Mitchell settles in for third N. Ireland winter> Unpaid peace talks chairman committed to ending conflict

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BELFAST, Northern Ireland — From his dowdy suite in one of Europe’s most frequently bombed hotels, U.S. statesman George Mitchell personifies the commitment and the loneliness of the long-distance peacemaker. He is teaching civics in real time to the heirs of hatred in one country, and repaying an old debt to his own.

Mitchell was Senate majority leader until he left politics in 1995 — for greener pastures, he thought. Since, he has been mooted variously as a possible Supreme Court nominee, as secretary of state, as commissioner of baseball.

Instead, at 64, a new father thousands of miles from his wife and infant son, Mitchell is settling into his third winter in violence-scarred Belfast. His role created more by circumstance than design, Mitchell is the improbable flame-keeper of the labored search for peace in Northern Ireland.

“This is extremely demanding, very difficult for me in the personal sense because of my family, but I am here because I believe this is a worthwhile cause,” he said quietly over tea one gray morning.

It is a sapping task, emotionally, financially and physically. In the past 18 months, Mitchell has flown across the Atlantic Ocean more than 100 times. He sees law clients in the United States and wrestles with balky Irish politicians here with almost perpetual jet lag.

Mitchell walks in the footsteps of the quiet, stubborn negotiators who linked Arab and Jew in Oslo, Norway, and who cajoled an end to Bosnian violence at Dayton, Ohio.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mitchell’s high-wire act is how alone he is as the independent chairman of the peace talks. He has no ambassadorial or governmental rank, no official safety net. He is unpaid.

He works with retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain and former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri at the invitation of the British and Irish governments, which pay their expenses.

“I believe there is an historic opportunity to end centuries of conflict. The process has gone further than ever before, and I am committed to seeing it through,” said Mitchell, a tall, slender man with a priestly air who is reticent about himself but commands respect on both sides of Northern Ireland’s chasm of fraternal hate.

Said John Alderdice, leader of the small nonsectarian Alliance Party: “George is so good and so universally praised that we may be expecting too much of him. It’s a messianic role he has now.”

As chairman of peace talks that have progressed beyond what most thought possible — but face mountains still to climb — Mitchell has emerged as a figure of patience and constancy in a land he knew not long ago only by reputation.

“This is a tremendously literate and productive society,” he noted, against a background of cold rain sweeping the main street of this city that has been prisoner of sectarian savagery for three decades.

Under his stewardship, Northern Ireland for the first time is witnessing peace talks simultaneously with cease-fires by the Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitaries, whose internecine warfare has claimed more than 3,000 lives.

And for the first time, Sinn Fein, political arm of the IRA, is present at talks with leading loyalist parties, although two of them have refused so far to participate.

The former Democratic senator has strong moral support from the Clinton administration but no official mandate. As Mitchell sees it, his contribution here is a repayment.

“I have been very lucky with my life. My parents had no education. My father was a janitor, my mother a textile mill worker. A lot of people helped me,” he said reflectively. “Now, although I never sought this job. … I have been drawn in more deeply as time has gone on, and I feel a clear responsibility to do what I can.”

The rivalry between Protestant loyalists who want the province to remain a part of Britain and Catholic nationalists who want it to become part of the Irish Republic is supercharged and unrelenting.

Mitchell knows that there will be days when his most essential task is to shelter flickering peace hopes from life-threatening gusts.

Mitchell seeks a lasting and unarmed peace between majority Protestants and minority Catholics who have been fighting since the 17th century in a six-county province smaller than the state of Connecticut. The deadline set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair is May 1, 1998.

Blame Bill Clinton for Mitchell’s challenge. But four prime ministers, two British, two Irish, also recognized a doer unabashed by overwhelming odds.

As Mitchell tells the story, when he left the Senate, political ally Clinton asked if he would work part-time for six months organizing a trade investment conference on Northern Ireland. Then Clinton asked if he would stay on until the end of the year, when he was himself visiting Northern Ireland.

In November 1995, Prime Ministers John Major of Britain and John Bruton of Ireland asked if Mitchell would serve 90 days chairing a team setting out ways to disarm the warring sides Northern Ireland. The commission reported back early, in January 1996, “and when we handed in our report I thought that would be the end of it,” Mitchell recalled.

Wrong. Two prime ministers asked him to serve for six months beginning in June 1996 to oversee peace talks. A year and a half later, Major and Bruton have been replaced by Blair and Bertie Ahern, but George Mitchell is still on the griddle.

In July 1996, amid street violence in the province, Mitchell battled to keep the peace dream alive as his brother Robert died of cancer. He remembers winning agreement on the talks agenda just in time to fly home to deliver the eulogy.

“Everybody — even the two loyalist parties that refuse to participate in the talks — regards Mitchell with respect. There are times when it is one of few levers he has,” said Alderdice.

Mitchell, divorced from his first wife in 1987, was remarried in 1994 to Heather MacLachlan, a Canadian tennis promoter who sometimes accompanied him as far as London in the early stages of her pregnancy but now remains with their son in New York. Mitchell had never visited Northern Ireland before Clinton sent him. But he soon learned that perspectives here are different from in the United States, where “I was in politics for 30 years and nobody asked about my religion or heritage.”

Because he was from the American Northeast and had an Irish-sounding name, people assumed that he was an Irish Catholic. That did not sit well among Protestant loyalists.

Tracing his Maine roots, British reporters soon learned that Mitchell’s father was an Irish immigrant who surrendered his children to an orphanage in Boston after his wife died. At age 3, Mitchell was adopted by a Lebanese immigrant couple in Waterville who had changed their Arabic name to Mitchell.

“There was no discussion of Ireland and Irish roots in my upbringing,” said Mitchell. He was an altar boy — in Waterville’s Maronite Catholic Church, where the Lebanese community worshiped. Mitchell is not a Roman Catholic, but many Protestants suspected that he was vulnerable to the powerful Irish-American lobby in America.

Now, Mitchell is accepted, and predicts the peace talks will succeed. They are still a long shot, but — make or break — he is the rock on which they rest.