Michael Ancram: Northern Ireland peace negotiator urged talks with Hamas
A senior British politician lauded for his role in the Northern Ireland peace agreement called for urgent dialogue with Hamas and Hezbollah as a necessary step towards a peace settlement in the Middle East.
Michael Ancram, a former Northern Ireland minister, who has died at the age of 79, held a number of meetings with senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders between 2007 and 2009 as part of unofficial diplomatic efforts to revive a peace process in the aftermath of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon in 2006.
Ancram, a long-time Conservative MP, was part of a British delegation which met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, Syria, in June 2008.
He also held talks with senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Beirut, Lebanon, including a meeting with Nawaf al-Moussawi, Hezbollah’s head of international relations, in January 2009.
Writing in July 2007, following former prime minster Tony Blair’s appointment as a Middle East peace envoy for the "quartet" – the United State, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia – Ancram urged Blair to establish a dialogue with Hamas, which by then had gained control of Gaza following its victory in Palestinian elections in 2006.
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“Talking to Hamas and Hezbollah is no 'great step'. I have been doing so in bomb-damaged southern Beirut with senior officials from both movements on and off for the last six months,” Ancram wrote.
“They are encouragingly ready to talk. I have not been negotiating but exploring, not browbeating but trying to understand, not trying to pin down but to engage.
'I have met with Hamas in Beirut on a number of occasions and I believe that the basis for constructive exploratory dialogue is there'
- Michael Ancram
"This is the process of ‘exploratory dialogue’ that began to open windows in Northern Ireland. So far my conversations with both Hamas and Hezbollah have been rewarding - and civilised.”
Hamas and Hezbollah are both now proscribed groups in the UK. But at the time, only the armed wings of each organisation were proscribed by the British government.
In 2009, CNN reported that Blair, who had stepped down as prime minister only weeks before his appointment by the quartet, was aware of the meetings between British parliamentarians and Hamas and Hezbollah officials when he was in office.
“The previous prime minister of Great Britain was informed and briefed on these meetings. While without explicitly approving the meetings, he did not direct that they not take place," a source told CNN.
Ancram, who was also a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, repeated his call for dialogue with Hamas in an article for the Conservative Home website in July 2007 in which he warned that it was a “misapprehension” to believe that the militant group could be militarily defeated.
“I have met with Hamas in Beirut on a number of occasions and I believe that the basis for constructive exploratory dialogue is there,” he wrote.
Ancram said Hamas had chosen to “go down the democratic path” and was ready to reconcile with the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority after the two Palestinian factions fought each other for control of Gaza following the 2006 elections.
Gaza was blockaded by Israel after Hamas gained control in 2007, and the quartet made recognition of the state of Israel a condition for negotiations with the group.
Middle East Eye revealed in 2015 that Blair eventually held a number of meetings to discuss an end to the siege of Gaza with Hamas leader Meshaal in Doha, Qatar, including prior to his resignation as envoy for the quartet in May 2015.
Ancram was a Conservative MP between the 1970s and 2010, and was later a member of the House of Lords.
In the 1990s, he was appointed Northern Ireland minister by John Major at a time when the UK government was in the early stages of exploring the prospects for a peace process in Northern Ireland.
Ancram, who had survived the IRA’s attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher by bombing a Brighton hotel during the Conservative Party conference in 1984, was the first government minister to hold talks with the militant republican group and Sinn Fein, its political wing.
The talks eventually paved the way for the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which largely brought decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland to an end.
'Israeli military action over the last sixty years failed to defeat either Hamas or Hezbollah, but in both cases that same military action arguably gave rise to their coming into being'
- Michael Ancram
Speaking about the lessons he had learnt from the Northern Ireland peace process and their possible application for the situation in the Middle East in a lecture calling for "Jaw-jaw not War-war" in 2007, Ancram said he was “no pacifist or liberal appeaser”.
But, he wrote, UK officials had concluded that the war in Northern Ireland “could not be won”.
“As in Northern Ireland, I look at the antagonists, and ask what the effect of military action upon them has been.
“Not only has Israeli military action over the last sixty years failed to defeat either Hamas or Hezbollah, but in both cases that same military action arguably gave rise to their coming into being.
“Future military action might at best contain them - and [Israel’s 2006] war in Lebanon indicates that even that is no longer certain - it will not defeat them. Any genuine peace process must therefore seek to include them.”
Ancram's death, following a short illness, was announced on Tuesday by his family.
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