 Good evening. Good evening and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Andrew Schwartz and I work here in External Relations. I'm so glad that you all joined us this evening for what promises to be a truly fascinating discussion with Anjan here about his recently released book and it's brand new, Stringer or Porter's Journey into the Congo. I'd especially like to thank our partners at Internews for helping us put this event on and specifically Internews's president and CEO, Jeanne Borgald, who's here. Jeanne, where are you? Oh, there you are. Big round of applause for Jeanne. Internews if you don't know who Internews is, they're basically the peace core for journalists, okay? Internews is one of the most important organizations in Washington and we want to thank them for their tireless work in training media professionals and citizen journalists all around the world. Special thank you to my friend Ambassador Bill Garvelink for joining us. Ambassador Garvelink is currently a senior advisor at CSIS's project on U.S. leadership and development. He was here permanently and then we seem to have let him slip through our fingers to go on to do other cool things and it's so good to have Bill back here. Of course, Bill was the United States ambassador to the DRC from 2007 until 2010. I'd also like to thank and welcome the director of our Africa program, Jennifer Cook, for her many years of putting on amazing Africa programming here at CSIS and thank you so much for being here, Jennifer. This event is exceptional in that we're going to hear the perspectives of both a journalist who covered a major world event and an ambassador who served during another chapter of that same event. We're delighted that Anjan's here to share his experiences with us and earlier this year I don't know if you all saw but Anjan was featured on the Daily Show with John Stewart which is the barometer of all things these days. On the show, John Stewart mentioned that as a stringer for the Associated Press the AP only paid Anjan 15 cents per word for the articles he wrote. So in light of that, we have a lot of books in the back for sale. So you can buy two or three to make up for the AP's, let's just say, frivolousness, yeah. Anjan will also be around to sign books afterwards if you want to stick around. Anjan studied at Yale and gave up the opportunity to work at Goldman Sachs for the chance to experience the uncertainty of an indefinite sojourn in the Congo. There's many things that spoke to me about this book when Carolyn Powers first introduced a book to me but what really spoke to me personally was Anjan's desire to bear witness to events that the rest of the world was ignoring. As I read his book I recalled a letter that General Eisenhower wrote in April of 1945 to the then Army Chief of Staff George Marshall regarding his recent visit to a Nazi concentration camp. He said, quote, I made the visit deliberately in order to be in position to give first hand evidence of these things, if ever, in the future. There develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda, end quote. Anjan, your work has sealed the experiences of the Congolese and the pages of history and we're very proud of everything you've done. You've done the world a great service by taking the road less traveled and I hope that your book will inspire others including my three boys to do the same. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our guest Anjan right here. Thank you all for coming. Very kind and thank you also special thanks to our host tonight, CSIS and internews. Very proud and happy to be here. We're here to talk about Congo, a place where five or six million people have died over the past 20 years. This is what some describe as the worst war in the world, one of the great events of our time and in my book Stringer, which is a memoir, I explore two themes. The first is trying to make sense of this crisis in which five or six million people have died. And the second is to understand how we report on it. The kind of news that we tell people back home and tell each other, the stories that we tell each other about Congo. When I arrived in Congo, I was the fourth foreign journalist in the country. And I was a Stringer, the other three were living in suites in the intercontinental, in fancy colonial bungalows with white-loved servants and really nice accommodations. And I was living in Islam. And the street that I lived on, I remember there were families down the road that did not have enough money for everyone to eat. So every day they would choose one person who would eat on that day and the others would scavenge for food. There were houses across from our house where parents told their daughters to go out and fend for themselves, which meant they had to prostitute themselves. And this was accepted, not talked about, but accepted as something that was necessary. I met some of these children on one of my first reporting trips outside my home. I met some of these children who had been abandoned. And because families were unable to feed them, they had to sever ties to those children and they would accuse them of being possessed by the devil. And these children would go off and live in this cemetery in the middle of Kinshasa, in these carcasses of cars. And one of the first trips I made was to go out and spend a night with them to understand the kind of lives they led. Through much of the book, one of the themes that runs through much of the book is the difference in the stories that we tell each other and the news that I was expected to report from the Congo. And the stories that people, for example, in my family, the family I lived with, would tell each other about Congo. There was a great divorce, a great divide between the kinds of stories that were told. And I was very much aware that the stories that I was writing were to become the official, in some way, record of history of that country. People would refer to these reports for the AP as what happened in that country at that time. But it was extremely striking to find that it had almost no relation or very little to the stories that my family told their children at home. And through much of the book, I grapple with this. And I tried in the book to describe these stories and write these down so the reader can understand the stories that are not told and that are told with great difficulty by a few journalists and then read and quickly forgotten. In the middle of the book, desperate to find a story because it was so hard to publish on the Congo, I traveled up the river with an Indian businessman to his mine. And what I found up in this jungle, in northern Congo, was not a country completely abandoned as I had expected, but I found a people caught up in global forces, international dynamics, to an extent that I had not expected. People asked me not for money, but for metal detectors. I did find the story that I was looking for. I found a pygmy tribe that had given away huge sections of their forest for a few sacks of salt. And they didn't understand the value of their forest. When I asked them why they had done that, they said, look at the forest, it never ends. Who can destroy all this? It's impossible. And that was something that really got to me that these people were there so far away and their stories were not being told. The other thing that I discovered in that area was a mass grave. A mass grave left by a coalition of Congolese armies and neighboring countries. And so you begin to realize, even in the outbacks, the scale and the dynamics, the international forces that are at play in a place like Congo. But what I want to talk about most, perhaps, in my book and in some of my work is the importance of information. Towards the end of the book, I describe an episode where I'm in a border town just before the elections. And this was Congo's first elections in 40 years, first free elections in 2006. It was a major event. I met people, women who'd walked three days from their village to come to a polling station to cast their ballot. It was that important to them. And just before the vote, a militiamen came to a hill outside our town and the rumors began to fly. He's going to come and massacre us because he had a terrible reputation of this militiamen. And he's going to massacre us, he's going to kill us, he's going to, he's against the election because that would bring a legitimate power into government. And in all this chaos, this was only 15 kilometers away from where we were. And in all this chaos, the only way to find out what was going on was to go there and meet him. And I did. And by the way, I found out that he had once been a nurse for the Red Cross. So you begin to see the complexity of the stories that are to be unearthed in these places. But if we cannot know what is happening 15 kilometers from where we are, and this is often the case in these war zones, in these conflict zones, then how are we to devise policies from 2,000 kilometers away in Washington? And this is one of the things that I'd like to stress and also where the work of our two hosts tonight, Mary, introduced works to build networks of local journalists who can help us be better informed about these places because that's the only way in the end that we will be informed through local informers, reliable sources, local debate, and CSIS, Crafts International Policy to help places like Congo to confront the challenges of conflict minerals and other issues that are still alive in Congo. And so it is my hope, and I'm very glad that we've had this event tonight with our two hosts, because it is my hope that with better information, we can craft more effective international policy. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. What we thought we'd do is hear a little bit, have Ambassador Garvelin talk a little bit about kind of the broader context, those international forces, the policy perspective on this. And what your book provides is this kind of very granular kind of immediate experience that you had in a very poor neighborhood, kind of the ups and downs of that, what I appreciated was kind of your honesty in how unprepared you were, let's say. Kind of you get a sense of irritability, you're not having a great time, it's very difficult, you get robbed twice in the first couple of months that you're there, moments of panic, moments of fear. And I think you don't come across as coming in as the bold explorer, it's kind of, oh my gosh, what have I gotten into? And I think that's a really interesting part of the book. So it's as much about Congo as kind of your experience there and I really appreciated that. But this is all playing out, these kind of granular stories in this much bigger context as you say, and those two narratives are sometimes divorced. You were there in the run up to the 2006 elections, which in the aftermath was quite violent in Kinshasa. The Electoral Commission was attacked, for example, and I think you were hunkering down, looking for a way out. And again, Congo has so many layers of kind of complication, of the local conflicts, the regional conflicts, and the international forces that you speak of, that it makes it a huge diplomatic conundrum as well. And so we thought maybe Ambassador Garvelin could say a little bit about that period and how things have changed since then. Yeah, thanks, and the first of all, the book is very interesting to me because of the examples you cite and the living in a different part of Kinshasa than I lived in. But it rings true when we would venture into some of the poor areas and talk to people and when we travel down the Congo River and some of the same experiences you've had. And so it's a very interesting perspective as you say it, in fact, unfortunately, it gets lost a lot on the diplomatic side of things. These are antidotes that you talk about and you never really report on and you know about them and you talk about them in your embassy and that sort of thing, but the reporting back and forth to Washington and with your other ambassador colleagues, you don't really get into that sort of stuff. So you lose a lot of what's really important in the day-to-day life of people. But you were there 2005 and 2006, and this is a really critical period in the Congo just very briefly, I assume most of the folks here probably know that, but I'll talk a little bit about it. After the genocide in Rwanda, a lot of the genocide areas moved into the Congo and from 2006 and 2007 was the first Congo war where you had the appearance of Laurent Kabila and Rwanda and some of his pals that ended up taking over in 2007, Mobutu left and got out of the country and then from 1998 until 2003, there was the second Congo war or the World War because nine countries were involved in that and 20 to 30 odd rebel groups were engaged in that war. And then in 2001, President Kabila, the elder, the old one was assassinated and Joseph Kabila, the first president came in in 2001 and then there were negotiations going on for peace agreements in a variety of countries and they finally signed a peace accord in Pretoria in 2003 which created a transitional government with Joseph Kabila as the provisional head and four vice presidents, Bemba, Ruberwa, and I can remember the other two guys. No, he was not one of them. And the main task of this transitional government was to write a constitution. And which they did in 2005, it was endorsed and came into effect in 2006 and then there were elections in the latter part of 2006 for the first time, as Ajahn mentioned, that said 40 years or so. And there was a lot of enthusiasm for these elections and people were very much engaged and expectations kind of went through the roof that once you had elections and democracy was in place, everything was gonna get better, everything's gonna change, and everything was gonna be pretty good. So they have their first election or their first vote and at those days you had two elections and so there was a runoff between Bemba, Jean-Pierre Bemba and Kabila. And if you were in the Kinshasa area where you were, Bemba was the popular guy. He was the Lingala speaker. Kabila was really more popular in the eastern part of the country with other ethnic groups, VTAL Committee was running his campaign out in the east and really packing up the votes. And so there was a lot of disappointment when Bemba actually lost the election in Kinshasa and Ecuador province and those sort of areas. And the agreement was after the election or they thought they had the agreement as the four vice presidents had their own militias. And the ones that did not win would all those guys, the candidates and these four vice presidents would either have their militias join the military or disband them and the agreement was they could keep about 20 people for personal security. Everybody did that, but Bemba. So what you have in March of 2007 is, I think no one's quite sure who started the thing but the patients ran out and there was a conflict in right along the Congo River in some of the nicer areas of Kinshasa. The shelling started when the four US, South African, Belgian, I mean the British ambassadors were at Bemba's house and the shelling started at his house, fortunately those guys weren't hurt then Bemba went to the South African residence and stayed there for several months before he got out of the country and went to Belgium. So there were a lot of changes going on and I showed up about two or three months after you left. It was kind of the late summer of 2007 and the violence that took place in March had a dramatic impact on Kinshasa. The guys with tanks in the U and every corner had guys with guns from the United Nations set up and checkpoints and all that sort of stuff that all disappeared after Bemba's troops were defeated and somewhere in neighborhood of five or 600 people were killed in that several day period where you were in the factory. It was pretty nasty stuff. And I think it went a long way to settle down Kinshasa proper, not the rest of the country but Kinshasa became much more stable and certainly more livable place by the time I got there. So you had rather dramatic changes going on politically in the Congo that had been at war since basically since 1994. So things, it did in fact improve quite a bit. Then if you follow it through from 2006, Kabila took over. He was declared a free and fair election but not much changed. Not for the average Congolese, it was all the same. And it continued, the fighting picked up in the eastern part of the country. The Rwandans and Ugandans were very much meddling in eastern Congo and the conflict minerals became very important. Coltan, which everybody with your cell phone, you're contributing the war in eastern Congo by buying those things. That was fueled and the fighting kept going and of course continues today hopefully at a much reduced level. But it was a very difficult time for a lot of the Congolese who expected things to get better. And then on top of that in 2007 and 2008 you had a dramatic spike in fuel and food prices and a drop in mineral prices. So the ability to buy food, particularly in places like Kinshasa where virtually all of it's imported became very expensive. And while the price spikes affected us here in Washington and settled down after a while they didn't settle down in the Congo. Those prices remained very high. And I remember after I got there we did a survey in the areas near where you live and the average income for a family per day was about 80 cents. I think you've mentioned it in the book too. And we talked to a lot of folks who would tell their kids Monday, Wednesday and Friday you eat. Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday you eat the other part of the family and on Sunday you're all on your own. We don't know where you're gonna get food. It was tough living for the Congolese in Kinshasa. And I think just to switch a little bit to the book I, one of the things that I found very intriguing and very interesting is that it does detail kind of the struggles and the coping mechanisms that families use to get by. It always struck me when I was there that things, you think things can't get worse than they do or they were at that point in the Congo but the population always figured out a way to survive. One way or another, this little scam or scheme or something they would get by and survive and you detail that very nicely with the families and how they get by and how they share expenses when it's funerals and things like that. And they do have their problems with each other with the ethnic groups but they come together and they depend on each other to survive. They have to. So I think it's a very interesting book that's very, very thoughtful, particularly in your discussions of Bunya which is so far from Kinshasa but they still kind of looked at Kinshasa as the capital and one of the things, again, another theme that I noticed running through the book is sort of the legacy of the Belgian and Mabutu eras. You have a predatory military that has never been trained to protect the people. It's to protect the elite from the people and to take advantage of them since they don't get paid regularly and those sorts of things. Infectual government, really lack of concern about government, no interest in infrastructure, any of those sorts of things. And so that's the kind of environment you have that was started with the Belgians and continued with the vengeance with Mabutu and those legacies last and are very acutely felt by the population but the one thing that Mabutu did which Shoy struck me as very interesting is he created a sense of nationalism and I think you mentioned that in there. You can be anywhere in the Congo and ask people who they are and they'll say they're Congolese. Most other places I've been in Africa, they'll give you their ethnic group first and then say, oh, I live in this country. Not in the Congo, they're all Congolese and then they'll tell you what ethnic group they belong to and I don't know quite how Mabutu did that but you hear a lot of discussion over time of the Congo splitting up. You really hear that from Congolese. Those are expatriates who are convinced Katanga's gonna split off for some other part as Congolese. Never talk about that. I never heard anybody anyway. So just by way of a couple of introductory comments and then those are a couple of themes I saw through the book that I thought were very interesting and certainly rang true to form when I got there and the last one I think you mentioned it too is the elections. Everybody was excited about the elections in 2006 and expected big things. Once democracy, meaning an election happened things were gonna get better and there certainly after you left and if you go on a year or so sort of the shock set in that nothing was changing. It didn't make any difference even though they had elections and they still had a cope and continue on with their process. So anyway, just a couple of comments. That was something that's probably energy that's put into elections and it doesn't, you know, people are politically charged but you don't see the government in there and the daily life you describe it. Absolutely, the government, huge areas of the country have no government presence and you wonder, you wonder why it isn't worse even sometimes because we rely on government in our lives to keep order, keep the peace and if you believed Hobbs, if you believed Hobbs, you would believe that the country should go to pieces but there are huge swaths of Congo outside the east, which is very violent but huge swaths of Congo that are largely peaceful you find a few bandits here and there but they're largely getting by doing trade and this is something marvelous. There is also the great expectation I remember when I was in Boone around the election, the electricity went off and I complained about it to the boy at the hotel at the convent I was staying at and he said, don't worry, sir as soon as we have elections Congo will be like France and America, we'll have electricity. It didn't happen. The electricity is still out there. Speaking of electricity, okay, now I'm on. After Congo, you went and you moved to Rwanda and you lived there for four years now you're temporary in Canada so you went from kind of a under-governed or let's say a place where the government is not in people's lives to a place that is where the government is ever-present and over-governed almost in Rwanda and I wonder if that contrast strikes you, are you nostalgic at all for the days of kind of the liveliness of Kinshasa? You end the book and it's a pretty bleak look at Kinshasa and it doesn't end kind of on a note of hopeful optimism but I wonder as you've been there, you've seen the changes happening, now that you've lived a bit longer in the region have your mind changed about certain things? The difficult thing about Congo without government is that I found very few people were able to construct their sense of identity. Very few people were able to say I am an author, I'm a journalist or this is what I do, even journalists had to rely on something else for their living and everyone was running some kind of side business selling telephone cards or something like that because the economic structures and institutions were just not there to sustain any stable state business or mode of living and so that was very difficult I found that experience living among people who were constantly in search of themselves and in search of constructing who they were and not getting any help. In Rwanda you almost had the opposite, the two countries are like night and day and when I first arrived in Rwanda I found it incredibly pleasant, the systems worked, the government was functioning as you mentioned, electricity, water, for some of us only 8% of the country has electricity, I was in that lucky 8% but if you're in that lucky 8% you don't realize what life is like for the rest of the country but it was interesting in Rwanda I met a, one of the people I met was a genocide and one of the people who killed during the genocide of 1994, 20 years ago almost exactly to this day and when I asked him what he felt he had been a school teacher at the time and then he had also killed I asked him what he thought people should teach in Rwanda or should have taught to avoid the genocide and he said human rights and I thought oh it's just something he learned at school or learned it somewhere and it's just a practice response and then he later said no no you don't understand what I mean by human rights later in the conversation he said you don't understand what I mean by human rights in Rwanda I don't know where the state ends and where I begin and that is very striking it's a very sophisticated response and that's the danger of a strong government he was not able to affirm himself he felt and people were not in some sense because the government was so powerful and they felt and if you talk to them there are all kinds of strange responses to the trauma of genocide but if you talk to them you get the strong sense that somehow they didn't feel even that they were acting that they, you could interpret it as a lack of responsibility but you felt that they were not able to construct themselves in the way that they would have wished and therefore to act in the way that they would wish and it's a long conversation to have but so you see the complications of both states of an absence of government and a government that's incredibly powerful. I know we don't have a whole lot of time Bill did you have a, we can answer open up to questions and if you could just identify yourself we'll take the lady there in the aisle. Hi my name is Mary Ann Stein I'm a board member of the Fund for Global Human Rights and we fund human rights organizations in the DRC as well as a number of other places and our focus is in the east in the Keyloos primarily and there it seems to me there is still a lot of violence and fighting in fact the day I left Goma was the day the M23 came in and was murdering, raping, looting, et cetera but I'm interested to know whether you had any experiences with any local organizations, NGOs, human rights groups, et cetera because part of my feeling is that the answer in so many of these countries isn't just with the government governments do sometimes tend to overreach in fact most of them do and without strong local organizations of people who keep their governments accountable and demand the kinds of things they need I'm not sure those things happen so I'd be really interested to know what your sense was of civil society in what you experienced in the DRC. Thank you, that's a great question. Often in our narratives of Congo we describe the horror and the war and the conflict and the difficulty of people's lives we sometimes I think overlook the fact that there are good people, talented people who are committed to the development of their country and who really do care and who are forced into compromised situations because there are few avenues available a few institutions that allow their efforts to add up but in my experience almost in every little town every little village I would find people who could speak intelligently about their needs about what they wanted from the government and what they felt had to be built at that time they had thought through they didn't just spend their time surviving they really took the time to step back and think about the bigger picture and what you say about civil society groups holding government accountable is essential and I do my own personal feeling is that a chronic lack of information is responsible for a consistent lack of understanding of the problems in each area each region is different they all have their unique problems there are land issues in one area infrastructure and other conflict and other minerals and so what we really would do well to do and groups are doing this is to build local information networks and I do believe that that would be a first step to understanding even the violations that are occurring not just the symptoms but the causes and then from there I do think there are good people on the ground with whom it's possible to work to address some of the problems of overreach of government or lack of authority even the soldiers act with impunity outside the chain of command are never brought to justice so these are the fundamentals like building the fundamental institutions justice, press, a parliament that is somehow representative and represents people if these basic things could be aided we would do well far better I think than treating symptoms of the violence which is important in the moment but I think doesn't do enough to prevent those crises from occurring and recurring sure, yeah thank you very much my name is Nia Kuete I work on US relations with Africa here in Washington my question actually I think it's a very good mirror image of the first question about civil society responsibility but here I'm looking at civil society in the US you know you came to my notice in your essay in Politico about the darling tyrant Paul Kagame and what strikes me is that the Congo is in shambles when it was ruled by a tyrant backed by the US Mobutu and now we have phase two where in my opinion Irwanda which is a strong state but is messing up messing the Congo up and it's also backed by the US and so as an African living here what I keep thinking is what I would love to see it rings a bell with me about lack of information because I keep thinking the US is a great democracy the people who hold the government accountable if they only knew some of the terrible governments that the US backs but to my mind the story about Kagame is very different he was implicated in the killing of people in South Africa there are 5 million you talk about Americans and the US issued a statement but the next week he was in California giving speeches so I feel like the American people if they knew and told their government we don't want you backing bad leaders in Africa it will stop so I wonder how you would react to that for better information so that ordinary Americans can hold their government responsible intelligence analyst if you had let's say 2 million bucks to throw at the problem and you wanted to turn things around would you buy 100,000 cheap laptop computers would you open an Oprah style academy for bright young women would you do teacher training in situ would you do a few hundred grad students coming to the US in hopes that they'll return and turn things around would you do would you just simply hire more teachers out in the countryside you know here's 2 million bucks give me the most efficacious use of this money to turn this country around in one generation I wonder I'm kind of hi I'm Bill Lucas and I've traveled through that part of Africa as well and I was wondering you said how difficult it would be to make policy from that far away but did you come away with some general ideas of what we could be doing better in terms of our policy I think they're all linked in some way and I'd be interested to hear what Ambassador Garbelink thinks about American support I would be curious but I think the three questions are linked in a fundamental way and I think the central question is if you had money to spend how would you spend it what policy would you implement and in my mind I would come back to a network of reliable journalists and an organization that actually functions offers them a career offers them a hope of building that career in journalism and which they can use to inform their communities and also ask the international journalists because we don't get a lot done without local journalists I was listening to the radio every day Congo is a huge country half the size of Europe and I was one of four foreign journalists every morning I would listen to the radio and I would read the papers and without those local journalists I would have pounding the pavement in their little towns I would have learnt very little it would have been much much infinitely harder and this feeds into a larger question if we can allow the stories of the Congolese to be told by them through those domestic institutions I think we will go a long way towards understanding them better and also helping them identify not only their problems but their own solutions the problems of Congo have a strong Congolese component to them the solution must come from Congo and what we can do is to facilitate that and there are organizations on the ground in Congo we don't have to reinvent the wheel the inter-news is working there with radio stations indispensable reliable objective information and but that's only the beginning of a larger more extensive network that begins to inform us about the kinds of things I describe in the book that don't often make it to world news because they're deemed unimportant because we don't understand the situation it's a vicious cycle and yes I'd be curious to hear ambassadors well well now that I'm not in the government anymore I can say a few different sorts of things first of all if you're going to just lumping all these things together deal with the problems of the Congo it's a regional problem it's not just the Congolese problem so I think the U.S. government and the British government particularly the Belgians and the South Africans perhaps have to be a little more forceful in holding not only the Congo but the neighboring countries accountable for what they do and we've spent a lot of time not doing that and I think what's happening in the Congo in the past year is interesting it's been a pretty good year for the Democratic Republic of Congo the M23 movement was defeated the U.N. is engaged in a much larger way than ever before even with the intervention brigade which is a very good idea and there's a bigger network of envoys that are engaged fine gold from the United States Robinson and these folks have played a far bigger role in the past year in dealing with the issues in eastern Congo in particular than any group has in the past that I think you're seeing a little bit of a difference now President Kabila has removed about 100 generals from moved them to Kinshasa and they're still there they've been replaced with much more effective generals there's a long way to go I'm not trying to minimize the problems but changes have been underway for a long time and a long time there is international interest and support for not only helping the Congo but dealing with the regional issues and engaging the Rwandans and engaging the Ugandans and even Burundi and some of the others saying enough of this I remember a meeting with a foreign minister when I first got there and they said you know we don't have any friends we don't have any allies in our region everybody likes the Congo just the way it is so they can rip it off and that's the truth to that and I think particularly the US and the British have tolerated that for a very long time and just not dealt with the issue and hopefully now beginning with Senator Feingold and his role and the others we're starting to call people to account and I think that's a start we've got a long ways to go but that's a start what would you do with $2 million first of all it's peanuts $200 million and worked with as much as we could in the eastern Congo it was women's groups I think the power of women in eastern Congo has not been utilized they're the group that holds the country together they're the glue that runs eastern Congo and makes things happen whether from a business point of view or a social point of view and if you could link women's groups from Rwanda, Uganda and Kigali together I think you could have a big impact where I know when I was there we brought some women leaders from Sierra Leone and Liberia who are pretty effective to the Congo for discussions with Congolese women and I think that's just an untapped source that can have a very big impact on what's going on in the eastern Congo we just haven't really utilized that great I'm avoiding some of the we have two more questions five more minutes Tammy I'm Tammy Holtman from AllAfrica.com a pan-African news organization that posts over 2,000 articles a day from over 130 African news organizations and hundreds of civil society groups and NGOs I read your book straight through I couldn't put it down however your presentation tonight is going to force me to and reassess my reaction to it which was almost entirely negative and I'm trying to reconcile those two things and I think part of my concern is that your instincts towards and your abilities to be a compelling personal storyteller the book is beautifully written as all the reviewers have said tends to obscure for people who don't know Congo or Africa the facts that you presented here and tends to reinforce the stereotypes of Africa as a helpless hopeless place do you have any of those concerns am I just wrong do I need to reread it from cover to cover it's a fair question the purpose of the book was always to say to readers I like you have read these 200 word stories in newspapers from very far away often these stories about famine about rape and like you probably I sense that there's something for deeper and more to be learned and so I'm going to go there and you can sort of sit on my shoulder and you can witness the things that I witness and you can draw your own conclusions about them so that it would have been very easy and this is where the book differs from how I present the Congo it would have been much easier for me to write a book that was authoritative say I have been in the Congo these things about the Congo let me teach them to you or let me present them to you and it's not what you think or I know better and that really was never the purpose the purpose was to start from a common understanding that we have a common perception that exists in the world because of the news media largely and what we absorb it's not anyone's fault we are absorbed to what we are absorbed every day to be blamed for that but we will start from there and we will probe the country and go through it and see for example a militiaman who was once a nurse and I think the sort of perceptions of Africa I think when you go to a place I think it's important to go there without prejudice without perceptions good or bad there is a danger with thinking oh this is the prevailing perception of Africa I want to change that I think there is a danger to that because I think you can be dishonest and I think my purpose was to go there to see what I saw and to narrate it in a straightforward and honest way and I think without by going there by not being sent by someone or with any predefined purpose other than to learn the story behind those 200 word stories there was a certain purity to my venture and that was really the purpose of the book as I say it is kind of strikingly honest in that way that you don't kind of put a gloss on your experience or kind of draw the big conclusions you're left at the end of the book kind of saying what's the future here what's the conclusion and it's hard to draw one in fact yes and let's have one more or two more Marco in the back good afternoon my name is Marie Claire Gonda I'm from the Democratic Republic of Congo good to see you ambassador and the two other vice presidents at the Kabila time were Erodea and Zahid N'Goma just a couple thank you I'm very happy to be having this conversation I do believe that by having conversation that's the way we find solutions and I do believe that Congolese and want solution want to find have peace in our country and if only we have a chance to do that we are willing to work for it I do believe America has a big role to play here and I listen to everybody almost afraid to speak the truth I see what's going on in Ukraine CNN keep talking about it every single day what's going on there why we don't talk about Congo why people are afraid to talk about what's going on in Congo especially that it's been going on for almost 20 years and up to today I still hear people asking what's going on in Congo 5 million people die in Congo women are brutally raped on a daily basis and we have the largest peacekeeping in the eastern part of the Congo we have NGO we have all of that and my question is why is it so much is it so difficult why we have the silence the people in Congo and especially the women I do believe the ambassador mentioned the role of the women in Congo we want peace you cannot build a country where there is no peace you cannot talk about election where there is no peace there is no security women don't feel secure I believe a lot of people in the Congo now if you don't feel secure you cannot have a sense of wanting to build a long lasting place where you can live so my question again is why is America so silent with what's been going on in the Congo why are we afraid to talk about this so that's my question New York Times I think I agree with you I think we should talk more about this and talking about it is a first step to helping to resolve it or helping the Congolese to resolve it because it is their work I think to build their country and build their future I think that there are multiple things going on and perhaps the least talked about among them is the fact that we do bear some relation to what is going on in Congo Congo is part of the global supply chain for many products electronics and things like that and and since sort of the colonial years, more than 100 years the world has been complicit in some of the crises that have occurred in the Congo and that takes a great deal of courage to confront because it's like looking at yourself and looking at your own flaws and giving them a good hard look and looking them straight up and that's not something humans do very easily and I do think that's part of why we tend to turn away because it is painful to look not only because of the suffering that we see but because we are complicit and the world is complicit, not we as individuals but the world is complicit the systems that we are part of that we rely on are complicit in what's going on there just the last word it was striking to me the Central African Republic is now in the middle of a great war just north of Congo and I wanted to go there to report it is still incredibly difficult to get people interested in what is going on in these places no matter the scale of the catastrophe the Central African Republic is something of Syrian proportions but for a variety of reasons either oh yes this is not news because Africa has always been like this or this is not news because Africa is now rising so we don't want to hear about this both those are guilty and and also the fact that we are complicit I think all those things together make this cocktail of forces that want us to turn away and I don't blame people it's just a normal human reaction yeah just to add, I agree completely and to add a couple of comments the Congo where this fighting is going on in Eastern Congo is the middle of Africa it's a hard place to get to however for journalists and for the media it's sad to say but it's not on the top 10 list of US foreign policy objectives it is on our humanitarian objectives but the Congo doesn't figure in as a key foreign policy issue for the United States and that's unfortunate but that's how the United States deals with this sort of thing and then the other factor that I sort of noticed when I was spending a lot of time in the Congo and I'd come back and forth to meet with members of Congress and the State Department there's not a big constituency in the United States that's focused on the Congo not like Sudan where you've got anti-slavery people and all this other there's no big constituency that is vocal all the time on Capitol Hill and the State Department together and doesn't take much divert attention to the Ukraine or some other place and I always kind of cringe when everybody says this is the worst crisis going on in the world they keep referring to Syria well actually it's not it's the Congo and but it seems like our tension span is only one or two things at a time too and it's Ukraine and Syria right now and so and then you've got CAR there it's a perpetual thing that people don't know what to do about it called the Congo it's unfortunate and it's that's not a I think that's sort of there's a few realities that's not an excuse we should be very much focused on the Congo and what's going on there I do think and I agree with kind of the US complicity and the skewing of incentives for governance and the Cold War and the current kind of regional interest within Africa policy I do think Congo is getting more attention than it has in the past and it's partly a result of groups that were active on Sudan kind of expanding their scope you know for better or for worse kind of the celebrity element that brings some attention complicated thing with Congo it's hard to identify good and bad and who's right and who's wrong and disentangle this into a narrative that can capture the public and capture a policy maker all you have to do is X you know and I genuinely like your idea kind of that building that network of information that kind of draws out some of the complexity that allows people to really get a much better sense of what's going on and maybe some of the options for influence and leverage so it's still low down on the totem pole I do think there's some good energetic people beginning to focus and Senator Feingold has actually done some really interesting kind of serious work on this so it's not a hopeless case and I hope that your book begins to contribute to that kind of momentum that's growing in terms of looking much more seriously and getting tougher with regional powers getting tougher with Kabila himself as well we're at time I just want to thank you Anjan for coming and raising the issue and Ambassador Garvelink really it's very beautifully written book and even if you come out slightly depressed we're going to look for your next book as well but thank you again and please join me in thanking Anjan