 Good morning everybody, good morning and welcome to US Institute of Peace, my name is Nancy Lindborg, I'm the president here and I'm delighted to welcome everybody here. We have many dignitaries and delegations from embassies around town, welcome to you. We also have colleagues from state NADES, welcome Mark and Tori, delighted to have so many wonderful partners here. And I'm very happy to welcome you here to USIP for a conversation on the Kigali principles. USIP was founded 32 years ago by Congress, dedicated to the proposition that peace is very practical, it's very possible and it is absolutely essential for US and international security and we pursue a vision of a world without violent conflict by working with partners on the ground and we research and apply and evaluate tools, methods and trainings for how to make peace possible. Peacekeeping is definitely one of those tools and we have looked at peacekeeping as one of our priorities, we focused both on peacekeeping reform as well as the training and education of peacekeepers. In March 2015 we convened here and probably a number of you joined us for that, the conversations with the UN high level independent panel on peace operations and we've continued to track and support where possible efforts on peacekeeping reform. Since 2008 USIP has conducted peacekeeping pre-deployment training in partnership with the State Department's ACOTA program and Dr. Rainey, are you here? There you are, Dr. Rainey, director of the ACOTA program here with perhaps members of your team. It's been an important number of years training that focuses on strengthening peacekeeper capacities to protect civilians through nonviolent resolution of conflict and using very specific skills of conflict mediation, conflict mapping, negotiation skills and we've just completed a comprehensive assessment of how has that worked, what have we learned and this assessment will help us not just do more effective training in partnership with the ACOTA but also gave us insights into some of the complexities of civilian protection. But we are especially eager to co-host this conversation today with a focus on how to implement the Kigali principles for peacekeeping given the rising number of crises around the world in which peacekeepers are deployed. The Kigali principles on the protection of civilians is a very important commitment that has been made by over 40 troop and police contributing countries and top peacekeeping funding countries with the goal of more effectively providing protection of civilians and implementing those protection mandates. And with these 18 imperatives if we could get those right it would mean saving lives in many peacekeeping missions. So the goal today with excellent panels to talk to us about how we can do that, the goal is to generate greater awareness among various peacekeeping stakeholders here in Washington, D.C. about the Kigali principles and very, very importantly how to commit, how do we collectively commit to turn those words into action. And doing so at a time where it is more important than ever, I was just recently in Central Africa Republic where the peacekeeping mission there is very challenged under very difficult circumstances and just a few weeks ago was in Addis with a regional meeting on South Sudan where the potential for mass atrocities, even the potential of genocide is already upon us with enormous challenges for peacekeepers, those already there and the 4,000 that are hopefully going to be deployed soon. So it's my honor to introduce the next speaker, Ambassador Matilde Mukantabana of the Republic of Rwanda to the United States of America and the non-resident ambassador to Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. And Ambassador Mukantabana has been a passionate community organizer for several decades and she's the co-founder of many associations and organizations whose main purpose is to promote a positive engagement and collaboration of Rwandan communities in the United States with other groups and organizations that could benefit their respective countries. She was previously a tenured professor of history at Consumnes River College in Sacramento, California and she's the co-founder and president of Friends of Rwanda Association which is a non-profit relief association created in the wake of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. So she has a particular voice and experience that I think is especially relevant to the urgency of the conversation that we're having today. She's an active member of the Board of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Sonoma State University. Please ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming to the stage Ambassador Mukantabanda. Thank you so much, President. And USIP for hosting this amazing conference, Excellencies Distinguished Guests or Protocol Observed, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to be here and to represent Rwanda, my country, as one of the top troop contributors to peacekeeping. I'm especially honored to welcome our Chief of Staff of Defense Staff, General Patrick Nyavumba, who will share a lot of insights on peacekeeping missions and on the Kigari principles. As the first commander of one of the biggest UN missions, peacekeeping missions, and now the Chief of Defense Staff who makes the policies, he understands the conflicts but also the challenges tied to peacekeeping. About two years ago in September 2014, President Kagame, Por Kagame, the President of Rwanda, US Vice President Joe Biden, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and other world leaders including the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Japan, and Pakistan, heard the high level meeting at the margins of UN General Assembly. And the discuss ways in which we would collectively strengthen peacekeeping operations. As a follow-up to the pledges made during the summit, on May 28 and 29 last year, Rwanda hosted a high level conference to discuss how to effectively implement the protection of civilians' mandate in peacekeeping missions. The conference successfully brought together about 30 of the top troop contributing countries, major financial contributors, and other protection of civilians' stakeholders at the senior level to extensively examine the gaps in protecting civilians in conflict. Throughout of that discussion, and especially from the impassioned exchange of experiences on the ground, the Qigari principles were born. The Qigari principles are the standards or best practices. Many agree if implemented will make a big difference in peacekeeping. They provide the troop and contributing countries with a thorough understanding of what it means to protect civilians under any context and what roles and responsibilities we play in ensuring that our troops can accomplish assigned missions. Among others, the principles include a commitment to properly train troops on protection of civilians prior to their deployment, to identify potential threats, mitigate them, and avoid imposing caveats and use of force when necessary. They also committed to rapid deployments and to hold troops to the highest standards of conduct and discipline and where appropriate investigate and prosecute any incidents of abuse. Many countries have subscribed to these principles and as of today we have about 39 countries that have signed to the principles, the Qigari principles, and we call on those countries that have yet to endorse them to join us and reaffirm our commitment to the preservation of innocent lives during conflict. One of the commitments to peacekeeping and protection of civilians came from events that befell our country in 1994 when the genocide against the Tutsi left more than one million people dead, seemingly while the international community was watching. For Rwanda, never again is not simply a slogan, it's a commitment. It is a call to action when and where civilians are caught in cycles of conflict. Along with our regional and international partners, we feel the responsibility to protect is our duty. And we subscribe to the idea that human life and human dignity start with assuring that our people's lives matter. As our president, my president, said, when lives are at stake, nothing matters more than saving them. Our protection of civilians should be the central purpose of peacekeeping. Ladies and gentlemen, as you might have seen in the concept note that we have circulated prior to this event, we are gathered here today to discuss on this important topic, especially explore the challenges of closing the gap between aspirations of protection of civilians' mandate and their implementation, and make commitments to translate the Kigari principles into practice. It's also important for decision makers in the political arena and other stakeholders in Washington, D.C., to be aware of this development and take them into consideration as they devise policies in peacekeeping. Other discussions and events were heard at the UN headquarters in New York, including the High Revolt Summit that was co-hosted by President Obama and other world leaders in September of last year. And then other events were heard in various capitals throughout the world. Last month, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Rwanda and the U.S. conducted a pilot training courses on protection of civilians in the Kigali. That was very successful. It emphasized the core component of the Kigari principles. We are doing our best to fulfill our mandate and we urge all the partners and key players in peacekeeping to do the same. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for all joining for this important conversation. So thanks to go to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Uruguay, the United States and the Institute of Peace for partnering with us for this important event. And I wish you wonderful holidays and happy new year. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Henes Schiewer. I'm the ambassador of the Netherlands and I'm next on your program. And I'll make it short in a way. Because I think this conference or this conversation, as it's called, is a conversation that I think should lead to action. I think we have seen a lot of words and a lot of people talk about the subject. And I would definitely hope that after you have listened, you will see this as a call to action more than as a mere conversation. First of all, let me thank Nancy, let me thank Mathilde, and let me thank the Institute of Peace. This is a beautiful building and a beautiful building that reminds us that we are obliged, in a way, and funny enough, it's written in the Constitution of the Netherlands to strive for a peaceful world. And this is a building that is dedicated to that idea. And it's not dedicated only to that idea, but it's also dedicated to the peaceful world for the civilians who live in that world. And that is what the Kiekeli Principles is about. We have entered in a partnership with Rwanda. The Netherlands was one of the early signups of the Kiekeli Principles in May 2015. And we have entered because I think all of us, we have heard the stories. We have seen the images. We have listened to everything that's going on. I think, as Nancy said, the South of Sudan is an excellent example yet again, where we are seeing things unfolding before our eyes, and we have not been able to come to grips with our reaction. And I think the Kiekeli Principles could be an elite for us. Take a cue from the Kiekeli Principles, act according to the Kiekeli Principles, and then you connect. And I would like to applaud our one colleague, and especially Matilde, but I would also like to say your history gives you a place. It's not for nothing that these principles are called Kiekeli Principles. What you have lived through should never happen again. But therefore, as the survivors of what has been happening in Rwanda, you have a special place and a special responsibility, almost, to be our guiding light in many cases for the Kiekeli Principles. And I applaud you for that, and I applaud all those countries who have signed up to the Kiekeli Principles. And I'm very happy to be here with my colleague from Uruguay who will speak later on the panel as one of those countries who have seen the need to sign up to the Kiekeli Principles and to act in concert with other countries. And I'm very happy to be here in the United States with representatives of the United States. Administration, Tori Holt will also speak later on the panel. They have always been very supportive, and their dedication and their drive has helped us enormously. I'm also very happy to have this event here in Washington. There are lots of – this is, in a way, let's call it the center of the world. I just came from New York. They call it the center of the world there, but okay, we live here in Washington. But it's one of – we are all represented here. And in this room are representatives of countries who have signed up to the Kiekeli Principles and are representatives of countries who are big contributors to UN peacekeeping but have not signed up to the Kiekeli Principles. And I hope, if anything, that when you step out of here at the end of the morning, you will be convinced that the Kiekeli Principles is a worthwhile concept. And at least read it. And I'm sure that if you read it, you will see the necessity to sign up to it and then most importantly act, implement the Kiekeli Principle, be a part of the UN effort and of the Kiekeli effort. Because in a way, we need to change the way we train our troops. We need to change those people whom we will send in harm's way. And then see again sort of the difficulties, for instance, in the Central African Republic. It's a very difficult mission. You have to be able to send well-trained troops. We would abandoning our duty if we do not train the troops that we sent in harm's way under very difficult circumstances, not to give them everything we can do to train them for the difficult task and to basically explain to them the principles that they were are there to defend. I can tell you for as far as the Netherlands is concerned, we will concentrate on capacity building on that training. We will also concentrate on the situation that develops after a conflict is resolved. I think it's very important for the civilians, the protection of civilians, that in a post-conflict situation they will be able to live in peace and they will, in the aftermath, will be able to count on a peaceful situation. We will also very much concentrate on women and girls in a conflict situation. We think that in many instances women are key to building a peaceful society. And in any case they are key to I think what's most important in these circumstances, the pre-evention of a conflict, I think in that respect I think if we can reach the women and work with them to prevent a conflict into escalating or even occurring, it will be very, very important. I realize that the task that is upon us is not easy, it's difficult, but I hope that we collectively will be able to make the blue flag of the United Nations, a flag that stands for protection and peace and that you know when the blue flag of the United Nations is hoisted in your country, is hoisted on a battlefield or in a dangerous area that you are protected, you can count on the soldiers, the protection force of the UN to keep you safe, to rebuild your nation and to do what we are all here for, what we are all here for, to rebuild and give back peace to wherever you come from. Thank you very much. Good morning, my name is George Moose and I have the honor of serving as the Vice Chair of the Board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. And this morning it's my privilege to be able to moderate the first of two patents. The intent of which is to try to carry forward a conversation that we've been having here at the Institute for some time, a conversation about peace operations, recognizing that they are vital to providing the context within which so many of us in the peace building community work. And I would also say that they are vital to the work of humanitarians and to human rights advocates as well. So we have had a long-standing, long-running conversation. As Nancy Lindworth mentioned, we were honored to be able to serve as the host a year ago in March of the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, chaired by former President of Timor-Leste, Moise-Rodron-Souffle. And again, I will repeat what I hear, what I said at that time that this issue, the importance of peace operations is vitally important for those of us in the peace building community. Our purpose today is to try to extend and deepen the conversation we've been having about the Cagalli principles to understand better the challenges of fulfilling that obligation, that vital obligation for the protection of civilians. And I think those of us who work in this community know that at the moment that's probably one of the most urgent and important challenges that the United Nations and those who work with and forward are now facing. And the principles have charted a way forward for us. And I think the purpose of this conversation is to get a better understanding of how we now make them real. How do we actualize them? How do we ensure that, in fact, we're taking the practical steps necessary to give them real meaning? And to help us do that, we have three panelists who each of them brings to the subject a wealth of experience. I won't introduce them in full because you have their bios and materials that were circulated to you. But I will invite each of them to take maybe five minutes with our initial question to help us frame this conversation. And then perhaps we'll have a follow-on question for them to address. And then I promise that I will allow some time for those of you in the audience who may have questions to pose those. So let me begin with His Excellency Ambassador Elvio Roselli, who's Uruguay's permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. A career diplomat, he's served previously as Uruguay's ambassador to Canada, as advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Director General for Political Affairs at the Foreign Ministry and Director General for International Economic Affairs with Responsibility for America's Horror and Economic Integration. Ambassador Roselli, I'd be grateful if you could begin by helping us frame this issue of the protection of civilians and why it constitutes such a challenge for us and how you believe the Kali principles might help us advance in fulfilling that goal. And perhaps you could say a word as well about your country's commitment to these principles and how you have come to occupy such an important leadership role on this question. Good. Five minutes, you said? About five minutes. Now we could spend the entire day, as everyone knows here, we could spend the entire day on this subject. But the purpose here is to try to expand the understanding of what it is we're talking about and what's important. Well, thank you very much for your kind words. Thank you for your invitation. Good morning, everybody. I would start with the caveat, which goes against the Kali principles. The caveat is I'm always very wary of having to speak in front of an audience that knows about the subject a lot more than I do. So with that caveat on, I would start by the following two images, which come from our recent visit to the DRC. Uruguay is currently a non-peminent member of the Security Council. And in Congo, we were meeting with members of the civil society and obviously with members of the Manusko. And we had two different views, two different expressions. Civil society is saying, Manusko has failed us, Security Council has failed us, the United Nations have failed us. And on the other hand, from the Manusko, the expression, we simply cannot protect everybody everywhere all of the time. Now, you know better than I do, those are the two extremes. On the one hand, the very high expectations, and on the other hand, the harsh words of reality. And how do you try to protect most of the people, most of the time everywhere, apart from almost being an impossible task, it does create conundrums, it does create the needs to make decisions, it does generate the need for options. I would say that why protection of civilians? Well, we all know civilians are the ones who actually bear the grunt and suffer the most of any conflict. For a small country as Uruguay, our projection abroad is not related to power. Our projection abroad is related to the rule of law, to respect for human rights, for the protection of civilians, for making the life better for populations. Therefore, POC, the acronym that's usually used, is not at the center of our participation. It is the core, it is the reason why we do that. And that has a lot to do with traditions of a military in Uruguay which, except for what you call it, a strange hip-cup in history, has always been very much integrated with people. And with a nation that has a history of being a democratic nation, with democratic institutions, trying always to take care of the most and of the needs of the people. So protection of civilians is a must. And you read the Kigali principles and you would say, how come not everybody has signed onto them? This is so evident, so logical. And yet, as Maser Shul was saying earlier, not all of the contributing countries in the United Nations have signed on. And even not all the very large contributor countries have not signed on to it. So we have to look into that and we know why in many occasions this is so. But then again, the principles aim at a number of disciplines and commitments that would help the peacekeepers to keep the peace, but particularly to keep the peace protecting civilians, which is today the most fundamental work, because peacekeeping started, as we all know, with the concept of basically guaranteeing or surveying the ceasefire agreements between conflicting parties, state parties. And this has changed dramatically and basically very few of current peacekeeping missions relate to that ancient convert. Today we're engaged basically in domestic conflicts, which are the worst kind of conflicts. I think that my five minutes are up, but the idea was then we have this difficulty of the demands on the one hand, the limitations of reality, and where is it that you want to come from? And from our side, protection of civilians is the fundamental task of any peacekeeping operation. Ambassador, thank you very much for getting us started here. And I'd like next to turn to General Niembumba of Rwanda. General Patrick Niembumba serves as the Chief of the Defence Staff of the Rwandan Defence Forces, a position to which he was appointed in June of 2013. He's held a number of senior command staff appointments, but especially relevant for this conversation. From 2009 until 2013, he was the force commander for UNIMID, the joint United Nations African Union mission in Darfur, which without a question is one of the most difficult and challenging peace operations ever to be mounted. General Niembumba, Ambassador Mukat Dabamda has already underscored why this issue of civilian protection has such deep resonance in Rwanda. And I think we would appreciate having your perspective as a military, a senior military leader and officer, but also somebody who's been on the front line in leading one of these missions to help us understand the nature of this challenge of civilian protection and also your thoughts about the Kigali principles and how they may help us in addressing some of those concerns. First of all, thank you very much and let me also join my ambassador in thanking the organisers of this conversation, as I had it being called, particularly the Institute of Peace, the US, the Netherlands and Uruguay. Let me start my conversation by saying that I believe that the United Nations remains, in my view, the most relevant organisation for matters of peace and security globally. Now, starting from there, then I'll come and talk about probably the topic today, which is the protection of civilians. Since the creation of the UN 45 years ago, the founders of the organisation had these no-buy ideas for us to live in a world free of conflict. The reality on the ground is different, that conflict is with us, conflict is inherent in mankind. Therefore, not to think about conflict would be like living in Utopia. But over the 70 years of UN's existence, protection of civilians first came to light, I think, in 1999, when the Security Council at the time mandated the mission in Sierra Leone and was explicit in talking about protection of civilians. Now, we also have to acknowledge that conflict has evolved from interstate conflict to interstate conflict. You have belligerents who have no idea of law of armed conflict, law of war, who violate all the laws that exist. Therefore, in such a situation, how do you deal with such a situation? And this is where the Kigali principles become very relevant. Again, I cannot thank the people who thought about the Kigali principles. They do not in any way replace the principles that we all know about that guide us in conduct of peace operations, but they can't reinforce how peacekeeping is done. If I break it down now into, if I bring it down to the operational tactical level. First of all, these 18 common sense principles, but me and you know that the common sense is also not easily common. Now, the first principle talks, if I may go through some of them quickly, training. And it stipulates that troops must be trained on protection of civilians prior to their deployment in mission areas. Again, these sounds are something that is very obvious. But on the ground, what I observed as a force commander was that it's not necessarily the case. It is, we are training of both the troops that participate in peacekeeping operations and their leaders at the different levels, whether it's at the section, platoon, or even at battalion and sector commander level. Well, the second principle basically talks about leadership training, which is important. Now, again, what is the focus here on when comes protection of civilians? The focus is on the use of force as and when necessary. And this is where we've had issues, particularly for practitioners. My colleagues in uniform would know. And that's actually even what happened in my own country 22 years ago in Rwanda when then Unamel decided to close shop and abandon people who had even run to pure suicides, if you will. More accurately, the Security Council in New York took the decision to shut down the mission, even though there were those in the field who actually wanted to continue that mission. Yeah. Now, so the issue of when do you apply force, which is, again, I think the third principle, you find in most cases, particularly for those who do not want to apply force, they always have reasons as to why they didn't do it. And then there is also this argument, particularly in the headquarters, that you don't want to be seen as part of the problem because when you apply force, then you'll have taken sides, which I think in my views, excuse my language, absolute nonsense. People should be able to tell, at least at any level, that these are citizens in danger, and therefore the actions you've taken, we are solely meant to protect this. And so therefore, let me go back to training a little bit. And I'm going to ask you to wrap up on that one because we're going to come back to this on our second question as well, and I want to get back to you. In most cases where you have this protection of Syrian mandate, you find its protection by presence. And that is the misunderstanding of most of our peacekeepers. And again, I say this from a point of experience because I've been on the ground. I think it involves a host of other actions that include patrols, that include engaging and knowing the belligerents, knowing when to interposition forces, where and how and when. So there is more than physical presence. So physical presence in itself might not deter the wrongdoers. And then finally, the eighth principle talks about peacekeepers not stating to take action. Again, by over example, some time back, again in my previous job, there is a time civilians came running to one of my team-side commanders. They had been robbed of their belongings, they were taken by roaming militias. So I got on the radio and told the commander who was in that particular location and told him to get forces and go and rescue those some of the citizens that had actually been taken hostage. And he told me, he asked me if I could send him a task order in writing. So I said, two things, by the time you receive that task order, you'll be out of this mission. But let me advise you that go and do that first and then we'll talk about the task order. So he went, did it, of course he had never spoken to a force commander, he felt a bit threatened. He went, and then he was very proud and then it was in the press, you know, we did this. I said, but young man, next time I talk to you to do something, never ask me because instructions, whether or not written, at least have the distance. But you see, it's about the mindset. He doesn't think it's his job. It doesn't. Now, this is a very illuminating anecdote about how the practicalities are doing this. And I want to return to that when we talk about our second question. And I want to give Mr. Cisterfede a chance to give us a bit of perspective from the headquarters and somebody who is charged with the responsibility of trying to create these mandates that will in fact empower and enable the commanders and troops on the ground to in fact effect this mission's task of protecting civilians. And you come at this as somebody who's had extensive experience as well as director for Africa too in the division of the Office of Peacekeeping Operations but currently as the director of the division of policy and evaluation and training in the departments of peacekeeping operations and field support. So the center of this challenge of trying to translate purposes into mandates that will enable peacekeepers in the field to actually exercise this. I'd like to ask you from your perspective to help us understand how you see this challenge of protecting civilians and how you go about creating the frameworks within which that can happen. Thank you very much, Ambassador. Thank you very much to the organizers and to the countries concerned who've arranged this. 2016 has been very difficult here with the events in South Sudan and the events in Congo. But it's also been a year where we've been able to take some lessons from these horrible incidents that have happened and focus us on what we need to improve. The Kigali principles are extremely useful for us. But there is an important gap in them and that gap is political commitment. And I'm saying this in the context of what the high level panel last year said about the primacy of the political. As important as the Kigali principles are about making our forces better, about training them better, having better approaches, not doing the things that General Patrick had spoken about, the fact is that we have to recognize that peacekeeping is not a military tool. The use of force is a last resort. And what we need to focus on far more is the political resolution of conflict. The tier one and the tier three approach to protection of civilians. Because all too often we look at the protection of civilians as something for uniforms to do. And we look at something for a young captain to do when he arrives at a checkpoint and some member of an armed group won't let him through the checkpoint and he has to turn back and he can't protect civilians on the other side of that checkpoint. We can't make every corporal a strategic person in our mission. We have to have a far broader approach which includes prevention in the first analysis, using the peacekeeping operations, full authorities of good officers, but also the security council's authorities. The security council is ultimately the one that mandates us and sends us into these places. But if there isn't a clear understanding between the council and the troop contributors about exactly what is expected of troop contributors and the risks that they face, we are ultimately not going to be able to do the things that the civilian population that you so ambassador in Congo expect us to do. And the third tier of the protection of civilians is creating those institutions that can eventually address conflict in a society. There's conflict in most of our societies but we don't go to war to resolve our differences. So how do we build those long-term institutions and capacities and mechanisms to de-conflict societies? But a lot of the focus is on tier two, is about the physical protection and how do we do that better? About a month or so ago General Khmerit was dispatched by the Secretary General to look at what happened in July in South Sudan. And the findings are harsh and they're harsh in peacekeeping and they were harsh on some of the contributors involved. But what's important is not only those findings, it's what we're going to do with those findings not just in terms of holding people accountable. And as you know, people are being held accountable for those. But how do we improve our performance? How do we improve the policies that we adopt to make sure this never happens again and how do we improve the training of our troops? And one of the most important things that we can do is a conversation we've started to have and the investors heard me say this about the outer limits of protection. By that I mean there are simply some conflicts. Usually when conflict is being perpetrated by the forces of the state itself that we are not necessarily the right instrument for. And we are ultimately going to fail if we over-promise and under-deliver. Thank you, sir. Thank you. So as I hear you, we need to start there for what is our approach to the conflict itself or the situation in which we find ourselves and build into that an understanding of how civilian protection will be accomplished not just as a standalone but as an integral part of what our purpose is in terms of maintaining peace and hopefully building an endurable peace. Ambassador, let me return to you because General pointed out that these are sort of common-sense principles and you all yourself mentioned so why is it, why do you think it is that not everyone, not all of the troop contributors and others have signed up to this? Where's the problem, where's the political issue here that we need to think about in order to make this to expand the commitment to the principles and so doing also increase our capacity to implement those principles. I would very frankly thank to believe that one of the harshest parts of the principles is the requirement of not applying caveats. The caveats are from our perspective the things that really break into the flow of what the structure requires because they certainly interrupt there. And the problem is as a high official told us is not only the caveats that are written is the hidden caveats, the caveats that only manifest themselves on the field and those are totally unexpected. That's my view where it would come harder from because again all of us states, nation states and authorities we do not like to yield all of our authority, we like to retain control and I think that's a catch, that's the harder thing. General, just to return because you were getting us into I think a very important discussion of the actual practicalities. How do you take these mandates and give them reality in the field? Would you continue that a bit and talk about particularly the problems you've witnessed in terms of the gap between what the Security Council would have you do and the resources that you were given with which to actually accomplish that mission. Yes, I think it's actually important that Jack did mention the gap that exists at the different levels but my take on that would be that again starting from why do we take that decision to deploy peacekeepers. It's because again peacekeeping like use of force is always a last resort. It's because the nation state concerned has failed in its entirety to govern themselves therefore and it's not here we're not talking about deploying a peacekeeping to go and do political work where we have to deploy peacekeepers it's because there has been total breakdown of law and order and in this case you also look at mass atrocities being committed and therefore peacekeepers moving in to stop those mass atrocities so having that as the background therefore how do you now bring it down to make sure that the presence of these peacekeepers will make a difference is relevant and therefore we need commitments on two sides. One is the political aspect that Jack did talk about the Security Council and most importantly through contributors will have to understand that by moving in there are risks to peacekeepers otherwise it does doesn't mean I mean even as military commanders you would want to go back home with everybody as they came you don't want to send body bags home but this is a serious business we're not talking about you know just showing up again they said the conflicts have have changed so much so that there is a lot of violence that you have to deal with and the best way to deal with violence at times is using violent means to stop violence therefore there has to be commitment on the political side they have to understand the risks involved and I would urge that those countries not willing to take that extra risk don't deploy number two is peacekeepers on ground my understanding is that we don't join the military to do peacekeeping we join the military to defend interests of our countries we join the military to die for our countries just extend that into peacekeeping I do not expect a uniformed personnel like I used to see you know you get scared by it is possible that you may get into trouble but I don't see a trained soldier surrendering for this for them to save their lives then we'll be doing peacekeeping the other way around if that's what we are going to do better stay at home better stay at all yeah because this is not boy scouting this is some serious business and therefore the commitment has to be two-fold by the peacekeepers they have to understand why they're into that business the countries that do send them have to realize that it is pursue that in the course of beauty people may lose their lives and therefore they should be able to engage with their whether it's electorate or to understand that it's a noble challenge I kept telling peacekeepers that I've never seen a nobler profession where you are willing to die so that others get peace and then he never got a friend a response especially from lawyers I want to be sure to give our audience a chance to ask questions and we have some microphones that are set up here on either side so anyone who has a question if you would perhaps position yourselves accordingly and then but I would I do want to give Jack you give you the last word here at least at this segment and to take into account some of the things that we've just been talking about would you like to sort of flesh out some of the things we were saying earlier how do we create holistic mandates here that in a strategy that actually embeds protection as part of a political strategy not just a peacekeeping strategy if you must I think that is one of the challenges that we face before it's about 97% of all peacekeepers today serve under a protection of civilians mandate but when you look at the way we do peacekeeping it's almost as if we do it as a standalone function that it isn't fully part of the missions organic system that we don't send our peacemakers to design peace agreements that will help protect civilians let me give you a practical example when general Patrick and I were working on Darfur together many years ago when we were in Doha with the peace negotiations it was not as if we were designing a peace process that would ultimately mean that the Darfurians themselves would enjoy better protection there was a disconnect between our political efforts which were noble these I'm not criticizing what they were and what general Patrick was doing on the ground from a more tactical position yes there were some aspects of what he was doing like ceasefire monitoring which had a link to the peace agreement but we didn't fully grasp that unless you make protection of civilians the essence of what we are trying to do then we're always going to see it as an add-on to our role that is changing but where we run into problems and I'll be very frankie ambassador because we're running into this in South Sudan is when the United Nations is not leading a political process but that political process is being done by others by the regional organizations or groups of countries and the UN peacekeeping operation is seen as a service provider basically only providing security services that disjointed approach is not working clearly Sudan is a evidence of a major challenge to all of this in terms of peacekeeping and the protection of civilians let me and let me go to the microphones and we start over here is there Mike oh I'm sorry we have folks already lined up on this side so let me do that please go ahead and please identify yourself please keep your questions thank you so much thank you so much for a very interesting and important panel this morning my name is Lee's Howard I'm a professor of government at Georgetown University and I have a few friends in the audience here today and I was formerly a senior fellow here at USIP working on issues of peacekeeping I've been studying peacekeeping for the better part of the last 20 years I've written a book about the successful operations and that is what I'd actually like to talk about which is I feel like we are trying to learn from the peacekeeping failures more so than from the successes okay so in peacekeeping operations we've had a number of complex missions that have succeeded starting with Namibia of course which Ambassador Muses well aware of Namibia El Salvador Mozambique Cambodia was a little more mixed at mandated implementing its mandate but still I would count Cambodia among them East Timor Sierra Leone each in Sabonia we have a lot of complex difficult missions that were all challenged and yet it wasn't necessarily the UN using force it was other entities using force because we had a clear distinction between the differences between peacekeeping peace enforcement and counterinsurgency and so my question is are we moving peacekeeping into the realm of counterinsurgency which also takes as a its essence the protection of civilians thank you very much it's an excellent question I'm going to take one more and then we'll turn back to our panel thank you my name is Cornelia Weiss I'm a colonel in the US military I'm also a military lawyer and so my question is for the general you had mentioned that the lawyers my impression from your from from your statement was that that were not helpful and so if you could help illuminate what it is that you mean by your your comment if I understood it correctly if you could illuminate what is meant by that and what principles should be engaged by military lawyers so that those type of impressions or realities don't exist thank you sir thank you very much I'm going to ask Jack if you could start us off on the first question which was actually two questions as I heard it one has to do with learning the lessons of our successes and we tend to forget we've had some really had some important successes in terms of peace operation but the second one has to do with the changing nature of peace operations and the fact that we've moved beyond ceasefire monitoring into peacekeeping in a more general sense into very complex operations and then now beyond that into things which involve peace enforcement counterterrorism and that too has changed the way we think about protection but I wonder if you could start us off on that so I'll start off with the count insurgency question first the Security Council has never authorized a UN peacekeeping operation to undertake counterterrorism counterinsurgency operations and I don't think it will I think we some way away from that it has authorized others to do it and it has authorized us to assist them now of course the confusion is Mali Minusma because we deployed a very large very robust peacekeeping operation in a theater dominated by insurgents and terrorists but that was not our job our job was to stabilize and to protect civilians and to a large extent we have done that protect civilians are not being attacked in northern Mali we are being attacked and we are dying we've had more peacekeepers dying in the shortest amount of time in northern Mali than anywhere else in peacekeeping history and it's forced us to rethink the way we do our business but I do think there is still a gap between protecting civilians and counterinsurgency that doesn't mean to say that broader peacekeeping in other words not kinetic military operations can play a very useful role when it comes to the broader issues of counterinsurgency I'll leave it at that for a second I think you're absolutely right that we need to focus on some of the places where we've done well and learn why we've done well and I'll just offer one possible reason why we've done well and all of those cases that you've mentioned we deployed with a consent of the state or the consent of the major parties today we may deploy with a consent to that state but that consent is partial for example in Congo the Congolese government may want us to deploy in the eastern part of the country but doesn't especially want us to meddle in the political issues and human rights monitoring and to broadcast radio messages so that consent is very partial but it's also clearly the case in South Sudan where the consent to deploy and to operate and to move is very very restricted so consent is increasingly a problem and the more we face challenges of consent the less likely it is that we're going to succeed I'm sorry to be so blunt but the most effective operation that we will ever design will not succeed where we do not have the consent of the state. That's a very good point. General we have a question from a lawyer and we all know we ignore our lawyer's advice at our peril but what is it that you have found unduly constraining? I have no issues with lawyers. Actually what I meant was it was on a lighter note that lawyers think that their profession is more noble and I was arguing that I think the military profession is much more nobler. You will get no argument from me on that panel. Yeah but otherwise in most of the it is true that in most of what happens whether it's in the field or at headquarters I would imagine that Jack would be more qualified to talk about than myself is that we do engage their services just to make sure that you know again we don't get into unnecessary trouble and let me also take the opportunity to clarify on I've had on a number of occasions when we talk about use of force that it tends to be misconstrued as recklessness and again I hear I think the challenge is always and the worst examples that we've seen whether it's in Rwanda whether it's in Srebrenica you had presence of peacekeepers. That's right you did. Things happened in their presence and they didn't take action. So all we are saying now is that okay that was them. We can't afford to do that now. If you're going to be physically present your presence should not only be a deterrence but even actions that accompany your presence should contribute to securing your point of danger. Thank you. It's a mix please. Something that Jack started. Because sometimes we tend to be overly critical of the performance of the missions and I think we should have to bring some of this back to the origin. Basically the mandate council is giving the missions many times is unclear, overburdened or it's full of a variety of number of issues without any prioritization and therefore a mission is number one constrained by a mandate which is elastic and very fuzzy. Secondly under budgeting missions are running very low on budget and that means also poorly equipped or not adequately equipped for the mission they have to fulfill. Therefore yes how do you tell a commander to move or protect civilians when he is way outnumbered by the like what Jack was pointing by the local forces because this is one of the craziest things that we have now. We have local forces shooting on blue helmets and this is not supposed to happen. Currently the issue of consent of the government several of our missions are basically there against the will of the respective governments and they're constrained and their ability even to move it was a case in Unmiss in South Sudan that could simply not patrol without the previous authority of the government which was not interested in Unmiss patrolling. So a lot of the criticisms are supposed failures come number one from the wrong or from the not properly instrumented mandate the Security Council has given and on the other hand the attitude of the government. We may get into some of those issues also in our next panel. I think there was perhaps a question up here on the left side. Thank you very much Mike J.G. formerly of USIP and now adjunct faculty at George Mason University. I just completed a book actually that I began here on criminalized power structures as the leading threat spoiler threat to peace missions and certainly they represent a threat to civilians. So my question relates to that Ambassador Rosselli pointed out that the strategy of trying to protect civilians everywhere is an impossible task and the general pointed out that the military is not necessary providing physical protection really is not the essence of the solution and Mr. Chaffelides said that UN needs new policies. UN has a very interesting new policy on their police guidelines and we don't have a discussion of the role of the police in this issue which I want to focus on but this year they accepted that UN police are a criminal intelligence led police force and that they use special operations to address spoilers. So rather than trying to adopt a strategy of protecting all civilians everywhere with the military a more winning strategy is the UN moving in the direction of trying to identify using intelligence who the sources of the threats are the nature of their networks so that they can be dismantled and that's something that the military can't really do because they don't have a capacity for high risk arrest or doing criminal intelligence or protecting your criminal interlocutors close protection that police can do conducting surveillance. So number one my first part of my question is has the UN undertaken to be able to identify prior to a mandate intervention what the likely source of spoilers might be and second of all the Kigali principles call on rapid deployment capabilities not just for the military but also for police so and this is probably a question for the second panel but has there been any progress made on providing the necessary policing units for doing not just form protection but surveillance, high risk arrest, etc. That's an excellent question and it falls into that category too of having first and foremost an accurate analysis of the conflict dynamics on the ground and to include likely spoilers or likely spoilers might be but also having effective strategies for dealing with them. Jack do you want to? We're in a public meeting so there's a limit to how much I can say but I will say this much, there are a number of operations where over the last few years we have led operations on the basis of criminal intelligence and those of you that have worked on Haiti know exactly what I'm talking about what is perhaps more current is what we are trying to do in eastern Congo and in northern Mali where in eastern Congo for those of you that perhaps are not so familiar one of the groups that is carrying out large scale massacres the ADF is driven by criminal networks is a criminal network aspect to its work that we have not always fully grasped it is vitally important to understand those linkages and those linkages with criminal actors in the Congo and with armed groups and when it comes to northern Mali the same goes for the traffickers that are operating there and the extent to which they have an impact on operations. But if I can answer your second question now we are not able to get the criminal intelligence capacities that we desperately seek in our missions from the police contributing countries. Criminal intelligence is a scarce capacity in most national governments and I don't think that they are going to be super generous in giving it to us. In a more general way you will see during the course of next year new policies on intelligence gathering it will probably have a much more anodyne title like information but it will be intelligence and it will certainly include policing in it. Thank you very much. Question here in the middle. Good morning and thank you for your comments today. My name is Emmanuel. I'm a graduate student at the School of International Service and my question very briefly is about the issue of consultant with the capitals. As we know in previous experiences force commanders and the contingent leaders have had troubles with this consultation process that have led ultimately to one of the greatest failures including of course the case of Rwanda. This is still one of the in my opinion enduring challenges for these principles that were adopted in 2015 how can we parse those specific processes out in order to make them more expedient. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ambassador this is sort of the problem you touched on earlier and you posed the issue very clearly and I wondered if you had any reflections on how we actually begin to address this. Well we always thought that one of the ways was precisely through the annunciation of I don't remember the number of the principle right now which is no caveats. That's a fundamental. It's as simple as that no caveats. Once you have a caveat whether written or not written the problem arises and it would probably manifest itself in many many more ways that I can think of but that certainly the practitioners would know a lot better than myself. General do you have thoughts on it? Yeah. Because you've been in the field where you've had to deal with caveats both expressed and implicit. Yeah it is true caveats remain a very big impediment in the implementation of peacekeeping operations including protection of civilians. Well the Kigali principles try to urge member states that once you've allowed the deployment of these peacekeepers don't follow that deployment with the necessary caveats. In my previous experience we lost some peacekeepers in action and when we were here in New York for a meeting I was approached by the ambassador of that troop contributing country and he did ask for assurances from me to the extent that their troops will never die in action. You know we have very high regard for ambassadors and I and I was looking at him and I told him that if I had those powers I would first give those guarantees to myself before I extend it to your troops. So the fact that I can't decide when I die but I'm sure I will I can't give you those guarantees but I was a little bit more serious with him and said ambassador this and it is very true as any commander will tell you we all wish that you know men and women who come into theater if we can should go back the way they came. But again this is very serious business and if you are not ready to make that extra sacrifice I would rather do not deploy. Now very often and I don't intend to speak for Jack but headquarters will always be bashed for the failures of peacekeeping missions and very little do we mention about countries that do send them and also send caveats along with those troops. So you're basically tying the not only the UN itself but even the essence of peacekeeping as far as I'm concerned. At the heart central to this question let me take a stab but I want to stir the pot a little bit here. When General Patrick served he had a national flag here and a UN and AU flag there and we should never forget about this flag. Because countries train their troops they loan them to us and they would generally like to get them back in working order. They do not expect us to take such command over those troops that they lose their authority and by the way it's important to remember that for military authority purposes such as sanctions or punishment they fall under the authority of the troop contributing country and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Caveats are a nuisance it's been mentioned before on the panel and we all agree with that. But we also don't need to make too much of caveats. We're realistic we've worked with caveats for the last 70 years they're not going to go away. There are bigger issues than caveats leadership leadership is one of those making sure that that contingent commander that General Patrick spoke to understood what's at stake if he doesn't carry out their responsibilities. Training it's all in the Kigali principles by the way it's nothing new here. If people just did what they were expected to do these days when you deploy on mission whether you're a police or military you're supposed to certify that your troops have undergone certain training. About a third of countries are certifying do you think we send the other two thirds back? Non-certification is not a sanction to participating peacekeeping I'm ashamed to say this but we can't afford not to have non-certified troops. Now can you help us make sure that every single contingent is certified? We'd love that. That's what President Obama and the United States and others tried to do to change the narrative that every single contingent member will be trained will have the right doctrine in place to go and do the job that you've asked us to do. An important part of that conversation as well is to increase the number of those at the table and that was the other purpose of President Obama's somebody a year ago September was to try to find ways to bring more countries and troop contributors to the table because to the extent that we enlarge that capacity we have a better chance of having truly capable competent forces that we can deploy in those circumstances so there's a lot of there are a lot of elements to the strategy the overall strategy for how do we get to the point where we have the kind of capable competent forces that are available to us with the kind of leadership that they need in order to enable us to fulfill that obligation for the protection of civilians. I think we're going to end our panel here because we have a succeeding panel with some notable experts on it who are going to also help us mine a little bit more some of the practicalities of how we actually accomplish this important this vitally important mission of protecting civilians in the context of peace operations. But please join me in thanking our panelists for their insights and contributions. Your Excellencies General Niem Wumba ladies and gentlemen I'm Air Commodore Tennaf I'm the Dutch Defense Attaché and please allow me to address you. The importance of protection of civilians is clear we only have to look at the news that's coming to us from places like Darfur, Congo, Cuba and recently Aleppo. We've just heard in this previous panel how challenging this task is or in the words of General Niem Wumba it's not so common to follow common principles. It requires commitment and efforts of both military and police but it's just not it's not just the men and women in uniform the ones who are actually out there in those in difficult circumstances who are accountable. For this part of the mandate to succeed the mission's leadership and it was addressed in the panel needs to be fully on board as well and lead by example. Also decision makers in capitals are far removed from the actual conflict. Decision makers in New York City Council members need to be aware that what they're asking blue helmets to do and how to match noble objective resources that can be out to put in use. Fully equipped missions, information driven missions and with state of the art material can enhance the performance of peacekeeping missions. Over promising and under delivering will set the UN up for failure. That was addressed in the panel as well as you clearly stated and the international community just cannot allow that to happen. We owe it to the world's citizens for example in South Sudan to do better. Last month was already mentioned my countrymen Major General Retired Patrick Kamert issued a damning report on the United Nations mission in South Sudan concluding that there was a lack of leadership a lack of preparedness a lack of integration and a risk averse culture within the mission as a result unmasked field to protect hundreds of civilians from death or rape. A tragedy these are issues we not only need to address and talk about but we need to repair them too we need to act on these findings. In his report General Kamert recommended a mobile training support team that could assist battalion officers in training on mandates, rules of engagements and use of force. This could be achieved through scenario training. The Netherlands hopes that this report will gather the momentum to improve protection of the civilians within UN missions and that it will contribute to a culture that is best described as the responsibility to act. Ladies and gentlemen the next panel will talk more about the actual implementation of the Kigali principles and how troop contribution countries can prepare the staff that they deploy for this responsibility. A practical example was that the Netherlands has collaborated with Rwanda and the United States on comprehensive capacity building of both civilian and military staff training people on how to deal with protection of civilians in peacekeeping missions. This is essential and we have in close consultation with the United Nations worked on a curriculum and we brought participants together in Muzanze, Rwanda last month and to engage in the first of the series of these training sessions. The training was a scenario based exercise which used the Kigali principles as guidance. To have been part of this trilateral collaboration and it was the first start of many more training missions to come. Collaboration we took up on this with both Rwanda and US Africa. It was an extremely worthwhile effort people from different backgrounds and angles attended they arrived as individuals but left as a connected group equipped with new insights, knowledge and skills this training will hopefully help them too in the various capacities to gain trust of a population a key take away from the course. Building trust with communities and building trust within the line of command it requires the right mindset. Before we turn to the next panel let's have a closer look at some of the participants from this conference and in particular in this video I draw your attention to the difficulties our troops face when they are conducting their operations. How do you differentiate between civilians and rebels for example you will see two young soldiers who are faced with these kind of challenges the other thing I draw your attention is to the message it's given by police women that in protecting civilians you cannot work alone a defensive approach is needed to provide security but also establishing good government and to establish rule of law. Good civil military cooperation in this field is of the utmost important it has been said already by the general as well military actions can only provide time and space for the real solutions and protection of civilians to happen and that's good governance it's good rule of law it's good political action in a sound basis that people are not seeking solutions by violence we provide time and space but civilian political actions have to do it. To me this short clip you're about to see reflects a story of hope although protection of civilians as mentioned remains a prime responsibility of host governments it's good to see that there are good young people out there people wanting to do the right thing putting their lives on the line taking risk to protect people that's a positive story and I'm happy to share some of that with you today thank you for your attention. Good morning what a wonderful initiative I'm happy that we all had the opportunity to see that and see some of the work that is happening around training in the field. My name is Ilana Lancaster and I am a senior program officer here at the Institute in the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation I am responsible for two initiatives one is a conflict management training for peacekeepers and the second initiative is capacity development for educational institutions for the past six years the Institute and the Dakota program office have worked closely together to offer five day trainings aimed at strengthening the capacity of peacekeepers on the ground in Africa to resolve to protect civilians through the nonviolent resolution of conflict and we do this work with our colleagues in state I.O Tori and Jen Dr. Rainey and we do this through GpoI funding I had the great pleasure of moderating this panel of esteemed colleagues from across the international peace support operations community on a conversation about the implementation of the Kigali principles I will briefly introduce the panel by stating simply names and institutions for more information please refer to their bios and I just want to take a moment to talk about my role as a moderator it's a little bit different than the first panel my role here is to facilitate the conversation I'm hoping to create a space where we can talk to and with each other so it will be much more informal and more of a conversational tone we have two principle questions that we will try to take on in the amount of time that we have and I have a third question for you if we have time if time allows the participants receive the questions in advance I will read the first question and then I will invite my colleagues to go at it basically we'll take probably about 15 to 20 minutes just to have that conversation and then we'll move on to the second question and so on depending on how we're moving through the time I may ask follow up questions or ask for clarification we then want to expand the conversation to our audience here in Carlucci but also our audience who is joining us from around the world virtually so we should have some time in space to consider some questions that may be coming through social media and then after that we will open the floor to you here so it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you the panel I want to begin with Ms. Tori Holt and Tori Holt is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of International Organizations welcome I'd like to welcome Colonel Commence who is the commander of the Peacekeeper Training Center of the Republic of Togo Colonel Commence is temporarily up in Carlisle Pennsylvania at the War College but we've had a great fortune of working in the field with Colonel Commence and his colleagues at Syampi in Lomay welcome Colonel Commence Mr. Mark Swain is the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability and Humanitarian Assistance with the Department of Defense and Ms. Aditi Gore who is at the Stimson Center and she's the Director of Protecting Civilians in Conflict Program so I welcome my panel here I'd like to begin with question one the international community has reached consensus as we talked about earlier around the importance of protection of civilians as was stated earlier more than 90% of UN peacekeepers currently have a mandate to protect civilians however even though we've reached consensus around the protection we have not reached consensus around how the protection of civilians needs to be operationalized in his remarks at the Kigali Principal Conference in Rwanda in May of last year his Excellency Jose Ramos Orta observed that member states simply do not agree on whose job it is and how far missions are supposed to go with the resources they have been provided in fact Kigali Principal Number 9 demands clarity for the UN mission leadership on rules of engagement including under which circumstances the use of force is appropriate and we discussed some of this during panel one so again with an eye to implementation keeping in mind this tension how do we bridge this divide and effectively implement the Kigali principals in other words how can UN member states troop and police contributing countries work together on operationalizing the principals and ensure that there are no more failures to protect civilians the floor is yours whoever would like to go for it well first of all thank you very much the US Institute of Peace and to the governments of Uruguay Rwanda and the Netherlands for their steadfast leadership on this we've seen the last few years the member states come together to really speak up I just have to briefly say this is not a theoretical problem your numbers may belie the fact but when you look at the missions today whether it's Mali or South Sudan, TAR4, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, and also Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire while winding down Haiti and implied in Lebanon those are all real missions with real people and the numbers of over 100,000 serving these missions means this is an urgent issue to address and I have to say I'm very glad that Jack was able to sketch out the UN concept for protection of civilians that first it's political messaging it's a government's responsibility, second it's physical protection of civilians and third it's environment shaping through a rule of law but the problem is it doesn't work yet and that's why we need the Kigali principals if this was well understood by every police officer, civilian, humanitarian actor, police, and troop contributing country it's not a problem but we do too many missions have confused people in the field they don't have a sense of who's under threat and they don't understand what action they should take and so the reason Kigali is so important is that mission failure to protect civilians can be strategic and even though we do not want to make every corporal strategic when they do not understand their rules of engagement when caveats are not obvious to the leadership then this gets in the way so I just want to sort of emphasize why we really welcome the leadership of the countries who joined on and support the principals because over 40% of the countries that are in peacekeeping today and that's a very heartening number so to practical things I would say first of all where there is a gap is often in the missions that have chapter 7 authority to use force to protect civilians that are in environments that are not permissive so for those we would recommend that any country that is signed on to the Kigali principals be prioritized for employment in the field this is for the troop and police contributing countries because you know up front the government understands the political challenge and is willing to send in capacity to support that which takes the political will in part off the table we'd also recommend that leadership be selected from countries which have also agreed to the Kigali principals because it just shortens the time lag between understanding the mission and being willing to take action so in addition to prioritizing caveats are mentioned earlier in the panel but perhaps making them up front explicit no government wants to send in personnel, civilian, military or police who are not in an environment where they can succeed and if you give them caveats which make it uncomfortable or unlikely that they're able to take action such an environment where there may be a more active conflict then let's not have that and one of the reasons behind the series of summits including President Obama's summit in 2015 and London hosted this fall was to build out a larger base and supply of police military and enablers so the UN can be picky about who goes where and allocate capabilities into the field. I would also say the Security Council's responsibilities here and they need to be mindful of how the mandates are being implemented which means we need a better information flow between the field and New York you see in the Security Council elevate protection of civilians and mandates almost like underline and bold it but there's nothing automatic that comes with those mandates except the emphasis that it needs to happen in the field so that would get to your point about training and understanding we believe there should be scenario based training for every mission for the leadership as well as the contingent commanders as our Dutch colleague pointed out earlier every mission is different and before anybody deploys and I would argue this is a political problem as well as one that military and police face so you have to know the potential perpetrators of violence be able to distinguish between a migration route where there is localized violence or something that may occur around elections opportunistic crime and where it's organized and purposeful and civilians are being targeted for political gain or freedom of change in government those are very different environments and every mission should go in knowing exactly their operating terrain. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation I took the opportunity because I'm just around here so it's a pleasure to come and share and widen my perspective upon peacekeeping operation and peacekeeping training to your question I think the whole thing goes first to the country's willingness, political will to let their contingents be fully part of the mission. It's not about just feeling the gaps or being part of it because I just want my flag to be there. It's to take into account what is involved. Make sure or be willing to accept casualties when you are sending your people make sure that their life can be at stake. This is what many countries are not willing to take this way. Sometimes you have some people or some peacekeepers they will go but not do the real job that they are supposed to be doing on the ground they'll just go and get in the foxhole somewhere because I'm there. So it goes first the political will to make the people understand that okay you're not going just to be there and come back. You may not come back but you bear that in mind and that is so obvious because most of the troop contributing countries are those countries who are at peace. So most of the soldiers they are not really confronted to putting their life on the line most of the time. That takes me to the training parts. So as she just mentioned we need to have a thorough training and the mental prepare our troops mentally they are not just going it's not a picnic party they are going to everything can happen there. So this is the real thing that we should take into account when we go on that mission to protect. We are going to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. That also should be clear in mind of all the peacekeepers. We are there to fight for people who cannot fight. If they could do it we wouldn't be there. So we'll be ready to put our life on the line for those civilians. This is what I can tell you. Well like Tori I'd like to thank USIP for hosting and thanks to the governments of the Netherlands and Uruguay and Rwanda for focusing so much attention on this important issue. I think when I first started working on UN peacekeeping missions it was in Africa in 2003 and most of the discussion at the time was chapter 6 or chapter 7 you know the peace enforcement mandates trying to get more UN peacekeeping missions to be peacekeeping enforcers and the words protection of civilians I don't remember that lexicon that those words being used at the time and then over the years as we have had a growing number of UN peacekeeping missions which the United States military has supported with logistics and an airlift we've seen the importance of peacekeepers in their operations having the need to protect civilians and sometimes some of those peacekeepers have not done what they were supposed to do or what we would think they were supposed to do more specifically in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo I can remember chaos going outside the UN compound we had a UN peacekeeping contingent and they stayed in their compound and did not go actively go out and try to stop the chaos and the violence that was going on that was being perpetrated against civilians so I think as policymakers here in Washington D.C. we spent a lot of time working between the Department of Defense and state with our colleagues in the UN federal community to say we need more instructions and guidance on the protection of civilians and I was happy to say I was in Kigali last year when we talked about the Kigali principles and Rwanda the government of Rwanda ruled those out because it in one document shows the world what our principles are what we guide ourselves as UN peacekeeping missions so the question was how you bridge the gap I think we started 97% of UN peacekeeping missions have protection of civilians in their mandate now we have to work on the training and we have to bridge that gap and I think the work that was done last month by the United States government U.S. Africa Command and in partnership with the Netherlands and Rwanda at the Rwanda Peace Academy is very important because that is focused on looking at problems looking at real world examples of how we go about protecting civilians looking at examples where civilians were not protected how the UN troop contributing countries either responded or not responded and learn from those lessons and try to make things better for the next contingent so I think the question was how do we bridge the gap we've got the language in the mandate now we need to put it into practice and part of that is with the training and equipping that we do with our partners thank you. Thanks so much for the opportunity to speak it's a really important topic and I'm grateful for the chance as the only civil society representative on this panel I thought I should probably try and focus on the civilians that we're talking about as part of my work I travel to different peacekeeping missions and I meet with peacekeepers but I also meet with local civil society representatives human rights defenders and where I can with the civilians who are being affected by the threats that the peacekeepers are trying to address and so what I'm going to try and do is just channel some of the priorities that I've heard are important to the civilians under threat to bring their perspective into the conversation about implementing the Kigali principles so I think if I can claim to speak for civilians under threat there would be three things that I think civilians would like us to focus on would like us to understand the first is that protection means talking to the civilians the second is that protection is local and the third is that protection requires holding peacekeepers accountable so I'll just go through those quickly in term and the first is about talking I was remembering this morning an experience I had in the DRC the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year Jack mentioned in the first panel the conflict related to the ADF armed group and I was speaking to someone from the military component of the peacekeeping mission in DRC who was saying this is a really challenging problem the ADF armed group has links to the Congolese armed forces and we are doing joint operations with the Congolese armed forces against this armed group and so because of those links that exist when we plan an operation against the ADF by the time we show up there someone in the Congolese army has tipped them off by the time we get there the ADF leadership has moved somewhere else we can't track them down and I said well why don't you think about why are you doing it with the FRDC with the Congolese army if you know that this is the problem and he said well the problem is that we need information that the Congolese army has we can't plan these operations on our own and I said well couldn't you get that information from the communities in the area who know who the ADF are and he said oh well but information from civilians isn't actionable and I think that's illustrative of a kind of mindset that exists in a lot of peacekeeping missions particularly in military components I think a lot of progress has been made over the years amongst civilian personnel in peacekeeping missions there's a lot of understanding now that peacekeeping missions need to engage with local communities need to talk to them to understand their priorities to understand what the threats are and to communicate with them about the limits and the mandate of the peacekeeping mission that understanding doesn't always exist on the military side of peacekeeping missions so I think there's a lot of work that can be done there in training when we talk about training on POC that has to include training on how to engage with local communities and how to report that information back to headquarters the second point about protection being local what I mean here is that the preoccupation of the Security Council of the UN Secretariat and of peacekeepers on the ground a lot of the time is on the capital it's on the politics in the capital and that's fine as far as supporting a peace agreement and as far as negotiating between different parties to a conflict but the violence that happens in a peacekeeping setting is local it happens across the country and it's not always clear that peacekeepers understand that they are obliged to respond to threats against civilians no matter where in the country they might be obviously peacekeepers are restricted by their resources as to where in the country they can respond but another story might help illustrate this point before the civil war started in South Sudan we were having a conversation with a sector commander in the UN mission there in Unmiss and we were talking about the violence in Zhongli in the Zhongli region of South Sudan where it's inter-communal violence between different groups that raid each other's cattle and attack civilians along the way that was where most of the violence in the country was happening at that point in time and this gentleman was saying that he didn't see it as the mission's responsibility to respond to that kind of violence and he said we're not here to respond to every cattle attack or car accident he was comparing local violence in the country as normalized or part of the country's fabric and saying that they were there to address national level conflict so I think again this is an issue that can be addressed through some pre-deployment training of contributing countries but it also has to come from the top it also has to come from UN headquarters to make it clear in mandates and indoctrin that protection of civilians is not limited to conflicts that peacekeepers perceive as being national level and the third issue I wanted to touch on is on accountability you know the Kigali principles include a pledge by the signatories to hold peacekeepers accountable for failures to protect civilians and I think that's really commendable it's a big step forward because holding peacekeepers accountable for failing to protect civilians is one of the hardest tasks there is in peacekeeping it's very difficult to say when a peacekeeping mission has failed to protect it's difficult to judge these are extremely chaotic environments sometimes with very difficult communications structure it's very difficult to know when a peacekeeping mission has really failed to live up to its responsibility to protect but where it is clear an example has been mentioned several times already this morning with the UN mission in South Sudan and the failure to respond to some of the violence that happened in July this year where it's clear that peacekeepers haven't lived up to their responsibility holding those peacekeepers accountable truly is a very very difficult thing to do you know while the signatories of the Kigali principles may pledge to hold their peacekeepers accountable as we've discussed this morning there are many other countries that including some of the major contributing countries that haven't signed on to the Kigali principles and who haven't pledged to hold their people accountable for failures to protect it often happens that major countries countries that offer a lot of troops to UN peacekeeping missions when they fail to act if the UN tries to hold them accountable by sending them home by repatriating them they have a trump card they can pull which is well if you send us home we will withdraw all of our troops from all UN peacekeeping missions and it's a kind of retaliatory mindset that makes accountability very difficult to implement so I think what the signatories of the Kigali principles can do apart from encouraging more countries to sign on and to hold their troops accountable is to speak up when countries try to respond in that kind of retaliatory way so for example after the report came out exploring the failures in South Sudan the UN made I think a courageous decision to send home the force commander of the UN mission in South Sudan and it was a decision that didn't reflect his personal failures but reflected a view that the force commander of a mission was responsible for what happens under their command and in response the Kenyan government decided to withdraw all of its troops from the UN mission in South Sudan where they are vitally needed and that kind of response requires the signatories of the Kigali principles I think to speak out to say this is not what protection of civilians means that we are all obliged as countries that have pledged troops to missions with mandates to protect that we all have an obligation to hold our people accountable and not to retaliate in this way against the UN so I think all of those ideas are things that civilians on the ground who are relying on UN peacekeepers for protection would really encourage signatories of the Kigali principles to think about Thank you. I'd like us to drill down a bit more and I would like to invite our panelists to select one of the 18 principles that most resonates with you which you've done some thinking around can you briefly sketch out what that principle is and can you talk about how you would go about from your particular institutional affiliation how would you go about implementing this particular principle Please, Colonel Commence To me the principle that resonates to me is the principle 10 which talks about identifying the threats prior to the deployment that way we won't have to use force and get someone in trouble or lack thereof so if you identify the threats we can take major proactive measures to mitigate those threats and make the mission more smoothly that means I don't know a weak step the first commander and his major subordinates are involved in the preparation of the mission because it needs to do the assessment on the ground design what we call military they appropriate operational design and operational approach with all the components involved in that process to prepare the mission that way we can design some deterrence options some flexible response options and proceed the mission that way before the mandate is draft we have all those elements that we can incorporate in the mandate that way on the ground we can implement what we want so I think earlier enough the first commander and his sector commanders would be involved in the preparation of the mission conduct a rookie reconnaissance on the ground that will involve also the criminal investigators that someone wanted out earlier in the questions section so these are all things that we have to put together then 20 people in key leader engagement when they go on the ground how do they engage with the local community leaders that's where they can get information so that the mission can be protected because the way we are operating right now as you point out that the country should be held accountable yes but not when the whole mandate is so fuzzy you don't know when there is a failure to protect the video we don't know that in some mission for instance at night you cannot operate they said after 1800 no more UN mission out that happened to me when I was in Rwanda we failed that mission because we were so framed in Rwanda we couldn't do much so and it's still going on in Mali right now so we know what's going on but we cannot there's no hard pursuit we cannot do that so if we have the intelligence in advance we can prevent and even at least displace those civilians if we cannot act we displace them or show our praises so this is the number 10 to me is the most important thing that we can do thank you Tori can I ask you to consider the same thing and perhaps add anticipated challenges yeah well I completely agree with my good colleague I think number 10 which is for those of you in the audience to seek and to identify as early as possible potential threats to civilians to actively take steps to mitigate such threats and otherwise reduce the vulnerability of the civilian population so I will take it out of maybe the field and just say I will look to our good friends in the UN I think there's a bit of a gap between the concept of protection of civilians and the machinery of the UN after a council and before a council resolution so to enable you to do the job in the field when the mission is first designed the concept of operations it should identify what those threats are up front so the USGS and the political team will need to know what the presumption is when they go in but so will the police to understand how they work with the local security or local communities so will the military to understand am I deploying near or very far from where the civilians might be under threat and what events might occur that would change that map right now I think the UN has a hard time doing that integrated planning is not easy and despite the Brahimi report calling for the leadership to meet well in advance for deploying the field I will look to Jack but I believe that's deeply important in progress I would also say the Office of Operations is not always communicate well with the people who do the guidance so I would also add to my list force generation every troop in police contributing country and I encourage all those who believe in the Kigali principles should ask for guidance before they deploy on each of these elements what are the threats to civilians what am I expected to do how specific to this mission will I be asked to respond and then in turn say within the mission area do I have backup if I take a deterrent robust posture we know that some of the reforms that we're calling for in peacekeeping include faster medical and casual evacuation better assessment of safety and security for the mission itself better information of course leadership and now since the planning so in addition to adding that to what I do think that UN and New York needs to get better at there should be a planning cell that is always active and iterative on this in the field so I would agree that number ten is kind of the core thing one last point there's been some good work to look at perpetrators and I just want to emphasize that sometimes it's a political strategy to go after civilians and that is some extent what the first panel talked about the theory of peacekeeping is that it's backing up a political agreement and we have to always be mindful of that political agreement is torn up in fact in the field and I think we've seen missions like that I think that's the worry today on South Sudan where the government itself has the greatest threats to its own population then that partnership gets broken and that's why identifying who the source of the threat is and baking that into the plan across the mission is key to understanding how to make choices in the moment and long term about how to use all the tools of the UN mission including the use of force and I do have to say it's very rare when peacekeepers use force and we certainly don't want them to do it willy nilly but right now the ratio is off. So there's many heroes out there whose names we do not know but unfortunately it's the times it doesn't work that we hear about. Okay, I'll go next. For the Department of Defense looking at the Kigali principle 18 that covers mobility, logistics and support is the one that's the most relevant to the Department of Defense because it's what we do to help UN peacekeepers and also AU peacekeepers most of the time before there is a UN mission when a crisis occurs it's often the African Union or ECOWAS the economic community of West African states that has responded in Africa and the United States military has supported those efforts and so as we're looking for a focus on the protection of civilians troop contributing countries have the ability to deploy but trying to take on too many missions they say that they don't have logistics and the mobility for the Department of Defense I would say that in the last 13 years of covering these issues I've never seen such a more focused attention for the United States government on peacekeeping since two years ago the Vice President held a summit President Obama held a summit last year followed up by this past year with Secretary Carter participating in the UK ministerial and that has really focused the attention for the Department of Defense to work closely with the State Department to determine what our key focus is and how we support UN peacekeeping missions and where we do things one of the things for logistics is the ACSA the acquisition and cross servicing agreement with which we have with the UN which will allow us to provide airlift if called upon if the UN needs the United States military to airlift peacekeepers we can do that more easily than we could in the past we have a good history of doing that in the United States military we did it with Rwanda in 2005 we airlifted the first Rwandan peacekeepers to Darfur we airlifted French and Chad into Mali when that started and we airlifted the Rwandan and Burundian soldiers into the Central African Republic and I think that the area of logistics and also our technology our military has spent a lot of time learning lessons for our deployments throughout the world and we're working closely with UN counterparts on our technology some of the specific things we can say is that we can use camp technologies to allow peacekeepers to better recycle and reuse resources and eliminate some of the logistical burdens to resupply and as you those of you who have been in peacekeeping missions some of those units are pretty far away from the headquarters and resupplying those units are very difficult and if we can make that more effective and efficient I think that's important it's also important for the United States military we have a good example of El Salvador in the last year there were helicopter contingent in Mali and US Southern Command helped train that helicopter contingent and then when that contingent was actually deployed in the UN mission a desert environment of Mali is much different than El Salvador we sent five military mentors to help them the El Salvador helicopter unit in the mission to try to support others so I think that as we look at focusing on the protection of civilians that creates more challenges for the units involved the troop contributing countries that puts a stress on the logistics to and the demands and the United States military will do what it can to help with those things. Thank you. I see that we're running out of time I was actually going to choose a principle 10-2 it's very popular principle today but since most of what I wanted to say is being said already better by my colleagues I'll just touch on one aspect which is planning ahead for like these scenarios and worst case scenarios of threats to civilians and I think that there is a lot of room for improvement on this front and I think it comes it can happen on a number of levels including scenario-based planning for peacekeepers before they deploy including joint contingency planning exercises in the field along with humanitarian colleagues who maybe have a more realistic understanding of some of the threats to civilians and I think it also involves simulation exercises for missions in the field to practice dealing with crises and see where their weaknesses are so often there are communication failures within a mission that prevent the mission from responding effectively when the threat is upon them so having some of those simulation exercises to help missions diagnose those problems before the crises happen I think can be really crucial. Thank you. I want to open our conversation up to the audience but I just as you know I'm a trainer and so the trainer in me because we have talked a lot about training but I'd like us just to maybe a few people comment on what does this mean for training so we know that principle number one is training right of contingence and the second principle is around leadership training and many of you mentioned training even in about principle number ten for example how do we do that better what advice would you have for the those of us who are working with contingence doing the work of training them to prepare to protect civilians please Colonel Comance. As I said I will start with the prepare the troops their mindsets this is all where the whole thing starts you know back home people are the portray me as General Patton who is telling people that you may not come back you are going to die so prepare them mentally that where they are going they have to put their life on the line the mindsets so the moral preparation of the troops then the rest is technique so we know how these are not recruited we are sending on the ground these are trained military we just need to readjust their knowledge how to implement it on the peacekeeping operation i.e. protection of civilians I think in our campus we do that too we protect our civilians this is why we are in uniform for the General Patton pointed it out earlier we wear those uniform because we want to protect people who cannot protect themselves so the rest is how to implement it on the ground so to me the basic is the mindsets because it's no secret most people they are there the rest they are here and I'm going to go to mission because the incentive the human incentive behind you should turn that mindset off you may die so if you are not ready two things came up earlier one is scenario based training you have to do that otherwise these are all theoretical problems and both successes and failures because the decisions are going to be made in the field far from capitals far from New York and we need to have confidence that they are able to have internalized their goals and make the best choice possible if you look at U.N. missions today some come from diplomatic background others have familiar with the military but no one person captures it all so particularly for environments we do our seniorly as a disservice if they don't have their own scenario planning at least in the field with the senior leadership the police, the military, the political level, the humanitarian community and go through real scenarios they will never be exactly what they experienced from the start to work coherently as a group to understand the assumptions of each other and to actually in some cases do operational plan that's not yet a capacity that most missions I mean Jack correct me I don't think most missions have that capability in the field right now and so as a result the leadership team sometimes lacks the cohesion in advance of the crisis so I would strongly push for that. For DOD it's the cooperation we have with the State Department that's the state program and funding that allows the United States to train partner militaries to participate in peacekeeping missions. We do it throughout the world and it's the Department of Defense who does most of the training if it's the Pacific Command or if it's Central Command European Command, Southern Command or Africa Command it's through GPOY money and we work hand in hand with our state partners and we include protection of civilians training in our training and in Africa where we have the preponderance of training it's we already talked about ACOTA, the African Continency Operations Training and Assistance Program and US Africa Command and ACOTA partners work hand in hand to use that GPOY provided funding to train so I think that it's something that we always have to take a look at the syllabus and to make sure that we're including and incorporating the lessons learned for those next peacekeepers that get sent out. Thank you and with that I would like to open the conversation up to those of you who are here in the audience I would invite you to please come to the mics and state your name and your affiliation and then your question. I do think we may have some questions, do we have any questions? Social media no questions, excellent. Sorry Jack I think did you, yes? It's incredibly rare to be able to correct Tori and I'm simply not going to pass at the opportunity. We didn't ask you questions. She asked an important question which is how many missions at the moment have the capability to run scenario based planning and I'm happy to say more than we've ever had before. The new special representative that's going out to South Sudan next month was in New York last week for the first time he received a very dedicated program which included precisely this aspect so when he deploys he will have that which his predecessors never had. More importantly there are training of trainer courses, there are enhanced protection of civilian courses being run out for every single peacekeeping operation today that has a POC mandate. In addition to that there are going to be exercises that are run in missions together with the senior leadership so civilian military police on exactly the points that Tori has mentioned. I have to recognize the considerable support that we receive from member states including the United States for precisely this. We simply don't have the resources to do it out of our regular budget. We need additional resources for that but it is being done more than ever before. Hi, my name is Chuck Woolery. I'm a former chair of the United Nations Association Council of Organizations here in the Washington DC area. This need for a rapid deployment force fully effective and trained has been going on for at least two decades maybe more. One of the flaws one of the principle flaws I see is reliance on the Security Council in terms of protecting humans but what I'm concerned about is 20 years from now will we still be here talking about these problems and what's needed in terms of implementation and what is needed between now and the next few years in order to get us rolling and actually make these principles implemented. Just briefly on rapid deployment we know this has been an issue for a long time. I hope we're not here in 20 years in the same situation. So there's been some really positive progress. The summits that have been mentioned which for those of you who aren't familiar with it, two years ago we got a list from the UN of all its gaps and we found out that the UN was missing critical enablers whether it's medical units and hospitals, logistics and engineers. It was missing critical military capabilities and it was missing critical police capabilities including people who speak French. And so that list was facts worldwide to about 100 countries and they were asked to provide something from the gaps list to participate in the first in the summit in 2015 that President Obama co-hosted in New York and then in advance of the London summit ministerial that happens fall. So it's been a forcing mechanism to expand the capabilities available to the UN because rapid deployment in part gets hung up when there isn't a supply. And I would say that's something our government learned in the case of South Sudan where in the crisis in December of 2013 the council acted very quickly. In less than a week it authorized another 4,000 or 5,000 more troops. Remember having this conversation? But the ability for them to deploy was molasses. It took forever and there were all kinds of reasons for it. So the summit process has been meant to identify both the actual people who would deploy, the enablers that would go along with, and now coming out of London we've encouraged governments that are making pledges to pledge up to and inclusive what's called the rapid deployment level. And to actually work with UN in advance for I don't know if it's a memorandum of understanding what the term would be but to lay out the conditions under which they would be able to deploy and smooth out some of the vicious paperwork that can get in the way or misunderstandings about what equipment comes. I mean it gets much into the system. So that is not a panacea. It does not solve everything. But it is a very robust move in the right direction to start lining up capabilities against rapid deployment. From my perspective the rapid deployment the UN now has identified countries that say they will rapidly deploy so I think that's a step in the right direction. It's not enough. That's the hardest thing there is to do when you look at it. If you're talking about Burundi in 2003, Liberia in 2003, Darfur in 2005 then most recently Mali and Khar. It was not the United Nations who was the first contingent to respond to an emerging crisis. It was again as I said before the African Union and ECOWAS that responded most quickly. And it's usually infantry battalions and as Tori said those key enablers it's the medical units, the engineering. It's those other support elements that are critical for any mission to succeed. One of the reasons that this current administration of the United States government we have APREP the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership. We're working with six partner nations in Africa and we're trying to do just that to give them the ability for mostly logistics and engineering and have that reserve capability because when you look at UNDPKO they have a planned out schedule for every troop contributing country that's going to an existing UN mission. That's a very difficult task in itself. And then when you have another crisis or an emergence where you have an existing UN mission that's under a crisis that needs additional troops, someone has to respond. So that's how that we are trying to as a government enable partners to help respond but it's a very good question so we're working towards that. Thank you very much. I'm Laura Basko. I'm a PhD candidate up at American University and I like to return to Aditi's point about accountability. Not accountability after a failure but rather prior accountability and the daily actions. I was hoping or loved to hear more about the state of monitoring and evaluation on POC daily actions. As it stands today, do we know what we want peacekeepers to do? Is there somebody monitoring it and do we have consistent numbers? And back to Lisa's point about successes. Is there a good role model that already exists within the UN right now? Thank you. Can we take the second question here? Thank you very much. My name is Bob Perito. I'm an adjunct professor in the peacekeeping program at George Basin University and I've also been an advisor over the years to the UN police decisions effort to develop policy and guidelines for police and peace operations. This has been a very military centric conversation and I can see the need and the reasons for this but there's another aspect of peacekeeping and to protection of civilians if an armed attack occurs on an IDP camp the defense of that IDP camp from armed attackers is of course a military responsibility but inside the wire if the people in that IDP camp are being preyed upon by criminals and rapists that's a police matter. Now we have a policy in the UN for the role of military but the policies that cover civilians in these situations and also I'm sorry that cover civilian police in these operations there is a policy that's been under development now for about five years in the UN system to develop an actual policy for UN police in the protection of civilians and that policy doesn't seem to be the subject of any urgency at this point. So we need certainly the kinds of scenarios that have been discussing for military but we also need those same kind of scenario development, policy development and guideline development for UN police. You find themselves as you know very often in situations where they also don't understand quite what their responsibilities are and what to do. So I just wonder if you have a comment on that. Thanks. So it seems we have two questions on the table the role of monitoring and evaluation around protecting civilians and the second question on the tables what about police and security of civilians. I can start. So just first the question on M&E. So Jack's team at the UN released earlier this year a set of 52 indicators that missions are meant to be incorporating to look at how effective they are on POC. So far I've encountered very few people in field missions who are aware of those indicators but a year is not a very long time in the peacekeeping world so perhaps they will sort of begin to be implemented over the course of next year. But beyond those indicators it's obviously a very thorny challenge to try and measure protection of civilians but there are some steps that peacekeeping missions are trying to take. So one interesting approach that's being taken in the UN mission in the Central African Republic is to set up weapons free zones. They're clearly established and clearly delimited areas of the country that armed groups are not meant to be entering. And it's fairly easy to evaluate whether that weapons free zone is being maintained. If you see an armed group inside it it hasn't worked. And because there are particular country contingents that are responsible for maintaining those weapons free zones it's also it helps to hold those troop contributing countries accountable a little bit easier if they've failed in that task. So there are some interesting approaches that I think are being pioneered in the field and I think it's great to keep an eye on some of those approaches. And Bob I think that the UN police just released a strategic framework a couple months ago. No? Okay. I mean I agree with you that in South Sudan in particular for the reasons that you mentioned the UN police are really struggling to figure out and there's a lot of good approaches that have come out that they've come to hard fought lessons that they've arrived at on how you hand over from a police situation to a military how you maintain a detention facility inside a protection of civilian site where there's no legal jurisdiction for the UN to be conducting arrests. It's definitely a very challenging situation both in terms of implementing POC and in terms of the legalities a lot of UN police in South Sudan are really concerned that they're sort of operating without a legal framework so we're definitely all looking forward to that guidance coming up. Yeah. I think in terms of working with the police on the ground most of the time we train our police and the military with the same of the UN peacekeeping operations. So now on the ground most of the time most of the two nowadays peacekeeping operations are violence so the proponent is given to the military before the police comes to do the legal part of the work. So the work in full cooperation so we cannot say that we are military centric now just because most of the time the military the civilian they feel safer in the presence of the military with arms because the danger they are facing is also through violent people armed robbery or this kind of stuff which the police cannot face to start with. So for the second question in terms of monitoring the accountability I think we should de-conflict the gray zone that we have between the mandates and what is supposed to be done on the ground. So if we don't delineate those things clearly it will difficult to monitor this accountability ahead. So I think that one I will leave it to the upper hierarchy to take care of that. So the UN should come up with some code of conducts or ethic and stated clearly in the mandate that is given to the force commander and how it will be instilled into the troops. And that also again goes back to the preparation. How much time do we have to prepare for the mission and what's involved in all those matters. So this is what I think should be done. It's sometimes accountability is the backbone of a mission. And it speaks to clear guidance on what the expectations are prior to deployment and then after deployment. And it gets the chain of command and accountability both within the chain and then also to civilian leadership across the mission. So just to state the obvious. You know I think if a contingent is underperforming particularly say on protection of civilians it may be because there's confusion, there's poor training or there's more capabilities needed and if so that should be flagged early and capabilities provided to the contingent. But if it's a consistently underperforming unit or a country which is struggling to meet that part of the mandate this should be potentially repatriated. Because the whole point is that the whole mission has to be able to perform to the best that it can. And just protection of civilians is an ambition of a mission. It's not protect everybody from everything. But what I think studies have shown over the years is that the effort to try to work with communities to do their best. Because a long ways there's legitimacy and the credibility of a mission. Conversely when the mission fails to take action or try. Then that can undercut the mission quicker than anything else. Obviously one other area of accountability is to make sure that the peacekeepers themselves never abuse the population. So sexual exploitation abuse of any form is unacceptable. And you see now a Security Council resolution dedicated solely to that and a lot of work in progress within the UN system to have better training and also accountability. So not exactly a topic of the Kigali principles but a corollary to it. And just on police really briefly there was a police review in the last year. You all know this extremely well. Kigali is less on the policing element. But certainly I think the form police units and even the advisers can find themselves in areas without much doctrine and guidance. Particularly in some of the missions that are facing ongoing conflicts. So just to say it's a really important area and it's an area that needs increasing support and attention. Good morning I'm Major General Marcelo Montaner from the Uruguayan Army. I'm a former even staff member in the Bunya crisis in 2003. I'm also a former commander battalion in the East Congo in 2009, 2010. I see a lot of civilians here. How do we the military? I just want to complement something. I will not make a question. How do we do to execute everything you say into a ground? With the classical military tools we make our operations order. We have to take five or probably six sheets of paper A4, which is the mandate, very elastical, which it's politically cover everything. But the military has to make a very concrete statement in order to the soldiers that probably doesn't speak English to go on ground and succeed and protect civilians. That obliges us the leaders to have a very big good mindset. And for that it's very important the teamwork. It's very important that the civilian side doesn't look the military in the far side. We're in the same team, not only for the UN civilian side but also for the NGOs. As a troop commander I use the intelligence provided by the NGOs. We have a very good relationships. I invite them to have some social activities in my battalion. They feel very comfortable and when they feel that the relationship is good they will provide the complete help to make a very complete work because nobody could be more important than the UN and the mission and the protection of civilians. Another thing that sometimes happens is that probably in the first UN missions there is not everything covered. In Boonia we found a lot of antipersonal minds. But the mandates, nothing said about who takes care of them. Who do that? How do we protect the civilians? Only the Uruguayan soldiers were there and we have to take care of them without being covered by anything but our hurt. So a civilian side should be very comfortable that the military people when they're trained, when they're committed will do the job very well in a teamwork concept. Thank you. Thank you very much for both panels. It's more Anne Phillips USIP. A quick question. The UN Secretary General starting with Kofi Annan and subsequent have always asked for a larger pool of troop contributing countries. And a lot of the points that were made today say that, and I think the point was made in the first panel, the UN cannot be selective for a whole host of reasons that were mentioned here. If somebody is disciplined or a unit is disciplined, and Tom, a force commander discipline, the country will may in retaliation pull all those. The UN is always seeking troops for these missions. So the goals are very laudable. Expanding the number of troop contributing countries seems to be a critical feature for making the progress that's been identified for so many people, by so many people. In these sessions and others I was just in a conference in Belgium on UN peace operations. So my question very quickly is, will the US become a troop contributing country? Thank you. I'll see. Well, since that was directed right for the Department of Defense, I'll take that one. To this point, no, we have not. I mean what will be in the future, I don't know. I can say that that issue has been discussed a lot, especially in the last two years. As I said, we, I've been working on this for some years and I think the focus and attention on peacekeeping has never been higher in our building and I think that right now the focus of the Department of Defense is how are we going to how can we enhance and enable others and our partners. And we are increasing the number of staff officers that we have assigned. Soon we will have the highest number of officers in the UN mission in Mali and it's an important mission. It's also a dangerous mission and we talked about earlier today and I think that those sorts of things with the military advisors and looking to see where the Department of Defense can help enhance our partner troop contributing countries. That's where our focus will be for the near future. And maybe to amplify, I mean the United States has had a really tremendous inter-agency effort to look hard at peacekeeping and when President Obama hosted the summit in 2015 he also issued the first guidance in 20 years on the U.S. approach and so maybe to amplify a little what Marcus said, which is I mentioned the gaps this earlier. When we took a good look at that, we said, wow what the U.S. has to offer are probably not battalions as the highest value. There's all this sort of expertise that the UN has deeply saw. So I would say for example understanding how to counter IEDs in Mali was something the mission was facing and our government has expertise on it. So sometimes it's us providing bilateral assistance directly to a UN operation and that may can also in turn support training and equipping. So we've also agreed this ACSA agreement which has been mentioned which is providing for the UN a capability to reach to us on a reimbursable basis but on short notice if they need lift and that's an agreement that has been used already. So there's a lot of things that don't look like a large contingent but that we were very confident would make a material and substantive difference in the short run to the things that the UN needed now and it didn't take off the table future considerations but in our assessment that was the right way to go for the summit. I'll also say from a larger point we also do feel that the last few years where so many governments have come forward to make pledges. There's now coming out of London 50,000 new pledges in police, military enablers, 50,000. I think the UN is gasping at how they accept these all, they go out and visit them in the field, they put them in the system. I mean their phone is ringing off the hook a bit and for some of these countries they haven't been in peacekeeping for 10 or even 20 years. As mentioned if you look at Mali and maybe some of these governments are here, some of the Nordic countries had gone into that mission. I think for the Dutch it was the first time in 20 years and then also you see other countries emerging in that. So I really think it's a really interesting time. It's a time of energy where I think it's over 100 countries now that contribute to UN missions across the whole area so it is a time for optimism and high energy to marry up both the contributions and the reforms needed to have this result in more effective field missions. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Sarah Thompson. I work at the State Department on police peacekeeping and I do have a question but before I pose my question I would be remiss not to put another plug in for APRAP, the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership. We have been working with the partner countries the three of the six as police contributing countries and we've identified that the biggest gap to rapid deployment especially for the police is the lack of availability of equipment. The amount of equipment required for peacekeeping missions is too extraordinary for the financial capacities of a lot of our PCCs. Additionally we've worked on institutionalizing pre-deployment training so that the PCCs do in essence have a stand by force as they're training even the rotational units. Additionally rather than just deploying peacekeepers for the sake of deploying peacekeepers we're enhancing the quality of the peacekeepers by providing training for equipment sustainment and operational purposes. So we will be providing training equipment packages and training on how to maintain it repair it etc. That was just a quick plug on APRAP and what the State Department is doing on the police side. As it relates to the police and I guess even the military there has been some discussion this morning about the engagement of communities and gathering of intelligence I would put a cautionary tale of engaging with the communities for the purposes of gathering intelligence a lot of these communities already distressed public officials especially the police especially the military so if the community sees the engagement of these peacekeepers to be intelligence gathering only that could really undermine not only the credibility of the various institutions that we're trying to build but it could also undermine the credibility of the entire peacekeeping operation. So I wonder with the growing trend of gathering intelligence if there is any move by the UN or anybody else to actually put in a standard of procedures or some sort of policy in place to highlight this as a potential issue and what we could proactively do to address the issue before it gets kind of out of control. That makes sense. The only comment I have is intelligence should be intelligence so if the one gathering the intelligence do the intelligence job is intelligent enough they wouldn't know that he is gathering it so I don't see any problem there how would the community know that he is gathering intelligence if he is intelligence so it's paramount to everything so intelligence one way or another we have to do it then we put the white train intelligence officers on the ground we'll know that they are gathering intelligence so I don't see any problem intelligence should be intelligence. Adi did you have a perspective or opinion on that? Yeah maybe a slightly different perspective different sections and components of a peacekeeping mission engage with local communities in different ways and for different reasons the point that I was making in my remarks was about whether and how military components feel comfortable engaging with civilians and a lot of the time they don't but I completely agree that it's not a one way street that peacekeepers shouldn't see talking to civilians as being only about extracting information from them but different parts of a peacekeeping mission as I said engage for different reasons civil affairs components are engaging for the purpose of understanding local conflicts and helping to resolve them for example political fair sections might be engaging with local communities to resolve political disputes and I think as far as the military is concerned yes it shouldn't just be about extracting information for example you often hear stories when you talk to local communities that the peacekeepers for example are taking water from a well at a time that disrupts the time that the women normally go to that well and those are easy sort of issues to address as long as the peacekeepers are maintaining that level of communication with local communities and understanding what their concerns are so I completely agree that it shouldn't just be about gathering intelligence but I think we do need to emphasize to troops that serve in peacekeeping missions that the information that civilians have is invaluable and that they shouldn't overlook them as a source of information. I could just say just one thing about the work that we do in pre-deployment training we work with contingents deploying and a lot of what our curriculum is about is about the building of relationships with the local population so in order to protect civilians you must have relationships positive productive relationships not exploitative relationships with the local population I think Colonel Commence earlier talked a little bit about this shift in mindset I think he was thinking about the shift of mindset in terms of having contingents being prepared to losing their lives for the protection of civilians but I think another shift in that mindset really is about seeing your work and I think someone on the first panel mentioned this but peacekeepers seeing their work is really the primary core work as protecting civilians and many of these peacekeepers as was articulated earlier are trained in a very different discipline and doctrine and so it is a paradigm shift in many ways to get peacekeepers prepared to protect civilians and those of you who do work around trying to create and develop and cultivate paradigm shifts know that it's a lot of hard work to do that and my I would think that we need to do a little bit more around shifting that paradigm I'm looking at the time and it's actually time for us to bring this event to a close of course I wanted to thank our partners the Netherlands, Rwanda and Uruguayans and of course to help us in the State Department as well and the Department of Defense to bring this event together I just want to synthesize a few final thoughts as we kind of walk out here today I encourage us all to continue these conversations as we know this is really complex work peacekeeping is complex work, peace support is complex work and the conversations need to continue and what I hear the panel is saying both in the first panel and the second panel as well as some of our guest remarks for that we need to have better communication generally in this field we of course need better and more effective training and there is the solution of scenario based training as being a helpful way to enhance training we need better information and we need to plan in advance we need to do better planning in advance there needs to be a change of mindset we need to have prior accountability and we also need to have accountability after the mission we need to spend a little bit more time to attending to and thinking around our police colleagues and the work that our police colleagues do there was a commitment to prioritize the signatories of the Kikali principles as a way to try to make sure that civilians are protected thank you absolutely and this is maybe to those of you who are deploying to peacekeeping missions and also the military people in the room this last point is important because military's do not train at the strategic level for protection of civilians it is the outcome of what you do and while the tactics and operation can line up to protect it's not usually cast that way in doctrine at least what we found over the years is that doctor intends to talk about security and stability or an evacuation operation or how to work with civil society it kind of circles the question and yet for anybody who is seeing their country deployed to a UN led peacekeeping mission and is told you must protect civilians that at the concept level is critical to understanding how to employ the operations and tactics and I think for many governments at the national level which is the basis for training we don't have that on our books and if we do it's not always heavily exercised so I just want to pause because this has been to be the practical panel and say this is a work in progress and so what Jackson laid out as a concept that the UN has developed is the first time any international institution has developed this concept but because it does include physical protection I'll just again say to my military colleagues take a look at what your training is not just like the standards where you brief that it's in the mandate but how do you operationalize that operationally and tactically and how does that add up strategically that conversation is very dynamic it's a work in progress we have not sorted that out and I say that whether it's a western government a non-western government a traditional contributing country or a new one so just a point of emphasis thank you for raising it thank you and have a wonderful afternoon