 This topic is something that's very close to my heart. After all, it was a mass exodus and a refugee crisis that has shaped who I am today. As an American of Palestinian roots, my parents lived firsthand, the experience of displacement, insecurity about their future, and desperation to provide their family with a better life. They traveled through five countries with a consistent struggle of nationality and citizenship before finally settling in the United States. As such, I was raised in a home where displacement and a thirst for return was part of our daily life, even long after we were safe and secure. So to witness firsthand the forced displacement and unprecedented numbers of people is something that was very difficult for me and many of the working group members and all of us to watch. Today, we watch as refugees internally displaced people and those who remain in their communities are ripped apart by conflict and this has become the norm in the region. It has become an enduring yet fluid phenomenon across the Middle East and North Africa and now throughout Europe. Their desperation is a reflection of the failure of the international community to address violent conflict in a sustainable way and it's given way to enormous casualties, caused widespread destruction and has rolled back development progress and threatened the welfare and security of generations to come. For each of us, the reality of the current crisis can be overwhelming, which is why we were very eager through the working group to focus on pragmatic solutions. The images are painful to see, especially for those who've been working in the humanitarian development and peace building field because unfortunately, it is not something new. The crisis continued to emerge and it's everyday people who carry the brunt of the violence in the region. This reality forced us to really look carefully and to ask ourselves some difficult questions. What needs to change within the international community's response to violent conflict? As we face a region that will be dealing with long-term, protracted conflict, how can we ensure that the international responses are moving beyond the humanitarian needs, which in themselves are overwhelming? And how can we play a supportive role to the actors in the region who are in the front lines of responding? The goal of the working group, which was focused on moving beyond refugees and rebuilding societies, was to provide a pragmatic recommendations to encouraging a paradigm shift on which international organizations have been operating. One of the main realities that the working group continued to really grapple with was the danger of assuming a brighter post-conflict future may be coming. This assumption has the potential to distract the international community from introducing programming that are needed now, even in the midst of violent conflict. It has also influenced the way we think about in-do programming, often working on a sequence of humanitarian aid, conflict management and mitigation, post-conflict stabilization development. Until today, I've yet to see a conflict that actually follows that linear sequence. So as such, we wanted to be able to address how to move beyond humanitarian needs, but we were also very careful in framing this discussion not to underplay the magnitude of the current humanitarian emergency, nor the challenge of donor fatigue that is jeopardizing entire existing aid programs to the region. The working group maintains that these grim realities can be addressed only if action is framed with a clear long-term strategy for enhancing the resilience of local populations and helping them create the basis on which societies can be built. This shift also means displaced communities can be seen as potential opportunities for host communities and local economies and not simply as burdens. It is in this vein that we tackled the issue of refugees and rebuilding societies under the Middle East Strategy Task Force. Our co-chairs, Secretary Arbri and Dr. Hadley instructed each of the conveners to ensure voices from the groups in the region and particularly also including European voices. The reality is that the strategy for the Middle East must be a global strategy. And so by design, we've ensured voices from the region and from Europe built in to the working group that we developed. It is exemplified by the members as well as by the two conveners with me being based in DC, Elie Abon being based in Beirut and we had Beatriz Palloni who is the lead author with Deep European and International Experience. As such, the working group members presented diverse backgrounds and our hope is that as a result, we were able to capture a holistic set of recommendations. Before I go into the recommendations, I did want to take a moment to thank each and every one of the working group members, some of who are with us here today and some who are following us online by being webcasted. They not only participated during the meetings, but everyone was able to send us endless reports so that we were able to see a lot of the background research that has already been done in the field. They participated on one-in-one interviews and they also shared very detailed written comments that was incorporated into the paper. It is our hope by doing this that we were able to provide a holistic, multi-directional, different perspective in terms of some of the solutions that we were able to offer. I also wanted to thank the Atlantic Council for their leadership and guidance during our working group because we recognize when we're dealing with the refugees and talking about rebuilding societies, it's not an isolated sector and one of the hopes is that through the other working groups, we will be able to really integrate an overall approach to developing a Middle East strategy and link it with the crucial challenges in the region. In keeping with the guidance of our co-chairs, I also want to mention that the event is being webcast again for regional participation and we are encouraging questions through Twitter. We have also created a hashtag, hashtag beyond refugees, so we encourage interaction from the audience members as well as questions and we're hoping that the hashtag will make that easier for everyone. Now I want to jump into some of the findings to share with you both the discussions of the working group and what we've summarized within our paper. Among our key findings is the reality that the fates of refugees, internally displaced people and other impacted communities across the region are inseparable due to four overlapping themes. First, ongoing cycles of violence and instability that have spawned re-incurrent displacement and will only continue. Second, displacement situations in the region are increasingly protracted and the most important element is to be able to deal with some of the roots of the conflict in the region. And third, the massive displacements are affecting the demographics of the entire region and must be factored into the programming so that we're not also enhancing further fragmentation. And finally, refugees in the region are mostly an urban phenomenon which has been one of the challenges in programming since in the past, a lot of the programming have been built around rural refugee crisis. The fact that the refugees and internally displaced people are dispersed throughout communities makes outreach to these populations particularly difficult. This reality helps explain one of the shifts in terms of the need to approach IDPs, refugees, impacted communities which also includes people who stay in the countries of conflict as well as the host communities as connected realities. We must be careful not to separate our responses in a way that leads to further fragmentation or the potential for further conflict. We were able to identify small successes and that was one of the real goals of the working group was to really explore what was working well. And we were able to see that among the programs that were the most successful were ones that were focusing in on designing joint community-based projects and therefore it's one of our recommendations in terms of looking at programs for the future. It was also emphasized that there is a reality when we're looking at programming that we can't simply look just for national solutions. We must aim to facilitate smaller settlements in liberated areas and stabilized areas and ensure that they do not fall back into conflict. And finally, as mentioned, the demographic shifts, it is important that we're integrating these demographic issues and programings very early on as we move forward. The reality is the longer local populations are maintained in survival mode, the smaller the chance of them becoming resilient later in the process. Our report calls for a radical paradigm shift in the international aid to the region based on five key imperatives. First, based on the success of some of the programings, better integrate the cross-border dimensions of ongoing crises in all the programming that is being developed. As I mentioned before, one of the key recommendations was for us not to conceive work as sequential but as concurrent. There was an important call, particularly coming from organizations in the region, to move towards sustainable aid beyond just shelter and food and to support people's ownership of revitalizing their own communities. And for many of us who've been seeing the recent crisis, we can see how in many ways it's the Syrians themselves who are at the front line delivering the aid. And so a crucial question is how do we support them to be able to do their programming better? It is crucial that from the very beginning, we are introducing the conditions for future social cohesion. Again, it is not something that we can wait when we're talking about cohesion and reconciliation for after conflict, but the seeds must be planted today. The working group consistently asked what could be done now to plant the seeds of full recovery and social cohesion in society that are in the midst of protracted violent conflicts and provide more sustainable, coherent, and substantive answers to the ongoing crisis. In a context where we realize that funds are limited and aid programs for the region are short of money, what we would recommend is that the priorities be centered geared towards supporting long-term resilience and the restoration of hope and dignity. Local communities often lack basic supplies and services that they also need and have repeatedly been asking for international aid that goes beyond food rations, such as the food rations and blankets. And some of the programings that we've recommended in greater detail in the report include sustainable economic aid to enable resilience, psychological support, supporting resilience and laying the ground for long-term reconciliation. Education was a key element, particularly now with a need to really initiate a no-loss generation emergency program. And an emphasis on community dialogues, particularly among local conflicts that are arising that are not tied to the national conflicts or the political dynamics but are emerging and creating friction and challenges within communities. And of course, ways to introduce security and mechanisms to stabilize the situation for refugees in a way that will allow them to be able to look towards resilience and more sustainable programming. We even went into some details about some of the strong challenges, such as identity papers and births registration, which there are some tools and mechanisms that the international community can work together with host communities who've been very welcoming and supportive in terms of supporting some of the communities that have been there for many years now. In terms of the international donors, there are at least two considerations that must be borne in mind as it seeks to enable internally displaced people and refugees and the populations affected by violence across the Middle East and North Africa to move beyond the day-to-day survival and start laying the foundations of a future life together. One of them is the way in which we are interacting with local actors. And the second is to support the support that should be giving to countries hosting a large number of refugees in the region. Everyone agreed that these two factors were going to be key in really being able to develop programs where we could begin to address the needs on the ground. Specifically, it was a reminder for us in terms of when we're talking about supporting local actors and ownership, remembering our do-no-harm policy and paying more attention to local actors in ways where we're not fueling conflict but actually providing support. We must be able to better target and organize the support of local actors with innovative and new policies and procedures that will enhance their work without adding administrative burdens while also not sacrificing the importance of oversight. It is also important that we carefully involve the diaspora who have unique skills and access to support the crisis but in some cases if we're not working with them carefully can also be used to fuel the divides. We also emphasized an important need for the supporting countries hosting a large number of refugees. Particularly and most important is really acknowledging the difficult political reality that they face every day and handling the refugee crisis as well as their own internal domestic issues. We have recommended to give priority support to host country governments as well as to support creative ways and new innovations for addressing refugee and local community needs that would be able to build bridges across different international programming and support with stronger coordination. It is time for the donor community and we would like to also include the GCC countries, the European Union and the United States to make courageous political decisions. One is by making a clear commitment to refugee burden sharing, making a long-term commitment to supporting people's resilience with an acknowledgement that humanitarian aid alone in the short term will not be able to suffice in helping the communities that are affected. And to reaffirm international community commitment to international norms, transparency and accountability on all levels. The group was very well aware of the challenge and discussed in depth that by asking for support and accepting refugees by increasing aid and is not a substitute for any political solution. Let's make no mistake the political nuances that are happening on the ground are the only way to solve the refugee crisis in the long-term. I cannot see a time or a place where the international community can meet the demands in rebuilding societies as they exist today. Let alone to think about the fact that the needs are multiplying every minute. The only solution to the problem is addressing the roots of conflict. Despite the horror of the situation, I don't wanna end with a doom and gloom. Make no mistake, the refugees are not to be addressed only as a problem. A crucial reframing needs to take place and it was a strong part of the recommendations that we made where we recognize the communities as assets as well. With 20 years working in the region, specifically on this issue, I'm amazed to see today the level of vibrant activism, a very strong emergence of civil society across the region and a strength from the region to own their problems and to find solutions. The reality is they need resources and technical skills to be able to do that. We now have counterparts across the Middle East and North Africa that have emerged at very great personal risks to themselves to initiate change, demand a better life, and it reminded the world of the importance of human dignity as a priority need. We've also been reminded that no crisis can be contained but the global community at large will be affected. The failure to invest now in the future of entire societies would lead to greater problems and more costs down the road. Supporting people's resilience now is not only a sound political strategy but it is a good economic investment that will save taxpayer money in the future while planting the seeds much needed for long-term peace and stability in the region. It is an honor now to introduce the Honorable Madeleine Albright, a woman who needs no introduction but whose accomplishments are very important to highlight. Honorable Madeleine Albright is the co-chair of the Atlantic Council's Middle East Strategy Task Force and an honorary director at the Atlantic Council's Board of Directors. She's a chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group and a chair of Albright Capital Management and Affiliated Investment Advisory Board focused on emerging markets. She was also the 64th Secretary of State of the United States. In 2012, Dr. Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor from President Obama. In 1997, Dr. Albright was named the first female Secretary of State and became at that time the highest ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Dr. Albright served as a U.S. permanent representative to the United States and was a member of the President's Cabinet. Prior to her service in the Clinton administration, she served as Jimmy Carter's National Security Council and White House staff and served as Chief Legislator Assistant to U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie. Dr. Albright is a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Affairs. She chairs both the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the Pew Global Attitudes Projects and serve as President of the Truman Scholarship Policy Board. Welcome, Secretary Albright. Thank you very much, Manal, for that introduction and thank you very much for your excellent work in directing the study and your report on it here. I thought that was terrific and I'm very pleased to be hosted by the U.S. Institute for Peace today. So for reasons known to everyone, today's forum could not be more timely. Recent events have proven once and for all that the destruction of whole societies in the Middle East is not a regional problem, but a global crisis and it's a crisis that is not only a humanitarian emergency but also a political emergency. For it's a series of political failures that have led to the grave situation that we find today. European nations have not adopted a coherent common approach to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who've already arrived with Germany building welcoming centers as Hungary erects barbed wire fences. Meanwhile, the international community has not stepped forward to provide anything near sufficient support to the countries in the Middle East who are playing host to millions of people displaced by war. And of course, at the heart of the matter lies the international community's failure to find a way to end the catastrophic violence in the region. These horrific conflicts, particularly in Syria, have given people no choice but to flee their homes and seek a new life elsewhere at considerable risk to themselves and their families. The policy failures that have brought us to this point are clear. The solutions, however, seem maddeningly out of reach. But the situation is proving so untenable that a new consensus is emerging that we need a completely new approach to what has quickly become the largest humanitarian crisis in generations. For the past several months, Manal Omar and her working group here at USIP under the leadership of Nancy Lindborg have been spending a great deal of time thinking about what such a shift would look like in practice. And the purpose of today's event is to discuss how new strategies for resilience and recovery might be used to rebuild these societies over the long term. As Manal said, her work will feed directly into the project that Steve Hadley and I are co-chairing at the Atlantic Council, the Middle East Strategy Task Force, which is taking a deeper look at how to address both the causes and symptoms of the broader crisis in the region. Of course, even as we take a wider lens here today, we can't ignore the urgent needs on the ground, both in the region and in Europe. And for that reason, I'm especially pleased by the composition of today's panel. Nancy Lindborg not only serves today as president of the US Institute of Peace, but also was a longtime president of Mercy Corps. She is one of the leading global voices on issues of transition, democracy, and civil society conflict and humanitarian response. David Miliband is the president of the International Rescue Committee, an organization which is leading efforts on the front lines of the humanitarian response. And he's not only the former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, but is himself the son of refugees. We will also hear a unique perspective from the region today from Antoine Frém, the mayor of Junier in Lebanon. All of our panelists today bring with them a range of perspectives shaped by their personal experiences with these issues. And if I may, I would like briefly to share mine. As many of you know, I was born in Czechoslovakia just two years before Hitler's troops marched into the capital city of Prague. My father was a diplomat and a strong supporter of democracy. So my parents and I fled to England, which is where we spent the Second World War. I was eight when the war ended and we returned to Prague. And then the communists took over and my family was forced into exile in a new and welcoming home, the United States of America. And I will never forget sailing by the Statue of Liberty on November 11th, 1948. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. For much of my life, I've been described as a refugee, which is accurate, but in contrast to many who came to America before and after, my family was not a hardship case. We didn't have to escape through barbed wire. We didn't have much money, but we did come on diplomatic passports. And so I can't pretend to know what it's like to endure even a fraction of what so many millions of people are going through today. But I do know what it's like to be uprooted and to be unable to return home. And I also know what an important role the United States must play on these issues. One of the special privileges I've had in life has been to preside over swearing in ceremonies for new citizens. And I'll never forget someone who came up to me afterwards and said, isn't it incredible that a refugee could be sworn in by a secretary of state? To which I replied, isn't it incredible that a refugee could be secretary of state? I have long said that Americans are the most generous people in the world, but we do have the shortest attention spans. And when it comes to global crisis today, I fear that too many in the United States believe we can insulate ourselves from the world's problems and leave it to the countries of the region and Europe to sort out. The idea that we can stand aside or wait for others to act is an illusion mocked by the lessons of history. It would be naive to expect that a solution to this crisis will arrive soon or that when it does take shape, it will be implemented quickly and without further pain. But it will not come at all if we fail to uphold our own standards and values and the situation will get much worse if we don't take action now. This is not a task we can accomplish alone, but it is a responsibility that we cannot in good conscience ignore or refuse or accept. I am wearing a pin of the Statue of Liberty for a good reason today. Thank you all very much and I now look forward to the discussion and Manal why don't you come up and introduce the rest. Thank you and I've been tasked to introduce our very esteemed and honorable panel which also needs no introduction but their accomplishments are definitely worth highlighting. Starting with Dr. Stephen Hadley who is the Co-Chair of the Atlantic Council's Middle East Strategy Task Force and he's the Chairman of the USIP Board of Directors. He completed four years as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs on January 20th, 2009. In that capacity he was the Principal White House Foreign Policy Advisor to the then President George W. Bush, directed the National Security Council staff and ran the Interagency National Security Policy Development and Execution process. From 2001 to 2005, Hadley was the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor. Welcome Dr. Hadley too as the moderator. Next we would like to welcome David Miliband who's the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee where he oversees the agency's humanitarian relief operations in more than 30 war-affected countries and its refugee resettlement and assistant programs in 25 United States cities. From 2007 to 2010, Miliband was the 74th Secretary of State and for Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, driving advancements in human rights and representing the UK throughout the world. In 2006, as Secretary of State for the environment, he pioneered the words first legally binding emissions reduction requirements. He was a Member of Parliament for South Shields from 2001 to 2013. As a son of refugees, he brings a personal commitment to his work with IRC. Welcome. I would like to invite Nancy Lindberg to this stage. Nancy Lindberg was sworn as President of the US Institute of Peace in February 2015. Prior to joining USIP, she served as the Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at USAID. From 2010 through 2014, Nancy Lindberg directed the efforts of more than 600 team members in nine offices focused on crisis prevention, response, recovery and transition. Ms. Lindberg, let, welcome. I see you're moving. And last but not least, we would like to welcome Dr. Antoine Frim. He's the Mayor of Junior Lebanon. As Mayor, Dr. Frim is on the front lines of Lebanon's response to the Syrian refugee crisis, giving him first hand experience in dealing with the challenges the crisis has created in cities across his country. He is a strong advocate of humanitarian action and a firm believer in social responsibility. Mr. Frim is a Vice Chairman of the Industrial Development Company headquartered in Lebanon and has over 40 years working experience in the packaging and paper board industry and has a wide range of experiences in this industry in the US and international. Welcome, Dr. Frim. Let me welcome the panel for joining us on the stage and let me welcome all of you who are participating in the audience or by the miracles of modern technology. Let me just outline briefly what we're going to do for the balance of the afternoon. We're gonna hear from each of our three panelists. They will talk about the issues that Benal has so ably framed up from their respective perspectives. They will speak for about 10 minutes each. We're then gonna proceed to questions from the audience. I'm gonna first call on a couple members of the audience who have a special perspective on these issues to give them an opportunity to comment. And then we are gonna take questions from the audience. During the course of the presentations as you have questions, you should have gotten cards as you come in and we would ask you to write your question on the cards, send it to the aisle and we will have runners on the aisle who will pick them up and bring them down to Jessica Ashoo and she will then feed them to me. We will try to get through as many questions as we can. We'll try and keep the questions short. We'll try and keep the answers short and not every member of the panel will need to answer every question and we'll try to get through as many of them as we can and we will conclude at about 425 sharp. So that's how we propose to proceed. Again, thank you for being with us and let me start in terms of comments with you, Nancy Lindworth. Great, thank you, Steve. And nice to see so many people here. You know, my hope is that even as we are having this discussion against the backdrop of the crisis in Europe, which as Dr. Albright mentioned, was unforeseen as this event was planned. It serves to help us refocus attention, resources and energy on addressing this critical issue in the region that is really at the roots of the crisis that we're seeing. I'm just back from Iraq two days ago where I had an opportunity to meet with a number of displaced people, primarily women in some of the minority groups in Erbil and Northern Iraq, and listening to their stories where about a year and a half of displacement from Mosul and surrounding areas when ISIS rampaged through Iraq. You know, they are swallowing those daily indignities of being displaced. They are without work often. They are living in containers and tents. They have terrible stories of trauma. I mean, they really illustrate why so many people are taking that incredible risk of going to Europe against great, great odds and danger. And they've only been displaced for a year and a half, whereas when you move over to the Syria crisis, we're now in our fifth year. And so it just underscores how important so many of the recommendations are as we look at how to deal with this extraordinary crisis that has really, I think, brought our attention back to a crisis that has gone on for so long that you become a bit numb to it. And it is still very present and still very live for those in the region, particularly the neighbors of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, who are hosting such an extraordinary burden of refugees, and displaced people. One in five in Erbil, in Kurdistan where I was, is a displaced person. I think it's one in four in Lebanon, which is a really unimaginable ratio to consider in either Europe or the US. So the paper outlines some really important ways to think about a crisis where clearly people are not going to go home anytime soon in Syria. And this is against a global statistic that the average displacement is now around 17 years. And it really pushes us to think differently about how we provide that assistance. And I was particularly pleased at the ability to highlight the ways in which we enable the building of resilience and the building of social cohesion and addressing the personal trauma, all of which are critical for these people to have a future life with hope, whether they stay out of their country of origin or whether they eventually go home. But this isn't easy. And most of the recommendations in the paper, I would say, are not new. These are ways in which the humanitarian community has tried to shift to rethink in a time of protracted crises, not just in the Middle East but around the world and many countries of Africa. How do we do a better job of addressing these protracted crises? And so I want to offer four reasons that I think we are really challenged in pushing forward on what I think are very wise recommendations in the paper. And the first is that what we have right now is the driving by the Syrian crisis, by the Iraq crisis of a global displacement, where you have two record levels. So we now have about 60 million people who are globally displaced by conflict, which I understand is about the population of Italy. So it's as if the entire country of Italy is out of their homes. And there is simply not enough money in the system to do what we have collectively pledged to do to provide that kind of assistance. And there is, right now, the UN has only been able to raise about 38% of what is a really unprecedented appeal for the Syria crisis of $7.4 billion and about half of the $704 million required for Iraq. And this is also the kind of crisis that it's very hard to supplement government funding with private funding. And I'm sure David can verify that you probably raised more after the Nepal earthquake or the Philippines typhoon in one day than you've done for much of the Syrian crisis. We would have done, but we announced that we weren't doing programming in Nepal. So we didn't do anything for Nepal. Your point is a really, really good one. I mean, these crises are too complex. They're too complicated to mobilize the private donors that are the backbone of a response to a natural disaster. And so we also, there's been a great deal of effort over the last five years to engage a broader set of governmental donors, besides the US, the European Union, both collectively and as the EU, Japan, and sometimes Australia. Beyond that small group of donors, there's not a consistent and generous contribution to the humanitarian system. And so we are just not raising enough money to do everything that we would like to do, meet basic needs as well as build resilience. The second big barrier is the institutional architecture of providing assistance does not lend itself to quickly moving into these new ways of providing assistance. And Manal made the point about the importance of thinking in a protracted crisis of more simultaneous approaches as opposed to sequential. That you need to move now with education, with livelihoods, with psychosocial, not do food and shelter now and the other pieces later. That's hard in a system where there's not enough money. And when you have an institutional landscape that has proliferated over the last 50 years to have very large stovepipes that make that difficult, I will note that over the last five years there has been big progress. And I wanna just quickly note a couple of successes. In Lebanon, WFP, HCR, and the World Bank are working very closely with the Ministry of Social Welfare to provide assistance to vulnerable Lebanese who have been hosting. And there's also been a lot of work with HCR and WFP to combine efforts so that they are delivering cash assistance to refugee populations and getting greater cost efficiencies and, by the way, improved dignity for the refugees. And WFP estimates they've raised about a billion dollars back into the local economy by providing cash instead of food to the refugees, which, footnote, this is a problem with the way USG still delivers food assistance, longer conversation. Thirdly is that there's failure in the effort to really move on education. And I would just note that there was an effort to galvanize everyone around a campaign called No Lost Generation, which has sputtered. It really hasn't gotten the kind of funding and attention, and with the number of children who are displaced, who are not attending school, as an activist in Kurdistan told me, we have seven camps, we have seven time bombs waiting to go, we've got to be thinking about the future of these children. Country policies are often a big barrier when you have, understandably, prohibitions to go to school or prohibitions to work, even with all of those other problems solved that's an issue. And it's an issue really regardless of what country and it's a big political conversation to have. And then finally is the ongoing rampant insecurity and the festering of the conflict at the heart of this crisis that makes it so impossible for people to go home. So I offer those because it does, I think, however, to end on a slightly more positive note that this is catalyzing a rethink that we can move on those advances that we've already seen, that we need to use this to really push forward what a lot of people are thinking about in terms of how we do assistance and take this to the next level. And a part of that is refocusing our development assistance not just on health and agriculture and economic assistance, but really on that ineffective and illegitimate governance that drives so many of these conflicts at their very heart. Thank you. Thank you, Nancy, very much. David Milliman. Thanks very much, Steve. It's a real pleasure and privilege to be here with this distinguished panel and to congratulate the Atlantic Council and the task force on the work they're doing. I just want to talk about three things in my 10 minutes. First of all, what's going on in Europe. Secondly, address the question of how the international community and local players need to respond to this extraordinary refugee influx into the neighboring states of Syria. And thirdly, say a little bit about the absence of political process to bring any sense of hope that the war will come to an end. So that's about three minutes for each and apologies for being very superficial in the process. Look, I've just come back from Lesbos, which is a beautiful island that's part of Greece. It's a tourist haven and at the moment it's receiving half of the refugees arriving in Europe are coming through Lesbos. That's two to 3,000 people a day coming through Lesbos. Lesbos has more refugees in a day than the United States has admitted from the Syria conflict in the last four and a half years. So that's the scale of the challenge that exists in Lesbos. At one point 10 days ago, there were 25 to 30,000 refugees on Lesbos because the tourists were filling up the ferries going off Lesbos. So refugees couldn't get a ticket to get off Lesbos. At the moment, neither the Greek government nor the European Union nor I'm sorry to say the UN are providing any kind of effective services for the refugees arriving. If you land on, if you're lucky enough to survive the dinghy journey from Turkey to Lesbos, you will be, you will arrive on a beach in the north of the island and you'll be expected to trek 40 kilometers to the transit camp in the south of the island. There is no proper bus service. So when we drove to Mitalini, from Mitalini to Molovos on Sunday afternoon and found 250 refugees standing at a bus stop in the north of the island, some of them said they'd been waiting there for 24 hours. And these are families with kids who have got all the traditional elements that you'd expect from an industrialized society because these are Syrians in the main. They've got diabetes. They've got a range of other chronic conditions. And so in the world's richest, largest single market, you've got levels of need that are extraordinary and frankly appalling. And the point I want to make is that the current uncoordinated, haphazard, feeble European response to this crisis is not just threatening the refugees. It is threatening an extraordinary institution which is the European Union. Because what you're seeing now is a daily arms race between different countries in the east of Europe to move from fences, to water cannon, to tear gas to keep refugees out. And I think it's very, very important that one understands the interaction here of policy and politics. And the politics is going in the wrong direction. And I think that the threat to the most basic norms and values of the European Union is very, very substantial at this stage. And until there is an effective system, I don't like to call it burden sharing because that falls into the trap that Manal mentioned of always seeing refugees as a burden. But until there's an effective system for distributing refugees across the 28 states of the European Union, I'm afraid we're going to face what I call a beg and my neighbor approach that is very, very dangerous. And it's frankly a race to the bottom at the moment. So there's a big need for some of the richest countries in the world to step up and frankly the US has got to step up as well on the refugee resettlement front. Let me talk a bit about the neighboring states because Nancy's absolutely right, four and a half million refugees, the vast bulk of them in the neighboring states of Syria. And it's always important to remind ourselves as a Western audience, 85% of the world's refugees are in poor countries, not in rich countries. For all the fuss that you hear, I mean there's a great debate going on in the country I'm from in the UK at the moment, about 3,000 to 5,000 people who are in Calais trying to get to the UK. 85% of the world's 20 million refugees, 40 million internally displaced people are in poor countries, not in rich countries. Now in the case of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, I want to make one point to start with. And that is that there's a fiction, which I'm afraid unites donors and hosts. And the fiction is that there's a temporary problem that needs a temporary response. Whereas actually the truth, and the people of the neighboring states know this, and the refugees know it, the truth is that this is not a temporary problem, it's a long-term problem. And to deal with a long-term problem, you have to be far more radical than when you're dealing with a short-term problem. If you're dealing with a short-term problem, you can put on a sticking plaster. If you're talking about the influx of one in 10 of the population, never mind one in four of the population, you're talking about a real problem of a different sort, and a solution needs to be of a different sort. And I want to urge the task force that Madeleine and Steve are running to be as radical as possible. Because the policies that define refugee response come from a world of temporary displacement where people are in refugee camps in stable settings before they go home. Whereas the truth is we're talking about long-term displacement in urban areas, not in refugee camps, that's going to require a really different approach. And one of the things that we're developing in the IRC, we're an agency which over its 80 years has developed services of education, health, child protection, water and sanitation. The first question we're asking before we deliver services is, why not give out cash? At the moment, less than 3% of the global humanitarian budget goes in cash distribution. Not necessarily literally cash, but it could be electronic money. We did a study in Lebanon of the distribution of 90,000 people of $100 a month, and compared it with a sample. What it showed was that for every dollar you gave out, $2.16 rotated in the local economy, that was Nancy's point. You empowered local people so that they made choices for things that they actually wanted rather than things that they were given that they didn't necessarily want. There was actually very striking evidence of decreased social tension within families but also between refugees and host communities. And cash is not going to be the answer everywhere. Money is not going to be the answer everywhere. But I think that it illustrates a really important point which is that we have to think, not just about NGO solutions or public solutions, we've got to think about public-private solutions. We've got to think about social interventions but also economic interventions. And my inspiration about this, I hope this doesn't sound completely ridiculous, but if you think back to after the Second World War, what was the Marshall Plan? The Marshall Plan was a plan that had a social element but also an economic element and, at frankly, a cultural and an educational element. It brought together public and private sector in a remarkable way. And I'm really looking forward to hearing the mayor speak because it strikes me from my visits to Lebanon that the challenge for that country is to align short-term response to the number of refugees with medium-term renewal of the country. I mean, Lebanon has big needs even before the refugees arrived. The host populations want to see addressed. And I think the absolute key to making this an acceptable situation is for there fundamentally to be a deal with countries like Lebanon, which is to recognize that they do have national needs for economic and social modernization that existed before the refugees arrived. And so as long as Western countries are asking them, keep your borders open, let the refugees come in, there's got to be the other side of the deal, which is if they accept the refugees, they've got to get a different order of magnitude of flow of public and private support for meeting their own needs. And it's got to be over a five to 10 year horizon rather than a five to 10 month horizon, which is what most of the grants are on at the moment. So move from the drip feed to a genuinely strategic approach and use the economic side as well as the social side to try to make the situation palatable. Let me just finish off on the following point, third point I wanted to make. Humanitarian organizations can staunch the dying, but it takes politics to stop the killing. And what is most remarkable to me about the Syria crisis is not even the four and a half million refugees, the 280,000 absolute minimums, probably double that, 280,000 officially who've been killed. The most extraordinary thing after four and a half years of tumultuous war is that there isn't a political process of any integrity at an international level to bring it to a close. It's absolutely extraordinary. There's one UN official, very experienced and laudable official, Stefan de Mistura, who's working to try and achieve some temporary ceasefires, but the permanent members of the UN haven't found a contact group to engage with him. There is no contact group. There's no regional grouping of countries that's engaging in a systematic way. And so there is no political process at all. And so we have inside Syria a war without end. And we also have a war without law where the refugees I met on Sunday and Monday and Tuesday in Lesbos, many of them were coming straight from Syria, by the way. They hadn't spent a year or two in neighboring states. They were coming straight out of Syria. And what they told me was, one man said to me, look, Aleppo is hell and I have to escape from hell. On the one hand, you've got barrel bombs from Assad. And on the other hand, you've got the terror of ISIS. And frankly, it's not surprising that people are trying to escape. And a war without law means that barrel bombs are being dropped on Assad's own citizens. And I think there's a really fundamental, not just a moral question, but an instrumental and political question as well, which is how much longer is it tenable and tolerable for permanent members of the Security Council to pass resolutions on humanitarian aid and then not see them implemented? Because the situation inside Syria is worse today than when the UN resolutions on humanitarian aid were passed. And how much longer is it tenable and tolerable for there to be no political process at all? Obviously, we are engaged as a humanitarian organization day to day in trying to help provide a modicum of dignity for people. But frankly, we're fighting an uphill battle in the absence of any kind of sustained political engagement. And I think it would be a pity if we didn't, in this meeting, as well as reflecting on the vital policy measures that are essential, also send out a message that the absence of political engagement, essentially the turning away from the world's running sore, is not just making it worse, but is actually untenable. Thanks very much indeed. Thank you, David, very much. Mayor Fram. Okay. It's a great pleasure to be here today among such distinguished panelists to talk about a subject that has been on the headlines for the newspaper lately. As the Syrian War entered into its fifth year and with a big crisis of refugee, Lebanon has now 1.2 million refugees, meaning that out of every four Lebanese, one is Syrian. Just to give you an idea, Lebanon is an overpopulous country. Its density is 478 people per kilometer square. Now with the refugee, we become 600. To put things into perspective, the United States is 33% per square kilometer. Saudi Arabia is 30, Turkey is 100. So just imagine if the US gets 90 million refugees overnight. This is just to put it into the picture how we are living in Lebanon. Now we also have other problems in Lebanon. We have a huge government deficit. We are above $60 billion in debt. You know, we have been unable to elect a president. We have been unable to have a parliamentary election. And on top of that, we have to deal with the sectarian tension that are important into the country. We already have our own problem, but plus we have to deal with the sectarian tension. You know, and Lebanon today is a quasi-stable state. It's not a very stable state. It's a quasi-stable. And it's surrounded by countries such as Iraq, Syria, who are having their own problems. And we have the big fighting in Syria. And as I say, when elephants fight, the grass gets hurt. So, and we happen to be in this case. As a mayor of the city of Juni, you know, it's a city of about 200,000 people. We are facing certainly serious major problem, which I'd like to list here. First, what we have tried to do with the refugees. We have installed a new facility with the national security service of the central government, whereby every Syrian who is in the city will have to come into this center, get fingerprinted, get his paper, get his working permit, and get his residency permit. So in this way, we can control who we have in the city. Second, we have created a meeting point whereby Syrian laborers who like to get a job, they meet in one place, the contractor will come in, and basically they are building contractors because most of the Syrian deal with buildings. So the contractor comes to this meeting point and select the people who wants to work and they are properly documented. We have provided financial assistance to the public schools so in order to accommodate some of the refugees. However, we have the following problem which has resulted. Now number one, we have increased poverty and hygiene problems. Most refugees are living in unfinished building. Some of the building have no walls, some of the building have no toilets, so you can imagine the hygiene problem that are resulting. Second, there is a competition for job and business. The Syrians refugees are replacing the Lebanese workforce in many places. You go to restaurant now and the waiter serving you has a Syrian accent and this is creating a job loss for Lebanese. And many of the Lebanese now, and especially the talented one, are immigrating. So we have a negative effect in this situation. We have increased prices and shortages. For example, people cannot afford anymore to pay rent because some of the Syrians has created a crisis in housing and the rents have been elevated. Some Lebanese family are unable to pay the rent. Also, we have a problem with healthcare services. Our hospitals are all private. There is some dispensary in the city which are run by NGOs. But they cannot offer the quality of healthcare that is required. So there is a problem here, especially that the Syrian people have no money to pay. I think the most critical is the educational sector. Our public school cannot handle the amount of refugees. We barely can service our local people. Even though some high schools or some schools are running second shifts to accommodate some of the refugees. And I would like to hear to highlight that we're gonna be ending up with the lost generation of Syrians who are completely illiterate. And what does this mean? This means this is fertile ground for terrorism and radicalism. Riyadh refugees, adults, have all undergone military training because in Syria, the military service is compulsory. So all these people can be one day a dormant cell for future destabilization and terrorist activity. Impact on our infrastructure. Our city sewage system and municipal solid waste is unable to handle it. We have in our flow and our sewer line have increased by 20%. Our playgrounds and parks are overcrowded by refugees causing friction among the people and causing hygiene problems. When we talk about security and safety, we have seen increased number of theft. We have had friction with the local population causing some violence. In view of the above, what we have done? Number one, we have established checkpoints in the city. So we make sure that every Syrian in the city is well documented. Second, we have increased our police force to patrol the city around the clock. The cost of putting an end to the Syrian crisis is much less than the cost that will be paid by countries hosting this influx of refugee with a large generation susceptible to radicalism and potential terrorism. We should all agree that Lebanon alone cannot solve the refugee crisis. And the international community must extend massive support to help Lebanon. In Lebanon, we have 18 religious community. And it's essential for Lebanese survival. This is a pluralistic society. Any delicate demographic imbalance is a danger of being disrupted should the presence of the refugee becomes enduring. Lebanon is not a country. It's a message, as John Paul II stated, Pope John Paul stated. And it's the duty of the Lebanese and the international community to keep Lebanon the message alive. Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank the panel members for their comprehensive and sober assessments of what's going on. I want to note and the mayor noted the burden that the refugees are posing for Lebanon, a similar burden almost as being born by Jordan, which has, this is just the latest of waves of refugees that have gone into Jordan. And Turkey is another country that is taking an enormous burden in terms of the refugees from Syria. And I wanted to give Ambassador Kilic, who's with us an opportunity if he wishes to make a comment for the Turkish perspective on this problem. And I think we have microphones. If we could bring one down, give it to the ambassador. That would be great. You can do whatever you would like to do, however, you would be comfortable. That was very good. I wish I could do that. Please. Thank you very much for providing this opportunity. I didn't want to address the panel, but I wanted to address the audience on this important issue. First of all, I would like to thank the Atlantic Council for this important event and the working group for the report that they have prepared. It's a timely event and a timely report on a very important issue. Turkey has opened this border in 2011 to all the refugees that would like to take refuge into Turkey from the atrocities of Bashar Assad. And regardless of their religion and ethnic background, we have taken all the people that would like to take refuge in Turkey. And today, the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister announced that the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey have reached 2.2 million. And the money that we have spent in order to take care of the necessities of the refugees have reached to 7.5 billion US dollars. And the international aid that we got so far from the international community is a mere 350 million US dollars. Ladies and gentlemen, the international community has performed poorly. Not in view of the crisis ongoing crisis in Syria, but also in taking care of the necessities of the refugees. Humanity has been killed on the streets of Syria on a daily basis. But the dignity of those people is being killed on a daily basis in the countries that they have taken refuge. So it's a high time for the international community to assume their responsibility and to uphold the values that make us human beings for taking care of the necessities of the refugees. That child, Aydan, three years old, he washed up to the shores of Turkey in the region. But that was not the body of Aydan. That was the humanity that washed up to the shores of the Mediterranean coast. It is high time for the international community to take action. And the action should be on threefold. First, we have to take care of the necessities of the refugees in the neighboring countries. And second, we have to take the necessities of the internally displaced person in Syria. We shouldn't turn a blind eye to the necessities of those people in Syria. And third, we have to make sure that we enable the conditions in Syria so that those people will be able to return back to their original areas of living and live with the human dignity. Thank you very much. Ambassador, thank you very much. Ambassador Sir Peter West-McCott is here, the UK ambassador to the United States. And we've talked a lot, and there's a lot in the news about the response of Europe and the pressure this is putting on the EU. I wonder if I might invite you to make some comment from that, either from the floor with the mic or at the podium, as you so choose. Steve, thank you very much. This is indeed a sobering discussion and it's great privilege, but also deeply disturbing to be in front of these extraordinary experts telling us just how serious the problem is. I just want to add a couple of points. The first is, of course, the immediate requirements to deal with a humanitarian crisis. The European Union didn't make this crisis. The European Union is doing what it can, inadequately, as you have been saying, to deal with it. Some are showing extraordinary leadership. Germany believes it is going to have probably a million refugees on its territory alone. Others have got 100, 200,000 already on their territory. People are doing different jobs in different ways. We've got the Royal Navy trying to pick people up from the boats in the Mediterranean where they have taken their lives into their hands to try to cross to safety. We're taking another 20,000, it's perhaps not more than, it's more than a drop in the ocean, but it's nothing like enough to deal with the size of this crisis in the United Kingdom. We actually have produced more than anybody else except America in terms of money for the refugee camps of billion and a half dollars so far. I think in our different ways, the European Union governments are trying to come together to face this extraordinary crisis. We know that what we've done so far is not adequate. That's why Angela Merkel has called us to a extraordinary European Council on Wednesday of next week. It's why John Kerry is in London today. He's got a meeting tomorrow with his British counterpart. He's talking to a number of the other key players. And he's joining us in saying to some of the countries with deep pockets in the region, you've got to come up with more of the money simply to help provide the basic necessities for the millions of people in camps, in Turkey, in Iraq, in Jordan, in Lebanon. The statistics you've all given are an extraordinary reminder of the burden on those countries and the extraordinary humanitarian response they have shown so far, but they need a lot of help and we totally understand that. And I think we all recognize that we have to do better. So there's the immediate humanitarian response that the international community has got to come up with and there is clearly a lot of scope for doing a lot more and we recognize that. And then the second point is the one that David Miliband was making and indeed others reflected upon. This is already a long-term problem. This is already changing the demography and indeed the character of the European Union and of much of the Middle East. It's not gonna go away tomorrow. We need, therefore, a political and a strategic approach. But in the short term as well as the medium term, we have to get the political track going again. One of the very minor, if you like, silver linings to the cloud of recent developments and of the pictures of the small child washed ashore on the beach near Bodrum in Turkey is that I think it has provided a catalyst for an attempt by different governments to look afresh at the policies we have been adopting or not adopting over the last four years of the Syrian crisis. Ash Carter this morning was talking to the Russian Defense Minister. Will that help in Syria? Who knows, but it's something that hasn't happened for a long time. John Kerry has spoken three times in 10 days to the Russian Foreign Minister. We are all looking afresh at ways in which we can engage with the key governments to try to bring a political track back into process, particularly for Syria. But of course it goes beyond that. There are refugee problems of horrendous proportion flowing from Iraq next door. There's Libya, which we haven't talked about very much, but where that too has got a problem area. It's both a transit country and a source of many refugees desperately seeking for a new life. That's why my government and many others are doing what they can to try to bring together an effective government of national unity in Libya and to help the Libyans build the institutions to deal with that thing. So we need the two things. You're absolutely right. We need an immediate humanitarian response, but we have to get the political track back into business as well. And we are doing what we can and we're gonna be doing a great deal more in the weeks to come. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador, very much. We're now gonna move to questions that have been submitted by the audience or by Twitter. Most of them are on the cards, but President Cody of the Task Force on Lebanon is here with us and asked to make the first question. Mr. President. Thank you very much. I'm directed to Mayor Friend. And first of all, I'd like to welcome you to the United States. Mayor, do you see a quote unquote quick solution to the resettlement of Syrian refugees, particularly as it affects Lebanon? And in this regard, how is Lebanon's economy functioning given the crisis that the Lebanon's facing today? Just to put it in perspective, Lebanon is 5% the size of Syria, 5%. So I'm sure if the international community, the United Nations, who could find a place in Syria, which is 5% of Syrian territory and make it a safe place, not an off-line zone, make it a safe place where people from Syria, instead of being refugee in foreign countries, they can be displaced in their own country. And I'm sure if there is a serious effort, one could find 5% of Syria, which he can make it safe. Regarding your economic question, George, you know, Lebanon borders now, there is no vital routes. Before Lebanon, we used to count a lot to export to the surrounding Arab country, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. But today, there are no vital routes. So we have no land routes to have access to this country. So our industrial, our industries and agricultural products, we are unable to ship. Now we are thinking to use UC, but you know, once you start shipping by sea, you become incompetent and you lose this special service of doing it door-to-door. So we have a serious economic problem because there are no vital routes to our regular markets. Thank you. Thank you very much. The first question I'd like to put Nancy to you, if I could, it comes from Tara Siegel of Georgetown University. And her question is, how do you sell long-term resilience to host countries overburdened with refugees that actually have no interest in hosting refugees over the long term, and therefore no interest in building long-term resilience among those refugees? That's absolutely the right question. And that was one of the key barriers that I noted in terms of host country policies. You know, for all the very well-interested reasons that we've just heard from the mayor. However, I do think that the one way to sell it is to note the benefit to the host country of having refugees who have access to education, who have ability to contribute in a positive way to the local economy, to do so in the context of the kind of international assistance that both addresses some of the critical burdens often water, electricity, schools, hospitals are not built to accommodate the larger population and it's essential that the assistance coming from the international community addresses those needs, but also in the forms of cash. And so the refugees are actually facilitating injection of cash into often an overstrapped economy. So you need to, you know, so what's the alternative? The alternative is you have, as I noted before, the civil society activist in Erbil who said seven camps, seven time bombs. Because you have people who don't have access to livelihoods, education, a future hope, dignity. There are a whole new host of conflicts that can arise. Which goes to my final point and that is you also add into the mix a focus on addressing social cohesion both within the refugee community and with the refugees and the host communities so that you've got, and this is in the paper as well, you've got joint problem solving and dialogue to reduce the potential of additional cycles of conflict. Nancy, is it possible that by more attention to resilience and doing the things you said with the refugee population, it also makes it more likely that they will be able to go home and contemplate the ability of returning because they will have some confidence they can build a successful life back in their home? Well, you know, ultimately it will depend on the security of the region of, are they able to go home because they feel secure enough? And so that is what you hear over and over again is probably the number one criteria for families deciding whether they'll go home or not. However, I will note that in talking to a number of, particularly some of the minority displaced people in Northern Iraq, that they are in a real deep, deep dilemma because many of them feel like the longer they're displaced, the more their communities will dissipate, that they won't be able to maintain the social cohesion of their communities that have been in Iraq for millennia. By the same token, if they resettle, if they go overseas to Europe, they face a similar sense of loss of identity and a dissolution. So they are in utter despair in lesson and tell they're able to go home with guarantees of security. And I heard, you know, like the Yazidis are saying we want an international security for us to guarantee our safety. I mean, these are really difficult issues, but either solution is problematic for many of these communities. Thank you very much. The next question I think is for Mayor Fram and I think you talked about this a bit and maybe you wanna expand on it. This is from Gio Caracchi, a journalist with Algeria in Kuwait, and asked, do the refugees represent a demographic threat to Lebanon and Jordan? How do you then manage this in terms of your own politics? First, you know, I mean, the refugee have always presented a demographic problem for Lebanon, starting with the Palestinians since 1948. We have a million Palestinians, but there has been a decision, you know, part of our national agreement or what we call it, that we will not accept the settlement of refugees in Lebanon. This has been a fact for the Palestinians because they have the right to go back home. And this will be a fact for the Syrian. There is a general consensus in the country that no refugees will be settled in Lebanon unless this consensus is broken then we are dealing with a different problem because the Syrians refugee as a majority of a certain sect and this could create a very big imbalance between the 18 different community because then you are talking about a big majority and a small minorities and this will not be good. It will not be Lebanon anymore, you know. And Lebanon, as you know, we are an example of coexistence. If you have been to Beirut, you know, St. George Cathedral stand next to the biggest mosque. So this is something we have lived in Lebanon all the time and we sure don't want to lose it. Otherwise Lebanon will have no reason to exist. Thank you very much. Let me put this one on David Miliband to you if I could. This is from Katarina Sokau, the Katharini Greek daily question. Is the solution to the Syrian refugee crisis to build refugee camps in Europe or should we think of integrating them by giving them citizenship? Let me just say a couple of things. First of all, in respect to that question, I would not advocate a camp-based approach. I think for those refugees who are given refugee status in Europe, the key success factor is about integration, economic integration, educational integration, and therefore contribution to society. And I think that there's a lot of experience that that is actually the best route to refugee resettlement. So I don't think camps the answer. There is an issue about transit camp for registration, very short-term registration that needs to be done actually in Greece and needs to be done probably in other border states of the European Union. And I think that's the short answer to the question. Just to pick up a couple of things that others have said, I think that the balance between the interests of the refugee and the interests of the host community comes out in the starkest conceivable form in the Lebanese case because the delicacy of the constitutional construction following the Civil War is obviously of paramount importance in holding the country together and keeping the peace. Now, I think that the trick to pull off, though, is that if you follow from that principle that the refugees have got to be third or fourth class citizens or not even citizens at all, then you're storing up a lot of trouble. They're not going to be making an economic contribution. They may not be getting the education that would allow them eventually ever to go back or to go somewhere else. And you really are storing up not just a time bomb but a burden of very serious proportions. And so I think even in the most delicate situation, which is the Lebanese situation, the issue comes in starkest form in the question, should refugees be allowed to work? Because obviously in Western countries, Western countries don't allow anyone who turns up to work. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work in the European Union. Refugees are in different cases. And I think that in the Lebanese case, the mayor can correct me if I'm wrong, the danger of a formal ban on refugees being allowed to work, which is the current situation, is that they end up working in the informal market. So there's a fiction, another fiction, that refugees aren't allowed to work. There's a reality that they're working on the black market. And I think that it's really, it brings out in very, very stark form for policy makers the need not to believe one's own rhetoric, because actually people will find means of surviving. And I think that without underestimating at all the very, very difficult issues that are faced in Lebanon but also elsewhere, in the end reality triumphs. And the reality is that people are there, they're going to want to survive, they're going to actually want their kids to get an education. And that says to me that it's worth taking a five to 10 year perspective, because it's the only one that's got to purchase on reality. And I think that that's really important to hold on to. But refugees do are allowed to work in Lebanon in certain jobs, you know. Very restricted. Construction, all the construction sites are, you know, are, you know, you have Syrian worker. I think the only restriction you are having is companies where you have, you have social security and benefit, et cetera. But let me give you, I mean, it's really interesting, I'd love to do some work with you in your town on this, but we run community based education. So there are 300,000 Syrian kids who have got no place in a Lebanese school. We are not allowed to, there are prohibitions on Syrians being employed as teachers. I see, maybe because the government, because the government's going to, you know, the government will not be able to hire, you know, somebody who's not Lebanese. But private people can. Well, that's the, that's where there needs to be. Maybe government job is there, but, you know, I can assure you that if you go to any construction site in Lebanon, it's all Syrians working in the construction site. The only place where you have a problem is when you are going to work for an industrial company and you have to be part of their benefit plan, et cetera, this is the problem comes in. One of the benefits of a panel like this is particularly before we finalize the paper is it gives us, I think, some useful tasks to do. And I think, Madeleine, there's three that come from this. One, David Meliband's comment is time for bold solutions. And I think one of the things we need to do is go back and look about how we be, how we step it up a little bit in terms of boldness. Two, I think Nancy's suggestions as to why many of the recommendations of the paper have not been adopted needs to be incorporated into the paper as well. I think that's a very important reality to it. And third, I would like to see us focus on this issue that the mayor and David have been talking about, which is how do you help build resiliency and find a way to bring these refugees into the real economy, the legal economy, so they don't wander into the illegal economy with all the graft corruption and exploitation and crime that that ultimately inflicts on the host country. And at the same time, take into account the sentiments and the political requirements of a country like Lebanon. Can you have your cake and eat it too? Can you empower with economic rights without political rights? And is that sustainable? I don't know the answer, but I think this issue that you have well framed for us is something that we need to try to address in the work of the task force, because it is the question of whether a lot of this resiliency is really practical on the ground in these refugee areas. So thank you for that. In the case of Lebanon, remember, we're talking about 25% of our population is refugee. We're not talking few percent. If it was 2%, the problem would not exist, but with 25%, it's a very, very big problem for a little country like Lebanon. And the problem is the longer this goes on, the percentages build up in Lebanon, in Jordan, which has a civil problem. Turkey is big enough, so it is less of a political problem in this sense, but it has its own political problems as you could tell us, Ambassador. Let me move on. We have another question. This one is for Madam Secretary. And it's from Anush Avasyan, the Voice of American Russian Service, the Voice of America Russian Service. What are the responsibilities of the United States and Russia in this crisis, and can they work together on this current issue? And I would add, given all the divisions on the ultimate solution of Syria, is there some way that they could work together on this aspect of it? Well, thank you, and I do think we've heard that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the Russian military chief are working with each other, and Secretary Kerry has indicated that he wants to work on this. I do think that this is an area in which the United States and Russia can and should work together. I think the hard part is that, in terms of trying to figure out the political solution in Syria, because it's been mentioned now a number of times that obviously the problem isn't just what is happening in terms of ISIS or Daesh, as we prefer to call it, and Assad. Assad is the one who is dropping the barrel bombs, and so I think it's really trying to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea here. It is a very tough choice in terms of that. But I do think that it is worth looking at how they can work together, and in terms of one of the aspects that's been raised here, the United Nations is meeting as we speak. Russia is president of the Security Council. I do think that it is worth looking at some kind of a security force that you were talking about, Nancy, in terms of the possibility of, we've looked at peacekeeping. When I was there, we were looking at how to re-mandate some of the peacekeeping operations. I do think that the United Nations in some way has to try to figure out how to do this. The other part, though, that I have to say, is that one of the things that we've all, those of us that have been in the diplomatic service know, is that you have to be able to separate things. I think that we should work with Russia and Syria, but we cannot forget what the Russians have done in Ukraine. And it would be a big mistake if we decided all of a sudden to forget all that, which leads me to something that may seem not germane, but partially I think that the Central and East Europeans need to change their behavior. I think that is very important because given Russia's behavior in Central and Eastern Europe, they want help from us. And I think some of them are members of NATO, some of them are not, but all this does in fact go together. And as somebody who was born in Czechoslovakia and who spent a large portion of my life trying to figure out how to help those who were stuck behind the Iron Curtain, I think passing strange that at this stage there is not enough respect for what happens when you are stuck somewhere where you don't want to be by the Central and Eastern Europeans. We worked very hard to bring them into NATO and we worked very hard to persuade the Europeans about the EU. I do hope that they hear this because I think that that part needs to be taken into consideration also as we look at this. And then one other thing in terms of contradictions, the hard part is, I do think on the whole people want to live in the country where they were born and the longer that this takes and the integration which is essential does make it harder then to pick up and leave and go home when the situation in Syria is resolved. So I think that this is one of the hardest issues that I've seen and as we have been working on the issues on all our papers here, I think we are beginning to see the difficulty of the contradictions. And we do have to make strong recommendations but we also have to see the difficulties of it. And I would like to suggest that we reprint the mayor's paper because I think describing the day-to-day aspects of how this affects a small country I think is very, very important. It was brilliant and I do think that and it's there. I think we should use that. Steve, can I just have one note about, you know there was a hard fought UN security resolution 2165 that took several years to actually develop and pass that said there will be delivery of humanitarian assistance throughout Syria and it decried the barrel bombs and it called on members of the United Nation to act in a way that enabled less violence and more assistance to Syrians. That has not been, David, I think you referred to it. This has never been fully implemented. So what else could the Russians do? Even in the absence of the fuller political solution there are ways that you could staunch the worst of the suffering and the worst of the killing if there was just implementation of 2165. That we ought to keep in mind because that took a lot of work to pass it and actually I think that it doesn't reflect well on the Security Council that is so egregiously unsupported and unacted upon. And you know one thing just to follow up on that we'll go back to questions. The idea of a safe haven in Syria has been very much associated with desires to have a place where you could train opposition forces who are non-terrorist. That could both fight ISIS but also put pressure on the Assad regime. I wonder, and then almost as a secondary matter people have said, and it could also be an area where refugees could go and be taken care of so they would not have to leave the country. I wonder if there's a way to separate those notions and to talk about a safe zone that is not for training opposition forces but is strictly for humanitarian purposes. And whether you could then, that is something you could take to the Russians. You have to separate them. And separate it. And we have not, as we've talked about safe haven in our debate, we have not separated those two purposes. And I think the question is, is there an ocean and a possibility for a safe zone that is strictly humanitarian and that you could get the international community rally around? David? Can I just come in? It will be very, very galling for Syrians in one part of the country to still be barrel-bombed but to know that there's a safe zone in another part of the country. I think the question is, how do you stop barrel bombs being dropped on civilians in any part? Yeah. This is territory where rightly humanitarians are extremely careful in treading. And as far as I am willing to tread is as follows. It's to say that the debate about a no-fly zone has to move from slogans to details. And the detail is actually that we're talking about aeroplanes that are carrying bombs, not aeroplanes that are carrying supplies, because no-fly zone doesn't distinguish between the two. But the figure to have in mind is that, I think I'm right in saying that in May 2015, which is when the last month for which figures are available, it might be June 2015, 65% of the civilians who died died as a result of barrel bombs being dropped on them by their own government. And so the starting point for the discussion has got to be what is the international community so-called willing to do to prevent the abuse, not just of the civilians who are on the wrong end of a barrel bomb. And by the way, seven of our beneficiaries from our own programs were sent home early from work last month, the month before last, and they were sent home early from work and they were killed in their own homes. Because we thought they'd be safer at home and it turned out it was the opposite. And I think that until we're willing to address that abuse and the fact that, as Nancy so correctly points out, it's an abuse not just of the United Nations but of the nations who voted for the resolution. Because it seems to me that you've got an absolute prima facie case there. That sounds great and I'm all for that. But let's be real, there are some of us on this stage who've been calling since 2011 and 2012 for the kinds of military actions that would stop the capacity of the Syrian Air Force to drop anything in order to prevent it from doing barrel bombs. And we have been voices crying in the wilderness and it has not happened and it's now 2015. And the question is, do we need to go another four years generating more refugees and more burdens on the neighboring countries? So this is Madeline's tough choices. I'm all for doing more to stop what Assad is doing. But you know, it's been four years and it hasn't happened and the question is while we pursue that way to try to solve the crisis, is there also a way that we can make progress on these refugees and humanitarian issues? This is a tough trade off and I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer. Can I just add, if the Russians really do think that they have some influence on Assad, they can be a part of this and say, we can discuss whether you're in the government or not, but we cannot discuss it if you are dropping barrel bombs and they should use their influence that way. If the Russians wish to be seen as a normal country, I think it would be useful if they said something that made clear that barrel bombs are not the way to deal with civilians. I think, please, all for that. So let's, in this project, try to see if we can take on this issue of can we make some progress here on these difficult trades and can we do the kind of, think about options of the kind Madeleine's talked about. And we will, David, if we can, invite you to dialogue with us on this because you're quite right to focus on the barrel bomb piece. And this inconsistency, a safe haven in one part of the country when people are being, you know, killed in the most brutal fashion and other. It is, it shows the difficult choices we're forced to by this unacceptable situation. We are, we've got a few more questions. I'd like to try to get back to you from the audience. Madeleine made a wonderful statement about the responsibilities of Central and Eastern European countries, which I have not focused on in the way you had. And I think it was very useful. Turnabout is fair play. We have a question from Skyler Benedict to Georgetown University, and Joyce Karam from Al Hayat newspaper, which is, so what are the primary challenges in galvanizing the United States into shouldering its international responsibilities in regards to this crisis? And I would throw that open to anyone on the panel who can offer some wisdom in response to that question. Well, I used to speak on behalf of the United States. I do think that the United States, I think in terms of the density that you gave, and those of us that fly across this country a lot, there's a lot of space here. I do actually think that the United States needs to, we cannot ask other countries to be taking on a burden if we don't do it ourselves. And I did quote the Statue of Liberty statement on purpose. I do think that this is what we are about. And I think that there needs to be more public outcry about the fact that we can't, that we have to share in responsibility with this and calling our members of Congress and making clear that this is an American way to approach this. I think it's very good. Well, I would just note, I mean, the US has provided, I think it's $4 billion to date for the Syria crisis, plus significant amounts for Iraq. That's in addition, several billions of dollars of direct budget support, primarily to Jordan, and then additional development assistance to both Jordan and Lebanon. So the US has been a leader in providing the financial assistance. What I think the bigger question is, is what's the role of the United States in seeking to really get at the roots of this and solving the Syrian crisis? And the US was one of the leaders on this UN Security Council resolution. But none of this is really gonna solve the problem. Whether you're resettling, whether you're helping refugees in place, none of this is gonna staunch the flow of people fleeing. And so it's really, I think, looking far more seriously at the diplomatic approaches and looking at all of the tools that we have available to focus again. I think there's been a defocusing because it's gone on for so long and people are feeling so hopeless about this, that one of the possible positive outcomes of the current crisis in Europe is that it will force a refocusing of attention on this, not just on dealing with the refugees, but on dealing with how do we solve this? Let me follow up Nancy's excellent point about the diplomacy vibe, saying two things about how we deal with the symptoms. One is about the aid to the neighboring states. $4 billion sounds like a lot of money, but when it's sped over four and a half years and it's spread across four countries, there's not so much money. When it's given out in small chunks, three months at a time, it's even less money. And I think there's a real imperative for the US as the global leader in many ways of the humanitarian system to frame and offer and to build a coalition that engages golf partners and Europeans in a genuinely strategic approach to underpinning the economic and social and humanitarian conditions in the neighboring states because it's only if you have a strategic approach to it that we're going to get anywhere beyond the drip feed, which frankly is what Lebanese towns, Jordanian towns are on at the moment. And the drip feed partly comes from us, US partly comes from Europeans, partly frankly comes from the Gulf. And it comes in a different range of ways and too much of it doesn't reach the people who need it. And unless we're willing to break out of the three month cycle of short-term grants, we're not going to be able to make the kind of sustained difference that's necessary. Secondly, though, I do... I know the US gives year-long grants. It's not a long-term, but it's more than three months. But there's emergency grants which are three months and then there's one year grants and I think I can't remember the exact figure on the balance, but we're chasing our tails in the grant giving business and that's the difficulty. And we're often having to run programs and get paid for them after they've started because we've had to put our own money into them. We've done this with our education programs. I mean, the education in Lebanon, we talked about this when we had a panel here in June, is an international scandal of monumental proportions. Lebanon is not a country in the middle of war. It's a peaceful country at the moment and it's got 300,000 kids who for four years from Syria who are not getting an education. And there have been speeches given about no lost generation and still these kids are not in school. And we know how to run schools. It's not difficult. We know how to run community-based compliments to schools. But between the Lebanese government and the international community, it's stuck. And it falls between the cracks. Let's have a pilot program in June. Well, we're running. We're actually helping 5,000 kids in Lebanon but with our own money. And it's caught up in the bureaucracy of is it a state institution? Is it not a state institution? Now, for me, the failure on education in Lebanon is the prototype indictment of the international humanitarian system was if we can't organize education for kids which everyone's in favor of in a country that's not at war, what on earth are we going to be able to say to future generations? Let me just make one other point, though, about to trespass on the hospitality of my American hosts and hopefully not to get into trouble with my H1B visa. Look, this point about I'm on our bound. I mean, the IRC is an international humanitarian organization but we're also an organization which for 80 years since Albert Einstein set up the IRC in 1933 when he came to New York, we've resettled refugees into the United States. 70,000 refugees a year come to be resettled in the US. That's more or less half the global number of refugees who are resettled. But the number of Syrians is frankly pitiful. Now, three weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, the State Department said 8,000 Syrians would be resettled by the end of 2016. President Obama then said it would be 10,000. Look, the German number is 500,000 a year for the next three or four years. And for the US to continue to be a leader in refugee resettlement, it needs to take a much bolder approach. Now, I'm not saying the US should figure out the air and match the Germans, but it can do the following. The UN has said that the global figure for Syrian refugee resettlement from the region, so not those who are already in Europe, but from the region, the UN has said 200,000 Syrians a year should be resettled from the region into the richer countries of the world. Now, if the US is to continue its historic leadership role, which was to resettle half of the world's resettled refugees, that would mean the US taking 100,000 a year. And that's where the 100,000 figures come from, that a range of charities have put forward. There was a press conference this morning about this in Washington. And frankly, the 100,000 a year gets into serious policy and serious politics. And one really important point for me is on my first visit to Lebanon and Jordan in doing this job, I asked, well, why is resettling tens of thousands of people so important to you? And they said, well, I said, I can see, obviously, it makes a difference to those who are resettled. But they said, look, it's an act of solidarity with us of symbolic proportions beyond the substantive help it gives to the 100,000 that you were, the tens of thousands or the 100,000 that you helped. And I think this notion that the bar has been set by the UN, that leadership on refugee resettlement means the US taking 100,000 is one that has to be taken very, very seriously. And there are all sorts of issues where actually NGOs like MIME will be very supportive. There are security concerns. Let's address them and have them properly done. No NGO wants to see security issues flouted. There are issues about which communities should Syrians go to. There are successful Syrian American communities in the United States that are waiting to welcome these people. And I think it's really, really important not to lose sight of this refugee resettlement test, really, which has been set for all advanced industrialist countries. And by the way, I make the same. I'm on the case of the British government as well. I'm not sort of giving them a pass. But since I'm living here and running a US NGO, I really think that this is the country that set the standard for a refugee resettlement. And to keep up, it's going to have to up its game in a massive way. I think David has given us one more recommendation we ought to think about in addition to, and I want to come back to your last point. And that is, I think the point he was making was the United States should lead in a strategic approach to mobilize global resources in this cause with a particular focus on education because everybody agrees that is central. And that seems to me the kind of thing that America ought to do if it wants to show American leadership on this cause. I'd like to, David, just tease you out a little bit more because one of the questions that came from Twilight Sean of George Washington University is how can we reframe the concept of burden sharing? And you said you don't like that term because it suggests refugees are a burden rather than opportunity and an asset. But on the point you just said, on the issue of allocation, what is the right approach? What is the right formula? What is the right mechanism? So there is some kind of equity in what people sign up for in terms of taking refugees. This is going to be obviously a subject next week in the EU, but more globally, is it the UN framework that we ought to be looking to for that? What is the mechanism for getting people to step up and doing their fair share of responsibility? I've spoken too much already so let me try and be brief on this. First of all, the UN is the right overarching mechanism. Secondly, the starting point is for countries all to sign up to the 1951 refugee convention because there are 500,000 Syrians in Saudi Arabia, 150,000 Syrians in the UAE, but neither of those countries are signed up to the refugee convention so they're not part of the international distribution system. Thirdly, what's the criteria by which you allocate? It's the size of the country and the wealth of the country. And there's a very simple principle, the bigger the country, the wealthier you are, the more people you should take. I mean, it's not, it's a very rough and ready way of putting it, but that's the basis on which the US has historically been a leader of refugee resettlement. And frankly, within the European Union, that's the basis on which countries other than Germany will end up hopefully playing their part. Steve, can I just comment on the point you made about the US taking a leadership role in galvanizing others to contribute? And I just want to note that, to a large extent, enormous efforts and political capital has been expended on doing that, on getting others to step forward and contribute against the UN appeals. The no-loss generation campaign that was launched in October 2013 had a lot of support from NGOs, UN, some of the key governments. What we're not seeing is a broadening of the circle of those who contribute. We're not seeing a sustained, significant donation from others than the usual suspects of the US and the EU and Japan. And so even as those countries need to look hard at, A, how to sustain and maybe even increase the level of funding. And this becomes a congressional conversation because the humanitarian budgets of the United States have increased substantially over the last few years. And the problem is we have a global crisis. And we've only spoken today about the Syria and Iraq crisis. You've got over here getting very little attention, Yemen, Central Africa, Republic, South Sudan. I mean, this is an unprecedented strain on the global humanitarian system. So if we, the US, want to step forward, we need a partner with Congress. And we need a partner that helps and doesn't have humanitarian assistance in a more expansive application so that we can think about education, so that we can think about building resilience. And then you need others to step forward in ways that they have not. Including some of our P5, Security Council permanent members, are not really a part of this burden-sharing effort, financial burden sharing. I think Nancy has just given us a very good summary of some of the points that have come out of this. I want to, we're come to the end of our time. I'm sorry for those who submitted questions that we did not have time to ask. I want to thank the audience here in the room and the audience through the miracles of modern communication for participating and being with us this afternoon. And please join me in thanking our panel for making this a panel.