The Peace Wager

His hair cut short, Hoffman entered the cell blocks of a Guelph, Ontario, correctional centre shortly after. He quickly advanced to upper management with the Ontario Corrections Ministry, where he stayed for nine years, earning a master’s degree in psychology in his spare time. After quitting his job in corrections, he found work managing large-scale projects to help battered women and their abusers and, later, writing diagnostic assessments of convicted criminals for use during sentencing. Hoffman was becoming an expert on the dark recesses of the criminal mind, and where others saw an abyss he saw cause for hope.

By the early 1980s, he was at the centre of a movement in the Canadian criminal justice system to switch from “retributive” to “restorative” justice, which has a stronger focus on healing, reconciliation, and victims’ rights. He became obsessed with the concept and, believing strongly in its ability to make the world a better place, returned to school to study international conflict resolution, first at Tufts University in Boston, then at Harvard, and finally at the University of York, England, where he received a Ph.D. Along the way, he found time to run unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election.

In 1992, Hoffman co-founded the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiation (ciian) in Ottawa, which trained Canadian peacekeepers working abroad. He launched his own mediation company and negotiated a number of high-profile cases, among them environmental disputes and sexual-abuse charges against the Catholic Church.

The most famous of these was a landmark case involving 142 men (a number that eventually grew to almost 1,300) who were abused at two Ontario Catholic schools—St. Joseph’s in Alfred and St. John’s in Uxbridge—from the 1940s to the 1970s. The men sought redress from the Toronto Christian Brothers, who ran the schools, but rather than going through the court system they asked Hoffman to design an alternative dispute-resolution mechanism that would allow them to reconcile with the church in a way that the courts would not. Hoffman arranged for apologies from the government and the church, a mass for the victims, and financial compensation that included a college fund for the men’s children. In the process, he created a model for alternative dispute resolution in Canada. Retired Senator Douglas Roche, who worked on the case, says Hoffman’s approach to reconciliation was “visionary.”

Hoffman’s call to the world stage came in 1994, after he spoke at a unesco seminar about the emergence of inter-ethnic disputes in the Balkans and elsewhere following the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe. He says most of the people present agreed with the explanation, advanced by Michael Ignatieff and others, that these conflicts were related to feelings of deep-rooted ethnic identity. Hoffman took a different view. “I felt it was a struggle for power and resources disguised as ethnic conflict or ethnic rivalry,” he says. He impressed the delegates, and soon found himself travelling to places such as Ukraine and Romania—assessing, mediating, and trying to prevent violence from breaking out.

In late 1999, a headhunter working for Jimmy Carter called. The former president had a well-known track record as a peacemaker: he’d helped bring the Korean peninsula back from the brink of war, prevented a US-led invasion of Haiti, mediated in Liberia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and created an opening for the peace process in Bosnia (accomplishments that would earn him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002). Still, he’d had his share of disappointments and he feared that his initiatives were flagging in the era of inter-ethnic conflicts. He wanted someone capable of wrestling belligerents to the negotiating table, and none of the scholars and ambassadors who had applied—people from the world of Track One diplomacy, with its cocktail parties for elites—seemed quite right. Carter wanted the entrepreneurial Hoffman to be his director of conflict resolution at the Carter Center. Hoffman accepted the position and moved to Atlanta.

Sudan became Hoffman’s priority for an unusual reason. The Center funds a group of health experts dedicated to the worldwide eradication of guinea-worm disease—a debilitating illness, contracted from contaminated drinking water, that sees a worm measuring up to three feet long incubate in the human body before extracting itself via a painful skin ulcer. Within two weeks, the health experts brought Hoffman into their offices. They told him they had been purifying infected water sources since 1986 and had succeeded in reducing worldwide incidence by 98 percent. The last remaining frontier for the disease was Sudan. “The civil war must stop for three to five years,” they told him. “We cannot get into little villages because of the war.”

Carter also wanted Hoffman in Sudan. It was not just the guinea worm—the war was destabilizing the entire region, and Hoffman’s views on the causes of inter-ethnic conflict appeared well-suited to sorting it out. Although the conflict appeared on the surface to be a religious battle between Arab Muslims and black Christians and animists, the presence of oil in southern Sudan suggested other factors at work. The national oil companies of China and Malaysia, as well as Calgary-based Talisman Energy, were all drilling in the South, pouring revenue into government coffers and exacerbating the grievances of southern rebel groups.

The US government, too, was making things worse by overtly supporting rebel groups in the South. The Clinton administration had dubbed Sudan a terrorist state, imposing sanctions in 1996 and then, in August 1998, firing seventeen missiles into a Khartoum suburb to destroy an alleged chemical-weapons factory. Carter blasted the administration in an article in the Boston Globe in December 1999, charging that they were “committed to overthrowing the government in Khartoum.” And so, before leaving for Africa in 2000, Hoffman went to Washington to meet with Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. He put in a plea for the administration to rethink its approach, then, a week later, left for Sudan.

There is a sacred liturgy in mediation, as it is taught in universities, that mediators do not negotiate or offer solutions. They are impartial facilitators. As he boarded the plane for Africa, Hoffman was planning to violate that basic tenet. He was determined to wage peace in Sudan, dragging the warring parties to the table personally if he had to.