 This started, it was the idea of a close comrade of mine with a mentor actually, a gentleman named Ambassador Mark Palmer. He used to be the United States Ambassador in Hungary. He later became and remains Vice Chair of Freedom House in Washington. I've worked with him on his own book, and about five years ago he got in touch with me and said, I've got this idea, I'd like you to work with me on it. The idea he had was to develop a handbook for diplomats, sort of a field manual, an idea of what diplomats can do from embassies and consulates to assist civic and democratic activists to help consolidate democracy where you've had had a breakthrough or help assist those who are trying to peacefully pursue democratic change in their own countries. His view, and I believed it completely, was that very rarely are diplomats trained on how to do this or even educated as to what's already happened before. It's quite hit or miss, and he wanted to come up with a more systematic review of what had happened in the past and delineate what could be done within the ambit of diplomacy to assist in promoting peaceful democratic change. I was the civic, angionic half of the drafting team. The project director is the former Canadian Ambassador to the European Union. Prior to that had been an ambassador to Russia, Italy, and a number of other countries. His name is Ambassador Jeremy Kinsman. And so when we started to conceptualize how we'd go about this, one of the things we came up with is we did not want to make a prescriptive document. Rather, we wanted to try to describe the sorts of things diplomats could do to assist people trying to establish or consolidate deep in their democracy and document what had already been done in the past. And we came up with the idea of coming up with a toolbox, sort of a taxonomy, of the sorts of things diplomats can do and then show how they were used or not, or misused in some cases, in a number of case studies. The number of case studies in the handbook is continuing to grow. We're about to, Ambassador Kinsman himself is authoring one on Russia. It was just in Russia last week, and is in the process of, we've also commissioned one on Tunisia. So in coming up with the case study approach, we wanted to come up with a portfolio of countries that we thought would be broadly geographically representative, different sorts of situations, so both pre-breakthrough, post-breakthrough to democracy. The main point being we didn't want anybody, we didn't want somebody to say, well, yeah, that's great in South Africa, but that couldn't work here. Nothing is directly translatable, of course. You can't simply transcribe an approach that worked in one place to another, but there are lessons to be learned and there are certain principles I think hold true throughout. The case studies that we have, and I'm going from memory here because it keeps growing, we started with South Africa, Ukraine and Chile and went beyond that to Belarus, Zimbabwe, Burma, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, have added China, Cuba and Egypt since, and then we're adding Russia and Tunisia. All of these will be available online once we publish a third edition. What we do is we update everything. A lot of these, as you just heard from that litany of countries, are you could call live examples. I mean, Burma is more positive than we had last written. Knock on wood, it stays that way. Zimbabwe is even worse than when we had written the last edition where it looked like this cohabitation might bear more fruit, doesn't look like it's working out that way, and so forth. Each time we publish, we have an opportunity to get more information, there's new information that comes in. Essentially you're going fishing with the examples you've already had and people come to you. Doing this, though, required a lot of interviews. That's the main avenue to get information. Most of the examples that we have in the handbook are not written down. It's certainly not in publicly available documents. There are more things that you have to pry out of diplomats. You might get a hint of it in an article, but then you have to go to the source and figure out what actually happened. So it is quite labor intensive, and it's quite fun. It's been a steep learning curve for me. I've been dealing with democracy development for some time, but I've been residing in Sarajevo, so it was nice to get my head out of Bosnia every so often. The tool box, the taxonomy, has been updated repeatedly. We are in what was quite often called a democratic recession, a few years after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. I think that the Arab Spring has given new impetus and hope and broken new ground on what is conceived of as possible and what citizens in many non-democracies in the Middle East think is possible for themselves to do. Having seen this in Ukraine, which was not nearly as a tough case as some of the others that are ongoing, you could see the public self-confidence, civic self-confidence building on a daily basis. Before things got started, people would say, I don't think we'll be able to mobilize. I don't think we'll do it. We're not a particularly brave people. And then over time, you could literally see people standing up straighter and managing to mobilize peacefully for democratic change. Now, once you have a breakthrough, it doesn't guarantee that you can make it stick, and Ukraine is yet another cautionary tale of how things could not be consolidated effectively after a breakthrough. That's just as important, and in fact allows more leeway for diplomats than promoting and assisting those who are trying to accomplish a peaceful democratic breakthrough. I'll go briefly through what we call the assets and hand the toolbox and give you an idea of what's in there and give you a few brief examples from the handbook of the sorts of things diplomats have done, the sort of greatest hits, my own favorite examples and interviews, and then open the floor because it's quite a broad palette, and I think it would be most interesting for you all to be able to interact on it. The assets are sort of what a diplomat brings to the table through his or her own portfolio as representative of his country, her country, to not only a government, but you're accredited to the society, you're accredited to the people. It's not a strictly, I think quite often, and this is something that is seemingly changing diplomacy, particularly about, especially by democracies, is there a sense it's not just going to the government. You can meet with the opposition. That's completely legitimate. In fact, it's your responsibility just as a reporting officer to know what's going on in the country in question. And that in itself could be quite validating, particularly to beleaguered oppositions who are under a lot of governmental pressure. So different countries have different amounts of influence. Influence is one of the elements of one of the assets that diplomats bring to the table. So quite often this influence can be pooled or shared out. Different countries have different leverage points on a given government. I saw, personally, while I was in Ukraine for the OSCE as the political analyst for the election observation mission there in 2004 or 2005, a very effective collaborative effort among a very broad pool of European and Atlantic democracies, including new member states, including countries that don't look like they're on tap to ever become a member state of the European Union like Turkey, unfortunately, in my view. All of which had different contacts, different amount of leverage with the government, different assets with the opposition, and they were able to use those most effectively to try to keep an eye on the abuse of power that was going on during the electoral system. The media situation, and that was quite effective. I didn't see anything like that before and I don't think I've seen anything like that subsequently, though an example I'm going to give you on Zimbabwe I think might give is positive in that regard. Another element is diplomats have immunity. That gives them a lot more leeway and leverage. They're in a much safer position than democratic oppositions, human rights defenders who are citizens of a given country. The worst thing that can happen to them usually is that they get given a persona in Andrade and kicked out of the country. That's the worst thing that can happen. That could put them, that could give them quite a bit of leverage and ability to defend people in crisis situations. Legitimacy, diplomats represent their whole societies. They don't simply represent their government if we're talking about democratic states. This is all from the perspective of what diplomats from democracies can do, obviously, if they're trying to assist democratic development. That confers a great deal of legitimacy. You come representing the United States Congress if you're an American diplomat. You're not only representing the State Department. You could act as an interlocutor for your own civil society. Quite often, this has been a very effective connecting tool that the democratic diplomats have used. Finally, you have access to funding. Not only government funding, but you could act as a connector to foundations in your own society. The more you know and the wider network you are, the more effective in any professional realm you could be, and certainly this goes for diplomats too. The toolbox in terms, we divvy it up. There are about 15 different elements, but they fall into five baskets if you want to call them that. One is what we call the Golden Rules, which is basically, it's very helpful to know the language of the country you're going. That confers, that conveys a certain amount of respect as well as gives you a lot more ability to do your job. Unfortunately, and particularly in my own country's case, this is not always the norm. Unfortunately, I find that quite limiting. You end up reliant on translators and that they themselves can be in difficult position in these non-democratic countries. Language, listening, actually making a point to actually get your head around what's going on before coming with a preconceived notion of what the way things should be. There's a particular case in Belarus of a Swedish diplomat who is legendary in Minsk because his Belarusian is supposedly better than about 90% of Belarusians commanded their own language, which was not promoted in the Soviet period and wasn't promoted earlier in the Lukashenko presidency either. This has given him a lot more leeway and access to a broad range of society, including officialdom, not just civic activists. There's another group that we call Truth in Communications. Obviously, there's an element of delicacy here, but being clear with the host government about what your bottom lines are, that these are universal values that you're obligated to promote and assist, being clear in your pronunciation to the society at large of what your country or your European Union group of countries, democracies in general, their bottom lines are, what their policies are, what these flow from the basic values and not just strictly commercial interests. Being clear about that actually gives you more leverage and more ability to assist in promoting and assisting democratic development. Working with the government, that's an obvious thing for diplomacy, but that could come into handy. I'll give you a concrete example of what the American ambassador to Belarus had once done. Belarus was under a pretty serious, a series of sanctions and remains so for its suppression of its democratic opposition and human rights in general. Belarusian government wanted to get out of that box. Essentially, the American ambassador said, okay, well, what are the things you want, what are the things we want? Let's line it up and let's try to arrange. If you release these people, this is what's going to happen. If you do this, this is what's going to happen. That's using diplomatic leverage very honestly, directly in something where Belarus was able to pursue, was able to see that isolation wasn't just something that was a given. It had the ability to change it with its policies if it pursued different policies. And having that way out was very, even though the government ended up scuppering that idea at a very high level, middle ranking functionaries and diplomats in Belarus saw that this was not something, this was not automatically a dead end, that there was a way forward that could be pursued. Reaching out, this means interacting with the broadest spectrum of the society to which you're accredited, or society's plural. Quite often we have multi, you're accredited more than one country at a time. This is visibility in the media. This is getting out to the field. Unfortunately, in these straight and economic times, a lot of consulates are closing. I think that really is limiting for ability to represent and really know what's going on. It's particularly in larger countries where you can't get from one side to the other in a day. This broad engagement with society at as high a level as you can do, it's often quite damaging and limiting if it's seen that there's one relatively junior officer who's pursuing the human rights and democracy portfolio while the ambassador is dealing with the big shots in the country. Ambassadors and senior diplomats need to be seen as on the same page, so they're not just subcontracting the hard stuff to somebody relatively junior. Finally, there's defending Democrats. Again, as I said with immunity, there's a lot of leeway that diplomats can actually avail themselves of. The American ambassador in Zimbabwe, together with the British, European Union, Japanese ambassadors, plus the Dutch DCM and the Tanzanian DCM, in 2008 went on a long road trip because they had been hearing lots of stories of intimidation by ZAN-OPF, the ruling party, against citizens in general and movement for democratic change activists in particular. They were able to document a lot of this. They were intimidated and threatened by ZAN-OPF militia, not successfully. But Ambassador McGee, who was an African American diplomat, was really able to inform headquarters and demonstrate through doing this that the world was watching to people who would not have been on the radar if he had just been doing this from Harare and getting field reports from lower-ranking people. That made an impact with Mugabe's government. It may not have had the desired sway, but it definitely helped. Most recently in Syria, the French and American ambassadors went to some of the cities that were besieged earlier on. Now those embassies have been closed. But the American Ambassador Ford and his French counterpart went to Hama very visibly, and Assad government was extremely unhappy. They didn't want them there. They didn't want people to see what was going on. As I said, there's also a differentiation of what different countries and different democracies can bring to the table. In Burma, the Czech ambassador, who was operating from Bangkok, realized that the Czechs and other former socialist countries that now are new democracies and members of the European Union had something that the older members of the EU didn't have. They had an experience of what it was like to live under a repressive government, that experience of what it was like to worry about what was going to happen to your family if you were politically active. The Czechs decided to use this value added in helping Burmese get trained to document human rights abuses. So to film, to record, they gave them journalism training in these areas, abutting the Burmese border, Chiang Mai in particular. And this was something that came into its own. I don't know if you've seen a film called Burma VJ, which means video journalist. It was an award-winning film. And a lot of the training that these people were given came into its own during the Saffron Rebellion, essentially, or demonstrations that were violently put down. And also during Cyclone Nargis, which was incredibly devastating. And Burma still hasn't recovered from it. Maybe, I'm sure it's one of the contributing factors to their decision to open up relatively. It's still not a done deal by any stretch. The Americans and the British, the British ambassador in particular, the United States hasn't had an ambassador in Rangoon since 1988, since the coup in 1988. We've kept it at the DCM level, Charger level. Ambassador Mark Canning, who had been now as ambassador in Zimbabwe, but was ambassador in Burma when Nargis hit in 2008, was one of the main sources to Burmese of what was going on, because they called it the boomerang effect, that the ambassador was giving these reports to the BBC, and these were being carried back through the Burmese service. The government wasn't reporting on the damage of the Cyclone. That had to come from outside. And one of the main conduits was Western diplomats and the British ambassador in particular. Finally, on defending diplomats, defending Democrats, there were a host of cases from Chile going back to 1973. Some of these would have been funny if they weren't so serious, if lives were not at stake. The New Zealand ambassador, John MacArthur, had somebody come to his residence, who was a trade unionist the day after the coup and was afraid of getting killed. He got this guy dressed up as a woman. He knew he couldn't protect him in his residence too long, and moved him to the Swedish embassy where an ambassador, Adelstam, who was legendary, he protected hundreds of Chileans and other Latin Americans who had happened to be in Santiago when the coup hit, and managed to get them out. And he was ultimately awarded for that. Definitely not in the fan club of the Pinochet regime. Finally, there's a cross-pollination effect that diplomats and people in these authoritative positions can have. Ignacio Walker, who was the Chilean foreign minister when the community of democracies was being chaired by Chile. This is a project of the community of democracies that is supported by a number of governments, as well as private foundations. I won't list them all. He was, when I was talking, doing the Burmese case study and conducting one of the interviews, one of the interviewees I had asked me, do you know anybody from a former dictatorship who could try to encourage these people to participate in the referendum on the new constitution, even though they know it's going to be a stacked deck, that we are encouraging them not to sit it out because it's an opportunity for mobilization. And we need somebody who's been through it. I know just the guy because Ignacio Walker was incredibly helpful on doing the Chile case study. He had been a human rights lawyer during the Pinochet regime. And as he said proudly, I never won a case, but none of my clients died because he managed to get these by simply putting the cases forward and getting them visible, it made it more politically costly for the regime to do these people in or disappear them. He talked to these Burmese dissidents who were in Thailand at the time and the feedback, I was not on the phone call because it wasn't for me but I heard the after effect that they were more buoyed by that because there is somebody who walked somewhere similar to where they walked, got what they were about, got the dilemma that they don't want to legitimize the regime but they don't want to pass up an opportunity to mobilize so they could be more effective in resisting that regime. And so there's a lot to chew on. It's a learning process that I'm going through to this day. There's a particularly rich seam of examples where diplomats have stuck their necks out and actually done quite a bit of good, a lot of it durable. And it's something that's been embraced by a number of governments. The preface was written by, or the forward was written by Václav Havel. It was embraced by a number of foreign ministers, you'll see that in the preface. I would be happy to discuss it further on what sort of things diplomats can and should do in certain delicate situations from a non-diplomatic perspective or any other comments or questions you might have on what I discussed or what I wasn't able to raise in my brief introduction. Thank you very much again for the opportunity. Thank you.