 So why don't we get started? Can everyone hear me? So all of your mics turned on. We can hear me now. Wonderful. Well, welcome back, everyone. We are now having a change in gears. I'm sorry for the delay. Senator Feingold is able to deal with the great difficulties of DRC, but Washington Traffic has proved daunting this morning. So we're delighted that all of you are here. This panel is on peacebuilding and diplomacy, challenges, and opportunities in Africa. And the challenges of peacebuilding in Africa seem overwhelming, with heartbreaking conflict going on now in South Sudan, CAR, Nigeria, and precarious situations across the Sahel, the Great Lakes, and the Horn. But today we are tremendously fortunate to have with us three of the country's most experienced diplomats and policy experts to talk about their own experiences in peacebuilding and diplomacy in Africa. You have full bios in your packet, but just to highlight, former Senator Russell Feingold in the middle is a special advisor for the Great Lakes and Democratic Republic of the Congo for the U.S. State Department. He represented the State of Wisconsin for 18 years, and during this time served on and led the U.S. Senate Africa Subcommittee, traveling frequently to the continent. I should tell you, we have a robust delegation from Wisconsin here today, so I'm sure you'll hear from them. Immediately on my left, Ambassador Princeton Lyman is a senior advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and served most recently as special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan. And over the course of a long and distinguished foreign policy career, served as the ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa. And Ambassador Johnny Carson on my far left, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, served as Ambassador to Kenya, Sambabwe in Uganda, over a 37-year Foreign Service career. So welcome to all of you, and we wanted to structure this as an informal panel to really have some back and forth on the difficult issues, and then of course to open the floor for your questions. Unfortunately, we could have three conferences dedicated to these questions. We only have 45 minutes today, but at least we can scratch the surface. So I would love to ask each of you, starting on my left with Ambassador Lyman and moving down the line, a question about what are some of the underlying forces driving the conflicts that we're seeing in Africa right now? Well, let me speak quickly to the Sudan situation. You had two conflicts, really, that we've had to address over recent years. One is the separation of South Sudan from Sudan, a long, complicated peace process, and achieving that without a return to war. That agreement was the result of two civil wars, the last one lasting for 20 years before it was resolved. But the issues between the countries, even after South Sudan became, excuse me, independent, were threatening and involved a great deal of diplomacy, which we can get into later. Then we have, two years after South Sudan's independence, a complete breakdown in that country and civil war. And there's a lot to think about as to what was missed and what was lacking in South Sudan that it wasn't able to manage its independence. And it's really, in my view, a failure of the political structure of the country. It was able to fight its way to independence. It was able to set up a government, but it was not politically equipped to deal with political tensions and rivalries. So the failure of political structures. Thank you. Senator. Well, the first thing to say, I think, is that there is no common theme for all the conflicts on the continent. There are some common themes that exist. And I think one would be the consequences of the colonial decision-making about the boundaries of countries. When you look at a place like Nigeria, if you've ever worked on that, as I know that these gentlemen have, the idea of putting together a country with that kind of composition is almost begging for some of the problems that exist at this point. But each situation is separate. And the one with the Great Lakes that I'm involved with is really sort of unique. Of course, there have been difficulties with regard to these countries for many years, but the intertwining of the countries in this conflict in eastern Congo is a relatively recent development that relates in part to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the consequences of those who are now known as the FDLR, but they're predecessors, the Genoci Deris coming over into that region. And then others, seeing an ungoverned region as a window of opportunity, the ADF using it as a base to threaten Uganda, and then the reverse where the M23, with a clear relationship with the country of Rwanda, having a relationship across the borders. So this enormous human tragedy is coupled with these international boundaries and windows of opportunity of an essentially ungovernable region or ungoverned region that needs to be changed. But that's not the pattern everywhere, but it is one example. You are, thank you. I agree with Senator Fongo that the reasons behind conflicts in Africa have both similarities and dissimilarities. But let me say something about a country that is in conflict today, and that is Nigeria. And what drives the insecurity in two parts of that country in the northern part of the country where Boko Haram has been particularly brutal and responsible for the kidnapping of some 276 Nigerian schoolgirls, and a second conflict in that country in the middle belt of the nation. In the north, the problems in the drivers are a result of sustained economic decline and underdevelopment. Northern Nigeria is the poorest part of the country and in the northeast where the greatest amount of violence is occurring is absolutely the most impoverished part of that nation. So we have seen economic decline and large scale emissation. Equally, we see political marginalization. People in the north feeling as though their issues are not properly catered to cared for in Abuja. And we see a flawed security policy which has been heavy on the retaliation side and not nearly as sharp and sophisticated as it should be in terms of investigation, capture of terrorists through intelligence and surgical operations. We also have not seen the kind of policies which are designed to win over the hearts and minds of people in the north. A need for a social and economic strategy deals with the poverty to go along with a much refined security strategy. But if you look at the second crisis in Nigeria in the middle belt, that is a crisis which some people label as religious between herders, House of Filani from the north and settled populations that have traditionally been farmers. That's largely a resource conflict, a conflict driven by environmental changes, by climate changes. As we see herders increasingly desperate in the need of more grazing land for their cattle, more water, they have pushed south into farmlands that have been traditionally farmed by the people in the middle belt. So that is a resource crisis and one which has its roots in environmental change. Good, thank you very much. I'd like to ask you about a question that's relevant for all of the regions in which you work and where we as peace builders feel really strongly about engagement. And that's around elections. And what is your analysis of the dangers in upcoming elections in your regions? What do you feel that civil society can do to help prime the ground for a more peaceful election process? And what is your role as envoys in assuring that these are not just elections in name only and that they really do further a legitimate political process? Well, to be very candid in the Sudan peace process that was laid out in 2005, there were to be elections in the north and the south before the separation of two countries. It was supposed to democratize both entities. It did the opposite. It solidified one power rule in a party rule at each side. And the peace makers, all of us said, we'll let that go because the bigger thing is to get an agreement on the independence of South Sudan. Now in both Sudan and South Sudan, you see scheduled elections for 2015. I think neither country, frankly, ought to go forward with those elections. In Sudan, they really need a much bigger political transformation so that those elections will be more meaningful. South Sudan, I think there has to be a much bigger reconciliation process and political change. Otherwise, elections there will be meaningless. So elections are very important. But the question is, do they represent a political moving forward or do they solidify power relationships that are not sustainable? And are you saying that no election is better than election which is, would not be legitimate or timely? Deferred election. Deferred election. Thank you. Let me distinguish between the general issue of elections and what a special envoy does because he or she has to sort of talk to a number of countries at once. And then the particular importance of the upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in and of themselves. You know, as a general message, both the United States and the international community, of course, wants to encourage countries to have free, fair and transparent elections. We want them to respect their constitutions. We don't want them, we think it's in their best interests and all of our best interests if they don't change the constitution in terms of term limits for their presidents for an individual. They do it in a forward-looking way after the next office holder, as the United States did when it created term limits for its president. That's a different story, but too often it's the reverse. And as a general rule, it's been our observation that those countries that have allowed a clean transition from one executive to another have done better. So that's a challenge because if you start focusing in in one particular country saying you really need to do this, they will say, as the DRC is saying to us at the moment, you know, you need to give this same message to all the other countries and we're trying to be as consistent as possible. But sometimes a particular election in a particular place is so important in an overriding way for the future of a particular country that it goes beyond the exact principles I just stated, such as the case with regard to the DRC. When I was in the Senate in 2006, these gentlemen truly are experienced diplomats. I am a 10-month diplomat. But I remember being in the Senate, I remember being in the Senate and we were very surprised in a positive way by the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were far better than we might have expected given the fact that President Cabela only became president because his father was killed and he was chosen to become president. That was the good news aspect of the election. Unfortunately, in 2011, essentially the reverse occurred. Elections that were not credible. Elections that the International Community, the Carter Center and others could not say were good elections. So my staff warns me on these trips not to use American cliches, but privately I say this one coming up in 2016 is the rubber match. This is the one that will determine whether this country is really going to go forward respecting the Constitution, having a legitimate elections whether local or provincial. And what it has to do with is not just sort of a general Democratic value. The very credibility of this country as an economic unit, as a political human and in particular, its ability to govern the eastern part of that country that has suffered so much will depend on the people of that country believing that they really are represented by their government. So not to say that the other elections aren't terribly important. They are. We're going to Burundi next week because we're concerned about the elections coming up there. But this DRC election in 2016 and those that may precede it are fundamental to the future of that country. Thank you. Elections are an essential part of the Democratic process. Whether it is in the United States, Canada, India, or Botswana, or Ghana. We also know that elections generate tensions. And far too often in Africa, politicians use elections and to generate support in ways that inflame the tensions by appealing to ethnic loyalties, religious loyalties, to territorial loyalties, to old grievances. These tensions raise the stakes of elections across the continent. I think in looking at African elections, we all need to be as proactive as we possibly can be in working with civil society, with media, with community groups, with youth and women to put in place mechanisms that will reduce the prospects for violence and tension in elections. One great example of what has been achieved is to look at Kenya. Following the December 2007 elections there, there was widespread violence across that country in January and February. Some 1,500 people were killed and it required the intervention of Kofi Annan and a number of other leading African statesmen and women to come in to quell that violence. Indeed, following that violence, people realized that 70% of the violence that had occurred occurred as a result of young men being involved. To its credit, USAID, working with a number of private sector partners and including World Vision and Mercy Corps and WENROC set up a program called youth, yes, youth can, yes, youth can. And it helped to mobilize, this was in 2009, help to mobilize hundreds of thousands of young Kenyans to effectively, to discourage them from participating in violence, encouraging them to be more civically responsible and active, helping them to create jobs, hope and opportunity for their communities. And as the election cycle approached, the last election cycle approach, these young Kenyans were out preaching a message of peace and tolerance. Today, this yes, youth can movement across Kenya has over 1 million young Kenyans across the country. And in the run up to the elections, they held peace rallies, they had soccer games between different ethnic communities, constituency meetings in which they made the candidates all swear to peace pledges and worked with communities to ensure that the level of violence would not repeat itself in the elections that occurred in early 2013. But the important thing is to be proactive in all of these elections, whether they're elections that are forthcoming, and I think Senator Fingo was absolutely right in his strong message on the Congo, whether it is in the Congo, whether it is in the elections that took place just two days ago in Malawi, whether it's in the forthcoming elections that we see around the continent, it's important to serve as partners to those communities in Africa participating in elections to put in place programs that will reduce the level of tension that always comes with elections. These are electoral contests. They should never be the basis or grounds for the violence that we've seen in some of these places. Good, thank you. And this raises something of an existential question, especially with Kenya, where the issue of prosecution by the International Criminal Court was a factor both in the eventual slate that ran for the presidency and also in the prospects of peace there. And I wonder if all of you could speak just a little bit to the tension, if you feel it, between justice and accountability and reaching peace agreements, and if that's something that you wrestle with in a very concrete way. Well, it comes up in both Sudan and South Sudan now. It comes up in Sudan and that the president of Sudan is an indicted war criminal. And it has to do with how you interact with Sudan on the peace process, but it's also a challenge to those inside of Sudan who wanna change the political system and undertake a serious political transformation. But frankly, say to us, what do we do with the president? Because we are not politically able to turn him over and we don't know how to move beyond him. In South Sudan, where we've seen some very recent, very serious, terrible human rights violations and ethnic killing, et cetera, there's a demand for accountability. But if you look at the South Sudan situation and you watch what people are saying, you realize that South Sudan has a long history in which accountability has never been addressed. So people are saying, I remember what they did to us in the 90s. Somebody else said, well, I remember what they did to us in the 70s. Before one sets up tribunals and starts to try people in South Sudan, I feel the country needs to have a real conversation about justice, accountability, and reconciliation and come to an agreement as how do they wanna deal with this through a truth and reconciliation, through some tribunals, through political questions, but you can't just go and impose something on it without recognizing that this is an issue this country must deal with in a very fundamental way itself and then decide how it can balance justice, accountability, and reconciliation so they can move on. And I think it's a difficult process and I hear voices on the South Sudan. Ban Ki-moon says, we're gonna set a, we should set up an international tribunal and others say refer them to the Hague. And yeah, there are some people you can single out that way and the government has done that but I think it's a mistake not to deal with this more fundamentally in the South Sudan case. Ideally, you would be able to do that in Sudan. Things could be harder in Sudan. And are you saying to do that at all levels of society? Yes, it has to be because ethnic groups have been at war with each other in South Sudan and in Sudan and they have to have a voice whether it's the society, the churches, or otherwise. Can't just be through the political people who've been manipulating those violent confrontations. Thank you. Of the many dilemmas we face in the Great Lakes region, this was one of the very first that we confronted very directly. Our first task as a group of international envoys was to decide it was to go and to try to cause the compala talks which had to do with getting the M23 to stop their rebellion against the DRC to succeed. But there had been negotiations with the M23 and actually their predecessors on other occasions where the DRC agreed to the P side of the equation as opposed to the accountability side of the equation where leaders of the predecessor groups were given amnesty and not only amnesty but the ability to return to the Congolese military in charge of their own units and keeping their units intact. This had happened twice before. So fortunately, there was a unity of interest on the part of both the DRC, their negotiators as well as the public felt strongly that this kind of impunity should not continue and the international community felt that this was a red line. So this became the basis of some very heavy duty negotiations that were two particularly long sessions in compala where the issue of amnesty was among the most central issues. So it was finally resolved that there would not be amnesty for those who had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. Individuals who had simply waged rebellion would be given the opportunity and are given the opportunity under the agreement to sign a pledge that they will renounce rebellion and not do that anymore. And if they haven't committed other crimes, they can get immunity from prosecution but not those who have committed war crimes. So this was one of the most important aspects of what became the Nairobi declarations where we had to balance this. But of course, there's always the irony which is that this was signed in the state house of the president and the vice president who were under charges of the ICC in our presence. So it's always a little complicated. Thank you. It would be ideal and almost utopian to have both justice, peace and stability going along together. But in fact, the reality is that in different places, justice is frequently set aside in order to get both peace and stability. This is, I think, the case of Kenya, where indeed you have a president and a vice president who were both out of the United States who were both ICC and DITs for their alleged activities and fomenting and supporting the violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008. There has really been very little domestic justice for the victims of the violence and the international process has been very, very slow and delayed. But while there has not, in fact, been justice and accountability, there has been a higher level of peace and stability. The 2013 elections were not violence-free, but they were substantially and significantly less violent than the elections in 2007 and 2008. The trade-off is seen in different places around Africa as well. We've seen flawed processes in places like Zimbabwe, where untold pre-election violence has been meted out against the opposition and justice has not been delivered there, only a slow form of peace. So it differs from place to place. We'd like to have both. It's important to have accountability for those who commit crimes or are alleged to have commit crimes, but sometimes the justice part of it is, in fact, delayed. I'll just add one thing. I think one of the important things is you don't ignore the history. If there was one value to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, it was what people were able to get the history out. The clerk wanted to just amnesty everybody and forget the past. That would have left it simmering. The Truth and Reconciliation brought it all out. People had to face what had happened and then decide how to deal with it. That, it seems to me, is important that people understand the history and acknowledge it and the things on both sides and then figure out, okay, now how do we move forward? And even since the South Africa case, there have been a number of hybrid kinds of processes where you can face the history without necessarily going to the International Criminal Court, that there are shades of gray. Yeah, one of the issues with Burundi is that they are still expected to do a Truth and Reconciliation Commission years after the agreements that led to a relatively peaceful period and that has not happened yet and I think it's essential that it does. So let me ask you a final question before we throw it open for our Q and A. And earlier this year when Mali was coming into the final stages of its crisis before the elections and the United States was having its own near or the government shutdown, an ambassador from the Sahel said very poignantly, you know, we look at what's happening in Washington and we look at the Chinese model and we say, you know, it might be a lot easier to go the Chinese model route. Could I ask all of you in your experience as American envoys and ambassadors, to what extent do you feel that you're bringing with you a certain set of American values around governance, around democracy and to what extent are you feeling that there is receptivity to that or is there pushback? Look, I think each situation is a little bit different in terms of what our influence is on the particular crisis when we go into that. You're not, I don't like the idea that peacemakers are neutral. You're not neutral in terms of the settlement you want because you don't want a settlement that's a false settlement that just says, oh well, it looks like it's, so I used to call that into the end, I used to call that the whale, war after I leave. You're just getting done enough to dig it out. You're also not morally neutral. In South Africa, ending apartheid had to be part of the solution. In Afghanistan, you don't want a solution that demands all those girls that have now got education are suddenly gonna lose it all. So you're not totally neutral. We bring values, we bring certain values to the situation, certain belief in processes, et cetera. Yeah, are we perfect on it? No, but those values, if they're relevant to the society and usually they are, and if you're honest and can build credibility about what you're about and that you're respecting the parties you're dealing with, I think you can deal with that question of whether America is the right participant, if you will, and sometimes the leader in this process. Thank you. Well, from a practical point of view, I feel that a lot of the countries in the areas of Africa that I've worked in do really value being positively associated with the United States and its values. I think that even though, of course, they will say to you, fairly enough that they're sovereign countries and we can't dictate every aspect of their system, there's a general desire to aspire to these values that are also reflected, of course, in terms of international norms of how elections should be conducted and the like. So there is a power in that. And I think, frankly, the Chinese are now going through a challenging period. They've had an enormously strong involvement in China, but now they're becoming an issue in elections, in Zambia. Their role, their political parties are sometimes using this against a candidate or a government. So they are even struggling with the aspect where some of these values don't come associated with the approach they've taken. Of course, for many African countries, the Chinese approach is a lot easier, at least for the leaders, a lot is not asked. But I think, as I've indicated, I think to be involved in the long term, being consistent with these sorts of values, things like the Foreign Crub Practices Act, the fact that our country took the lead in having a law against bribery, passed by a Wisconsin senator from the past, am I right? Not this one, but somebody else. And that even though sometimes it disadvantages us, when you see the centrality of corruption as a problem in Africa, the fact that there is a country that's able to function and be successful in this kind of a law does have some impact, I think. Thank you. Our diplomacy is strongest and at its best when it represents the best of what our principles and values at home are. This is in Africa, and as we deal with the concerns that many raise about China. I think that we are strongest when we continue to point out the strength of our constitution, our bill of rights, our freedoms of speech and religion, and of course, our accountability through the strength of our courts. That set of democratic values underpins and should underpin the basis on which we do a lot of what we do and the success by which we've done it. I think that our economic system is a lot stronger and a lot better than that of the Chinese. We have transparency, we have accountability, we generally follow local labor laws, local environmental standards. We transfer technology and we incorporate Africans into the process. The Chinese system in Africa does not come with transparency. It does not come with a respect for labor laws, environmental standards, nor does it come with a great deal of technological transfer or technological inclusion. It's fast, it's expeditious, but it is not bureaucratically transparent. I think that if in fact one is trying to build a strong society, you build it on the basis of openness and a commitment to values and principles. The democratic values and principles that protect civil liberties also protect intellectual property rights. They protect citizens and they protect companies through transparent courts of law. China does offer a different model, but that model in Beijing on the political side does not support transparency, and it is in many ways a very corrupt and corrupting model. Thank you. We have just a few minutes for questions. Yes, Deshla, and can you please wait for the mic? I'm very sorry, but the people who are on video can't hear unless we have the mic. Thank you very much for an interesting panel. I'm Nejla Shergy and I teach at the University of San Diego. I teach courses on peace building and post-conflict peace building, and we all know that prevention is more effective than post-conflict peace building. And for the last three years in my courses, I've been using South Sudan as a case study, and we knew all of the risk factors in South Sudan, what could go wrong, and we saw it coming every year that there was violence building up. And my question is what could have been done differently from July 2011 to December 2013 to avoid the bloodshed in South Sudan? And whose responsibility is it to do that? And I'm building on Ambassador Carson's wonderful example of how much we invested in Kenya after the 2007 elections. Why were we not as an international community able to support South Sudan to avoid the bloodshed? And why don't we cluster a couple of questions and then answer as a panel down here in the green? Thank you. My name's Cornelia Weiss. I'm here today in my private capacity, and I have a question for Ambassador Carson. You talk about U.S. fundamental values, and so for example, the freedom of expression of speech. And I look back at Rwanda, and part of what was happening there was the radio incitement of hatred. And if my memory serves me, I believe that General DeLair reached back to the U.N. and said, look, we need to take these radio stations out, but that never happened because of the concern about freedom of speech, and I'd like for you to go ahead and address that, and certainly that is part of some of the, what's going on there right now. Thank you. One more, yes. Hi, I'm Rob Crisigliano, I'm on board of the Alliance. Rob Crisigliano, I'm on the board of the Alliance and also from the Partnership for Sustainability and Peacebuilding, University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. So I wanna focus my question on the once and future senator from Wisconsin. I think that is a yes. And so one of the critiques, and it maybe goes to some, one of the nationalist question of the international community's engagement around Africa is it really tends to be focused on dramatic events like elections or crises like the kidnapping in Nigeria or M23, taking GOMA a few years ago. And so I wanted you to reflect a little bit on your experience as a special envoys at what potential are you seeing, are you able to have to change that so that the engagement is more holistic, that it actually draws in a lot of the diversity of the people that are in this room and is more sustained at a sufficient level of intensity to really engage these longer term patterns and problems that you're dealing with all the time. So why don't we stop there? And it sounds like each of you had a question directed to your particular area. So why don't we start with Sudan? Well, the question is the one I lose a lot of sleep over. Thinking about why didn't we, could we have seen and prevented what happened in South Sudan? First of all, there was an enormous investment in South Sudan in helping them set up government structures, getting an election, setting up an administration, setting up a government. Much of our attention from 2011 to 2013 was on helping them resolve the conflict with Sudan which continued after independence and threatened war along the border and diverted their attention from their domestic requirements. We saw the political crisis coming. We were discussing it with them. We knew Riaq Mashaar was making that bid for the presidency well in advance. And we said this is an issue the political party needs to address. But our efforts to help them strengthen the political party were rebuffed even though they said we had a team out there from the International Republican Institute. They never used. And basically you had a government that was more a liberation army than a political. And when the crisis came, President Kier dismissed the party and tried to deal with it militarily. I think there perhaps more we should have done and could have done. I was very critical of South Sudan on a number of occasions, particularly there, the leadership's preoccupation with the issues with the North relative to the needs of their own people. And that came up over and over again. But I also think we failed in another respect and it had to do with a lot of differences and problems within our government. So well, we didn't have a strong military to military relationship that allowed us to see that that army was ready to fracture because if the army hadn't fractured you wouldn't have what you have today. And we should have seen that coming. So there are a lot of things we could have done and look back on it. And I think, and this is a general long-term proposition, we spend a lot of time thinking about civil society. We don't think enough about how you build political democratic movements. Not civil society goes out in the streets or talks or writes papers, but wins elections and are committed to democracy. And that the SPLM wasn't. Good, thank you. A challenge to us. Senator. Not surprisingly a terrific question from UW Milwaukee. But it happens to be when I was thinking about on the way over here when I was talking to my staff crossing the street looking both ways. I was holding forth on the fact that when we came into this job it was a very serious crisis in the DRC. It continues to be, but the thing that was on people's minds in Africa was the M23 conflict. So just as we get that put in a good place, we're coming back from Africa and in France, we look on television. It's a car conflict, South Sudan, now there's Nigeria. It is an enormous challenge for the State Department and any administration to maintain any kind of sustained attention on a place that maybe is getting a little better but still needs a lot of work. And this is, I'll do an advertisement for the people I work for. The Secretary of State and the President had a golden opportunity after the defeat of the M23 to say look what we did, we're done now. That's not the instruction I got. The instruction was create a process and it turned out that Angola's helped us do this to get at the root causes of the problem. Maintain that sort of my motto on this job is sustained attention. Now Congress is not as structured in fairness to do that sort of thing, even if it's operating well. That's not the nature of the place. That has to come now having served in both environments. That has to come from a sustained commitment by an administration to be more engaged and in place like Africa and in particular the Great Lakes. That's what this administration has decided to do. And if they keep doing it, my hope is that people will begin to see the value of the United States developing a good reputation for promoting peace and the values that the Ambassador spoke of in a way that makes us look very responsible and fair in the world. So this is the tough challenge and you're not gonna, people aren't gonna run for office, getting a lot of votes based on what they've done in Burundi. But it creates an impression of being a mature, responsible country that wants to lead in a fair way. Thank you. Rwanda, I don't want to revisit the history of Rwanda revisit the history of Rwanda in any great detail. There are lots of lessons to be learned from that. But the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was horrific. And what occurred was a set of international policy failures. I think that many people who were involved and associated here recognized that we probably could have and should have acted sooner. I think there are individuals across Europe who also believe that. And I think there are people in New York who are a part of the UN institution past and current who recognize that. Clearly, Radio Mill Kaleen was spewing enormous amounts of hatred, flaming the ethnic tensions that had existed there for a long time. It's also very true that General Romeo Delares appeals back to New York were in fact not heeded. And he did not get the kind of resources and support that he genuinely deserved. Coming out of Rwanda, I think we in Washington have learned a lesson. I think we continue to learn important lessons about how to prevent genocide. I will give compliments to President Obama and folks at the NSC and the White House for creating a atrocities prevention review board. A mechanism that is used worldwide to signal the possibilities of atrocities and interagency meetings here in Washington on a regular basis in that atrocities prevention review board to look at places where atrocities could in fact happen. Rwanda sensitized us, made us much more aware. And I think as a result, I think we have tried to respond more rapidly and quickly. A vignette, I heard again the Senator say sustainability and attention having dealt with a number of ongoing crises and working alongside both of these gentlemen and Ambassador Lyman too on Sudan related issues. We suffer from a number of deficits. One is a resource deficit and one is that sustainable attention deficit and the resources come both in manpower and woman power to have eyes on the issue and sustain it. The other comes with money and the need to have the resources and the attention means being able not to drift from one crisis to another. And we can from time to time have resources, serious resource problems and we can have crisis overload which is something that is important. And my last Ambassador post was in Kenya. And in 2003, I think we and the embassy as well as parts of the Western international community felt very, very pleased that we had witnessed a successful and peaceful transition of government. We're one of Africa's longest standing leaders. Daniel Arapmoy, one of the big men in Africa had stepped down and an election had occurred between the outgoing, recently outgoing president Muay Kabaki and the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta who was running against him, who's now president. Those elections were largely free and fair. People thought Kabaki had won fairly and that Muay had played his part and stepped away after 32 years in office. Things went very smoothly. I remember getting a number of telephone calls and accolades saying how wonderfully we had done in helping the Kenyans move the democratic process forward. But one of the calls that I got was from someone who said you've done a great job out there. You're to be congratulated. But the primary reason for my call today is to say we've got to cut back on our development assistance funds to your country. And just at a time when we should be reinvesting as we did it after 07 and 08 with greater engagement and greater support, we cut back. We cut back. And it is that sustained attention. An election is essential to democracy but it is only a process in the selection of those democratic leaders. After we've seen that democracy work, we need to double down in helping to further strengthen the institutions, further strengthen civil society and engage as aggressively as we can to build on what has been achieved and not to applaud ourselves for a success and then turn off the attention span and the resource spigot. Well, thank you. On that note, I want to thank all of you for sharing your wisdom with us and being here today. I know that many people will want to follow up with you but thank you.