 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Steve Morrison from CSIS. We're very honored today to have with us Tony Vanbury, the Assistant Secretary General for Field Support, the UN, who just recently completed a mission, very delicate, complicated, and difficult mission running the UNMIR operation in West Africa, which we'll hear a lot more about in a moment. Tony, we've known in various earlier settings where he's figured very prominently in several different important global natural disasters or crises. We were just discussing the last time we had interacted with during Nargis in 08, the crisis in Myanmar, which left, you were saying, 230,000 people dead. Haiti, Tony was very critical in that operation, played for many years the lead role for WFP across multiple country situations for WFP in Asia, worked in both the Clinton White House and the Bush White House on the multilateral operations, humanitarian operations at the White House as well as at DOD. So Tony, thank you so much for being with us. What we're going to do here this afternoon is ask Tony to speak for 10 or 15 minutes, longer if you need, in terms of your reflections on this period. I was looking at reading over some of the interviews you've done with NPR and other things. This is really an exceptional opportunity. You really haven't unpacked this experience in this sort of setting. I don't think in this sort of public setting. So this is terrific to be able to hear your reflections so soon after completing your work. And thank you so much for all the work that you did in taking on this really difficult job at such a crisis point. So we'll hear from Tony. We'll have a bit of a conversation as follow on to that. And then we're going to open the floor fairly quickly to all of you to get your comments and questions. And we'll just take it from there. So Tony, thank you so much for being with us. Thank your staff for bringing us to our attention on short notice where we always welcome these sorts of things. So keep the requests coming. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate CIS organizing this at short notice. And it is the first time I've really had a chance to speak publicly about my experiences with Unmir and share some of those experiences and perhaps some of the lessons not only from the Unmir experience, but also some of the other crises that I've been involved in with WFP, very much the tsunami as well as Nargis. And since then, in the UN secretariat with Haiti and the Syria chemical weapons mission that I started up in Central African Republic. So I'll focus on Unmir, but at the end perhaps share some observations that have maybe some broader relevance. The starting point maybe is to remember where we were when the Secretary General decided that the crisis of Ebola was so bad that something else needed to be done. But if we look at the period leading up to that, basically from when Ebola was officially diagnosed as having broken out in West Africa in late March to say August, what was going on? And various organizations get criticized for doing this or not doing that. There was a lot of activity between April and August by different actors, UN agencies, NGOs, governments. And a lot of good activity, building treatment units, doing safe burials, social mobilization. The problem was that all these activities were kind of isolated. They are isolated islands of good intentions and good activity, but they weren't being carried out with a clear purpose and objective or in a coherent fashion. It's like if there was a military deployment and the Air Force would send one place, Army, Navy, Marines, all in different places to do their own thing with no one at the top saying, hey, I have my battle plan. These are the objectives and this is what we're going to do. So there was a real lot of effort, but things were getting worse and worse. That's what we were confronted with when the Secretary General really seized the issue of Ebola in August. WHO, I think it was August 9 or so, declared Ebola international public health emergency of international concern, I think is a technical term. Secretary General appointed David Nabarro. Things kept getting worse, so David Nabarro was doing a very good job of, I think, trying to bring more international attention to the crisis, but operationally, things on the ground were getting worse. So Secretary General decides to start calling world leaders all over the place. He appoints an Ebola crisis manager, which was me, on September 8. And the first thing that I did, and it was the same in Central African Republic crisis and Syria chemical weapons, and one of the team members is here, Philpa, build a team, a very strong team from across the UN system and, indeed, outside the system, not just the World Bank, but Centers for Disease Control, the member states experts. We've actually had Boston Consulting Group on the team. And I'll get in a conference room, sit together around a big table, no offices or anything, and just try and figure things out. What is this emergency about? What is going on? Too often, I think, there's a tendency to launch into operations without pausing to think and gather information and analyze and ultimately understand as best we can, given the imperfect information we have. So this was in a very compressed time frame, but basically that first week, starting September 8, was all about trying to understand. And by the end of that week, we had concluded, I had concluded, certainly, that there was no way to do what had to be done without putting in place a command and control capability, a crisis management capability on the ground. Otherwise, you would still have all these actors doing good work, but in a disjointed way. If we got 200 ambulances, like who do we give them to and who's going to manage the ambulances, what are the objectives? Who's assigning responsibilities? There were so many important unanswered questions that were not going to be answered without a crisis management capability. So on that Sunday, which was the 14th, I guess, I called the chef to cabinet of the secretary general and basically said, I think we need a UN mission. There's no other way. And she said, fine. I agree. Write it up for the secretary general. And that Sunday, I wrote it up. It went to the secretary general. On that Monday, he immediately agreed with it. He had made it very clear that he was dissatisfied. He wanted results. He wanted action, that it was a crisis. Things weren't working. And he was really pushing us hard to sort things out. He agreed immediately. On that Monday, we wrote the report to the General Assembly and the Security Council Tuesday and Wednesday. And Wednesday night, it went. The Security Council passed this resolution Thursday with the largest number of cosponsors in the history of the United Nations, 134, almost double the previous number. General Assembly on Friday. Secretary General establishes the mission after the General Assembly resolution. So the first idea of the mission to its establishment was basically five days. Never before in the history of the UN anything approaching that rapid establishment of a UN mission. Then we sent an advanced team to each of the countries the following week. And we built the nucleus of the mission that would deploy to Ghana, the headquarters. A week later, it deployed. And we were on the ground and operational in four countries. At that point, when we deployed, we didn't know what to do. No one did. The world did not know how to handle that Ebola epidemic because it had never been faced with anything like that. So we had to do a number of things that normally would be done sequentially. What I was referring to before the information gathering, the analysis, the planning, but then the deployment and the implementation of operations. We had to do all of that contemporaneously as Samantha Power said again and again, build the plane while you're flying it. And that was hard. But it became very apparent. Well, we already knew we had to play this crisis management role. But as soon as we got on the ground, less than 48 hours later, we were visiting the three capitals, meeting with the presidents, meeting with the stakeholders. And it was really clear that the operations were all over the place. There was no coherence to them. People were confused. They didn't know what to do. People were talking to each other. And we decided we needed to get everyone on the same page. We called this big planning conference in a crock to over 910 and basically had all the stakeholders there. And the objective of that had ended up being absolutely fundamental to the following success. I think the objective of that planning conference was to play an essential role of crisis management where you get everyone agreeing on common objectives, a basic strategy to achieve those shared objectives, an implementation plan that had clearly assigned, well, that identified all the actions necessary to achieve or to implement the strategy, and assigned responsibilities to each of the actions, had timelines for them, had a system to measure the performance, the implementation of the plan. So if things weren't working, either weren't being done or they weren't working as expected, we identified that early and adjusted its basic crisis management thinking, basic crisis management function. And it had been totally lacking. This conference did that. And we had these shared objectives. We set specific targets for December 1, 70% of new cases in isolation, 70% of barriers done safely. We set January targets. And it really brought almost everyone around or to work in the same direction on a common plan. What it didn't do was include the governments. And that was very controversial at the time. But we made a conscious decision that if we invited the host governments in, it would have become very political. And we wouldn't have been able to do the technical planning work that we needed to get done. After that planning conference, we spent that basic month of October deploying. The first 30 days was about deploying capability, even while we tried to assess and plan and all that. Deploying capability, getting people and stuff in, playing helicopters, setting up offices. It was about deployment. The next 30 days, November, was essentially about achieving results. And we had set these targets for December 1, very aggressive targets. Most people thought that we'd never reach them and said we shouldn't even set such ambitious targets because we'd fall short. And then everyone would say, oh, you're failing. You're failing. And that would be bad for us. But the crisis was so bad at the time. Many of us were convinced that ambitious targets were necessary to drive us, to work fast and achieve results fast. But that 70% figure was a moving target because it was 70% of an absolute number that was growing exponentially. The caseload, when we deployed, was doubling every three to four weeks. So by December 1, no, we didn't achieve those targets. But we got very close. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, we basically achieved them. In Guinea, we were a little short, but not so far away. But it wasn't 65%, 72%. We can't even say because the information wasn't perfect. But it just oriented everyone. And this is what it's all about because this is how we're going to stop a bullet, isolating cases, safe burials. January 1, those targets were supposed to be 100%. We had the capacity to do that in all three countries. We were very close to achieving it in Sierra Leone and Guinea. The problem on the bedside or the isolation side was we had enough beds. But sometimes there were too many empty beds over here. And cases over there where there were no beds. On the safe burial side, it was community resistance. The capability to do safe burials was there. The information was spread, the safe burial teams, the ambulances, et cetera, the sprayers. We went into such detail on planning. Like, what is a safe burial team? It's 10 members. It's two drivers. It's two supervisors. It's six body carriers. How come six? Oh, because they have to walk up hills and carry them. We really went into all that detail in the planning conference. How many leaders of fuel a day? How many leaders of chlorine? How many PPE sets per day per burial team? Which then drove all these resorts and procurement decisions about what kind of flow of PPE and stuff we needed. So I think by January 1, and I left January 3, by January 1, clearly the numbers had turned around, Sierra Leone was responsible for over half of new cases. But we did this big surge in free time. The Western Area Surge, where we obviously were having problems, we put a lot of capability in there because we were monitoring and implementation of this plan. And now we've turned the numbers around there. There are different ways to judge whether the whole effort, and it was a global effort, clearly. It wasn't just the United Nations, certainly not just Unmere. It was NGOs. It was the host government. It was the communities very much. It was the bilaterals like the US, US military, USID, UK, DFID, lots of actors involved in this global response. But the response can be the efficacy of it. Or it can be looked at in a number of ways. But if you go back to September when the decision to establish Unmere was taken, we had the Tom Frieden, really smart guy, focused very much on it, come up to New York, give a presentation to member states early January. We could be at 1.3, 1.4 million cases. World Bank was saying economic impact, 35 billion. When we did this across planning conference, we had these targets of 70%, 70%. But to do planning, it was like 70% of what? What's the number? If we have 70% of new cases in isolation, how many beds is that? We needed to know what the case load was going to be in December so we could do the mathematical calculation, 70% equals X number of beds, X number of burials. So I asked WHO and CDC to go give us their best estimate on where we'd be the first week in December. Some of the world's best epidemiologists from the two organizations spent four days trying to figure that out, wrestling, Atlanta, Geneva, Accra going around and around. And they finally said, well, we think it'll be between 5,000 and 10,000 new cases a week. And we took the worst case figure for planning purposes because that's what you got to do. So we were working on 10,000 a week. Well, the first week of December, it was about 500 new cases a week is where we were at. Now in January, we're at 20, what is it, 3,000 or 4,000? I don't even know a far cry for 1.3 or 4 million. Revised economic impact by the World Bank is 3.5 billion or something, a 10th of the original estimate. And the numbers are going progressively down. Last week, for the first time since June, total new cases in the week was 99 under 100 for the first time since June. This week it's 124. So we're far from out of the woods and there's a lot of hard work ahead. But given where we were in September and the threats posed by the epidemic, the projections that were being made by really smart, well-meaning, hardworking scientists and economists, I think the conclusion has to be that the global response, member state, United Nation, NGO, community, government has been wildly successful in turning this thing around. Even while there's hard work ahead to get from where we are now down to zero, zero can be the only acceptable outcome in my view. It requires a different approach and the governments and UNMIR are well on their way to implementing now very district by district approach. 63 districts, everyone is different. We need different responses depending upon the characteristics of the district. Is it urban, is it rural, is it border? High transmission, low transmission, pre-transmission, post-transmission, degree of community resistance. We're factoring all those factors into a district, the strategy for that particular district. But what's going to be critical in getting it to zero are two basic things that are part of this district by district strategy is strong disease surveillance across the board. We need to know where Ebola is and when it pops up we need to know it and know it fast, early. So good disease surveillance and then a quick response capability. If it pops up in an area where we don't have an ETU, we don't have lots of burial teams because we can't have them everywhere, we need to quickly be able to put in place the capability on the spot to shut it down so two cases become zero cases and not 20 or 40. And I think that's recognized, agencies, governments, UN's working toward that. But that implies some capacity building because it's not going to be foreigners or not certainly just foreigners who are doing that. It gets into questions about building the national health systems to have not just disease surveillance from the health ministry and district health officers and all that, but really community surveillance, community-based surveillance. And UNMIR cannot be the organization that builds capacity, but UNMIR's exit strategy at the end of the crisis is going to depend on capacity being built and how that's managed and who builds the capacity and how long it's gonna take and what's the role of international actors versus national actors in doing that are some important open questions. Maybe just one last set of observations and then the conclusion. UNMIR is very, very unique. There's never been anything like it, the crisis, there's never been anything like the crisis so that's appropriate that UNMIR is so unique. But it's important to, when thinking about UNMIR and possible lessons for the future, it's important to think about how unique it is. One, it's the whole Ebola crisis the world's never faced. I think I like it. So what it was dealing with was so unique. Two, first ever global emergency health mission. First ever UN system-wide mission where UN agencies, funds and programs, their operations were put under the direct line authority of the head of mission unlike an integrated peacekeeping mission where they're sort of under the overall coordination of the SRSG but really are independent actors except to the degree that UN agencies reach consensus among themselves. Here, direct line authority and the heads of agencies all signed up to it. The degree to which that was respected on the field is another matter but that's the first time it's ever happened. Reported directly to the secretary general unlike other UN missions. It did not have a backstopping department unlike a political mission or a peacekeeping mission. The net effect of those last two things is that we didn't have a boss. I mean if you report to the secretary general you don't have a boss. He's doing everything all over the world constantly and you don't have a backstopping department so you're not subjected to the tyranny of desk offers who are trying to tell you what to do from 10,000 miles away so that had a lot of advantages in terms of giving us freedom but we were sort of on our own making all this up as we went. So the unique aspects of it gave us a lot of room for creativity and innovation which ended up being a very important part of the success of the mission. So maybe four conclusions or observations, lessons from this experience but also others. First there's no organization in the world or member state or anything else that can do what the United Nations can do. That doesn't mean the United Nations should be involved in trying to solve every problem in the world, I don't think it should but there will be times when the United Nations really is the indispensable organization and the leadership of the Secretary General is indispensable to the UN playing that role and Amir is an example but serial chemical weapons is also an example and there was a very strong technical agency in OPCW just like there was a very strong technical agency in WHO but for a variety of different or complex reasons in each case the technical agency on its own wasn't enough to do the job and the role of the Secretary General and what the Secretary itself could bring to complement the contribution of the technical agency was really a defining or a critical element in the success. The second conclusion or observation is that are the success factors. First is that Amir, I should probably pause because I know the three success factors but I'm gonna look at my notes. I've tried to do it without having to read a presentation but I don't wanna like chip you guys out on what the key points are. Okay, now I remember them. The first one and I alluded to this before it's that issue of understanding, learning. We have to be smart and too often we rush into something without really understanding and whether it's a political context or a peacekeeping context if we take a New York perspective or a secretary perspective or a security council perspective or Washington, Paris, Brussels, whatever and don't really understand what's happening on the ground that's going to be toward detriment and in Amir we were very focused on knowledge and being knowledge driven and having information and being able to collect it that would not just enable us to report faithfully to the secretary general and through him the member states but knowledge to drive our operations. We needed to understand what was happening on the ground so we could see where things were working well where we weren't and adjust. I think Amir was the first mission to hire anthropologists in the history of the UN. We had a number of anthropologists and I've been saying we need anthropologists in peacekeeping for a long time. I haven't gone very far but here I was like we're hiring anthropologists because we needed a diverse set of experience and capabilities. We needed the World Bank. We had people from CDC on the ground as well in our mission we had the Gates Foundation, Paul Allen Foundation. We had a professor from the US Army War College who I had met who I thought was really brilliant and we brought him in. He was hugely helpful. We got tremendous support from the Boston Consulting Group. Pro Bono, they spent millions of dollars of their own money. We didn't spend a penny, flights, hotels, anything and all of that contributed to our understanding, our analysis, our operations and being a knowledge driven organization. Second key success factor, absolutely key and again it happened in Syria. It happened here. It doesn't always happen. We were able to tailor our mission and the response to the unique circumstances on the ground. There was no cookie cutter planning. We didn't just pick up a template and say, oh well this is how we do it and square peg around whole problem. We took that understanding that we tried to develop and applied it to very tailored planning to this is exactly what's needed there and where and when the UN or the international intervention in a context is able to have that understanding and tailor response I think it's much more likely to be successful where there isn't a good understanding where the response is more cookie cutter, very unlikely to be successful. Third is that working to common goals. If there's not a unity around a shared approach, a common approach or objective, important actors are gonna be going off in different directions and that was clearly happening before September and we were able I think quite successfully to get the governments and all the actors focused around certain goals. If you don't have that strategic agreement and commitment to shared goals then the risk of disbursed and ineffective effort I think is very high. Next, the third observation. It sounds self-evident but too often it's not the case. A serious crisis needs strong crisis management and we had a serious crisis in August and we collectively did not have crisis management capabilities or approaches in place and again it's like those shared goals. If there isn't good crisis management you can have a lot of effort, a lot of resources, a lot of good intentions on the ground but it's unlikely that you're going to be successful. You can use the military analogy I used earlier, you can use an athletic one where a great team out there, I was rooting for the Patriots so if Bill Belichick hadn't been on the sidelines and none of the coaching staff had been on the sidelines they just had the players out there which is basically where we were in August. You had all the players on the field but who was running things and that wasn't happening. I think in the end that's what Unmere was able to do. The last observation and I believe this very strongly, the UN can be at its best when it's not business as usual. Too often it is and it's not just the UN. The world externally is changing so fast. The crisis we're confronted with are changing so fast but we're trying to use a lot of the same tools that we've been using to different degrees from and Jim Shearand is very well, going back to the 90s at least and the tools have not adapted to the changed external crises that the world, the UN is being asked to help manage and if we're going to tailor our response we can't be business as usual if we're going to have the right tools to combine in the right way to deal with the crisis. It can't be business as usual. We can't have business as usual approaches to these crises. There are some contexts where it's maybe appropriate but more and more it won't be and we won't achieve the results that presumably we all broadly desire if we are trying to use either outdated tools or tools in the world. Thank you very much, Tony. I'd like to offer a few thoughts to what you've said and draw in. We were, Catherine Stryphill, my colleague and I were in Liberia and Sierra Leone for the last two weeks, got back just a few days ago and we had a chance to meet with the UNMIR personnel in Monrovia and in Freetown and we had a chance to also speak with a broad array of officials, USG, UK, Liberian, Sierra Leonean, WHO, WFP and a long range of folks. My overall impression from this was that the decision by the Secretary General to move ahead with this ambitious program and with you and David Nabarro in the lead, it was a decision that was taken in the midst, really in the center of this worsening crisis where things had gotten into a point where the region was in the August, September timeframe was when things were going haywire and people were rapidly losing confidence that they were gonna be able to get control over anything. It was before the US had taken the decision, September 16th by President Obama, to intervene with upwards of 3,000 troops. It was before the UK had announced at the end of September their decision to deploy. It was a period when, if you go back and look at what was happening internally within Liberia and Sierra Leone in August and September, ministers were being pulled and thrown out, WHO representatives were being pulled and thrown out and replaced with competent people. And the fear factor was off the charts and people were really fundamentally wondering whether this could be rolled back, whether this really could be rolled back. And when the decision was taken by the Secretary General, it was against this backdrop of recognizing that Afro, the WHO regional office had failed abjectly and was part of the problem and needed to be reconstructed very rapidly to be more than just a problem, that Geneva had lost its will in terms of WHO's willingness to really lead on this. And so you're struggling in terms of design, you're struggling with what do you do where you don't have a reliable WHO, you don't have a reliable Afro, things are moving along this pace and you have a small UN peacekeeping operation in Liberia, Unmilled, you've got this OCHIS system that's a humanitarian mission. And this decision was taken to create this one thing and then to dispatch it with an ambitious target to be a coordinating, planning, and data gathering mission that could be crisis managers and the like. But it was still, it was very late in the day in which the rush of events were just charging ahead and charging ahead. And so it looks to me from a distance that it was just in retrospect, it was almost impossible for you and David to in the midst of that rush to really establish your authority and your claim to that authority among these disparate, you said there's all these actors out there on the field and they're all moving ahead and money is starting to flow and people are starting to arrive and there's a panic that is setting in here. And by the time your October planning session arrives in Accra, you could, it was things were already in a way, decisions were being taken, people were making, putting programs in place. And then once the US had made the decision on the military and the British had made the decision on the military, you had this, it seemed to me, this radical shift of authority and power to where the incident management system in Liberia was basically tracking to what the DART, the US military and CDC were, it became this intervention, US led intervention. In the case of the Brits, it was the military coming in, partnering with the defense ministry and basically shoving the health ministry out of the way and saying we are going to do this, this, this and this and you're gonna report to us on this. And so, Unmere found itself important in its country offices and in its role in the Accra way, in the Accra office, but things were moving ahead at a prodigious pace in the midst of this existential moment where people were really terrified that this haywire situation was just going to continue to descend and that you didn't, if the decision had been taken, looking back, if the decision had been taken by the Secretary General, when things were calmer, if it had been possible to take this decision, perhaps in May or June, you might have had that space to get those crisis managers in place, get that authority established before panic had set in. There's a lot of, in this world of crisis, there's a lot of finger pointing and there's a lot of snarkiness and there's a lot of people not giving credit for lots of important things happening by different institutions and different individuals and in every one of these offices, when you go in and you do a debrief, you learn great moments of courage and innovation and things that are done and Unmere is in that same pool of folks that did lots of things. I mean, you brought in Hans Rosling into Monrovia, you were talking about the anthropologists. You were identifying rapidly, identifying some of these discrete critical gaps and getting people in who were making sense of the situation and on the question around anthropologists, the fact that fear, distrust and contempt for government was running so deep and it created this strategic gap of 60 to 90 days where it didn't make any difference what the messages were coming across the horn. People that were on the ground in the county's districts and prefectures where all of this were unfolding didn't believe what they were being told and so the epidemic went underground, people were ignoring the safe burial, they were not recording cases, they were resisting and they're still resisting. And I think some of your most important contributions were around saying, unless you can connect anthropologically or knowledge-based to this, the game is going to be over. But on the macro level, I do think it's a hard set of lessons. I don't know that there was a different institutional solution than the one you described at that moment of crisis in early August when the Security Council and the Secretary General mobilized to say, oh my God, and even though the 1.4 million wasn't realized in the 33 million billion in economic cost, we're not realized, in the heat of events in September, August, September, October, I think people were simply scrambling to do whatever they thought could be done in their moment to avert this catastrophe because everybody saw this. I mean, it's very hard, I think, I mean, you were living this. I think for most of us in this room, it's very hard to imagine the force of that situation that you found yourself in and how panicked and driven by fear and driven by the fear that this was never gonna come under control was dominating that. So maybe you could say a bit about how do you, when you look back, how do you enumerate what the top line most important contributions were and what would you say to the Secretary General if he said, okay, the next time this happens, what do we do? You know, what do we do the next time? Because I think for a lot of people, the intentions were very good. The commitment was good. They picked you, they picked David, they picked their A team. Recruitment for these kinds of things is terribly difficult. Getting your A team at all levels in that when you've got world crisis proliferating all over the place and nobody knows how long your mission's gonna be and all of that, I mean, I felt for you that you must have been pulling your hair out trying to make this truly competent and able to move ahead and when you talked about how you didn't have a backstop agency or a technical agency, that's a huge vulnerability too. So maybe you could say a few more words around what would you advise to the next Secretary General, the next decision by the Secretary General, facing a situation where it's not, where something of a higher level has to happen in a very dangerous situation and there's no immediately apparent solution. Well, you, I think evoked very well the crazy realities we were facing in September. For all of us who ended up being involved in Unmire and Ebola, working September 15th on it, one week earlier or two weeks earlier, we had no idea we'd be doing it. We were so unprepared to take on the assignment, there was this huge and growing global panic about the spread of Ebola, horrible images on TVs of people kind of dying in the streets, panic spreading that not only is it gonna be in West Africa, it could lead to Asia or North America or Europe or whatever and the decision taken by President Obama to deploy US military, by Prime Minister Cameron to deploy UK military, those decisions generated a lot of their, okay, maybe fear is not the right word but there's so much political pressure on the US apparatus and the UK apparatus to get stuff done. So they're not gonna listen to the UN about what to do. The political pressure back home generated by the engagement of the head of state, head of government was so strong and so we were all kind of deploying simultaneously. And the UN was in a very disadvantageous position, particularly Unmire, because you had all the UN agencies on the ground, you had the peacekeeping mission on the ground, there was some sense that, hey, who are you to come in and tell us what to do? Or, hey, we were doing just fine without you, who are you? And so we had those problems in the UN, we had the US and UK with huge national pressures charging ahead and there was a legitimate question, what are you guys bringing to the table? Where's your value? And it was a real struggle for Unmire to establish itself and our legitimacy and that we could be something of value. The two basic ways we did that was one, the crisis management stuff I was talking about and two, the relationships with the governments, which were very strong, I mean, different in all cases, the governments were facing their own problems, but the relationship with the three governments at the head of state level was very, very strong and that allowed us to contribute in ways that we otherwise perhaps might not have been able to. But in terms of the advice going forward and you referred to the meeting in Geneva of WHO, there are people asking, how should there be this emergency medical response capability in the world? The bullet crisis has revealed that there's this gap in the world's toolbox and we set it up, is it set up in WHO or elsewhere? I do believe there is a gap. I believe August, September revealed it very clearly. We shouldn't have to invent it from scratch in that situation. I believe WHO is the best place for that capability to be placed. But more importantly than that, and I have shared this with colleagues inside the UN, we should not be looking at solving or giving the world the capability to address the crisis that we confronted in September. We should be looking at April and where we were in April and what we need to have in place to identify the situation in April and take action in April and May, so it's shut down in May. We never get to June, much less to September and that's a much smaller investment and much more effective. So, and that's also more in the WHO realm in the World Health Assembly than it is in the Secretary, but certainly the UN Secretary General has a strong voice, if not a formal technical responsibility in sharing his views on what might be appropriate. But if WHO had been able to respond more authoritatively and with more of an operational capacity than they had and more authority and more risk-taking, Secretary General might have made a different decision, don't you think? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a, partly this decision to go to something unprecedented and to build it on the fly in the middle of a crisis. That was an exceptional decision, a very exceptional decision. And it implied that you basically, your confidence had bottomed out in the tools that you had in front of you because you were choosing to roll the dice and say, okay, we're going to go and pull David and Tony in and we're gonna do this and pull in the WFP capacities and backstop this to the degree we can. That was a really exceptional moment, a very exceptional moment. There's a lot of talk now in the region in the three Ebola countries. A lot of talk about national recovery and there's going to be a number of occasions where the countries are asked to come and present their plans for recovery. The first case will be EU and UN sponsored in Brussels, March 3rd. The second will be here in Washington in April at the IMF World Bank, spring meetings, mid-April. And then I understand the Secretary General is talking about hosting something in May. Can you say a bit? Does Unmere's function, now that the high drama of the emergency mobilization is over and we're in this phase of, as you point out, intensified disease detection work, right? Going down to the county level, chasing down those cases, doing the case investigation, contact tracing, making sure the safe burials continuing, trying to get to zero or near zero. That's the phase we're in right now. You guys can continue to play an important role in that, particularly on the cross-border issues as I know you are picking that up as a priority. But looking beyond on the national recovery plans, do you see yourselves operating with the Secretary General, when I say yourselves, Unmere's office, in trying to move to that phase? Is that part of this? Or is Unmere's mission strictly the emergency? I took the view at the very beginning that Unmere needed to have a very narrow focus. It was all about ending a bowl and nothing else mattered. The house was burning down, put out the fire, and then worry about rebuilding it later. There were pressures to, oh, you need to get involved in essential services, and then the business, as usual, the UN started to kick in that we needed an advisor on this, an advisor, all those statutory things that go to peacekeeping missions. And I just absolutely refused to count an incident and take them on because it was not related to our work. We had to be focused just on getting the job done and leave that important work to others who are mandated to carry it out. But now, because getting to zero does require the development of national capability, Unmere has a direct interest in it. It's linked to the end of the crisis, the exit strategy. I don't think Unmere is the right organization to start building capacity, but it has to make sure that the strategy incorporates it and that there's an assignment of responsibilities to one or more actors to do it, that there's a plan to make it happen, that there's a timeline by which it will happen, there's some monitoring of the implementation to make sure it's happening as planned. Unmere has an important role there, but it's gotta be others who are building the capacity. And it bleeds over quickly from building capacity in the health system, say, on disease surveillance to end the Ebola crisis, to strengthening the national health system. So for instance, a lot of the healthcare workers in Guinea who were getting Ebola, toward the end when I was there, were getting it from non-Ebola health facilities. It was going to be very important to strengthen the non-Ebola health facility so when there are a hundred patients and 99 don't have Ebola but one does, that one person who shows up in not an ETU with a bunch of MSF doctors, but a primary health center somewhere, that the people there have the skills to recognize that, wait, this guy is different and we shouldn't be touching him. We need to isolate him and test him and figure out what it is. And Japan was very focused on then, Japan at a certain point wanted to give us 40,000, no, 400,000 sets of PPE and not Ebola PPE and have us distribute around. I was like, not Ebola PPE, I don't want anything to do with it, it's crazy. But then I got a little bit smarter and realized, wait a second, that's really important for the Ebola fight is to strengthen the non-Ebola facilities. So the Ebola work and the ability to get to zero and put in the crisis and at once and for all so it doesn't resurge is going to depend on some very serious work to build the health capabilities and it shouldn't be fancy, it shouldn't be really complex, it shouldn't be what you would see in Atlanta or Heidelberg, it's got to be appropriate and not hugely resource intensive so we can fund it for two years and then the donors drop off and then all of a sudden we can't fund it anymore and it's not sustainable. So there's some important hard work ahead on that issue. Thank you. Why don't we open up and hear from our audience members. I suggest just put your hands up and we'll get three or four folks to intervene. Please identify yourselves. There's two folks right here and just go ahead and introduce yourself. Be very quick in your intervention and we'll bundle three or four together and then we'll do around back to Tony and then we'll do another round. So we'll try and get to everyone. Yes please. Hi, thank you so much for all the information you provided. I previously worked for Oxfam now I'm an independent consultant and I was in Liberia in November and what I found was that a lot of the NGOs just didn't feel the presence yet of Unmir and we're a little bit confused about what they were there for how it was gonna work and all of those kinds of things and I at the time and I guess this is kind of follows onto Steve's question of what would you do differently in the future if such a crisis had come upon you? Would you have used OCHA in a different way? OCHA, obviously a lot of the NGOs are used to OCHA managing an emergency and managing a crisis. They know how it works. They know how to fit into that structure. What we saw was that the cluster system was working over here and the pillars were over there and there was a lot of concern about coordination not being strong enough to really run things in a crisis management way that you mentioned. I think it improved and I appreciate that and I appreciate that it was also a very complicated crisis. And the second thing was that when you had the conference in October, a lot of the organizations and ours in particular was interested in seeing the document and seeing the strategy and that was not made available and the question there is we all wanted to get around and support whatever plan was there but we weren't able to get access to the plan. We knew it was 70, 70, 60. We knew the basics of it but would you have done that any differently in terms of bringing in the NGO actors who are doing a lot of work on the ground so that they could also buy into that plan for the future and they had a lot of skills there. Thanks, so. Thank you. Sir. Yes. Thank you. My name is Adman Su. Actually I have been working with UNICEF in Nigeria and Afghanistan especially with Polio during the 2004 when they had a problem with Polio. I had that experience in Nigeria. What I would like to ask you here is yes, I have been working with the UN. As you correctly mentioned when there is this project or work program even while I was in UN we don't look at the exit strategy. You mentioned the Ebola. We have Polio which has been billions of dollars being spent and then still going on. What is the exit strategy even with the Polio? And then there will become more also. So don't we have to think about exit strategies? Exit strategies at the same time looking at ownership so that the countries, the governments, the countries which the projects are going on becoming owning that program. Thank you. Okay, thank you. You had your hand up. Yes, my name is Mike Borstein and I'm a retired Foreign Service Officer. I'm also retired from the World Health Organization, the PAHO office here in Washington where I was the director of administration. I also was on a UN Board of Inquiry when Greg Starr was up in New York looking into the bombing of the UN House in Abuja. So I have a variety of experiences and I'm waiting to hear if I will be deployed to be the head of the administrative operation for WHO in Conakry Guinea but to support the Ebola response. So my question very briefly is that you spoke about the next phase now that we're getting to zero and not there yet and there's been articles in the paper recently about what happens next in terms of building capacity. I'm just curious if you could speak about the role of the un-mere offices in the three countries and how that office, those offices work with the UN country team, WHO specifically in this effort going forward to increase capacity so that this crisis can be averted in the future. Thank you. Mike, can you just hand that back to Jim Shearer there? Thank you very much. Jim Shearer Wilson Center and former colleague of Tony's although that was before you were commuting to Pyongyang on a weekly basis. Two quick questions. We had gotten some reports of concern October, November about the prospect for within the Africa continent transmission vectors. Typically migrations of young workers leaving West Africa heading into Central Africa. That didn't appear to happen and I'm wondering was that just good luck because we had overly worst case predictions or were there good border efforts made to check possible transmission routes? To be interested in your response and that and secondly if you could wave your magic wand in addition to building stronger healthcare systems in West Africa which is clearly key where there are two or three things where the local host nation militaries could have been stronger to aid and abet the initial logistics flow and other things because in terms of capacity building priorities within the Department of Defense and elsewhere I think this might be an interesting issue to look at more broadly, thank you. Okay, hold off we'll come back to you in a moment. Just hold off for Zantoni, we've got a number of things here to address. Do you wanna go ahead? Sure, thanks. On the first question about the engagement with NGOs in Liberia elsewhere, possible role of OCHA, we should fess up to it really. I made a conscious decision early on and this was for the crop planning conference but it was more broadly that we were only going to, the crisis was so bad, the pressures were so big as was being mentioned before, we had such an important responsibility, we were just gonna deal with the major actors, we didn't have time or bandwidth to engage with all the stakeholders. That was true within the UN system and outside and I can assure you I have a number of good UN colleagues who didn't like the approach I took at all because they felt like they were left out but what they could bring to the table was very marginal to what we needed to do at the time. Accra, the principle for the crop planning conference in terms of participation was anyone who is a major actor on the ground creating real impact on the ground in a big way and that did include some NGOs like MSF, IFRC was there, CRC but there were a lot and this continued on, not just during the planning conference but later on in the capitals, there were a lot of NGOs who were very small players who weren't doing much to end Ebola, they were there, they were doing good work maybe but it wasn't like stopping Ebola, they were asking a lot of questions and for all kinds of assurances and the transaction costs of dealing with them was so high and what they brought to the table for what we had to do, what UNMIR had to do, it's not that what they brought to the table wasn't valuable but in terms of our responsibility, the direct relevance wasn't so great so every time I traveled around I always met with the major ones, I had so many meetings with MSF, I visited many of their facilities, I met with their directors because they were really doing a lot of work but that wasn't the case of all of them and in terms of OCHA and the role for OCHA, there have been some who said, well maybe OCHA should have played a better role, you know why you create UNMIR, you have OCHA and I think Valerie Ames would say the same thing, she said it to the Secretary General and others, she was a strong supporter of the SG's proposal and decision early on that this was not a role for OCHA because OCHA was not a command and control organization, it was not, although the UNMIR was more command and less control but in any case, the Secretary General said very clearly again and again, he wanted results, actions, decisions, he doesn't want consensus building, he doesn't want coordination, we don't have time for it, he doesn't want to see people wasting time all sitting around a table discussing things, he wanted execution and that's not what OCHA does so one can argue the relative merits of the approach but that was the thinking behind it. We learned a lot from polio that was applied here, particularly had disease surveillance and community action and W.A. Joe tried to draw it, it took a while but eventually we were able to bring in a lot of people from the polio eradication effort in Nigeria in Ethiopia, India who had that experience of doing kind of community disease surveillance so there's a lot to learn or we did learn a lot, we benefit a lot but I have no public health background whatsoever, I don't know anything about the subject so I can't say anything about the polio effort for Ebola, I thought it was very important to have a clear objective of eradication in a short time frame which resulted in having an exit strategy, I thought it was very, very important, we could not countenance and domicity or long term and kind of business as usual and that's one of the reasons we set those very aggressive early target, it was really more about saving lives but it's all connected. You know, you're eligible for an honorary MPH after all. We'll go work one up in the back then. There are probably some health experts who should say he should never be allowed anywhere near a public health crisis again so the opinions may vary on that, I'm not sure. I mean you're throwing around endemicity and you know, some of these. I've learned how to pronounce the term, I'm not sure what it means but the issue of unmeasured relationship with WHO and the UN country team, I could spend a long time talking about it, I'll refrain, Margaret Chan to her credit bought into this from the very beginning. She was very happy, I think the secretary general took the decision, very happy to have a partner ending Ebola, I think probably very happy to have a new entity that was getting a lot of attention. That wasn't necessarily the view of everyone in WHO but Margaret was a good partner and we had a lot of people inside WHO working with us, unlike some of the other agencies. So I would say the relationship with WHO, not Afro, which was a non-player with the WHO institution, WHO Geneva, the people they sent, very good. Country team, it was very different in each country for different reasons, Liberia was a particular unique situation. Because of the UN mill, peacekeeping operation. Yeah, personalities also play a big role in these issues, so sometimes you had an organization, someone in the organization who wouldn't lift a finger to help us and if anything deliberately obstructed our efforts, someone else in the same organization bending over backwards to do what's right for the greater good. But clearly there was defensiveness on the part of some UN country team people, some thought that, hey, we're here, we have a coordination system, we have all these structures who are you to come in and take over from us. It was pointed out to them not just or even not primarily by me, really by folks above me in the UN. Hey, yeah, you're there, but things are getting under your watch, things got progressively worse and worse and worse, so if you're arguing for the status quo, the SG has decided to do something different. We did try, I vary consciously, and this is an example of how it was in business as usual. Early on we were planning the mission, we had all these agencies coming up to us saying, oh, but you need to have this in there and we need to see our mandate in there and just like it was a peacekeeping mission, all the genders that we see again and again, they wanted to see it in the mission. Where's the advisor on this subject or that subject or this subject? And I was kind of pushing back against it and at the same time you had the agencies saying, oh, but the resident coordinator, they have an important role in the country team and you can't take it over for them, you can't put all this stuff in our mission. Why don't you take all that stuff you're talking about and leave it with the country team and the country team will do all this important work that you're saying is important, including economic recovery issues and essential services and capacity building. That's hugely important. Do all that and we'll do the firefighting, shut down Ebola. And Helen Clark got that early on. As soon as I said it to her, she's like, oh yeah, why are we doing that? We're going to put it in an un-mirror. Take it out of the report. We don't want it in there. So she kind of overruled what her people had been arguing very strongly for because she got it saying, oh yeah, it's better to protect the prerogatives of the UNCT. And so I tried to build up the UNCT and give it important roles, but they wanted to be involved in un-mirror. That's what the presidents were talking about. The press was after and the big donors were talking about. So they still felt a little bit marginalized, but we tried to make sure that we had very important roles. Jim, on the issue of did we just get lucky and dodge a bullet, I'm still incredulous that Ebola is not in Cote d'Ivoire. That hasn't moved over the border from Liberia. I am scared to death that it could, and I was really, really, really scared in September, October, November. I was, I think, a lot of, I mean, petrified that this was just going to go like that and so far exceed the capacities we had. Has it done it? I don't know. Is it in Cote d'Ivoire? I don't know, but we pushed hard with UNOC and WHO to put on in disease surveillance on the Liberian side, not just the, on the Ivorian side, not just the Liberian side. So I think right now it seems to be a lot of good luck. Some surveillance, airports and stuff, there was some good work that was screening legitimate controls at the border to allow for travel, but with certain controls. So I think that probably had an impact, but those controls weren't in place on the border between Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire, or with Senegal or Guinea-Vissau or Mali, I don't know. A lot of luck is part of it though, I'm sure. In terms of the military, the governments really were faced with a conundrum in treat, and it's what everyone did when the Ebola crisis was sped, spreading was looked at as a health issue. So put a bunch of doctors on it. But it became more than a public health crisis. It became a complex crisis that had complex social, political, security, economic development, like essential service dimensions to it. And it far exceeded the remit, much less capabilities of the public health field. So then the governments created the separate Ebola crisis structures, which took a lot, it's like the creation of UNMIR, took a lot away from the ministries of health, and in the case of Sierra Leone and to an extent Liberia, much less so Guinea, a lot of responsibility was given to the military, as you mentioned also. The head of the Ebola response in Sierra Leone is the ex-minister of defense. He was moved from the Ministry of Defense over there. There are also a lot of resources associated with the Ebola response, and I think there was certainly some element of Ebola economy, and people of various kinds seen this as an opportunity to get personal benefit. I mean, it was definitely the case. So the role of the military was sensitive, just like the role of UNMIR was sensitive. I think the Armed Forces of Liberia, AFL, very good job basically doing construction. The RSLAF, the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces, played a different role. They didn't construct so much, but they executed operations basically, but that disempowered the health folks more, and it was a real problem, particularly when we tried to get out the district level where RSLAF didn't have the same capabilities as say the Western area, and we needed to rely on district health officials. So all that to say, the military can have a very important role. The military worked great with the AFL, but it's got to be done in the right way, and the issue wasn't so much the capacity. There was an element of that, but it was much more what was the right role and how did they fit in with the bigger puzzle. It did look like, in the Sierra Leone case, I mean you had 250 British soldiers embedded as trainers with their military before the crisis broke, so it was a more natural and easily executed strategy to say, okay, the health ministry is a disaster. Let's push them aside for the moment and let's move to in this direction once the British had made that decision. In the Liberian case, it looked like there was much more respect paid to the civilian agencies from the get-go. In other words, the dart was put out front and center. The health ministry in Liberia didn't disappear or tank, didn't implode as it did in Sierra Leone, so they were able to get, you know, Tolbert, Neonswa, running the Incident Management Center. They were able to pull those things around the civilian structure, keeping AFL, the Armed Forces of Liberia, in the mix. It may have also been some of the caution and respect for the civilian agencies. It may have also stemmed from the crisis that came when they overplayed their hand in the quarantine in West Point in August and people were killed and became a huge episode and the minister Samokai was in crisis on that and they had to sort of pull back. In Sierra Leone case, they were running quarantines until three weeks ago. I mean, they were running forced quarantines down to the neighborhoods and districts were getting quarantined until just a few weeks ago. So it was a much more militarized setting than in Liberia. Let's get some other questions. There's a hand in the back there. Yes, please. And then we'll come up front. Thank you again for your presentation. Please identify yourself and give a quick intervention. Sure. My name is Faith Cooper. I'm an independent consultant as of two months ago. But for the past four years or so, I've worked with DOD Global Health Center to implement the U.S.-African Disaster Preparedness Program across 16 African nations. And Liberia was a priority in that. And so not only am I a Liberian native, I've also professionally worked in Liberia. In January of 2013, we were on the ground. 2014, I'm sorry, we were on the ground just as Ebola was coming out. We didn't know what it was then, but we were there unrelated to Ebola. We were there to help the government of Liberia develop its national disaster, national pandemic influenza plan. And in so doing, U.S.-African as a funding sponsor of that, the goal was to promote civil-military coordination and collaboration in terms of disaster. So I'm happy to hear you talk about Mr. Thomas Yensua, Minister Samukai, because those were the front runners of these programs. They sat in our tabletop exercises. They encouraged their various ministries to get involved. So you touched based on my question, but I'm going to ask another one. And I think for the region, it's important for us to focus on regional capacity building. And in terms of UNMAR, in your response, how did you ensure that you brought in other African nations that had previous experience? This was West Africa's first time dealing with Ebola, but we know that East Africa has some experience, Uganda, Congo, and some others. And we know that the African Union got involved a little late. But in moving forward, how do we ensure regional collaboration in capacity and capability building? Because ultimately, that's what's going to strengthen the country's response for future emerging infectious disease outbreak. Thank you. Vic, and then right down front here. Hi, I'm Vic Barbiero, George Washington University. Tony, great comments and very, very interesting perspectives on this outbreak. Endemicity. Ebola is endemic in West Africa and East Africa. I think this was the 27th outbreak that we've seen. So not the magnitude, but it's there. It kind of gets to my question, which for both of you actually, you're talking about systems. Most of the experts that I know are talking about systems strengthening now. So the question really is, could you be a little bit more specific, both you and Steve, to kind of say, what kinds of things might we do? What worries me is we still have vertical programs for polio. We have to have that. It's almost getting better, but still vertical. Even immunizations to some extent. $4.5 billion is going into Ebola from the U.S. government alone. How are we going to look at broadening the use of those tremendous assets to really prevent future outbreaks, not only in the three countries, but regionally as well? And those specifics of health systems development, I think are key that have been neglected. Why? Because it's boring. And I think that's a tragic thing. I used to be chief of child survival also for USAID, so I've got to say this, that 2,100 children die from diarrhea each day. Each day. And that's not viewed as a crisis. It's over 650,000 deaths a year. And how do we begin to meld these, the sensational side with the nuts and bolts of real health development? And last but not least, I got to make a plug. We both worked in Liberia and there's this tremendous institute called Liberian Institute of Biomedical Research that really needs some support. Thank you. Down front here. There, right there. Yes, right there. Thank you. Thank you very much for this great presentation. I'm Ordano for the International Crisis Group. I would like to get back to a comment. You made yesterday at the IPI presentation in New York. You said that there were no political or security aspects to the mission, but how would UNMEI reconcile its role with regard to the physical risk faced by health workers, for example, during the Guinea incident, the mandate of UNMEI resistance, non-compliance with quarantine, or competing bilateral agendas. Thank you. Thank you. Fascinating discussion as a public health professional. Sorry, my name's Louise Leach. I'm a public health consultant. I'm currently working with the Gavi Alliance. Fascinating as an ex-UNISOM staffer as well. But we have a dichotomy here. You were talking about not having cookie cutter responses to now building capacity in these countries post-UNMEI, yet we need completely community tailored responses. So how do we address the dichotomy of strengthening healthcare systems at community level, but with limited resources? Thank you. Thank you. Right behind here. Yes. Hi. I'm Aviva from American University. Some curious, what's the appointment process and based on what criteria when the Secretary General built your team? Thank you. Okay. We're getting towards the end of the clock right now. One last quick question, and then we'll come back and Tony ask you to wrap up. Thank you. I'm Erica Hovaneum from the African Risk Capacity, and we provide sovereign level insurance for natural disasters. And we've been asked by our member states to develop an epidemic, an outbreak insurance product for the African member states. And so I'm wondering from your perspective, how do you think something like that could have impacted the progress of the Ebola epidemic if the countries had had access to funding earlier in May or June? And that fits in a bit with the questions about the capacity of the governments themselves in developing those capacities and how that fits in with the overall strategy. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. You got a long list. Very much. I'll try and get through it pretty quickly. Regarding the issue of, well, the regional capacity building question, but there were a few questions on capacity building. I've never done development work. I'm not an expert on capacity building. I haven't tried to do it. So except to some limit, except maybe in WFP, but we were much more about emergency operations than also. So I'm not really well placed to answer the questions about capacity building. But in terms of the regional response, the AU, I give them a lot of credit for what they did. There was a confluence of interest between the AU and drawing on some really good medical capability from the previous Ebola cases in particularly Central and East Africa. And a lot of African health experts with that experience did come to the countries. And I saw them there running ETUs in Magbente and Sierra Leone. There was a great ETU being run by Sierra Leoneans and a few of these AU experts without any real fancy international support and they were doing a great job. So I think that was a good thing. It was happening. It should continue. It would have been nice it had happened faster earlier and all that, but there were certainly some challenges in getting things up and running. I think President Mahama of Ghana also deserves a lot of credit for his role both as President of Ghana but also as Chair of the ECOWAS Commission. He, when some leaders were shutting down borders and stopping their planes from flying, he was visiting the countries. And his leadership role, I think, in the region made a big difference and when history is written about this, I think he will be and should be identified as one of the real heroes of the response. And Vic, it's a bit the same answer to you. I mean, developing the health systems and also the question on tailoring health or being able to have a tailored response versus really systematic capacity building. I'm not really well equipped to talk about how to build healthcare capacity. I know we need some build to bring Ebola to an end there, but I have worked in crises and I have some views on how to deal with crises and that includes having a tailored response that may be totally inappropriate to the longer term challenges. You don't stop one day doing one thing and start the second and the next day doing something else and you have to have a transition in and there's some back and forth. So I know enough to know that building that capacity is really important, but we also have lots of failures of effort to do that and huge amounts of weights and resources. And there's a real risk that in the case now, there are going to be the donor conferences that you were talking about, Steve, and that price tags or big dollar figures will start being thrown in about it. And everyone will think it's all about getting money and then the population will lose confidence in the government because they think, oh, they just got 500 million dollars and I haven't seen any sign of it and so there are a bunch of corrupt people sitting in the capital. So there's some real risk going ahead, but I don't have easy, easy answers to it. On the issue of unmer not having a political security agenda or mandate, that was one of the big strengths of unmer and when you have an integrated peacekeeping mission and all those agencies in there but they're not really under the control of SRSG, one reason and it's a very good legitimate reason is agencies need to maintain their distance and have their humanitarian space and if there's a peacekeeping operation carrying out security operations, perhaps in conflict with other armed groups or if there are sensitive political issues being negotiated between different groups who have very different opinions, that creates a certain image for the mission. Unmer was only about saving lives, it was only about ending Ebola and the fact that we had so narrowly defined our mandate and it was so much focused on that very indisputable objective and didn't get into the messiness of political issues or security issues I think was a real strength of ours. That didn't mean there weren't important security issues that we had to confront like in Guinea and the hostility to Ebola workers, national, international, there were security issues but we didn't have any responsibilities in terms of the mandate. In terms of criteria that the Secretary General may have used in building a team, I mean, I don't really know, he just said, as you were saying, he concluded that the crisis was bad, it was getting worse, he needed to show some leadership, he assigned some of the people and he gave us very broad remit and said basically go do it, he didn't say do this, that or the other thing, he basically said this is a crisis, it's gotta end, figure it out, go fix it and you have my 100% total support, I'll do anything, I'll call anyone, tell me what you want me to do. He was really strong publicly on it but behind the scenes I think he showed really excellent leadership in supporting the effort. Last question, I can't believe you're from A or C, African risk capacity for people who don't know it is a brilliant, brilliant concept and entity that have done incredible work and should get all kinds of rewards for what they've done and their director and chief of staff came to Unmere and helped us out and I was very pleased to see this proposal to have an insurance scheme for future types of crisis like this and I do think if it had been in place it would have had an impact. In the designed way that is now being discussed and presented to member states which would provide governments with resources at an early stage but even more importantly probably in identifying this as an issue early on that needs high level attention Ebola needed a lot more attention in April, May, June and had this capacity been in place I think it would have helped to draw the kind of attention that was necessary that wasn't being paid to it back then so A or C is a great, great, great outfit I think what you're doing is excellent and I think it will, assuming it gets established be helpful in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Well Tony, this has been exceptionally rich you've been very forthcoming and candid and insightful we thank you for your service in this period this was a tough assignment we're very grateful for everything that you did do in this role which is a very important role and we're very grateful that you've come here today to be with us to share your experiences so please join me in thanking Tony. Thank you.