. The effort, funded by a $2.5 million
State Department grant, grew out of a successful pilot program in
southern Iraq that trained 19 mediators.
Already, the newly trained mediators have helped local officials tackle
dozens of conflicts, mostly over scarce resources such as farmland, oil
income, electricity and water as well as numerous family disputes. The
goal is to build a national network of respected local negotiators.
Few countries have as much conflict to manage as Iraq. But Iraq has
little tradition of mediation, said Arthur Martirosyan, who lives in
Belmont and has run the Iraqi training program for CMG since 2006.
Traditionally, arbitration of disputes is left up to local sheiks,
whose decisions – picking one claim over another – often leave behind
festering anger.
Martirosyan came to Cambridge in 1991 to work with Fisher at CMG,
after getting a master’s degree from Yale. An ethnic Armenian born
in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Martirosyan has used his
negotiation and language skills to mediate conflicts in Chechnya and
other regional hotspots as well as the Middle East.
Martirosyan returned to Iraq last month to train 24 more Iraqi
mediators, most of whom are tribal sheiks or municipal council
officials. He will also offer refresher courses to program graduates –
reflecting his conviction that good mediating skills take practice,
like playing the piano.
Khalidy, the coordinator for central and southern Iraq based in
Diwaniyah, said he has seen remarkable achievements by participants in
the pilot program, who went through five intensive rounds of classes.
Sixteen of them are full-time mediators, and have helped solve 32
disputes, ranging from an inheritance claim to a tense standoff
involving 50 abducted police officers, all of whom were released
safely.
"In many conflicts, they have been changed from enemies into partners
against the problem, not against each other," Khalidy said by phone
from Iraq.
Some successes are small. He described one mediation between two
families: one household with young girls built a privacy wall that
blocked sunlight from reaching the neighbor’s house. They had argued
for months, and were close to blows. A mediator helped them cool
down, and get away from their hardened positions. They came up with
a solution: The family that built the wall paid for a skylight for
the neighboring house.
The training uses methods that Fisher devised over decades of academic
study and popularized in "Getting to Yes," published in 1981. The
book has been translated into 18 languages – including a new edition
in Iraqi Arabic for this project.
Liza Baran, a Ukrainian who is Mercy Corps’ program manager for
the negotiation project in Iraq, said the sheiks appreciate the
step-by-step, common-sense approach that Fisher shaped. The bottom-line
goal is to help the parties identify their own interests, and the
other side’s interests – and then figure out ways to serve both sides.
"It’s kind of like getting the ABCs," Baran said. "Here is a whole
set of very systematized tools which you can apply, and it works."
Fisher, who is 88, lives in Cambridge and still goes to his Harvard Law
School office several days a week. Specialists in the field note that
some of his early ideas have been challenged and the field has evolved
dramatically in recent years, but no one doubts his seminal role.
Paul Cramer, a Harvard Law graduate who lives in Wellesley and is a
conflict management specialist for Accenture, the business consulting
firm, has traveled to Iraq with Martirosyan to conduct the training.
He said Iraqis had become used to having solutions imposed by a
dictatorship – and they quickly grasped Fisher’s premise that merely
defending entrenched positions was getting them nowhere.
He recalled one mediation by a sheik named Gazzi, who was called in
after a showdown between tribes over a murder. The usual solution would
be for the tribe to hand over the killer or go to battle. Gazzi helped
mediate one cooling-off period, and then another, giving the tribes
time to meet and express their longer-term interests. They finally
agreed to spare the young killer, lowering tensions in the whole
community and clearing the way to progress on their deeper conflicts.
Martirosyan said that building a network of Iraqi negotiators who can
then train others will extend the reach of the mediation far beyond
what foreigners could achieve trying to mediate cases themselves. He
said he is also talking to Iraqi universities, and several have said
they want to develop courses and exchanges with American institutions.
"I think negotiation is going to be an important skill set for Iraq,"
Martirosyan said. "People talk about the US exit strategy. I think
to a large degree it will depend how skilled the politicians are,
whether Kurds or Arabs . . . There are issues that will require a
lot of creative negotiation."