 For this particular program on the Middle East, West Africa, North Africa and the Sahel, some of our speakers who were supposed to be here had to leave for different reasons. So we have to do without Miguel Angel Moratinos, former Spanish Foreign Minister, who you saw yesterday in the Latin America panel. We have to do without Fatala Sigilmasi, the Moroccan diplomat and former president of the Union for the Mediterranean, who would certainly have given an important input on the Moroccan perspective and cooperation across the Mediterranean. And we also have to do for reasons connected to the situation in his own country without Farid Yasin, the current Iraqi ambassador to Washington, who had to stay put in his embassy to give advice to his government about how to handle the situation to Iraq. Still, I do have a now much smaller but wonderful panel with four speakers who I will briefly introduce. We have Mohamed Ibn Shambas from Ghana, who is currently the SSG, which means the Special Representative of the Secretary General and the Head of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel. He has quite an experience in mediation and UN and AU peacekeeping because he also used to be a wars, the AU UN Joint Representative for Darfur and among other positions. He is a former president of ECUVAS, the regional organization for West Africa. We have, aside from him, Mamduh Karakalukjo, he is the founding president of the Global Relations Forum in Turkey, which is an important think tank in that country. He's an engineer by training, which probably means, and an economist, which probably knows that he, or means that he knows what he is speaking about, at least we hope so. And he will give us a Turkish perspective, actually I think his presence has become even more important through the developments of the last couple of days. We have at the end of the row, I'm sort of going west to east, Abdulaziz Sagar from Saudi Arabia, also the founder and president of a think tank in his country, the Gulf Research Center. In UN circles and circles who are interested in mediating conflicts, he's also known as a person who has been moderating the Syrian opposition meeting in Riyadh, trying to get a unified delegation of the Syrian opposition for peace talks together. Now, we didn't have peace talks then, but we had the delegation at least. And we have last, not least, Don Manian, the vice president of the China Institute for International Studies, himself a specialist in Middle East issues, who among other things has previously served at the Chinese Embassy in Ankara, if I got that right. Let me briefly, before I enter into the debate, first with my colleagues here on the panel and then with you in the audience, try to set the scene a little bit. We're dealing with a vast area here, West Africa, the Sahel, North Africa, the Middle East. So that's a region from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean, if you so wish. And if we are looking for one headline to characterize the situation in that vast area, it's probably the dissolution of order and the dissolution of order on different levels as it were. On state level, in a couple of, quite a number of these states in the region, be that in Libya, be that in Mali, be that in Syria, be that in Yemen, order being undermined either through civil war, through war or through the weakness of states, which has undermined institutions and societal relations. But we also have a dissolution on order on a regional level as some of the regional organizations that had been set up in the last decades are disintegrating or not really working well. We still have something called the Maghreb Union here in the Maghreb, but I don't think it is working in any way as a Gulf Cooperation Council has been undermined by conflicts between the member states as to what the Arab League does. We can discuss, I think, the only healthy organization among the regional organization seems to be the African Union, but we may want to discuss that at a later stage. And some people would say that there's also something to the software of the region, which we could call the normative order, which is being undermined through civil wars, through unrest, through the way that governments are dealing with their people. A normative order which always was difficult, but sort of was resting on a time-honored tradition of the coexistence of cultures that at least is being questioned in a couple of states or in parts of this region. Speaking geopolitically or strategically, if you so wish, we don't have a stable but a very shifting balance of power. We don't have a regional hegemon, but we do have various struggles over sub-regional hegemony, and we do have a high level of military or hybrid interferences into the states of the region, into Syria, into Iraq, into Yemen, into Libya, into the Sahel, by regional and international actors. I would find it difficult to mention them all, but it's certainly among them. We have Iran and Israel. We have Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We have the United States and Russia. We have some Europeans and we have some others. Paradoxically, and that is probably something we want to discuss, the regional polarization, struggles for hegemony, non-cooperation, civil wars, and the weakness of states and institutions has opened the space very widely for external influence and external actors. And at the same time, and I think that's a paradox, the situation in this area has made international actors much more hesitant to involve themselves long time in a sustainable manner. That goes for the Europeans, who in the past try to engage in long-term transformative processes. Barcelona, Union for the Mediterranean, southern neighborhood, call it whatever you like, or even the Middle East peace process, which some Europeans still call that Middle East peace process. Or it goes for the United States, which of course was known for its long-term security guarantees, which actors could rely upon, that is, as much in question, I think, as a transformative engagement of the Europeans. My first question, therefore, and let me try to make this experiment, I would ask my four friends here to all answer in sort of 30 seconds in a yes or no or yes but and no but manner. My first question, therefore, would the region be better off? Would it be less polarized? Would it be more at peace if we had less international involvement? In other words, should we rather let the states of the region sort it out, as Mr. Trump, President Trump, indicated in one of his tweets, should we rather have the states and the societies of the region sort it out by themselves? Would we be better off here? Mohammad Ibn Shambas, would you like to start? The Sahel region, within the scope of the Ekoas in particular, has been doing relatively well and with good support from partners to reinforce many areas in which Ekoas has been trying to create a strong regional approach to grow the economies, integrate the region, but also in governance and in all of these areas, it has indeed built strong partnerships with the UN, with the EU, for instance, but also with the greater Middle East. However, the new threats to the region, the form of terrorism and violent extremism, if we see that as something that also has some external dimension, is certainly negative and the region could do better without that kind of external negative impact. Thank you. Clear statement. We are going into more detail in around. Memdu, how is that with you? I mean, you're sort of on either side of the question in a way, representing Turkey here for better or worse, was you? Like to be a representative of your country today, but you are by birth, as it seems. So would the region be better off with less of that interference from outside? Well, interference is a tricky word. Indeed. Instead of interference, if we can say more constructive sort of engagement, no, it would not be better off without constructive engagement from external parties, provided that those external parties, particularly the EU and the US, adjust to the new realities of power configuration both globally and in the region. I will need to expand on that, but I can't do that in 30 seconds, so maybe we can get back to that. That's fine. Adlaziz, how is that with the external interference? Would the region be better off without? Well, giving the type of policies that the US is implementing in the region, which is a very confusing, and also giving the position of the other powers also, I think we will be happier without that intervention. What we need to see is a much more constructive engagement from their side rather than a destructive engagement which is taking place now. So it seems the bottom line for the three regional speakers is more engagement but less interference or another form of engagement. Now, Damian, you happen to be the international representative here. We don't have our European or American speakers here. So what do you think? How does it look from China, from Beijing? More interference is better or less interference is better? First of all, I fully agree with my two colleagues that we should change the terminology from interference to engagement or cooperation. I think the new terminology of cooperation is better than the terminology of interference. Personally speaking, I am optimistic about the future of Middle East or the whole Minna region because the first, all the regional countries and peoples, they hope this region should be a peaceful, stable and prosperous region. And secondly, I think since the so-called Arab Spring, nine years after the people in the region realized that they are fed up with turbulences, fed up with wars, conflicts, and they even suffered from the rise of international terrorism and extremism. So they hope such a facade or scenario should be finished as soon as possible. OK, let's leave it. By the way, I think even though to some extent the Minna region is so turbulent, but I think the majority of the countries, they still focus on the domestic economic development. Thank you. I'm going to ask you for the specific role of China in a minute, but let us try again from the people who are actually working in the region and coming from the region.