Tylenol, anyone?

BOSTON — Sometimes, peace negotiations will give you a headache.

And if you’re lucky, maybe, just maybe, your so-called "enemy" will offer you a Tylenol across the roundtable.

It was one of those rare occasions when if you blinked, you missed it: Valdete Idrizi, who represents Albanian interests in Mitrovica, asked for a Tylenol on behalf of Momcilo Arlov, a Serb. Michael Doherty, a Catholic from Northern Ireland, came to the rescue.

“We give each other headaches here and we alleviate them, too,” joked Martha Minow, a law professor at Harvard University and a chief moderator of the negotiations.

But for those who managed to witness the nuanced event with their own eyes, it was just another sign of progress in Padraig O’Malley’s most recent experiment with peace at the University of Massachusetts Boston yesterday.

O’Malley, who is a renowned peace negotiator and distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is more than familiar with divided societies and the deep-rooted hatreds that often percolate beneath formal mandates and treaties.

Hosting the "Cities in Transition" conference at the university this week, O’Malley hopes delegates from five divided cities around the world will use their time in Boston to establish a permanent forum for discussion. They started by drafting an agenda to guide them through the the summit.

It was only 10 years ago when, after working endlessly to persuade opposing factions of Northern Irish political leaders to share their experiences with South Africans dealing with apartheid, the Catholic and Protestant delegations refused to share a plane together. The divisions were so solidified that the leaders wouldn’t even sit in the same room; Nelson Mandela had to give the same speech twice.

For O’Malley, while the faces and the conflicts change, the people involved always manage to find commonalities that unite them. This time around was no different.

Amid the flurry of translators, Ph.D. students, and conflict resolution experts are the real key players of the conference: Protestant and Catholic representatives from Belfast and Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland; Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and Assyrian delegates from Kirkuk in Iraq; Greek and Turkish representatives from Nicosia in Cyprus; and both Serbian and Albanian delegates from Mitrovica, a city divided by both Kosovo and Serbia.

Among the delegates are mayors, councilors, ministers and directors of reconciliation from each municipality, sharing one thing in common: A bitter history of conflicting religious, ethnic or national identities.

“For three days, you will engage in a series of conversations, which you, yourselves, will design,” O’Malley said during the conference opening remarks.

Three hours later, that design was complete.

After breaking up into working groups with delegates from other cities, the 34 architects of the agenda managed to see past their differences to identify four common obstacles to sustainable governing in divided societies: The role of foreign intervention, inter- and intra- community trust-building, the institutional protection of human rights and the equitable delivery of public services, such as waste, education and consumer goods.

The group members assigned to evaluate the role of foreign intervention, despite being separated by thousands of miles, agreed that international actors such as the United Nations and the European Union have, at times, served to exacerbate divisions.

“Kosovo was one of the largest territories given to the U.N. [to administer] a central government, [and] they failed to maintain that kind of [necessary] neutrality,” said Arlov, a Serbian program director for the Center for Civil Society Development in Mitrovica North, a portion of a city divided between independent Kosovo in the south and Serbia proper in the north.

Adding fuel to the fire, Idrizi, the Albanian director of community building in Mitrovica South, said that Kosovo is a particularly ripe example of power politics, adding conflicting international interests on top of pre-existing internal divisions.

“They [the U.N. and the European Union] use us as an arena for their own interests,” Idrizi said, referring to the clashing agendas of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the European Union both before and after Kosovo’s contentious declaration of independence in February 2007.

Before breaking for dinner after more than six hours of constructive dialogue, Ljubisa Petrovic, representing Mitrovica North, spoke optimistically about the future of the conference.

“We’ve passed 700 kilometers so we can sit together in one of the most powerful countries in the world, so we’d like that power to be used for the creation of equality and justice,” he said. “And I’m certain that this university where we are meeting will make steps in that direction.”

Today’s agenda includes hearing success stories of each divided municipality and a chance for delegates to meet one-on-one with other representatives.

The mention of the latter elicited wild, mischievous laughter that echoed out of the conference hall.

Now only to ensure each meeting room is equipped with extra Tylenol.

Olesia Plokhii, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts and intern at GlobalPost, is working as a notetaker at the Cities in Transition conference.