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.

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