The bicycle

Jonathan Powell’s father, a Royal Air Force pilot, took a bullet in his head from the Irish Republican Army in Ulster. Powell’s brother Charles, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, survived an IRA attack.

Powell, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, was once touted as the third most influential person in Britain after the PM and the chancellor. Powell, who espoused Britain’s liberal interventionism in Iraq, was also Blair’s chief negotiator in hammering out a peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

On Thursday last week Powell sat down to dinner in Makati, where he admitted that he didn’t like the IRA very much. Someone across the table commented, “Neither do I.”

That was Gerry Kelly, convicted IRA bomber and former fugitive who turned to politics, joining Sinn Fein following his release from prison.

The two men were in Manila last week on the invitation of the Philippine government, which has asked London for advice on the peace process with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Earlier in the day the two men, accompanied by a group that included David Gorman of the Committee for Humanitarian Dialogue, had gone to Davao and then to Cotabato for a meeting with a team from the MILF led by Mohagher Iqbal.

Both Powell and Kelly admitted ignorance of the Philippine problem before coming here. And both emphasized that the problem in Ireland, which started about a century ago, was not quite the same as in Mindanao.

But Powell had one piece of advice to Filipinos: the bicycle theory. The peace process, he said, was like a bicycle whose rider needs all the physical stamina to keep it going, because once it stops, “it’s almost impossible to restart it.”

There is no military solution, Powell emphasized at the dinner hosted by British Ambassador Peter Beckingham at his home. “Neither can wipe out the other side and neither can win.”

Powell believes in keeping lines of communication open even with groups such as al-Qaeda. He recalled that in 2004, the IRA staged the biggest bank robbery in Britain, and people wanted to scuttle the peace talks. But Blair kept the process going.

Not even approaching elections should derail the peace process, Powell said, aware that the Philippines is preparing for 2010. Ireland’s peace agreement, after all, was signed as Blair was approaching the end of his term.

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Gerard Kelly fully agreed with Powell. Growing up in Belfast, Kelly remembers the Irish pogroms. His brother Sean was not allowed to spell his name the Irish way and had to use the Catholic version. They could not vote because only people who owned houses had the right of suffrage. Like many Catholics in Ireland, the Kelly family, with 11 children, did not own a home.

“We were very poor,” Kelly told me as he recalled the discrimination suffered by Catholics in his land, which he likened to South Africa’s apartheid.

He received his primary school education from the De La Salle Christian Brothers at St. Finian’s, the same school attended by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

Kelly later joined the civil rights movement. He remembers a 9-year-old girl killed by British forces when he was 16. But it was when the British army opened fire on marchers belonging to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association on Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972 in Belfast that Kelly decided he had no recourse other than armed struggle. Thirteen marchers died immediately; seven of them were teenagers.

Kelly, 19 at the time, joined the provisional IRA. Over a year after the attack that became known as Bloody Sunday, bombs exploded near the Old Bailey court building and Scotland Yard in London, killing one person and wounding nearly 200 others. Two other car bombs were found in the city and defused.

In November of that same year, Kelly and nine other IRA members were found guilty of the bombings and sentenced to two life terms plus 20 years. Kelly and the others were locked up in England, then transferred to the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. He participated in several hunger strikes and tried several times to escape.

Was he responsible for the bombings? “No one will say he’s guilty,” he told me, grinning.

On Sept. 23, 1983, Kelly and 37 other republican inmates, armed with six handguns, hijacked a meal van and barreled past 28 alarm systems and 40 prison wardens, one of whom Kelly shot and wounded in the head. It was the biggest jailbreak in British history and in Europe since the last world war.

It took three years before Kelly was recaptured in Amsterdam. Dutch police seized from him and another fugitive fake passports, several currencies, and the keys to a container holding a poisonous compound, rifles and 100,000 rounds of ammunition. A British RAF helicopter brought Kelly back to the Maze prison, where he spent three more years.

I asked him if he had any regrets. “In life? No,” he replied quickly. “I regret that people were killed. I regret that armed struggle was necessary. But I don’t regret my past.”

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At one point in his role as peace negotiator, Jonathan Powell had refused to shake the hand of an IRA commander who would become the second highest official of Sinn Fein, Martin McGuinness. But the two would later become friends, and Powell would write a book about the peace process: “Great Hatred, Little Room.”

Powell, now an investment banker, has become comfortable having dinner and traveling overseas with Kelly, who is a Sinn Fein member of the Northern Ireland Assembly representing Northern Belfast.

Presidential peace adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr., who was at the dinner together with National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales, thinks that kind of peace is possible in Mindanao. There’s still time before May 2010, Esperon told me, to hammer out not just an interim but a final peace agreement with the MILF.

But the peace process is being relegated to the backburner by the forthcoming political campaign and the MILF’s seemingly intractable demand for the government to recognize the scuttled memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain.

Esperon, who once led the military’s fight against the MILF, thinks the demand is open to negotiations.

“You need courage… you need individual courage” to pursue peace, Kelly told us. “The courage is there.”