Opening of Oslo Forum 2007

A policy of engagement

• We face complex crises, where war, humanitarian needs and development challenges meet and intertwine. We share a responsibility to engage to prevent and solve armed conflict.
• Combined events of 9/11 and 11/9 has made engagement both possible and necessary.
• Conflicts cannot be isolated. They have a tendency to spread, unless we get involved. This is the rationale for the politics of engagement.
• Haiti’s delegate to the League of Nations, Alfred Nemours, said this in the debate over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia: “great or small, strong or weak, near or far, white or coloured, let us never forget that one day we may be sombody’s Ethiopia”. (Or Haiti, for that matter.)

Three lessons learned from peace processes

• Conflict after conflict demonstrates the importance of good governance and viable government institutions. Unequal distribution of economic and political power causes conflict, and governance deficits makes conflicts unmanageable.
• A second lesson is that the conflicts have bearing on our own security and welfare.  We are moved as fellow human beings when we see injustice and suffering, and we need peace and security “out there” if we are to be safe “back home”.
• And finally, Most important lesson learned from peace processes: In the end you have to find a political, negotiated solution to conflicts. We must create dialogue both internally in countries and across borders. We must pull states and political, social and religious groups into the political processes. We can’t afford to leave them stranded on the outside.

Oslo Forum

• The Oslo Forum is now in its fifth year. It started when an informal group of 14 or so mediators – from Norway, Sweden, Thailand, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and elsewhere gathered around an old dining room table. It grew to become this larger – but we hope, not much more formal - event. 
• The genus of the idea lay in the partnership between ourselves and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. We realized that the strong synergies (and sympathies) we had between us in our work existed precisely because of the different strengths and weaknesses conferred on us by the different kinds of organizations we are.
• This made us reflect on the need for the different actors in Track One peacemaking to have the opportunity to exchange and reflect amongst eachother, in a way which the hurly burly of daily working life frankly does not allow.  So, we conceived of a meeting where mediators, key members of their teams and other actors critical to ongoing peace processes might gather in an informal, relaxed but constructive setting to examine this profession we call conflict mediation: to share problems, identify solutions and genuinely learn from eachother.
• From this flowed the idea that such a meeting of peers, a Forum indeed, could help strengthen the professional networks of these mediators, and that it might enhance their capacity to manage the many headed-beasts we know as peace processes. It might even help us to identify and develop the next generation of conflict mediators.
• The fact that we see so many familiar faces after these five years is as heartening to me as the fact that we see so many new ones: we believe those at the heart of the profession – those who are driving it forward, developing and refining it as they go -  want and try to join us here each year. We are proud that each year we achieve a greater diversity and reach in those who join us, and that each year our agendas become more focused, more topical – and increasingly defined directly by you, through the contacts we have developed with you at the Oslo Forum.  The meeting is intended as a professional service to you, and to the cause of peacemaking, and we encourage you to use it as such.

Women and mediation

• But when I speak of diversity, I cannot simply hold my head up high.  Each year we make every effort to seek out the senior women peacemakers who may have escaped our notice before, and each year we are disappointed that we don’t find more. I was heartened today to hear Mr. Athisaari’s bracing references to the role of women in peacemaking, and the responses that were made to it - and to realize that such a veteran of hard politics in arenas where political correctness holds no sway, shares my belief that we have not yet done nearly enough to involve women and their perspectives at the table as mediators or negotiators. 
• Our efforts on this will continue – the list of potential women mediators which we started to develop last year with your help, needs a fresh infusion of ideas to keep it current, diverse and to make it actually have an impact; the plans of institutional actors to implement SCR1325 equally need invigoration to transform well-meant words into action.
• This year we have two figurehead role models who are looking forward to discussing with you your new ideas on names and strategies for the involvement of more women and women’s perspectives in Track One peacemaking: Margaret Anstee and Elisabeth Rehn will be awaiting your inputs over coffee in the coffee area after lunch on Thursday and I encourage you strongly to prepare names and action recommendations to share with them.  I hope they will be reporting to me not only those who came to share ideas with them – but those that did not, so we can follow up to ensure we have not missed critical insights and ideas.

This years retreat

• The shape of our event this year aims to follow the flow of the peace process, and to focus as much as possible on actual or potential conflicts, their contexts, and the techniques and strategies needed to approach them - rather than theoretical concepts. Starting with a sense of vision and overview of the world of conflict mediation from Mr. Annan and myself, we move tomorrow to look at the key methodology of our profession – dialogue, appraising its potential and its limitations.
• We then examine aspects of the craftsmanship of mediation, assessing tools and strategies, and move on to examine some aspects of the power and interests outside the process which affect and shape it. Finally, and most importantly, this year we have a much stronger focus on implementation, agreeing as we do that the mediator’s art is as much needed in guiding the ship over the choppy waters of implementation as it is the storms and doldrums of negotiations. 
• Conflict mediation and peace keeping are among the cornerstones of Norwegian foreign policy. Over the last year there has been a debate in Norway about our engagement in peace mediation. In this debate some have pointed out that mediated peace accords seem to slip back into conflict more easily than peace based on military victory. These are thoughts also put forward in the international debate by among others, Edward Luttwak.
• Does this mean that we should pack up, go home and give war a chance? Of course not.
• We should all remember the words of Edmund Burke: “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.
• It is a great pleasure and honour to again be among so many good men and women determined to do something. I wish you good luck and fruitful discussions over the next days.