Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994                   TAG: 9409210038
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By ABBA EBAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ODD COUPLES

This is the age of ``odd couples.'' Leaders of nations are holding civilized discourse with adversaries whom they would have puritanically shunned a few years ago. This tendency has produced a thaw in some of the most obdurate international conflicts.

Behind the twin microphones stood F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, speeding apartheid on its overdue demise.

Hardly had we rubbed our eyes at this spectacle when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Nabil Shaath took their places in a similar ritual, followed by King Hussein and Rabin opening horizons toward a new Middle East.

The Vatican, author of the medieval expulsions, the Inquisition and the humiliating ghetto system, sent its representatives to Jerusalem to mark its reconciliation with Israel, the state of the Jews. A long saga of avoidable suffering and intolerance came to an official end.

Now come the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Ireland, outlawing the bomb and gun and virtually legitimizing the IRA as a negotiating partner. All this only a few years after George Bush and Bill Clinton met Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as convincing proponents of pacific settlement.

This, alas, is not yet the norm of international conduct, and I am aware of the contrary examples with their tragic toll. But the strange encounters that I have evoked are more than individual episodes. The diplomatic discourse is liberating itself sensationally from entrenched routines.

The common feature is the acknowledgment of negotiation as an unconditional duty, not as an arbitrary option. Public opinion has no patience with the rejection of encounter.

There is also no toleration of the idea that rulers have the right to appoint their own representatives - and also those of their adversaries.

The IRA, the PLO and the ANC have abrasive chapters in their resumes, but so do their more empowered interlocutors. It is more fertile to confer with radicals who represent their constituencies than with amiable ``moderates'' who do not.

The current Israeli leaders deserve their plaudits, but if they had accepted dialogue with the PLO earlier than they did, many lives would have been saved. The same is true of those who spurned negotiation with the ANC in South Africa and the IRA in Ireland during the wasted years.

A novel approach to agendas goes together with a change in the principles of discourse.

Negotiators used to fill their rhetoric with arguments about the origins of conflicts and the culpability for their eruption. To the new diplomacy, the question ``who provoked and who responded'' is marginalized. The issue is how to quench the fires, not to hold interminable debate about who kindled them.

Pragmatic compromises usurp the pride of place hitherto occupied by reciprocal exchanges of self-righteousness. This liberates the diplomats and leaves ample livelihood for professional historians.

International agencies, in particular, previously allowed the issues of origins and culpability to monopolize their agendas and to exhaust the disputants. Today, the United Nations has joined and may even claim to have inspired the impulse and movement of the modern diplomatic age.

The U.N. General Assembly has gone so far as to express contrition for its previous anti-Zionist heresy, and its adoption of a joint Israeli-PLO resolution legitimizing the Mideastern peace process would have been even more inconceivable a year ago than any of the more publicized encounters that I have described above.

Diplomacy can only gain in public esteem by shaking off the intrinsically insoluble arguments about virtue and conscience and concentrating on more attainable goals. Reciprocal self-interest is, and should remain, its central theme.

Mankind has never had a single vision of virtue, justice, truth or legitimate pride, but nations have often been able to unite around themes of converging interest.

Diplomacy should be judged by what it prevents, not only by what it initiates and creates. Much of it is a holding action designed to avoid explosion until the unifying forces of history take humanity into their embrace.

Abba Eban is a former foreign minister of Israel and its former ambassador to the United States and the United Nations.

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