"Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace
to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating
the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel
Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province," writes
the London
Telegraph on March 3, 2008 (the dateline mistakenly reads 8-03-2008).
"I don’t know there was much she did apart from
accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent
statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of
thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections.
"She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she
can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain
on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly
different from being a principal player."
"I helped to bring peace to Northern
Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the
parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The
Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part
in the gruelling political talks over the years.
Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John
Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in
1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the
talks, said: "There would have been no contact with her either in
person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the
months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls
from the White House and they were invariably coming from the
president."
Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important
Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a
group of women from cross-community groups. "I actually went to
Northern Ireland more than my husband did," she said in Nashua, New
Hampshire on January 6th.
"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in
Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time
Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a
room where they had never been before with each other because they
don’t go to school together, they don’t live together and it was
only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were
there.
"And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very
successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said,
’You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I
worry he won’t come home at night.
"And then a Protestant woman on the other side
said, ’Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t
come home again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as
caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the
slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward."
There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall,
though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on
the Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady
appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by the
US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter Café on the city’s
Ormeau Road.
The "Belfast Telegraph" reported the next
day that the café meeting was crammed with reporters, cameramen and
Secret Service agents. Conversation "seemed a little bit stilted, a
little prepared at times" and Mrs Clinton admired a stainless steel
tea pot, which was duly given to her, for keeping the brew "so nice
and hot".
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Hillary Clinton meeting with Belfast
women
in 1995 and the teapot she admired. |
Among those attending were women from groups
representing single parents, relationship counsellors, youth workers and
a cultural society. In her 2003 autobiography "Living
History", Mrs Clinton wrote about the meeting in some detail but
made no claim that it was significant.
Rather than it being the first time the women had met,
Mrs Clinton wrote: "Because they were willing to work across the
religious divide, they had found common ground." Mary Fox, the wife
of a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting, said
she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community centre.
"It was quite a political change for the women’s sector after the
visit of Hillary Clinton. We would love to see her as president. She
spoke to each of us and was very interested in our work. She was
lovely."
Mr McDevitt said: "I’ve always had a theory
that these people were already well networked. Maybe they needed a bit
of bringing together and she [Mrs Clinton] was an ideal focus
point." Once a peace deal was in place, Mrs Clinton supported women
politicians and was always available if they visited Washington "to
give them a pat on the back, give them moral support", he added.
"So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I
think she was active...She was certainly investing some time, no doubt
about it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably
not." Some of the people Mrs Clinton met went on to help found the
Women’s Coalition, which took part in the Good Friday talks. Lord
Trimble said: "The Women’s Coalition will think they were
important. Other people beg to differ."
Steven King, a negotiator with Lord Trimble’s Ulster
Unionist Party, argued that Mrs Clinton might even have helped delay the
chances of peace. "She was invited along to some pre-arranged
meetings but I don’t think she exactly brought anybody together that
hadn’t been brought together already," he said. Mrs Clinton was
"a cheerleader for the Irish republican side of the argument",
he added.
"She really lost all credibility when on Bill
Clinton’s last visit to Northern Ireland [in December 2000] when she
hugged and kissed [Sinn Fein leaders] Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness."
Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, Hillary
Clinton’s campaign issued a statement from Mr Hume. "I am quite
surprised that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform
important foreign policy work as First Lady," the statement said.
"I can state from firsthand experience that she
played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to
Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many
people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.
"There is no doubt that the people of Northern
Ireland think very positively of Hillary Clinton’s support for our
peace process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings
with so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts,
speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to keep
moving forward."
Hillary's
Adventures Abroad
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ALAN LEWIS/AFP/Getty Images |
Clinton has taken an interest in the Northern Ireland peace process,
visiting the area seven times between 1995 and 2004 – making five of
those trips as first lady. Clinton has said that she "helped bring
peace to Northern Ireland." Of course, "helped" is a
fairly weak claim, one that could be made by nearly anyone who
contributed in a way that didn't actively hinder the process. Clinton
was not directly involved in the peace negotiations that eventually led
to the Good Friday Agreement. Her work focused on encouraging Irish
women to take a more active role in the male-dominated peace talks.
There is universal agreement that Clinton "helped." The
dispute is about how much she helped.
Figures close to the negotiations are split in their assessments.
Clinton's campaign has been busy sharing some responses with the press.
For example, former Sen. George Mitchell – the lead U.S. negotiator
– told
the Chicago Tribune that Clinton’s visits were "very
helpful" and that her work with women was a "significant
factor" in contributing to the success of the process. And in a
written statement, John Hume, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with David
Trimble for their work on the Good Friday Agreement, said
that Clinton provided "decisive support" for the process. Sinn
Féin President Gerry Adams agreed, telling the Irish Times
that "Senator
Clinton played an important role in the peace process" and praising
her as "extremely well informed on the issues."
But not everyone agrees. Trimble, for instance, remembers things
differently, saying
that Clinton’s role was mainly that of "cheerleader" and not
one of "principal player." One of Hume’s aides – perhaps
inadvertently showing why the peace process really did need to have more
women involved – opined that Clinton was active "in a classic
woman politicky sort of way," although he said that Clinton was
"certainly investing some time." And an Irish historian who
has written extensively about the peace process told the Tribune that
Clinton’s work was "nice" but also "ancillary to the
main thing."
Key players agree that Clinton was an active behind-the-scenes supporter
of the peace process and that she was an important player in getting
women involved in the negotiations. Getting parties to the table is a
crucial part of any peace process. But we note that many could claim
foreign policy credentials for bringing principal figures together,
including U2's Bono – who convinced Hume and Trimble to appear
together for the first time during the referendum campaign and whose photo
with the two Irish politicians has been called "one of the enduring
images of the peace process."
Hillary's
Adventures Abroad, FactCheck.org, Mar. 13, 2008
