America’s High-Wire Walker in N. Ireland

From his dowdy suite in one of Europe’s most frequently bombed hotels, American statesman George J. Mitchell personifies the commitment and the loneliness of the long-distance peacemaker. He is teaching civics in real time to the heirs of hatred in one country, and repaying an old debt to his own.

Mitchell was Senate majority leader until he left politics in 1995--for greener pastures, he thought. Since, he’s been mooted variously as a possible Supreme Court nominee, secretary of State and commissioner of baseball.

Instead, at 64, a new father thousands of miles from his wife and infant son, Mitchell is settling into his third winter in violence-scarred Belfast. His role created more by circumstance than design, Mitchell is improbable flame-keeper of the labored search for peace in Northern Ireland.

“This is extremely demanding, very difficult for me in the personal sense because of my family, but I am here because I believe this is a worthwhile cause,” he said quietly over tea one gray morning.

It is a sapping task emotionally, financially and physically. In the past 18 months, Mitchell has flown across the Atlantic Ocean more than 100 times. He sees law clients in the United States and wrestles with balky Irish politicians in this provincial capital amid almost perpetual jet lag.

Mitchell walks in the footsteps of the quiet, stubborn negotiators who linked Arab and Jew in Oslo and who cajoled an end to Bosnian violence at Dayton, Ohio.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mitchell’s high-wire act is how alone he is as the independent chairman of the peace talks. He has no ambassadorial or governmental rank, no official safety net. He is unpaid.

He works with retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain and former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri at the invitation of the British and Irish governments, which pay their expenses. Often, the three peace-seekers make a strung-out trio at dinner after a long day as umpires of political bickering.

“I believe there is an historic opportunity to end centuries of conflict. The process has gone further than ever before, and I am committed to seeing it through,” said Mitchell, a tall, slender man with a priestly air who is reticent about himself but commands respect on both sides of Northern Ireland’s chasm of fraternal hate.

Said John Alderdice, leader of the small nonsectarian Alliance Party: “George is so good and so universally praised that we may be expecting too much of him. It’s a messianic role he has now.”

As chairman of peace talks that have progressed beyond what most thought possible--but face mountains still to climb--Mitchell has emerged as a figure of patience and constancy in a land that not long ago he knew only by reputation. Roll tape: bomb debris, bodies, bloody survivors, troops dressed for war. It is a skewed vision, he says now.

“This is a tremendously literate and productive society,” he noted, against a background of cold rain sweeping the main street of this city that has been prisoner of sectarian savagery for three decades.

Frequent Flier

Mitchell shuttles from New York to Belfast via London every week, usually spending three nights in the same downtown hotel.

He walks a lot. People stop to chat, and most are complimentary. Mitchell has little security. “He’s not a retinue kind of guy,” said Kelly Currie, an American lawyer who is one of his three aides.

Mitchell is a tennis freak, but in Belfast he rarely plays. Mostly, he devotes long, stressful hours getting people who hate one another to sit around the same table.

Under his stewardship, Northern Ireland is for the first time witnessing peace talks simultaneous with cease-fires by the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitary groups, whose warfare has claimed more than 3,000 lives.

And for the first time, Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, is present at talks with leading loyalist parties, although two of the latter have so far refused to participate.

Mitchell’s impartiality and dedication have been crucial to the progress so far, said Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, British Cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, who is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles on Friday for a round of civic and media appearances on behalf of peace.

“Mitchell’s independence is his greatest strength,” Mowlam said. But it is often sorely tried. “Once he told me he thought running the Senate was difficult until he got here.”

Said Mitchell: “It’s two steps forward, one step back. Many times I have asked myself, ‘How did I get into this, and how do I get through it?’ ”

The former Democratic senator has strong moral support from the Clinton administration but no official link with it. As Mitchell sees it, his contribution here is a repayment.

Sense of Mission

“I have been very lucky with my life. My parents had no education. My father was a janitor, my mother a textile-mill worker. A lot of people helped me,” he said reflectively. “Now, although I never sought this job . . . I have been drawn in more deeply as time has gone on, and I feel a clear responsibility to do what I can.”

Mitchell’s task is to weave healing threads among warring political leaders weaned on sectarian hatred in a six-county province barely larger than Connecticut. The rivalry between Protestant loyalists who want the province to remain a part of Britain and Roman Catholic nationalists who want it to become part of the Irish Republic is supercharged and unrelenting.

Mitchell knows that there will be days when his most essential task is to shelter flickering peace hopes from life-threatening gusts.

“There have been several times when it was a bit like old serials--’The Perils of Pauline,’ ” Mitchell said with a smile. “When I was a kid in Maine, every Saturday at the movies the cowboy serial episode would end in a cliffhanger. Would the hero survive until next week? It’s been much the same here.”

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Mitchell seeks a lasting and unarmed peace between majority Protestants and minority Catholics who have been fighting since the 17th century. The deadline set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair is May 1, 1998.

Blame Bill Clinton for Mitchell’s challenge. But four prime ministers, two British, two Irish, also recognized a doer unabashed by overwhelming odds.

As Mitchell tells the story, when he left the Senate, political ally Clinton asked if he would work part time for six months organizing a trade investment conference on Northern Ireland. Then Clinton asked if he would stay on until the end of the year, when the president was himself visiting Northern Ireland.

In November 1995, prime ministers John Major of Britain and John Bruton of Ireland asked if Mitchell would serve 90 days chairing a team setting out ways to disarm the warring sides in Northern Ireland. The commission reported back early, in January 1996, “and when we handed in our report, I thought that would be the end of it,” Mitchell recalled.

Wrong. It was only the beginning, for the two prime ministers asked him to serve for six months, beginning that June, to oversee peace talks. Now, a year and a half later, Major and Bruton have been replaced by Blair and Bertie Ahern, but George Mitchell is still on the griddle.

Personal Loss

A lot of it has been a hard slog. In July 1996, amid street violence in the province, Mitchell battled to keep the peace dream alive as his brother Robert died of cancer. He remembers winning agreement on the talks agenda just in time to fly home to deliver the eulogy.

“Everybody--even the two loyalist parties that refuse to participate in the talks--regards Mitchell with respect. There are times when it is one of few levers he has,” Alderdice said.

But there are good times too. In Belfast, he practices and preaches his peace mission.

“People with differences need not kill and maim each other. . . . Trying to solve the political problems of Northern Ireland by violence can’t succeed. It’s morally wrong. The only way forward is through meaningful, inclusive, democratic dialogue,” Mitchell told a meeting of young people here one recent morning.

On Oct. 16, when his first son, Andrew MacLachlan Mitchell, was born in New York, Mitchell noted, 61 babies were born in Northern Ireland. “I believe they are entitled to the same chance in life that I want for my son,” Mitchell told his audience. “Peace, political stability and reconciliation are not too much to ask for. They are the minimum that every decent civil society should provide.”

Mitchell, divorced from his first wife in 1987, was remarried in 1994 to Heather MacLachlan, a Canadian tennis promoter who sometimes accompanied him as far as London in the early stages of her pregnancy but now remains with their son in New York. Mitchell had never visited Northern Ireland before Clinton sent him. But he soon learned that perspectives here are different from in the United States, where “I was in politics for 30 years and nobody asked about my religion or heritage.”

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Because he was from the American Northeast and had an Irish-sounding name, people assumed that he was an Irish Catholic. That did not sit well with Protestant loyalists.

Tracing his Maine roots, British reporters soon learned that Mitchell’s father was an Irish immigrant who surrendered his children to an orphanage in Boston after his wife died. At age 3, Mitchell was adopted by a Lebanese immigrant couple in Waterville who had changed their Arabic name to Mitchell.

“There was no discussion of Ireland and Irish roots in my upbringing,” Mitchell said. He was an altar boy--in Waterville’s Maronite Catholic church, where the Lebanese community worshiped. Mitchell is not a Catholic, but many Protestants suspected that he was vulnerable to the powerful Irish American lobby in America.

Said Ken Maginnis, a senior official of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant political grouping: “Sen. Mitchell has displayed a degree of patience and understanding that I think required a great deal of effort on his part. Some people see him firmly in the Irish American camp. . . . But I don’t think anybody who has sat under his chairmanship will have any criticism of him trying to manipulate anything.”

Said Martin McGuinness, chief negotiator for Sinn Fein, the political arm of the extremist IRA: “George Mitchell has brought an element of professionalism and evenhandedness to the talks. His contribution has been extremely positive, and we have faith in his impartiality.”

For Mitchell, Northern Ireland represents a whole new breed of politics. He reminisces about how he and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole fought tooth and nail but eventually worked out differences, “recognizing that in a diverse society with competing interests, there has to be compromise for society to function.”

That is not the Northern Irish ethic, Mitchell quickly learned.

“Because of the long history of violence here and the enormous sense of grievance that has piled up over the years, it is very difficult for political leaders to be willing to compromise,” he said. “One of the great obstacles is politicians who believe, ‘If I make this small compromise today, it means the loss of my ultimate position, so I have to stand firm on every issue, on every front.’ ”

As a mediator, Mitchell is trying to sell what is essentially an American view of the world. “I think they should concern themselves more with the future than the past,” he said. “I don’t encourage people to ignore or forget history, but there is a point at which there should be a recognition that we have got to look to the future.”

Calm and Hurried

As he begins his critical third winter in Belfast, Mitchell is a dogged soul calmly in a hurry.

Because his own world beckons. “I want to get back to my family, and to make up what I haven’t been able to do from my other activities.”

And because he thinks peace is overdue--and doable. “I am hopeful, and I console myself on the long flights that I am engaged in something meaningful that can have a positive outcome.”