Moakley Rallies Iraqi Political Leaders in Baghdad
On 5th July 2008 at the Al Rasheed Hotel in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraqi parliamentarians and diplomats from several countries gathered to participate in an event that was hosted by Iraqi participants from two meetings previously held in Helsinki, Finland to celebrate the signing of the Helsinki Agreement.
The Agreement defines 17 principles, to which all parties subscribe, and designates the contextual framework that will enshrine the rules of behavior and conduct among and within parties and alliances and among parties and government that will inform discussion and provide the guidelines for resolving matters of procedure and process. To monitor compliance with the principles, the agreement contains 15 mechanisms which outline the implementation measures that will be developed.
The meetings in Helsinki were organized by the Iraq Project, a joint venture of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies (MGS), and Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts and the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), Helsinki, Finland.
Project Director, Padraig O'Malley, who is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at MGS, spent six of the last twelve months in Baghdad meeting with members of the Iraqi parliament and government to arrange the meetings in Helsinki.
The Iraqis met with the senior negotiators from South Africa (SA), including Cyril Ramaphosa, chief negotiator for the African National Congress (ANC) under the leadership of Nelson Mandela; Roelf Meyer, chief negotiator for South Africa's last whites- only government and Mac Maharaj, who was co. secretary of the South African negotiating process and senior negotiators from Northern Ireland (NI), including Martin McGuinness from Sinn Fein, reputedly former chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and currently Deputy First Minister of NI, Jeffrey Donaldson from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the hard-line pro British party of Rev. Ian Paisley and Lord John Alderdice, Chairperson of the International Monitoring Commission (IMC) which oversaw the decommissioning of arms by paramilitary groups in NI.
In 1993, at the height of negotiations in South Africa, the University of Massachusetts Boston conferred honorary degrees on Ramaphosa and Meyer, who were also joint commencement speakers.
O'Malley had organized a similar type of meeting for the Northern Irish in South Africa with their South African counterpart’s in 1997.
September 2009, Professor Padraig O'Malley's meeting with President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani. This past week, September 3rd-6th, the second anniversary of the first convening of the Helsinki meetings in Finland, O'Malley met with President Talabani, Parliamentary Speaker Ayad Al-Samariee, and Chairman Rizgar Ali and Kirkuk Provincial council members, separately, to discuss the next phase of the Helsinki process. All enthusiastically endorsed creating a dialogue council that would facilitate discussions and use the agreement as the basis for future negotiations regarding the status of Kirkuk.
above: Mac Maharaj, South Africa; Lord John Alderdice, United Kingdom; Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland; Iraq President Jalal Talabani; Iraq Vice President Abd al-Mahdi; Padraig O'Malley, and Robert Bendetson of Massachusetts
Cochair of H2, Cyril Ramaphosa was chief negotiator for Nelson Mandela
Cochair Padraig O'Malley is the Moakley Professor of Peae and Reconciliaiton at UMass Boston
Cochair of H2, Martin McGuinness is Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland