 Well, it's my pleasure now to welcome the Director of the Crisis Management Planning Directorate, part of the Diplomatic Service of the European Union, Walter Stevens, who's just given a very powerful keynote at our conference. So welcome. Thank you very much. The aim of these conversations is to share with people who can't be at the conference some of the key issues and themes and challenges that we're discussing. But let's begin by what is your Directorate and its role? What are you fundamentally doing? Well, my Directorate is in fact strategically planning all the missions and operations that the European Union is doing as part of the common foreign and security policy. And that is very much in Africa. By that, it's also on our own continent, in the Balkans. We're also working for the moment on Libya. We have been able to develop also a mission sometime ago in Ache in Indonesia in order to help peace agreement. So that is our role. We also review, strategically review, the existing missions because of course the strategic context is changing. Take, for example, Afghanistan, where we have now the whole transition in Afghanistan while the role of our mission will change also. And we have to adapt that role also to the changing context. And then we also very much work with partnerships. So partnerships for the missions and operations that we have. And that's one of the lessons that we have learned that we have to work more closely with partners. For example, also Australia, but of course also international organisations like the United Nations, like the African Union, ACOAS, and also third states like Norway, like the United States, like Canada and others. This question of partnerships, the scale of the sort of international challenges that you're dealing with is almost mind-boggling. It's some of the most serious problems in the world with enormous consequences for human life and well-being. A gentleman from the audience asked you three tough questions about what you were doing to assist the Kenyans in their work in Somalia, what you were doing to try and deal with the 40-year crisis and instability in the Congo, what were you doing to try and stop weapons getting to the myriad of militias in Africa? I think you had four minutes to answer these three questions. But what I got from your answer was that you need the support of the local government, the local governance that exists to whatever degree, that unless they engage with you, your hands are almost tied. Is that the lesson or have I overstated it? It is definitely a lesson. If you really want to change the situation of a crisis, you have to have the buy-in of the local government, of the national government and all the authorities. If not, you're just on your own. As a matter of fact, for all the missions and operations, it's not like we come in like that from the sky. We do that on the basis of a UN Security Council resolution or an invitation by the local governments. Again, you can try to help the local governments, but it's in the end they who have to take ownership of the whole process and work on it from different fronts politically, but also sometimes in security ways like with defence and police. We are looking now for the moment at a very severe crisis in the Sahel that has been developing over the years with a lot of drug trafficking, human trafficking, combining that with terrorist elements of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and a lack of state control in large parts of the countries in the region, Mali, Niger, but also Mauritania, which have allowed to develop these Islamic radical groups and take control over parts of the territory. When you want to do something about that, you need the first of all a solid basis in the national states where you're trying to act, and they need to buy in. They need to take up their responsibility. We can only support, and that goes also for the United Nations. So there is a lot to do about combining political elements, but also supporting capacity building and maybe sometimes intervening with military or supporting with police functions. If a country is in bad trouble and a lot of people are dying, but the government is ambivalent about whether they want the European Union to help them, what lessons have you learnt about how to build trust so that help will be accepted? Yeah, sometimes, I mean, things have to be done against the will of the Dan rulers, take Libya for example, where the whole population came in revolt against their dictator, Gaddafi. But there are other examples, I mean, that sometimes governments do not have control anymore, are contested, and you become part of a conflict which is also involving the national government. For example, we had to intervene a couple of times in Congo in order to protect populations which were attacked by militias. But you can only do that if you have sort of an international agreement to do that, because it's tricky to intervene into local situations. And you cannot do that according to international rules like that. You have to have a sort of a mandate, you have to have a sort of an agreement by the international community, preferably of course the United Nations to do that. So there always has to be a legal framework, whether it's the local government inviting someone in, such as I think happened in the Solomon's, and we've heard about Ramsey, the mission here, or where that's lacking and a large population is in trouble, you go to look to the UN for a legal framework. So that's one key lesson. What is a transition? Can you explain that, and a transition that you're involved in at the moment? Well, a transition, you have many forms of transition. If you look, for example, at the Afghanistan for the moment, I mean, a lot of efforts have come putting that, military, police, but also politically and developmental. But the point is now that we have to give things more in the hands of the local authorities because we think they become more and more capable of taking things in their own hands. And I think that is the key of transition, that is making the local authorities, the national governments, more capable of handling the situation. We do that, for example, in Kosovo, where we are there to help the Kosovo authorities, a new state that is recognized by at least half of the international community, but they need help to set up their capacities, their police, their justice, their institutions. And that's why we are there. And so we help them, but at one point, they have to take responsibility of their own. And that is, in fact, guided or should be guided by sort of conditions, benchmarks that are capable of taking over things. So transition is, in fact, going from a sort of an international solution into a more local solution where the local governments is capable and willing of taking over responsibility. So with places like the Congo and Somalia, where there's been such long-term instability and high levels of violence and insecure national governments, is that a fair, simple way of putting it? Do you just have to always be on about capacity building? At whatever opportunity you get, you seek to build local capacity. There's no shortcut. I think that's key. I mean, look at Somalia and also the Congo. Somalia certainly is what we call a failed state. And there are many failed states, unfortunately. And the key essence of a failed state, what do you look for when it's failed? Well, a failed state means that it doesn't have the control over its own territory, that it doesn't have the control of its own population, that it doesn't have the support of its population, that it cannot rule like a normal country should rule. I mean, that the citizens have at least law and order, that they have economic development, that they have some institutions on which they can count on. In the African incident that you have a policeman and there is a crime that someone has brought in a normal international law situation to a court. But unfortunately, it doesn't exist in many countries. So we have to help these countries to bring that to their own populations. And why? What's in it for the European Union? You're in extreme economic trouble. Why are you investing in the Horn of Africa and in stability in the Horn of Africa? What's the fundamental driver of that for the European Union? Well, Somalia is very much linked also to piracy. And of course, piracy is a huge cost for international shipping. It's a huge challenge and danger for international shipping, not only for the European Union, but internationally. And of course, you can address this piracy issue at sea, which we do, but it's only addressing symptoms. So you have also to address the situation on land where you have a huge reserve of potential pirates. And you can only do that by bringing stability and at least some form of economic development and governance on the Somali lands. And that's what we try to do by helping the government of Somalia by supplying them with some security forces, which they can at least have control over the territory. Secondly, also helping them in the political process. They have now a government that has a plan that can move forward. Of course, I mean, the challenges are still immense and help them also with development means in order that they have a sort of a living and they don't have to go into piracy. Which in a way comes to another key message from your presentation that everything has to be integrated so that you can't just deal with the military or just deal with the civil or just deal with the economy. It all must be dealt with concurrently. It all must be linked up. Otherwise, you will end up in very strange situations. Let me talk, for example, about Mali, where we have been investing, European countries, but also the United States, huge amounts of development money. And there is still so much terrorism, so much radical Islamists, so much drug trafficking in that country. And parts of that country, the northern parts, has really become a sort of a safe haven for terrorism and all kind of radical groups. If you are not working also on the political system and make sure that the government does the things right and this is now what the international community wants, then you're lost. I mean, trying to address that situation only with military means wouldn't work. You have to have your whole story together, linking up the different elements. It must be so hard, economic development, when drug trafficking is so profitable. Exactly. There was a speaker at this conference who included in the summary of his presentation this quote, transition is the strategic end game for a military mission and the phase when the robustness or otherwise of mission success becomes apparent. It's nicely said. I took that to mean that once we leave, if everything goes wrong again, our mission has not been successful. Now, that is a very hard measure because as we transition out, the myriad of international players transition out of Afghanistan, will those little girls be safe on the way to school? That remains to be seen. To give you an honest transfer, I think as some speakers said in this seminar, that the transition, our transition and the Afghanistan transition is very much time-driven and not condition-driven. I think there's still much work to be done. The only thing is of course how much effort can we put and continue to put into that. I have the impression that sometimes that situation is also determined by out of Afghanistan political decisions because of the final cost and the tremendous effort that has to be made by, for example, the United States and others in order to continue that. Where does the management of public expectations come into this? Because you know that if, as people leave Afghanistan, if a whole lot of girls' schools are blown up or acids thrown in their face and the things that get in the media, the population of democracies will be saying, why are our taxes going into community development in these nations where such hideous things happen? Why have our men and women died? Do you see what I'm saying? This is the kind of, is part of the challenge of the lessons learnt in this civil military sphere, the need to communicate with the populations that are funding these actions? Definitely also, yes. That must be very hard. Luckily there is a multitude of messages coming out of these countries not only by official instances but also by NGOs and news agencies which bring out let's say a multi-dimensional picture of what is happening. But indeed communication is important. But I think communication should also be a little bit transparent and tell the real story. Many efforts have been done and maybe we have the tendency sometimes of being a little bit negative because we have not reached the end state yet. Can I just thank you, not only for this interview but for flying from Belgium to Sydney, Australia and I know you're flying back to Belgium this afternoon. We really thank you for your time, thank you. And you have such a lovely city.