 Well, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Excellent. Just want to make sure you're there. Anyway, welcome to USIP. My name is Michael Yaffe. I'm the Vice President for the Middle East and Africa program here at the USIP. And it's my honor to introduce this panel today. But before I do, let me just give you, for those who are unfamiliar with USIP, a brief background about the Institute. The Institute was founded in 1984 to be an independent national institution founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for the US and global security. We're pleased to co-host today's event on lessons of the US policy toward South Sudan with the Holocaust Museum's Simon Scode Center on the Prevention of Genocide. For those joining us via webcast and following us on Twitter, please feel free to join the conversation and ask questions by using the following hashtag South Sudan lessons. I would also like to extend a special welcome to our distinguished guests and to, and in particular, former ambassador to South Sudan, Mali Fee, who is with us today. USIP has a long history of work in South Sudan. Our current programming aims to promote inclusive and durable peace processes produced by our research and analysis strengthened by the capacity of local peace builders through training and network building, and by convening and advising high-level decision-making on options on peace. Last week, USIP hosted Senator Jeff Merkley, who shared his reflections on his recent trip to South Sudan and the impact of the devastating ongoing food crisis there that has left over half the population in need of food aid. South Sudan has been a bipartisan issue, an issue in Congress, and a priority for many of the champions in Africa and on Africa on Capitol Hill. South Sudan currently finds itself in a critical juncture. Nearly five years of conflict have left a devastating impact on South Sudan's citizens. Fighting continues throughout much of the country, despite attempts to implement a peace agreement in 2015 and several subsequent ceasefires. A series of recent peace talks mediated by regional leaders that began at the end of June have failed to produce an inclusive and sustainable peace agreement. And the UN Security Council approved a US-drafted resolution just last Friday that imposed an arms embargo and travel ban and asset freeze against several key South Sudanese officials. So how did we get here? This is an important moment in the international community to pause and reflect on the lessons from international policy towards South Sudan in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. We are fortunate to have here today with us an old friend and former colleague at USIP, John Tenom, who has authored a new report published by the Simon Scow Center that is titled From Independence to Civil War, Atrocity Prevention and US Policy Towards South Sudan. John currently serves as a visiting fellow at the Simon Scow Center and as African Director at Freedom House. You will hear from John in just a few moments as he shares his insights in a short summary in the main findings from his report. We are also pleased to have here on today a panel of distinguished experts. We are joined by Ambassador Don Bluth, former US Special Envoy for South Sudan and South Sudan, Kate Omkusnaf, Director of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Joshua Miservi, Senior Policy Analyst for Africa and the Middle East at the Heritage Foundation. We are also grateful to Ali Virgi, visiting expert here at USIP, who has agreed to take on the role of moderator in place of Ambassador Princeton Lyman, who is sorry he was not able to join us today. USIP has benefited during the last five years from the wise Council of Ambassador Lyman, former US Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan and has most recently transitioned here at USIP in his role as Advisor Emeritus. Today's event will begin with John's opening remarks that will serve to set the scene for the discussion. We will then be moderated on a panel discussion followed by a Q&A session in which we invite questions from the audience and those online. One final note about today's event. This is the first in a series of conversations. We plan to host a few subsequent discussions on South Sudanese views on what is happening in the current peace process and also on South Sudanese perspectives on US policy. And finally, we hope to host a discussion on what we have learned and what is the vision for US policy going into the future. So in conclusion, thanks for joining us today and we look forward to a productive conversation. John? Thank you very much, Mike. Let me first of all say thanks, especially to the Holocaust Museum, to the Simon Scott Center for the Prevention of Genocide, for the fellowship and the support that went into writing this report. The folks I worked with there, some of whom are here, were instrumental in framing and helping this, and so my thanks to them. My thanks as well to my old home at USIP here for organizing this event. It's a great chance to talk this through. I will give some brief remarks here about what I found, but I think the crux of this is in the discussion is some really excellent panelists lineup for feedback. Let me just start by saying two caveats that I think are really important that I wrote in the paper, but I want to re-emphasize here. One is that doing this kind of hindsight analysis is easy and hindsight is 20-20 compared to being in the midst of it in the fog of war and trying to make policy. And so I very much recognize that. And anything I have to say is really in the context of trying to learn lessons and trying to inform future policy responses. Second caveat is that I worked in the previous administration from late 2014 through the end, and so I was involved to some extent in some of what's going on here. And so to the extent that there is critique or criticism, I bear some of that, I think. So what was I trying to do here? I was trying to look back on US policy towards South Sudan, going back to the current war and really the run-up to it, and identify what we called pivotal periods. And so we defined that as short stretches of time during which events in South Sudan compelled the US to act, or in hindsight, times in which the US could have acted with greater conviction but did not. And so my process was to consult informally pretty widely to try to think about what are the many, many options that could form these periods, and I had a list of 8, 10, 12 or so. And then I started these more formal interviews, which I did with about 30 people, a lot of former government officials, some current officials, and a whole slew of people, experts, academics, and geo-folks who have worked on South Sudan for a long time, including several South Sudanese. And so I was doing these interviews to try to whittle down this list of pivotal periods to a manageable number and ultimately got down to the four that I'll talk about today. And to try to inform myself about what lessons come out of this and what I can write about in the report. So if you have a chance to look at the report, you'll see lots of voices, lots of quotes from the people who I interviewed, and I think that's where a lot of the richness and the texture comes out. So just before I get to talking about those four periods, there are these four contextual factors that I wrote about that I think are important when we consider this. One is what I call the post-Bengasi, post-Rwanda situation, because I see this as two, in some ways, competing impulses within policymaking in the U.S. government. By post-Rwanda, I mean the impulse to try to prevent mass atrocities. And clearly there was a sense of never again amongst people, particularly those who had been involved in the response to Rwanda. But then you have more recently Benghazi and the impetus to very understandably to try to protect American personnel and facilities at almost all costs. And that's critically important, but these two things are sometimes in conflict, as I think we'll see in a little bit. The second contextual factor was, it is, that really there's the long U.S. history on South Sudan, which as we'll get into is helpful, but can also be a little bit challenging as well. The third is the long-time hostility of the United States to Sudan and the North, northern Sudan, and how that plays with the relationship between the U.S. and South Sudan and the dynamic of oversimplification of bad guys in the north and good guys in the south. Obviously that's a gross oversimplification, but it is part of what we see here. And the fourth is just the really divergent and competing senses within the U.S. government of actually how much influence and leverage there is available. And to this day you get a huge range of people from saying that U.S. has a great ability to influence outcomes on the ground to the U.S. has almost no ability. And there really has not been a consensus on that question. So let me jump into what I described as the four pivotal periods here. The first one comes in the spring and summer of 2013. So obviously independence in 2011 and the war started at the very end of 2013, but you start to see all these warning signs building up in the spring, summer of 2013. Increasingly autocratic behavior by President Kier. He starts to remove some ministers and governors. He starts to reshuffle the SPLA, ultimately removing, of course, in the summer, React Mishar and dissolving the government. And I think a lot of these warning signs were received in Washington and I think the lights were blinking. One particularly notable instance was in the spring of 2013 there was a senior South Sudanese delegation that came here for some trade meetings and a senior official in that delegation met with the Deputy Secretary of State and basically said help. We're concerned about what's going on. We're concerned about the dynamics within the party. We could use some intervention. And my sense, and I wasn't there, but my sense trying to piece it together is that there wasn't really a concerted response to that request for help. And there wasn't really a concerted response from the U.S. to what we're seeing as these increasing warning signs. And there was a conflict, I think, within U.S. decision making on how much do we want to own this and how engaged do we want to get. And part of that is because a lot of the problem here was within the SPLM and the SPLM's inability to manage succession issues within their leadership. That's what so much of this comes down to. But there was, I think, a real reluctance in the U.S. to get into that, to get our hands dirty within the SPLM party dynamics in a sense of this is not our issue. We need to stay out of it. And that may well be the case. I think it's also notable that right when a lot of this was happening in the spring and summer there was some vacancies in key positions, both at the position of U.S. Special Envoy with Ambassador Lyman departing and Ambassador Booth coming in the early fall and also in the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa with Johnny Carson leaving and Linda Thomas-Greenfield coming. But for each of those there was a three, four, five month gap or so that was harmful, I think, and that inhibited some of the U.S. response to what were these increasing warning signs. Second one is soon after the war starts and when the Ugandan Army, the UPDF, intervenes. They came very quickly after the war started on December 15th, 2013. And they were greeted in a positive way in many ways in those early days in part because they really did help to secure Juba and really did help to prevent a lot of fighting in and around Juba and that was appreciated and that was good. But their role pretty quickly expanded too and they pretty quickly, clearly took sides with the government and with Salva Kier and in many ways propped up the government. By securing Juba they allowed the SPLA to do a lot of fighting outside of Juba and there were also all sorts of reports about UPDF fighting itself outside of Juba in Bohr and possibly further north. And Museveni himself clearly supported Salva Kier throughout all this and that intervention in those early days gave Uganda a foothold in this conflict that Uganda never really gave up. And Uganda and Museveni in particular have been a spoiler in the peace process all the way since and probably are still a spoiler in the peace process to this day. And so the question is really could the U.S. have done more not to necessarily prevent them from coming in at all but from limiting the Ugandan role. There are some interesting quotes in the report about whether or not the U.S. sort of approved or acquiesced to the Ugandan intervention. There's one quote saying we gave them a wink. But all that said could we have done more to prevent the expanding role of the UPDF and a lot of this actually gets into bigger bilateral issues between the U.S. and Uganda because for various reasons I don't think South Sudan has ever been a major issue in U.S.-Uganda dynamics. A lot of that conversation is taken up by security issues and particularly Uganda's contributions to Amazon and Somalia. This was also at a time when the counter LRA efforts were ongoing and that was a big part of U.S. discussions. South Sudan was fourth, fifth, sixth on the talking points for senior officials when they engage with Museveni. It doesn't have to be that way but that is how it was and that perhaps is a missed opportunity. Third juncture that I wrote about is concerning the arms embargo. A hot topic of course. And of course I was writing this before there was a U.S. unilateral embargo and certainly before there was a multilateral U.N. embargo. But early in 2014 really only days, weeks into this conflict there was a lot of discussion in U.S.G. elsewhere on imposing an arms embargo on South Sudan and in many ways it seemed like a very logical thing to do. And there's a lot of arguments for why it would have made a lot of sense. It raises the cost of importing arms. It prevents the purchase of large weapons systems and those large systems were quite important going forward in terms of helicopters and amphibious vehicles. It could have empowered the U.N. panel of experts and above all else it would have sent a clear message to the government and to the opposition too. Nobody's arguing that it would have been a perfect embargo. Nobody's arguing that arms and weapons would have gotten into South Sudan. But it would have done some really positive things. And there were these arguments against it including that it's hard to enforce that it disproportionately harms the government. That South Sudan is a sovereign state and you don't put arms and bargos on a sovereign state and also that this was sort of the last card to play and we have to hold it in reserve for something really meaningful. I don't think any of those arguments hold up particularly well and I don't think history is going to judge this decision particularly well. And again, I think the signaling aspect of not having an arms embargo was hugely important. I think this was taken as a pat on the back to Selvakir and his government. Everybody knew that the U.S. was the one who was holding this back and there was pretty wide consensus in those early weeks and months on the arms embargo. And I think most people believe it could have passed the U.N. Security Council at that stage. Of course, late in the Obama Administration the opinions turned and there was an effort to push through the embargo at the Security Council. At that point dynamics have changed and it wasn't possible then. Of course it is possible now. One question I continue to have is why the U.S. if we weren't able to push it through the council why pursuing a unilateral embargo like the current administration did was never really considered and I don't have a great answer for that but that could have helped. And then the last of these junctures is it expands in terms of time frame but it's in the spring and summer of 2016 so we had the peace agreement signed in the fall of 2015 even before the ink is dry the government did what it could to pull apart the agreement with the most egregious aspect of that being the creation of 28 states on their own which was pretty clearly a violation of agreement. Nonetheless, Riyak Mishar comes back to Juba after lots of discussion back and forth in the spring of 2016 but of course it doesn't last long the fighting resumes and Riyak gets pushed out of Juba and I think the evidence is clear that the government made a concerted effort to kill him to assassinate him. This is something that still boggles my mind Riyak Mishar is a killer and has a lot of blood in his hands for sure. He was also the co-signatory to peace agreement and the first vice president of South Sudan and the government was trying to kill him and almost nobody said anything about that. There were some murmurs here and there but there was no concerted statement or effort to call out the fact the government was doing this and I still find that shocking and I still confused about that and think that's another instance of sending a very clear message to Selvak here and his government of tacit support for what they were doing. So Riyak is gone, ultimately ends up in exile in South Africa and then the government, the remaining government in South Sudan pulls this sort of switcheroo by saying that the opposition, the I.O. has nominated to Bondeng to be the new first vice president and we will accept that and all will be good. And this is where I think the U.S. made some mistakes as well. Secretary John Kerry was in Nairobi in August and he was asked if the U.S. supports this move and he said essentially yes, we think it's in compliance with the peace agreement. And then a little bit later the U.S. also said we think Riyak needs to stay out of the picture and stay in South Africa. And I think those are, that's a one, two of mistakes right there. Again, you know, Riyak is no saint but he does represent a certain constituency and it's hard to find others who represent that constituency and keeping him out of the picture I think was counterproductive. Related to that is elevating to Bond. A man who has very little support on the ground is despised by many including in his home state and elevating him had real consequences, had consequences on the ground in his home state of unity as well in part because he was given this new found international legitimacy and he felt compelled to try to match that legitimacy with facts on the ground and that was a bloody process on the ground. So the U.S. of this switcheroo I think did real harm and I think the world followed this endorsement and that is something that in hindsight we could have done differently. The question there is what's the counterfactual? What's the other option? This is where I think it gets into a conversation of could the U.S. have more assertively tried to force both leaders out at this time and was this the juncture in which to do so? I think there may have been some thinking in parts of the U.S. government that here is an opportunity to get rid of REAC and that's a good thing and we'll look for an opportunity to remove salva as well but if that was the thinking I never saw much of a concerted effort to do that latter part and I'm not sure there really was a concerted effort. So those are the four junctures that we're talking about here and also just these two what I call critical questions in the report that are broader questions not attached to a particular time frame that I came across a lot that I wanted to highlight. One goes way back and asks the question of whether the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Sudan and later South Sudan but then the SPLM is to blame for a lot of what we're seeing here and there's sort of two arguments to that. One is that we set up the SPLM a rebel movement in a hegemonic position and it sort of gave them the keys to this new South Sudan but there was no accountability and that led to some of the behavior that we're seeing from the SPLM that we've seen for a while now even before independence but that the CPA vested in them an authority that really was not deserved and the second critique of the CPA there is that it really did very little to envision what a new independent South Sudan looks like and you get all sorts of different opinions when the CPA was being negotiated on-signed and how likely a new independent South Sudan would be and of course John Garang said I prefer United Sudan and so forth the reality is that there was at least a decent likelihood that the agreement would lead to an independent South Sudan and there's very little in the agreement about the nation building process that would be required for international oversight mechanisms that would be needed in a new state like that or should there have been some sort of gradual transition process along the lines of Kosovo or East Timor none of that's in there and even in the interim period there wasn't a whole lot of thinking done about that so that's one question and the second question I just alluded to this earlier is was there a stage at which the US should have been really sought to push Salvaq here and React Mishar from the scene and it was certainly entertained within the USG but there was never really much force put behind the idea some people would say that when President Obama went to the region in the summer of 2015 he was trying to get to that point maybe but if that was the case I'm not sure a well cooked process and again if the idea in 2016 was to push React out and then Salvaq that too was not a particularly well cooked process the two questions that I know US government people really struggled with around this was one how do you get the region on board because it's not a natural thing for the region to do and for other leaders to support and two if not these guys then who and those are questions that are hard to answer and I think continue to be hard to answer so let me just conclude with the four concluding observations that I have in the report and this is really where I'm trying to pull the observations and the arguments out of the South Sudan context and look for some broader applicability the first one just concerns questioning legitimacy of leaders and even of allies that are not appropriate and I think there's a very strong argument to be made for questioning the legitimacy of Salvaq here in particular he has never been elected the president of South Sudan he's elected president of Southern Sudan before independence never of this country there were supposed to be elections in 2015 those have been pushed off and apparently pushed off again he is unquestionably responsible for a lot of atrocities as documented in the report there is a real basis for arguing about his legitimacy and I think that's a conversation that needs to happen I also think that as we look back and as we take a big picture look at US policy it's hard to avoid the fact that US policy again and again favored Salva and supported Salvaq here in this conflict I think there was a tepid response to some of the initial fighting in Cuba there was tacit or otherwise support to the Ugandan intervention blockage of the arms embargo not a lot said about the violations of the peace agreement including the 28 states and not a lot said about the effort to assassinate Riyadh Kamashar I would also add Salvaq was invited in 2014 to the Africa leaders summit which I think is a questionable thing so I just think all of this adds up to some pretty clear signaling to Salvaq that the US was in his corner and that may not have been the intent and some of these individual decisions may be justifiable but I think when you add them all up and you look at them that's the messaging second bigger picture conclusion is not to overvalue relationships there was a lot of sentiment I think within the USG and probably elsewhere that we know a lot of these South Sudanese leaders we've worked with them for so long and those relationships will help us get somewhere those relationships will give us leverage and they do not the relationships provide access they provide information and that's vitally important but the relationships are not in themselves leverage and I think there's probably more that could have been done in order to build up that leverage and not assume that the relationships would do it the third is always to challenge assumptions and to do that especially when mass atrocities are involved and particularly here that relates to the sort of feel good narrative of South Sudan and it was a good narrative for some time but it turned bad pretty quickly and to question who are partners who are supposed friends in South Sudan really are and the narrative about who they are and what their interests are was simply too slow to change I think it has changed by now but for several years that was a pretty slow process and related to that I did not see a lot of instances of a really concerted effort to take a step back on US policy and again this is sort of in the midst of the fog of war and it's hard to do that but in terms of some sort of red team analysis or anything like that there wasn't a really strong effort to question our assumptions but I think especially in instances of mass atrocities where something fundamental in a society is broken it is all the more important to question those assumptions and to really look hard at yourself final point is the US need to really make a decision on how invested we are in some of these instances and to stick to it I referenced this earlier but there was a sort of wavering within the US government on how much we want to own this problem how much is this our problem to solve how much do we defer to the region versus sort of take things by the take the reins ourselves and try to drive the process and there's a lot of wavering back and forth on that but I think that confused people sometimes and I think there's more we could have done to reach a decision on that and to try to stick to that decision so that's the summary there's a lot more in the report if you have time to look at a lot of really interesting quotes from people who are deeply involved in this look forward to a really good discussion and I'm very open to the critique and feedback on some of what I've found so thanks very much good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining us first let me thank you for joining us and indeed also to our audience online let me also thank our panelists for participating and be willing to participate in this discussion and especially to John for a very valuable report which as you said contains a lot more than you were able to go over now and I do encourage everyone if you haven't already picked up a copy there are copies available outside it's also available on the Holocaust Memorial Museum website it's really a very interesting read a couple of observations that I made before we turn over to the panel one thing I hope you can come back to perhaps in the discussion is something that I think is very valuable in the report are the alternative policy options that you discuss and in a way it's very easy to be a critic and I think we'd all agree for those of us that were involved it is easy to criticize or much easier to criticize it's harder to always think about alternatives and it is perhaps useful not only in the South Sudan context but also beyond that to think about what are the lessons that could be learned what are the alternatives because as you pointed out John a regionally initiated or a regionally mediated conflict is something that is not unique to South Sudan many of the conflicts in which the US has an interest and solving will be regionally mediated there will be national interests involved involving the neighbors and so on the approach you've taken in terms of identifying the pivotal periods I think is also really interesting and valuable one because it does help us focus on some of the key moments there are others of course as well that we as we discussed backstage might also have been included but it helps us I think reflect on where the relevance of these issues is for future policy makers who often are faced with a lot of imperfect choices and it's not that there is always an apparently better option although I think as you pointed out on some of the cases the arms embargo in particular Tabaan is another perhaps it should have been clearer and it's perhaps useful for us to think about why those choices were not made you expressed your bafflement at why the embargo was not pursued earlier but I think it's useful for us to think about why is it difficult to take sometimes what seem to be the obvious right choices or the obvious better choices and finally I think the last point you've touched on the limits of US agency is also a really important point because in terms of the respondents you had who described these extremes either a lot of influence or a lack thereof probably the reality is somewhere in the middle but it's also something that's not constant it is something that might be dynamic over time and that I think is also useful for us who are interested in conflict resolution to think about how does that airmen flow and where can that influence be more useful at certain moments because it isn't necessarily fixed so again thank you all we're looking forward to a very useful conversation and discussion just a couple of housekeeping notes before we get started when we do get to the Q&A's please identify yourself your name and affiliation if you have one we're also accepting online the tweets and questions so feel free to do that South Sudan lessons is the hashtag and finally I think I want to reiterate something that both Mike said and that John said at the beginning this is very much about trying to identify lessons we're not necessarily saying so and so many wants to blame so let's also just keep that in mind because as we're all very much aware an ongoing situation where unfortunately there have been very tragic consequences as well so Ambassador Don Booth can I turn to you first what did you think of what John had to say and your own reflections and we've agreed just for the benefit of the audience everyone's going to have only three minutes which I think is rather tough but I see what we can do so go ahead Don thank you Ali first I'd like to commend John I think it was very well researched and you've put a good intellectual framework together in posing the questions the things that need to be looked at so I agree on the four pivotal periods that John has identified but I would definitely add a fifth which was the May 2014 intervention when Secretary Kerry went to and got both Riyadh Mashaar and Salvik here to agree that they were going to focus the negotiations on a transitional government of national unity and power sharing because that really did set the trajectory of the peace process from May 2014 on to the conclusion of the agreement in August 2015 second on his two critical questions I agree that the CPA was partly to blame for the conflict it definitely handed power to the non-democratic military elite really was to the SPLA not to the SPLM not to a lot of the politicians and diplomats that we engage with more so but the CPA itself really was between the SPLM and the government of Sudan and so it wasn't an agreement that was really foreseeing the creation of a new state at least certainly not from the Sudanese perspective perhaps from the SPLA perspective it did but I would also posit that no one in the SPLA SPLM in 2005 when the CPA was concluded would have had any interest at all in things like interventions from the outside like the East Timor example or even any type of financial controls from the outside for the new state the type of state building things that were needed they felt they had basically won the war rather than our perception which is we helped the end of the war and getting them to the referendum so there was not enough thought given to state building but there are reasons for that and I think we were in the follow up after the CPA too concerned with getting to the referendum getting independence actual on the ground after the referendum was held and then thirdly preventing a Sudan-South Sudan war so to another question should we have forced Kier and Mishar to leave I would say that we tried that but we could not get either the regional or the international backing needed to achieve that perhaps we should have tried harder but I would remind everyone that we did go to the highest levels to push that particular policy and it did not succeed on the key conclusions just on one the US always sided with Kier I would say that Salva Kier would not agree with that in fact he actively tried to undermine me because he didn't like the messages that I was bringing out now I guess a case could be made that the envoy was sent out to deliver one message but the policies in Washington were sending a different signal I don't quite agree with that but that's certainly something that can be debated on the invitation to the African leader summit in the summer of 2014 that was very much up in the air and was very intensely debated and the decision to invite Salva came after he agreed to reach out to Riek Mishar and agreed to move forward toward a power-sharing transitional government of national unity so that was the logic behind that but I do agree that we definitely held back on the arms embargo for too long second the US overvalued personal relationships I would argue that that's not unique to South Sudan we see that repeated over and over again and it's probably inevitable particularly in dealing with a country that has really no institutions it's going to be personal relationships I agree that the US saw the SPLM as the good guys certainly during the CPA negotiations and in the run up to the referendum and independence but the bloom was certainly off the rose by the middle of 2013 when I took over as a convoy the actions of Salva Kier were clearly showing that there were strains in the relationship but another thing to keep in mind is if the SPLM was not the good guys who were the good guys to deal with in South Sudan they were not easy to find the fourth thing that the US waffled on our level of investment in the peace process here John I really have to disagree with you the US was always firmly behind the EGAD peace process which had been blessed by the African Union and supported by the United Nations now when EGAD got stuck we did indeed try to explore different ways to help and so at one point we had to carry a visit which set the direction for negotiations that was May of 2014 in late 2014 early 2015 we did consider whether the US might to more of a Dayton type approach we found that that was lacking the support necessary would not have been practical but I think it gave a spur to the EGAD process in early 2015 we were very much behind the idea of expanding to the AU5 and expanded EGAD or African Union role and ultimately to the EGAD plus process in 2015 we actually had the president engaging directly with the leaders and delivering the get it done message that we were out of patience with this so just to summarize and I know I've gone over my three minutes Ali but I think it's important to step back from our analysis on just the South Sudan case to ask some bigger questions one, what civil war or mass atrocity has ever been prevented from intervention two, how many civil wars or atrocities have actually been stopped via negotiations particularly outside of have any of them been stopped outside of military intervention you can think of NATO and Bosnia you can think of Tanzania going into Uganda in 1980 but those are the only ones I could come up with so sadly my conclusion is that the US and the international community we really lack both the tools the will and the cohesion needed to prevent or resolve civil wars in our sovereign state system that doesn't mean it isn't worth looking at the lessons to be learned from South Sudan and I look forward to that today but really the bigger question is is it possible for the international community for the United States to actually achieve the type of outcome that we would have liked to have seen in South Sudan thank you thanks Don Josh well thank you very much and I just want to add my commendation to Don's for John's work here I think it's really valuable post-mortem of what went wrong I want to draw sort of four or five themes that struck me I'll do it quickly and because I think they're applicable to not only the continuing civil war but also similar situations that we are facing now in other areas but are going to face in the future and Don actually touched on several of these but the first thing that struck me was that there was an intense fixation on achieving a grand political agreement some sort of peace deal to the exclusion I think stepping back and assessing whether the situation was conducive to an agreement whether the interlocutors involved in this process were actually committed to peace and that was John mentioned the lack of red teaming and questioning assumptions I think this is one of those assumptions that needed to be questioned you can have all the political engagement and political dialogue at the highest levels that you want but if the combatants are held bent on fighting striking a deal is meaningless and I think South Sudan has shown us that over and over again that the international community is arm twisted these primarily react in salva to the table to sign something that they they violated within minutes in some cases and I would argue that there's there's downside and again John's report mentioned this that there's damage that is done when you when you are involved in an agreement process or negotiation that has no chance of succeeding you waste time, you waste energy you waste money, you lose credibility the US lost credibility by involving itself in pointless negotiations the second point again Don alluded to this in his final points that the US has a temptation to shoehorn the centralized nation state model on to situations where it might not be appropriate now we do that for good reason it works here in the US and in most areas but we should think much more creatively about what an acceptable peaceful government looks like in certain places like South Sudan I would argue this has never been a unified polity even in the midst of the Civil War the north some of the worst violence was intra-southern so in that context is a centralized nation state really the way to go the US is just institutionally not set up to think creatively about what alternative governance models looks like and I think we don't even consider it enough third very quick point there was an excessive focus on engaging with elites elites are important you have to talk to them you can't ignore them but there was a very large constituency in South Sudan who's very committed to peace and that's the South Sudanese people themselves it's hard to talk to them I get it who are honest and representative leaders of the people of South Sudan but it's doable and there are NGOs and other organizations that talk to the South Sudanese people civil side etc all the time and I think there should have been greater attempts there again Don alluded to this one but humility about what is accomplishable for the United States we do have leverage and we should have used it better been more aggressive at many points in this process but there was a I was struck by a series of blithe quotes about state building from officials oh we should have pushed more of a state building this and here and there and again there's no assessment of the fundamentals of this region of this country like can you build a state here at least in the way we traditionally think about building states and does the US have the power and the influence and the political will to do it finally I won't belabor this point it's obvious and Don mentioned that victims aren't always the good guys there's no doubt cartoon victimized the South but that doesn't make the SPLA the SPLM the good guys thank you Josh Kate thanks Ali and thanks John for giving us this thoughtful analysis and reflection let me preface my comments by saying I'm one of those who has been involved longest on at least the stage here you know since the mid 90's in the project of South Sudan and I did have direct responsibility during the Bush administration for US aid's efforts in South Sudan so I've reflected a lot on what's happened over the course of the trajectory of the country since the signing of the CPA and the referendum and independence and now is sent back into civil war and in September of 2016 I testified and tried to reflect some of the lessons that I think we missed during the interim period and the CPA and that I think we're being replicated then and I think sadly are still being replicated today and I hope that we don't leave the room in here that we have yet another peace agreement that repeats some of the same mistakes I think there are three principle tasks that we really need to focus our attention on and apply the lessons of our recent and more distant experience and those tasks are the transition out of violence for the people of South Sudan fundamentally the CPA ended Africa's longest running civil war it did that it was a negotiated settlement that stopped a civil war that had cost 2 million lives and over 4 million displaced it didn't do a lot of other things and notably it didn't identify and lead to a political settlement within South Sudan and we could talk a lot more about the details why that was the case and then thirdly it didn't lead to a productive nation state for the country of South Sudan and our approach at the time was very technocratic and I think thoughts around that continue to be very technocratic and while they're important things that we can do as outsiders with assistance and know how and capacity and political will it's missing the point I think there are four myths that I tried to identify 2 years ago now and repeatedly since then that continue to plague us today one is that a power sharing government can work in South Sudan this was the fundamental framework of the CPA between the north and south and it was replicated then in the pathway to independence for the interim government and for the new independent government and again in August 2015 under the current peace agreement that is now being revitalized and we're rearranging the tech chairs once again power sharing governments won't work in South Sudan we can talk a lot more about why secondly and relatedly that Salvekir and Riyadh Mishar both can be part of the solution in South Sudan neither can neither can we've seen this fail two times now spectacularly we're about to put them back in seat for a third time if this cartoon declaration comes to fruition under the current mediation process and it's insanity to keep repeating the same thing that hasn't worked truly epic costs to the people of South Sudan and to the region and then the two other myths or I think errors that we continue to make is that a peacekeeping operation without a viable political settlement can actually succeed and that ties into my fourth point which is that other technical investments financial bailouts all the great things we can do with our development and conflict mitigation and assistance in support of particular aspects those are not the solution themselves if there's not a viable political framework and a viable political settlement then we will never succeed just with those technocratic responses peacekeeping humanitarian assistance at the moment in different periods of time everything we did to help stand up an interim government of Southern Sudan and then to support an independent government of South Sudan it's that political framework that is so critically important and where I think the most important question that we haven't grappled with satisfactorily is the legitimacy of the current regime and that is the Achilles heel of our approach and continued policy to South Sudan and I continue to come down on the side of the government is not legitimate it is possible to de-recognize a government by the United States to not treat Selvakir as the legitimate head of state as John's already pointed out and similarly not to tolerate or entertain an option that will put Riyak Mashaar back in power neither one can be part of the solution here and unless and until we come to terms with that as the United States and our policy I don't think that we'll see a viable pathway forward and then finally and quickly I do think there are alternatives I think we've been discussing a number of them for some time including the alternative of an external transitional administration this is how other countries that have experienced extreme state failure and collapse have come out of their violent situation by borrowing external competency and legitimacy where institutions and norms of oversight and checks and accountability do not exist and this is a borrowing of it for a time until the state of South Sudan can stand on its own and serve the people the way that it's supposed to and another alternative and I think a related option to that is what many South Sudanese have suggested themselves and that's a technocratic transitional administration and there's been a lot of excellent work done on what those options could look like and they do exist so I think to the red teaming point and to challenging our assumptions it is absolutely possible to arrive at a policy in the United States that has agency over its positions and when we draw our lines around what we're willing to support both politically and financially with our resources and our diplomatic leverage and approach we can change the calculus of the parties both within South Sudan and within the region and that is what is required to get us out of the current situation thank you Kate John would you like to briefly respond to anything you've heard only to one thing is this on I just want to Ambassador Booth's point that if we were favoring Salva he didn't see it that way and I agree and there's a quote in the paper about how Salva thought we were going to drone him and so forth all these crazy fantasies that he has and we were going to drag him to the ICC and so forth I completely by the idea that he didn't see it that way and so we have this really tricky situation of I continue to believe in actions we were favoring him in terms of our government in words we probably weren't we were putting some strong words out there and that's probably part of what he's reacting to and he's probably just having his own sort of paranoid fantasies on his own but that puts us in a really difficult place of favoring him in actions but not being able to bring him along or to encourage him diplomatically because the bilateral relationship is broken so I don't have a great solution to that it's a tough place for the U.S. to be in Thanks John so before we turn to the floor one question for the panel just to dive into this issue of the alternatives I mean Don you mentioned the arms embargo and you agreed with that of the four pivotal periods that John has identified in this report what are your views on the alternatives that could have been pursued and I'd like everyone to try and respond to that and John perhaps you can also say a bit more at least about one or two of them from the report so Kate can I ask you to go first Sure, I think John identified four of them and I think his paper notes that there are other candidates for pivotal periods that he could have included and were surfaced in various ways I feel like I have a whole list of those as well and to me it's really a question of judgment calls when there are critical events, game changing moments and the U.S. response particularly in this situation with South Sudan because of our history, because of our role and legacy with the country could have changed the course of events in a different way so I don't disagree with any of the four that John identified I would emphasize that I think the very first week of violence in December 2013 was an absolutely critical moment that the United States did not use at the leverage I believe we did have at that moment and could have compelled Salvek here to reign back and same with Riyadh Mashaar before he launched his full scale counter assault there that to me was a pivotal moment we had senior leaders in the region next door they did not go to Juba and try and address that head on for lots of reasons but I think that was a missed opportunity I think I could go through a chronology bit I really think it's important to focus on today because it's another one of those pivotal moments we are on the cusp of endorsing yet another power sharing arrangement with the same two leaders fundamentally the plus more plus more vice presidents and plus inviting Sudan back into the oil fields of South Sudan as utter madness in terms of the history and all of the lessons that we should have learned by now for South Sudan Thanks Kate. Josh in terms of the four that John identified you mentioned pointless negotiations but beyond that within the four that he's pulled out what do you see in terms of alternatives that perhaps could have been pursued or maybe worth considering. Yeah I think it was absolutely right to seek a political agreement and a ceasefire at the beginning of this conflict because that should always be our first impulse because that's the best way to frequently to have any shot at ending these and I do think it was the early days of the conflict where we had the best chance of making a real impact what should have happened is there should and there was high level engagement there were President Obama released a statement just right in the early days of this conflict but there should have been a very clear series of expectations and demands delivered from the United States in concert as much as we could with our allies in the region and then real consequences for violating them that's where we I think is the critical point where we failed there were a lot of statements from the NSC from State Department wagging the US finger at the South Sudanese and saying you bad boys better stop it or else and then just there was just no follow-up there was consistent flouting of the agreements there was consistent defiance of the United States and the international community with virtually no consequences that was where I think the South Sudanese leadership very rationally came to believe that they could pursue this war with virtual impunity and that is how they proceeded throughout this conflict and I think maybe they're starting to become disabused of this notion but I suspect on some level they still believe it and again I think John's report very well documents the sense among the South Sudanese leadership that they were going to have US support and backing no matter what so that gave them almost carte blanche a blank check to do what they felt they needed to do which in this case was pursue a vicious brutal war Don Well first of all I'd like to just mention that the premise of getting to a power sharing agreement and a transitional government was based on the idea that you had to actually find a way to stop the fighting and to get the fighting to stop you had to get the guys who controlled the guys with the guns to get them to stop fighting so that was what was foreseen and we didn't have sort of rose-colored glasses on that suddenly they would all go to Juba and work together and everything would be happy ever after the idea was that it would give enough of a pause in them killing each other that they could sit down with a broader cross-section of South Sudanese society and actually come up with a constitution or at least a political agreement on how the country might be governed in a way that they wouldn't have to continually resort to violence now the lack of will was clearly there and you know when I first went out one of the things I did this was in December of 2013 right after the conflict began one of the things I took with me and read was a little pamphlet from USIP that said the rule book for mediation and rule number one is don't start a mediation unless both parties are supportive of this so that was violated from day one but I guess the question is what was the alternative we had to find some way to try to stop what was a very vicious war it was going to get more vicious because it was ethnically based and frankly in December and January of 2014 it was quite possible that Mashaar and the new air forces were going to march into Juba and we could have seen an even much bigger massacre than we saw occur there in December so that was really the laser focus was to find a way to get the fighting stopped so let me leave it there John, you want to add anything? Yeah and I would just underline Ambassador Booth's point there above all else saving lives is paramount in a situation like this and there was a lot of very justifiable focus on ending violence in the early days and that's part of why the UPDF intervention was appreciated and was in a limited way helpful the problem is it just went way beyond that very quickly just to say a few more words about the sort of counterfactuals that you're asking about Ali in 2013 I think the alternative is some sort of really concerted mediation effort within the SPLM within the party was what was being asked for by some could the US have done that given the history and relationships maybe but that's also a bullying role in some ways for the US so the other alternative is could another entity and here we get to the ANC from South Africa or CCM from Tanzania which also have long party to party relationships with the SPLM could they have been encouraged and supported to mount a more forceful mediation with the SPLM and they were involved at the time they weren't sitting it out but could they have done more with US support you know I think those are the kind of counterfactual scenarios that are worth considering and the fact that there weren't people in some of the senior positions at that time as I mentioned I think really did hurt in terms of getting up the process within the US government to mount that kind of intervention whether it was us or a sort of bank shot with somebody else you know on the UPDF intervention I think I talked about the sort of counterfactuals in terms of how we manage our relationship with Uganda I think on the arms bar it's a pretty clear one do it I think 2016 is more tricky but I do come back to the fact particularly when it all fell apart the second time and you have proven beyond a doubt that Salvin React can't co-exist and you have the attempt to assassinate First Vice President co-signatory to the peace agreements I think that is really where you go down the road of we need new leadership and a more forceful exploration of that idea okay thanks John let's go to the floor and just a reminder please be concise please tell us who you are and please ask a question so there are mics available just wait for the mic yeah yeah my name is Gordon Boye I'm the chair of the Republic of South Sudan in Washington so my question will be to John I read the book but there is a part that John did not elaborate that part is the in 2014-2015 I don't think people like Susan Rice the Vamanan Station would impose arms embargo knowing quite a while that the Sudan Government was supporting the rebels because you know we went to war with Sudan in 2012 and that one is obvious so if you put yourself in the shoes of people within Obama administration like Susan Rice we invested emotionally on South Sudan for them to say that okay let him impose arms embargo that would encourage the enemies of the South Sudan in the region to destabilize more I don't think they would have done that but the current arms embargo is not effective because we now sign an agreement with Sudan and Sudan is not any longer arming the rebels I believe and both would even witness that so it has no effect because if you want to end the war you have to and if the arms embargo is intended to end the war on both sides but in reality the arms embargo is targeting the Government it doesn't attack target the rebels because the rebels are supported by the neighboring countries that are that are against the South but currently even if this arms embargo imposed it has no effect on the ground because that is the dynamic, regional dynamic within the region for example we sign agreements with Sudan Government in June that change a lot of things like what Kate was saying that we sign agreement with Sudan to come back for the oil exploration and things that what the reason why we did that is because you need the two countries to cooperate to stop the rebels activities because the oil wells are along the border so if Sudan is involved it means that Sudan will not support South Sudan rebels knowing that it would stop the flow of the oil so this is what you did not elaborate in your study okay thank you there was a gentleman in the second row there just want to give thanks to John for presenting this summary it covers most of the whole history of what is going on in South Sudan I just want to thank you and we will definitely share this across our diversity to make sure that they get the message and the summary of what you have done I just want to commend Kate for what she have just mentioned about the Government of Tekkenkratz if you look through all the documents that South Sudan Opposition Alliance I represent NDM in the South Sudan Opposition Alliance if you look at the summary that the Opposition Alliance has given they gave a recommendation that all the Opposition Alliance plus the Government will stay out and we form a Government control body that can create an environment for the South Sudanese to move forward but none of the decision makers buy that idea I'm one of the people who goes to office of Ambassador Booth every single week when he was in the office and the recommendations that you have just Kate mentioned here is what we have shared with Ambassador Booth multiple times that reinstating self-care and recommend self-care back to the office is basically a recipe for another cycle of violence and this is at personal level I'm not speaking on behalf of the Alliance now I can make my own remarks that at personal level those who think that self-care and recommend self-care will still be legitimate Government which we believe is no longer legitimate eventually they will fail for the time I'm pretty much sure that as President and then five presidents is not going to help the final point I agree with John that the United States of America need to make a decision a decision that is very clear and in the benefit of the people of South Sudan and not necessarily the Government and people who are trying to protest the whole thing we need to stop the bloodshed and really make a decision that I believe has been covered on this summer as well thank you Ambassador Fee I think you had something you wanted to say Hi good morning my name is Molly Fee and I served as the US Ambassador to South Sudan from 2015 to 2017 and I want to thank USIP and John and the panel for this discussion I know so many of us in this room and listening care deeply about the situation there and this is an important discussion unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to talk to John and given our current state and as I'm sort of one of the last Senior Foreign Service officers standing in the Titanic I think it's important to mention that John you talk about an absence of leadership at the envoy level which we are now critically experiencing and at the assistant secretary level but you don't mention ambassadors or the diplomatic teams on the ground I have two of the best officers I've ever known in the Foreign Service sitting in this audience today a critical period from 2014 through 2015 we didn't have representation in Juba and then last year from 2017 to 2018 we didn't have a representative in Juba and I do think diplomats matter so sorry for standing on my soapbox I want to pull up and just make four general points to pull from this you and Ambassador Booth talk about the important conundrum where the government feels absolutely that we are hostile to it and yet John you argue compellingly that there is a suggestion of facts that could be interpreted to suggest that we've been pro-government I think my presumption is they never talk to me directly about it is that the senior principals and the Obama administration were dealing with a lot of challenges across the globe and they were dealing with broken states in a lot of places there was real reluctance whether it's the Obama administration the US government or any foreign government to sort of walk away from an existing government structure there were many other governments Japan is one of them Germany is another which felt that we were unrealistic that this was the government that we had we had to work with them and we had to make it work so ultimately my conclusion and that it wasn't workable but I want you to know that there I think legitimate debates along that line you have to sort of work with what you have and that's something that folks will have to consider in future conflicts secondly in your four areas where we could reconsider I think the issue of the agreement which has been brought out in this discussion and so how we get sort of hooked into a process and Ali I think you and I there were several points where we saw when we were working so hard to implement the agreement that there were just some very loud warning signals that it didn't seem like it could work despite every effort and should we have pulled back at some of those signposts we can talk about that separately but everybody gets invested in making the agreement work and it's hard to step back and say let's walk away from this process there's a real attraction to a process also I think it's important to know which you can't get if you're doing this externally is sort of how fluid the situation was and there were many points when in both camps they really wanted peace and they really tried to make it happen and then it would get overruled so it's hard to say it was fixed and I think that fluid nature and dynamic nature of the environment is really important and then lastly on the issue of the region I know there was some discussion in your paper and I remember there was discussion in Washington should we do some sort of dating like prospect for the SPLM or the leadership I wonder if we could have considered some sort of dating like process for the region it is true that Secretary Kerry went out and made an effort it is true that President Obama went out for that meeting and Addis but this is a group of damage broken people who don't know how to move forward so would a more sustained effort involving the region have been helpful I think that's a question to add to your questions and then lastly I think and I know John you feel about this passionately so I just want to emphasize this for you the people of South Sudan let's never forget what they think and I think it's pretty demonstrable what they think of their leadership so thanks very much for letting me offer those slides thank you Molly I will take one more from this side of the room so the lady in the front here Hello, Nicole Woodersheim recently retired NSC Africa director started working in South Sudan in 1998 thank you for your work John and everybody's efforts this is obviously a super timely discussion one thing I hear missing and I haven't read the report cover to cover is as a person of mass atrocities you also look to see not only with arms and weapons how you take away the means by which to commit that the parties who are committing the violence continue to commit the violence and I'm wondering if this was just assumed in the absence of nation building or if anybody raised pivotal moments where we could have talked about the financial means that the government the key perpetrators of violence against civilians had they had keys they had the means by which to continue to use the oil wealth and so it keeps it's a thing we've been focusing on now I wonder in 2013 if there were moments we see this repeated over and over and over again in Africa where warring parties dig in to hold their power because they have access to all of the country's wealth and then it also keeps their patronage network alive and it keeps them willing to continue to fight an unwinnable war so were there moments where we could have talked about not only arms and weapons but also the financial means that kept mass atrocities and if there were in 2013 and I know Ambassador Booth has experienced this in Liberia why didn't we do it and I know it's a difficult thing it's a sovereignty issue but it's still front and center and the money continues to flow thanks Nicole and let me just add one from the online audience which you also touched on in your report John about Zhonglei to what extended focus on the Zhonglei crisis in mid 2013 distract the US Embassy in Juba and DC counterparts from the warning signs within the SPLM at the time and maybe Don if I can also ask you to respond to that if you wouldn't mind so John maybe we start with you we have a few different questions a bunch of really good questions and I very much appreciate them let me start on the arms embargo question and I respectfully disagree part of the argument within the US government for not doing an arms embargo was that it disproportionately harms the government but I think the response to that is that there are things that can be done to balance that out if you want to if the opposition is getting their arms through less formal channels there are things not perfect but things you can do to limit those channels and so I think the argument that it's a one-sided action does not need to be the case you can balance that out but I didn't see a lot of effort to do that I think that gets to a larger point about what is an arms embargo in terms of a tool for limiting arms versus a signaling mechanism and it's both not dismiss one or the other limiting the arms is absolutely critical but it is just important to show international determination and to message to those who are seeking the arms and that latter point I think was missed in some of the discussion just to ambassador fees points I would associate myself with them all and I would particularly emphasize the point about the value of diplomacy in so much of what we do and in this context in particular and I think it's a really good point about the gap in ambassadors we had there probably one I should have included as I think about that now so thank you for that point on Nicole's good question you alluded to it but that really gets for me to the question of some sort of oversight mechanism some sort of international mechanism that I think should have been in place from the beginning and this is where I get back to the discussion of could the CPA have cooked some of this stuff into it or even during the interim period could there have been some anticipation of these problems and as 2011 approached could there have been conversations about putting these sort of mechanisms in place you know GMAP is the model that so many refer to I know Ambassador Booth has thoughts on that that will be valuable for us all whether it's GMAP or something else there could have been ways to explore that an oil escrow account is another option but I just don't think there was a lot of consideration of that I don't think there was a ton of muscle put behind trying to to make that happen then on Zhonglei there is discussion of that in the report I didn't have time to talk about it in my presentation and there was a very strong US government focus on response to Zhonglei and a very high level of alarm within the US government as to what was going on there and it was absolutely atrocious what was going on and I do have people in my report quoted saying that distracted us from paying attention to the political dynamics within the SPLM that were so central to breaking things late in 2013 I have a hard time sort of finding the balance between whether that you know was a negative distraction or a necessary distraction I'm not quite sure where I come down on that because a lot of people were dying in Zhonglei but I do think it is the case that attention was split between that and what was going on within the party Thanks John Just to add to Nicole's point about the economic issue it's worth noting that the first draft of the zero draft of the peace agreement of 2015 had a very much a GMAP model of financial arrangements but some people didn't like it so Kate I'm going to resist the urge to speak about these oversight mechanisms because I think there is a lot more that we could and should have done even in the interim period and planned for in the post independence period that's a key error of the CPA timeframe I don't think it was the job of the CPA per se to do that but I think our role as the lead donor for South Sudan should have devised a different pathway through that interim period and independence in terms of the resources that we invested as the United States of America in the project of an independent South Sudan but I do want to just leave one critical point which is we're missing the force for the trees our policy has failed we have not stopped the war it's been five plus years and since 2015 in the last attempt at this power sharing arrangement between our the conflict has spread across the entire country and we have a humanitarian catastrophe that is of the worst in the world and the costliest in the United States of America in terms of our resources but more importantly the costliest in terms of lives lost and so far we can't even know how many lives have been lost and I know there's work being done on a mortality estimate it's critically important for us the magnitude of this and when we miss and get these fundamental decisions wrong on political settlements there are real ramifications to that and I know it pains many of us in the room that this situation continues today but we have not succeeded here and these debates that we have over this decision the net effect of all of that is that thousands of lives have been lost in South Sudan and we have not yet abated that Josh I'll just quickly pick up on a point that Ambassador McPhee made diplomats absolutely matter I still think this idea that well if we had had more high level meetings or certain diplomats in place it would have shifted the conflict or would have made a difference maybe from my perspective maybe in the very beginning of the conflict but these men who have led this fight hardened their positions very early on they may have been hardened from the very beginning diplomats are important they're not omnipotent so they can't force someone to change their mind so I think at that point we should have moved very quickly to coercive diplomacy to act at price for continuing this war or the other option is force which wasn't an option South Sudan doesn't rise to the US national interest to actually send troops there or anyone else really besides Uganda I guess so I think that the fundamental assessment that has to be made is are the interlocutors for peace actually committed to peace rule one of the USIP mediation book and the conflict they haven't been and so that should give us pause about how we proceed Don Okay a lot of things to address here first let me start Josh with the idea of the course of diplomacy I'm really struck by the difference between my experience in putting Liberia sanctions against Charles Taylor and his supporters in place in the early around 2000 with the process that we had to go through to get a handful of South Sudanese on a sanctions list in the Liberia case we got close to 50 people on a list and probably less than a week in the South Sudan case everyone seemed to require a high level meeting and a paperwork process to justify everything so that it would be legally defensible in the US court so there's a bit of a process problem there there's a bit of a broken system to that I think we need to be careful and Kate I hear you that we you know trying other things is definitely worthwhile but we can't assume that if we had done something differently somehow this war would be over now I think that's a very dangerous assumption to make on the technocratic government idea that's great I mean some problems are solved that way and we've seen this you know Italy got through its economic crisis by having a technocratic government for a while but in South Sudan who is going to who is going to put it in power was the SPLA was the NIS were all the other armed actors there going to suddenly let technocrats come in and run the country I don't see how that was ever on in the cards so again a great idea the theory might be great but the practicality is something you need to take into account warning signs I think those warning signs really were seen in 2013 I think that's why Gail Smith for example went out to Juba twice in the summer of 2013 we have to also recognize that it wasn't just Zhang Lei that was a bit of a distraction from what was happening in the SPLM but it was also Abye deciding to have its unilateral referendum and the very great fear that depending on how that went and Juba reacted, we could very well have had another Sudan-South Sudan war as occurred in 2012 I think we forget sometimes some of the things we actually did succeed in heading off so the warning signs were seen and certainly it was the topic of my two visits pre-conflict to South Sudan it was certainly something that Ambassador Page and her team on the ground engaged in consistently in the messaging but the South Sudanese leaders were not really willing to listen to that going after the money and Nicole even before I became when I was Ambassador in Addis Ambassador Page and Special Envoy Lyman came to see me to talk about GMAP and what was involved and how did we get it and how did it work and at the end of about a four hour discussion of this they both concluded that there was no way the South Sudanese would ever accept this and we have to keep in mind that the mentality of South Sudanese leaders is we won what we got and we're now going to enjoy it and anybody who gets in our way is against us and we'll fight them and I'm reminded often of a quote when South Sudan cut off its own oil production back in 2012 and the SPLM leaders said if we push for 40 years eating snakes we can go do it again most of us didn't really believe that these guys wearing their expensive suits really were going to do that but that was the there was that mentality, that bluster we won this so there's only so far we're going to let you our good friends push us around we also as Ali said pushed very hard for a robust economic chapter in the peace agreement we frankly got zero support from the AU5 or EGAT on that quite understandably none of those states would have wanted us proposing similar things to them and frankly there was even a bit of a tepid support for it among the international financial institutions and some of our western friends because of the practicalities of it Liberia was a unique case and even there it was the implementation of it had its great flaws we also pushed very hard for something on an oil escrow and we worked very hard with the Chinese and at one point it looked like we were making some progress with the Chinese on that there was an openness to even talking about it but at the end of the day they weren't willing to cooperate and there was no way that we could see with the convoluted system where South Sudan produced the oil but it was exported through Sudan origin of it by the time it got to port Sudan was completely unknown what was Sudanese oil, what was South Sudanese oil without the cooperation of the Chinese who were the major purchasers and the major producers of it but that was indeed was tried and then on the arms embargo let me just say one of the concerns we had was whether it would be effective and just like supporting a negotiation that goes nowhere tends to have an effect on your credibility putting an arms embargo out that has no impact also erodes credibility so that I think was a legitimate consideration there were certainly others but that was one of them Thanks Don I know we are running out of time but if Nicoletta will permit me to have one very brief last round very quickly and Elise will give John the right to answer if not everyone but we'll take a couple from this side here so the gentleman here yep it's better I'm here on behalf of nonviolent peace force an international organization that has worked on the ground in South Sudan since 2010 employing 170 unarmed civilian protectors in 15 regions around South Sudan to help build up the local civilian society and this question is primarily directed towards Ambassador Booth and Joshua Ambassador Booth you posed an excellent question what mass atrocity has been solved by intervention and Joshua you spoke about the South Sudanese people and their desire for peace and I'm just wondering both of your perspectives on how can we build up the capacity for local civil societies to stop the violence Thanks and the last one yes here Thank you so much for the opportunity I'm Nathaniel Nyok a Sudanese activist here in Washington Honorable Booth thank you so much for having a clear understanding of what is happening in South Sudan I think for the international community to get a quality policy on how to address this situation in South Sudan they need to also understand the political culture and heritage in South Sudan so my question would be in December last year the parties to the conflict signed a session of hostilities not just above the U.S. did not initial it in June this year the parties to the conflict also agreed on security arrangement in Khartoum Sudan the U.S. did not initial it so what was the message to the warden parties was this a bad piece I mean it was a bad way to peace what would be the best way also had the push to push out President Kiraoud of power succeeded what would have been the mechanism or possibility or even the president of removing a sitting president of a sovereign state and would you still recommend the same option today is that would it be a possibility with the current administration thank you so much can I just ask you to respond to those of you who will and any concluding thoughts on the role of local civil society John and I had this discussion a lot about can you get to peace from the grassroots and we've agreed that building understanding at the grassroots level is very helpful in getting to peace particularly in getting to something that will be sustained there are two problems one is it's a very slow process it's probably a generational process and you don't want the conflict to go on for a generation trying to get the bottom up to get it solved and secondly was anytime any part of civil society got too high a profile the government either tended to squash them or co-opt them when the US brought a very large civil society delegation women's groups religious groups, leaders etc to at us to try to figure out a way to get them inserted into the peace process in March of 2014 at the end of our week long conference and workshops etc many of them expressed fear about going home they said don't even think about staying here on asylum you came here for a specific purpose of going home they did and a year later my understanding from our embassy was that well over half of them of the people who participated in that were working for the government they had been co-opted so if you get civil society to raise its head too high it can either get chopped off or yanked down and that's unfortunately I think not unique to South Sudan I think we've seen that in many other places in terms of US support for the recent ceasefires I can't speak for the current administration my understanding is there have been many public statements that have been put out by the State Department either as the US or as part of a Troika very much supporting the ceasefires and urging the parties to implement them so I don't think there's a signal by any means by us not initially I mean they weren't negotiated by us that somehow we don't support them the public statements are very clear on that Thanks Don, Josh civil society well it's really tough obviously and excuse me I think one way is and this is a broader point I think or a broader approach we should be taking is that we should be thinking less about Juba and more about the peripheries and sending less of our or focusing less of our aid operations to Juba things of that nature and thinking more creatively about how can we get directly to the people and yeah I absolutely I'm sure that those challenges that Don identified are very real but you know the SPLA doesn't control the entire country and there are clearly sort of pockets of opportunity I think there's some interesting work being done on trying to revive local markets for instance these are all small initiatives they're pinpricks but given how terribly this conflict has gone and how there seems to just be no viable path forward we do need to think creatively and maybe the small stuff is the best we can do right now Thanks Kate Let's be clear President Salva Kier is a leader who has failed his people 97% of the citizens of Juba the capital city does not eat more than one meal a day the state has utterly failed and the leadership has utterly failed and is incumbent upon both Salva Kier and React Masha to step aside that is what leaders are supposed to do when they have failed to deliver the mandate that they were put in place to do he's not the head of state for life he is not the sovereignty of South Sudan the people are the sovereignty of South Sudan and thus far we have all failed to remove the situation to a place where that can be protected for the enduring future of South Sudan that is the critical point Let me just make one final point building off of the good civil society discussion in the last few minutes which is that I think and I've thought for a while there really do need to be two simultaneous conversations going on here one is about how to end the violence and so much of the suffering that Kate and others have discussed the other one is about generational change and what is the 20 year plan for South Sudan and that's a conversation for South Sudanese and I think that we in the West and others can support and assist and prod and so forth but it's a conversation for South Sudan but that conversation and it's happening in some ways but I feel like it has to happen on a much larger scale in a much more concerted fashion and it has to be much more front and center because it is hard to see the current generation of leadership making any of the reforms that are necessary or even stepping aside as much as they really should there has to be that conversation it has to start now if you wait for that conversation then 20 years is always 20 years away but I feel like there's great need for that investment now there has been for a few years now and that is really I don't have a lot of solutions for the political peace process right now that is my firmest belief at this point well thank you John and thank you to all of you for your comments and thoughts and I think John's been very modest in encouraging you to read the report so we'll be his cheerleaders and say read this report because of all the things written about South Sudan this is actually a very reflective piece that is very helpful there's a lot that's written and this is something that everyone who's interested in the country but also in the policymaking process beyond South Sudan I think can learn something from so please do read the report I see Molly is here can I actually read it so the arrow can see sure just very quickly just for the panel I wanted to ask sort of in terms of you know this was somewhat raised in John's report but the cost of maintaining humanitarian access and diplomatic presence in South Sudan that was obviously a huge consideration so I just wanted to ask the panel you know what your thoughts are on because these discussions were also ongoing about how worth it is it to us to stay in country to provide this life-saving humanitarian assistance to maintain our diplomatic presence there because a lot of these different kind of counterfactuals and different paths we could have taken would have had repercussions for our ability to maintain that humanitarian access and our presence there on the ground and that's certainly true for us but it was also true for other countries it was true for humanitarians it was true for unmiss so I was just curious for it's a very good question I don't know we have the time to answer it but I do know that everyone who's to the left and right of me has a view on this question quite elaborate views I would say also so please do seek them out and I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you their views but again let me please join me in thanking all the speakers for their contributions today