Divided cities

Opinion: O'Malley's peace efforts help Kirkuk, Belfast, Mitrovica, Nicosia and Beirut see what they can learn from each other.

C.M. SennottApril 14, 2009 09:23Updated May 30, 2010 11:52

A photo of Padraig O’Malley taken in April 2009. O’Malley has pulled together a conference titled “The Forum for Cities in Transition,” which is being held at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. (Brynmore Williams/GlobalPost)

BOSTON — It is a burning reality in Kirkuk, Iraq — as fresh in the air as the acrid smell of another suicide bombing.

It’s there on Belfast’s Ardoyne Road that severs the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.

It’s there on the bridge in Mitrovica that separates the Serbs and Kosovar Albanians.

It haunts the mortar-punched ruins that still lie along the green line in Beirut.

And you still can find it smoldering in some corners of Nicosia, Cyprus.

In every one of these bitterly divided cities, you can hear the arrogant assertion that their conflict, their grievances, their hatreds are unique. They will spend hours telling you all about it.

And Padraig O’Malley will hear none of it.

A towering Irishman with a passion for peace-making, O’Malley has gotten to know these cities enough to know that their hatreds are not unique at all. And O’Malley believes that in discovering that their conflict is not so special, the different sides of these fractured cities can unlock a doorway to understanding.

That is the simple idea behind an important international conference pulled together by O’Malley, “The Forum for Cities in Transition,” which is being held here in Boston at the University of Massachusetts starting today and continuing through Thursday.

“People from divided cities are in the best position to help people in other divided cities,” says O’Malley, a professor of peace and reconciliation at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

And so he has brought together some 35 leaders, including mayors and city council members and police officials, from all of these divided cities so that they can share in a gathering aimed at learning how cities torn apart by hatred can heal their divisions.

“They share behavioral, political, social and psychological traits not seen in people in more 'normal' societies. And they end up believing that their conflict is special and that there has never been a conflict like theirs. No one can understand, they like to say, except those who’ve lived through it,” O’Malley explains.