 Hello, everybody. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president and CEO of US Institute of Peace, and I'm delighted to welcome you here today for a very important conversation on COVID and conflict and role of the security sector. For the past 35 years, US Institute of Peace has been working on some very tough challenges around the world. As we pursue our mission of preventing and resolving violent conflict, and without question, the current coronavirus pandemic presents one of the toughest challenges I think any of us have seen, and we are particularly concerned about the potential of COVID to trigger a multi-dimensional crisis in the most fragile and conflict-defected states, looking at the confluence of health and economic, but also a political and security crisis. In the places where we've seen systems decimated by years of conflict, sometimes especially targeted by members of the parties to the conflict, places where people can easily fall into the depths of poverty, where food security is tenuous in the best of times, and we're already seeing authoritarian regimes using the cover of COVID to implement even more repressive measures, and in particular security forces responding with very heavy-handed techniques as they enforce curfews or stay-at-home measures from Rwanda to Kenya to the Philippines to India. We're seeing these kinds of tactics put into place. I served in 2014 as the leader of the USA Ebola Task Force, as we responded as a nation and as a world to that crisis, and I came away from that with three really indelible lessons. The first is that trust is paramount, and when you don't have citizen trust in their government, it becomes much more difficult to get the actions and behaviors that are absolutely essential for defeating these kinds of diseases and pandemics. Secondly, that security forces can either be a help or a hindrance in these responses, and we saw in 2014 West Africa Ebola pandemic where the efforts to do lockdowns in Monrovia or in Guinea were resisted by the citizens because of their lack of trust. Finally, that it takes a coordinated international response. All of these factors, although they emerged from a very different kind of disease, are extremely relevant for the pandemic as we look for responses today. We have here today with us a very distinguished set of panelists joining us from Washington, Geneva, Nigeria, and Syria. I'm delighted to see my former colleague Jeremy Knydek with us, and we've had more than 500 RSVPs underscoring I think the importance of this conversation as we collectively seek to grapple with the gravity of this pandemic. You can submit questions to our panelists through the chat function on the YouTube event page, and our moderator will make sure the panelists hear those questions. With that, I'm delighted to turn it over to our wonderful moderator. Sarah Holowinski is a Randolph Senior Fellow at USIP. We're very delighted to have her with us this year. She brings an impressive array of experiences to the table herself. She was the deputy chief of staff for policy at the US mission to the UN under Samantha Power, and she spent nearly a decade leading efforts to advise warring parties on civilian protection and responsible use of force as the executive director of Center for Civilians and Conflicts. Sarah, over to you. Thank you. Thanks for that, for the welcoming remark. I'm certainly very happy with the lessons that you learned from responding to Ebola. As Nancy said, I am Sarah Holowinski. I am the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at USIP, which currently looks a lot like my home, actually, and this is an interesting way of having a panel. I'm used to seeing an audience. I'm used to seeing all of you, so it's wonderful to have you online. I wish that I could see your faces, but thank you for coming. We have a terrific panel today for you, and as I was talking with each panelist this week to prepare for you, a story began to emerge, and that is for me at least. I consider looking at the world, consider Imagine a Globe, and you have all of these conflicts, too many conflicts, and they are bright spots. They are lit up around the world, and then consider that same globe being enveloped by a pandemic that is spreading, and those conflicts get brighter, they glow brighter because pandemics fuel conflict and conflicts fuel pandemics. So when I think about those glowing spots, what I think about is the suffering of the millions of people who are trapped in them, caught between conflict and this health crisis. And of course, the security sector plays a big role in both conflicts and pandemic response, not always for the good, and that's what we're here to talk about. So to tell us more, and without further ado, I have Dr. Albrecht Schnabel from the Geneva Center for Security Sector Governance. Many of you know it as decaf. He's going to tell us about how security sectors around the world are responding to COVID. Francis Brown from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace will tell us about how non-state actors are using COVID response for their own gain often. Amani Kadour from the Syrian Relief and Development will tell us about what's happening in Syria. She is usually based in Syria. Today, she happens to be joining us from Kansas City. It is a small world. It's nearly impossible, of course, in Syria to count the number of security actors and it changes almost by the day. So she will tell us about that complicated place. Issyoma Kalmikalam will join us from Nigeria to tell us about how her community is engaging with the military and police as COVID cases there begin to rise. And finally, Jeremy Canandite from the Center for Global Development and a current Twitter sensation I should add, will be walking us through what crisis response should look like in the perfect world that we are all trying to create. So a reminder to send in your questions through the chat function, I will get to those after each of our speakers has had an opportunity to briefly offer us their expertise. Dr. Schnabel, will you please start us off and give us an overview of what's happening in the world? All right, thank you, Sarah. So I will briefly sketch out some main roles of formal security sector actors in the ongoing crisis. I mean, I'll focus on security forces and they are focused a bit on the military, especially with examples. So military hospitals, for instance, play important roles in research and vaccine development and they relieve pressure from civilian hospitals. Militaries maintain logistical preparedness with vehicles, aircraft, ships equipped to carry cargo and personnel prepared for rapid deployment. They deliver materials to remote locations where local medical facilities might not have the resources to handle crisis. They airlift people in critical condition or materials out of an area or they erect makeshift medical facilities. And let me mention some examples. So in Myanmar, for instance, the military renovated all the field hospitals, mobilized their medical cores, disinfected streets and areas since mid-March. Military barracks are currently transformed into quarantine facilities that are supposed to house thousands of potential patients if the outbreak actually takes place. In Malaysia, military doctors have been providing medical care also at airports. Military healthcare capacities have also been deployed on a very large scale by countries like the US, Italy, China, France and China sent over 10,000 soldiers to Wuhan during the height of the outbreak there. The People's Liberation Army also ran a large makeshift hospital. In Romania, just recently, the army has deployed a mobile hospital near Bucharest to treat COVID-19 patients. In Mongolia, for instance, security forces are involved in enforcement of public safety orders and traffic bans that were adopted by their national emergency committee and they're monitoring quarantine facilities. In South Korea, the military is sending its forces to assist quarantine and border control missions at Indian Airport, the big airport in Seoul. Army officer quarters are used to house patients. The military has also been heavily involved in disinfection campaigns and quarantine enforcement in countries like China, Iran, France, Thailand and Italy. In Japan, the self-defense forces have house patients that provided medical care and provided protective gear that were stored for nuclear plant accidents. In many countries, militaries are asked to provide logistical capacities for instance, in Germany, the Air Force has been used to transport patients from Italy and France to Germany where there were more available hospital beds. The armed forces of Indonesia and India are active in flying medical equipment, helping in large scale evacuations like in the case of India. In Taiwan, the Ministry of National Defense set up field hospitals deployed chemical cores to conduct hygiene tasks, mobilized military hospitals, mobilized military personnel to produce protective gear like masks. But then beyond the military, also other security services are playing important roles like chandamaries, national guards and civil protection units, provide crowd control, maintain public order, help enforce quarantine measures. Police assist in ensuring that individuals are in home, stay in home isolation if they are in isolation and quarantine. They ensure that people follow social distance recommendations or orders. They collect and share information in addition to also maintaining public safety and crime investigation. And then also of course, border and immigration guards, control monitor, cross border movements at airports, at harbors and land borders. Intelligent services, centralized and analyzed data, assisting contact tracing, collaborate internationally to prevent cross border disease transmission. Justice and penal systems help maintain law and order. The prison system, for instance, helps to maintain order in the prison, implement health security measures and prevent panic and riots. And that has been a particularly huge challenge in many countries. There have been unrest and widespread unrest across the globe in prisons, also prompting large scale of prison releases around the world, like in Turkey, in Iran, France, UK, India, Indonesia, Ethiopia and quite a lot of other countries. Ideally then also, of course, in conflict areas, formal security actors work in cooperation with non-state armed groups in remote locations where territories under non-governmental control access to affected individuals would otherwise be impossible. And we will hear a lot about this from other fellow panelists. And finally, I'll finish with a couple of concluding thoughts. Security forces clearly provide important services in managing the COVID crisis. In many countries, they were not well-prepared and trained at the beginning of the pandemic and many have been responding in an ad hoc fashion to evolving challenges. So it has been a bit of a hit and miss, but at the crisis goes on, the learning curve is steep in those countries that at early stages of an outbreak can learn from those who have gone through it already. Clearly, formal security actors can be very helpful in assisting public health services and local regional national governments in responding to crisis. Their roles must be recognized, but also they should also not be romanticized. The ends don't always justify the means and certainly not beyond the end of the crisis. So it's important that their interventions, their systems need to be proportional to the challenge. They need to be time limited and in close adherence to the legal framework. And that's where the oversight agencies of the security sector come in, like parliaments, judiciary, civil society and the public. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Dr. Schnabel. You had mentioned the training that these military forces receive. I would love to get into that a little bit later in the discussion, so keep that up there, consider that. Next up, we have Frances Brown from the Carnegie Center for International Peace. Please go. Great, thanks. So turning now from the state security sector to non-state security actors. We at Carnegie just yesterday published a collection of 12 analyses looking at particular conflicts around the globe and how the pandemic might affect them. I co-edited this along with my colleague, Jared Blank. I encourage you all to have a look at the collection. So today what I wanted to do is drawing from that, talk about some broad trends we see of how non-state armed actors, so militias, terrorist groups, gangs, how they are responding to the pandemic and what that might say about the conflict. So basically I see three top-level trends in terms of how these non-state actors are responding. There's of course a lot of local variation. We will get into that later in the pandemic, later in the conflict and we'll talk more about that, but in general I see three top-level trends. So taking these in turn, number one, I see groups instrumentalizing the pandemic for their own often pre-existing objectives. Number two, I see a lot of groups who are trying to shore up popular support via their response to the pandemic. And number three, I do see some groups showing some willingness to potentially de-escalate or cooperate due to the crisis. So a little more detail on each of these. Trend number one, many non-state groups are instrumentalizing the crisis for their own objectives, be it exerting control on a population, be it expanding territorial control, or be it propaganda recruitment purposes. Just a few examples of this, ISIS in mid-March in its newsletter sort of communicated a call to arms saying, while governments and counter-terrorism campaigns are distracted by the crisis, this is a great time to up a tax. Since then we've seen ISIS affiliated attacks in Niger, in Egypt and Afghanistan and elsewhere. We're particularly seeing signs of this in Iraq where the international assistance counter-terrorism assistance mission has been depleted and otherwise has sort of withdrawn more to bases. And as a consequence, ISIS in Iraq has been expanding operations. Separately from ISIS in Libya, we've seen the Eastern strongman commander Khalifa Haftar essentially use the crisis to do what he's been trying to do for a long time, which is to militarize governance in the areas in which he operates. My colleague Fred Wary at Carnegie has a really interesting analysis of that. Separate from terrorist groups in places like Columbia, we're seeing reports of armed groups and death squads using the fact that the government is distracted by responding to the crisis to take advantage of that and murder land-right activists, for example. We're also seeing some groups use the crisis for propaganda purposes, for recruitment purposes. In Yemen, we've seen the Houthi movement say in their media communications that it is better to die a martyr in heroic battles than dying at home from the coronavirus. So it's a recruitment boon for them. Separately, in Somalia, we've seen Shabab talk about how the virus can be blamed exclusively on crusader forces and keeping up their pace of attacks. So a lot of leveraging the crisis for these groups ends. Second big trend I'm seeing is that we do see a lot of non-state armed actors trying to respond to the crisis, actually bring some services, largely to shore up support from the population and legitimacy, but a few examples of this, there's many, in Afghanistan, the Taliban has actually rolled out its own public awareness campaign. It's reportedly cut down on public gatherings, on big gatherings in the areas where it controls its quarantining people coming back from Iran. It's allowing international healthcare workers to pass through its territories in some case. In Hezbollah, in Lebanon, Hezbollah is rolling out a robust social healthcare campaign standing at medical facilities and it is definitely bringing the media along to bear witness to this. In Brazil, we've seen reports of some drug trafficking gangs enforcing a curfew to contain the virus. There's reports of gangs in El Salvador doing their own efforts to enforce social distancing regulation. Of course, in all these cases and many more, it's likely that these objectives are not fully altruistic just to serve the population. These groups are obviously trying to exert their own control or shore up their own support from the population. And it's particularly important because in a lot of these areas, the actual government, the official government is really struggling to respond to the pandemic. So there's a lot going on there. Third big trend I see is that within some groups and in some conflicts, we've seen some modest signs that the pandemic has made them willing to de-escalate. Sometimes they've even cited the UN's call for a global ceasefire. So of course here again, it's hard to know what are good faith proclamations on this and what are just efforts at getting a propaganda victory, but it's still worth noting. So for example, in the Philippines, we've seen reports that communist guerrillas there declared a ceasefire after President Duterte did. In Colombia, the ELN at least temporarily declared a ceasefire. The Houthis in Yemen did respond to the Saudi proclaimed ceasefire with their own peace plan. It's unclear to what degree that'll be heated. And then finally in Afghanistan, the Taliban did offer ceasefires, although it seems that those are mostly in areas that it already controls rather than areas that it's currently contesting with the Afghan government. So again, there could be some instrumentalization there, but in short, there are some modest potential signs of openings. And that brings me to just a final policy thought, which is we know obviously the news is mostly bleak and what I've laid out is quite bleak, but we also do know that crises can sometimes provide an opportunity for positive disruption and that natural disasters can scramble the decks in potentially productive ways. So as I've laid out here, all of these conflicts really vary and specifics of where each might be going and what those windows might be are very hard to tell from 30,000 feet or months ahead of time. But I think as a policy matter for those of us who care about de-escalation of conflict and peace, what we need to do is continue to track these details, continue to bear witness to these opportunities, and as an international community, be ready to seize these windows of opportunity for de-escalation when they might occur going forward. Yes, that was terrific. Thank you for that walk around the world. So now that we have walked around the world and understood formal security sector responses and non-state actor responses, I wanna drill down into Syria, one of the more complicated conflicts that we've all seen. I also just wanna mention, if you have questions, please go to the chat box and you can type your questions in there on YouTube. And we have a hashtag, which is COVID and conflict. So you can also join the conversation on Twitter. So next we're gonna go to Amani Khador who is from the Syria Relief and Development Organization. She's been working with the WHO, the World Health Organization in Syria. Amani, take it away and tell us what's happening in Syria. Hi, Sarah and everyone, thank you for joining today. And just to clarify, I actually can't be based in Syria any longer because of my own security issues as a humanitarian worker who operates from the cross-border response in South Turkey for Northwest Syria. So just to begin, we know, and as many of the speakers have already spoken, health response obviously becomes much more complicated during a pandemic, but what we're dealing with in Syria is already, is a collapsed healthcare system from before. It's been entirely fragmented, I think over less than 50% of hospitals are functioning. And so we're really seeing how the health and governance piece is intersecting and is going to shape either the success or failure of this particular response. So I'll try to focus on three particular regions. And as Francis just mentioned, it does vary depending on if there are official state actors such as the government of Syria or non-state actor groups such as HTS, the self-administration in Northeast Syria or the residual effects of ISIS in some of these particular regions. So I'll start with the government of Syria and if we kind of rewind to one month back, the minister of health had claimed that the government's military force had completely cleansed and disinfected Syria of all traces of coronavirus. So that tune has changed a little bit now, we're seeing cases being reported from GOS, but there still is a concerted effort sort of around disinformation campaigns and major interference, even if not by the ministry of health, by the ministry of interior and other sort of elements of the government that come into the picture when we're dealing with monitoring and surveillance. And we know with any public health crisis, there has to be a great deal of surveillance that takes place for finding cases, for contact tracing, for containment, but there are still limitations by the ministries to stop the WHO and other health actors from actually tracing and surveying a lot of these sites. With government of Syria controlled in other areas, such as the self-administration in North East Syria, we're seeing a lot of crackdowns, we're seeing detainments, we're seeing disappearances. It's quite counterproductive actually, for example, in North East Syria, there's a curfew that's been in place and it wasn't gradually phased in, it was almost immediately put into place for people who rely on daily wages, for people who need bread, who need food, who don't have any other ability to access aid. And this is essentially their only form of sustenance. And so a lot of these detainments entail throwing in one prisoner in a 20 by 20 foot cell with 25 other individuals and after a few days are being thrown out again. So it essentially defies a lot of the social distancing, the hygienic practices that we're hearing about. In addition, for example, the limitations in hygiene and a lot of these overcrowded camps in North East Syria and Northwest Syria, where you might have one family that's sharing, excuse me, 24 families that are sharing one bathroom. And that is sort of ties in with governance and the service provision in a lot of these areas. Now in Northwest Syria with a lot of the other armed actors, the interference is more limited because the health services have been provided essentially from the beginning of the crisis from health actors, from NGOs such as my own, the WHO cross-border access from Turkey. The issue is not that the issue is in fighting between a lot of these armed groups and the residual and continuous attacks on healthcare from the government of Syria from other allies essentially destroying hospitals, clinics, ICUs which are needed at this point. So even as we're trying to scale up quarantine and different procedures in terms of infection prevention control and major risk communication and community engagement, there's still the fear that one of the ceasefire that has been in place since March 5th in Northwest Syria may be breached which there are continuous daily shellings. So that's really one of the biggest concerns and in an area like Northwest Syria where you have over 1 million displaced persons, that's more what you're concerned about. There are four million residing in this population. It's not coronavirus itself, it's the attacks that are continuously forcing people to move from place to place and unable to access a lot of these. And I think we, and I'll just wrap up here as we've seen in the past other outbreaks. We saw polio in 2013 and 2014 constantly undermining cases that were reported from areas that were not under government of Syria control. And that's really the concern right now is giving legitimacy these cases because an outbreak in one part of the country is ultimately going to affect other parts of the country just as we've seen with even the movement of individuals regionally. And I think I'll say one last point which we've gotten a lot of questions from people saying, do you think this is what's going to end the war? Is this what's going to unite everyone against this disease and create sort of this united front? And I think that's quite a naive assumption just getting how complex it is. But we've also seen time and time again really the weaponization of healthcare and healthcare issues, outbreaks, pandemics and using these instances to military and political advantage. So I look forward to Q&A, but I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you, Amani. That was a wonderful look at Syria, extraordinarily complicated place and I'll have a lot of questions for you later. Absolutely. Isyoma, can you tell us what's happening in Nigeria? I think the COVID pandemic has not reached you. You have a few cases, but not as bad as Syria. Can you tell us what you're doing to prepare? Yeah, thank you, Sarah. Before I begin, I would like to give a bit background of the Nigerian context. There are those who still don't believe that COVID-19 is real. Some have been made to believe that the lockdown is a deception by governments to achieve material motives. Powerful and influential leaders, including religious leaders, are among those who spread such narrative. 70% of our population are engaged in informal economy, meaning that with the lockdown, many, even as much as they would like to obey, will be forced out of their homes by want and hunger. Water and post-harnitary conditions remain a huge problem in overcrowded urban centers and cities. 80% of our communities rely on water vendor. This is where we are supposed to wash our hand regularly. What about perception between the government and the citizens? Public distrust of government remains a huge challenge to the source of efforts to effectively win this virus. The public perceive government personnel, including security operatives responding to COVID-19 as essentially self-seeking and insensitive to their interests and needs. At the home front, we have sexual and gender-based violence, abandonment of women and children by men. As I speak to you now on Tuesday, through gender deaths in police stations, we see such reports of families, women and children that have been abandoned by the men. But there is one thing. This pandemic has opened up kind of once. Many years of corruption now haunt us. Our leaders are now forced to face the systems we neglected for years. At the institutional level, interagency coordination and collaborations remain poor, even between complementary agencies and also between the police and public health agencies, exemplified by many conflicting policies and, of course, actions. We already know Nigeria before now is leading with insecurity, from Bukuhara to former headers conflicts and even to other crimes and pockets of community violence. This morning, I just received a report from Jaws that BASA community was attacked by gunmen. Tension, crime and conflict will continue to increase so long as the lockdown continue to last. And this is because government palliative measure is not enough. As I speak now in Delta States, citizens are beginning to protest the lockdown with hot food. Of course, we expect more citizens uprising the next coming days. And as soon as something is done to meet these needs, people will rather die of the coronavirus than of hunger virus as they chant on the streets. Initial response by the police and military is forced, matched with brutality and one-ton destruction of properties of people alleged to have floated government orders. As we speak, violence by law enforcement agencies has killed more than the virus itself. Today in Nabiya State, an officer of national civil defense killed a motorist, fulfilling to bribe his way through the block. There are also arrests. Police are heavily cracking down on people arrested, thereby even increasing the risk of infection. The public are now fighting back. We have seen public mob against the military and the police. For example, in Delta State, in a place called Saffle and Abo, police and the military were visibly attacked. It went viral in the special media. It will get worse in the coming months. But then people call out the police and the public health. And each time I asked for what, these are institutions that have suffered long history of neglect on the resource with limited or no training, even to find epidemics such as this. It appears to only understand the language of false. Institutional, there is no hazard allowance for the police. Even in the face of this pandemic, long history of institutional neglect does not mean that the police service is always destined for poor outcomes. No. But it might mean that they have more barriers to overcome than other institutions. Yes, I agree, police need to be heard accountable for their actions, but they also need to receive the training and resources they need to be a constructive part of an effective response to this pandemic. What should we intervene? One, government is indignant in the public trust and cooperation to contain COVID-19 pandemic. As we all know, public confidence is in government. It's crucial for the legitimacy and success of any government's intervention against the pandemic. If attempts to stop the pandemic cause severe damage to lives of social and economic nettles, community respond will experience large-scale suffering in the medium and long term. And years of gains of our work and the work of other development partners may be lost. If relevant agencies do not consider one another as part of a whole and they need to dialogue and respond together, government and development partners may have to face more than the pandemic to deal with. I will stop here and wait to get more answers and then I can respond on what we are reading on ground to actually support government efforts in the fight against COVID-19. Thank you. Thanks, Isiyoma. I will be asking you later, I'm really interested in your engagement with the police. So I'll ask you that in just a little while. Let's get to Jeremy Canine Dyke who is with the Center for Global Development and had a major role at USAID in responding to the Ebola epidemics across West Africa. Jeremy, can you tell us about how crisis response should look? Thanks Sarah and thanks everybody. It's been just fascinating listening to all the other speakers and talking about the different dynamics. I wanna go back to something that Nancy said right at the beginning and several of the other speakers have touched on it as well, including Isiyoma. And that's the importance of trust. So in any disease response, trust is a really crucial variable because fundamentally the way that you stop an outbreak like this is by changing people's behaviors. People have to be convinced and persuaded and confident that by changing certain behaviors, often very deep-seated behaviors, that they can stop the spread of the disease. And that's a difficult thing. I think during the West Africa Ebola outbreak, there was a lot of frankly arrogance in the United States looking at the spread of that disease in Africa and sort of assuming that that wouldn't happen here because we would know better. And now we see as COVID-19 spreads here, we see the same sort of politicization. We see the same sort of misinformation. We see the same sort of forces in different parts of the population that are spreading false information for a variety of reasons. And so I think that importance of trust and the importance of reliable information is really critical to persuading people to change their behavior and identifying those trusted interlocutors and connecting with people through them. And I think that gets to why the involvement of security forces in an outbreak response can be such a delicate proposition because there is value that security forces can bring. And I think Albrecht laid out quite a few of the different ways that security forces can play a positive role. But for Miss Yelma's examples, you can also see some of the ways that security evolve into the security forces can be dangerous or counterproductive. And I think we've seen that in past Ebola responses both in the West Africa outbreak in 2014, but also more recently in the outbreak in Eastern Congo that's been going on for the past two years. What it does is the preexisting perceptions that people have of the security forces will then color their perception of the outbreak response depending on how those forces are involved. And so if there is trust in the security forces and if they are doing things that people generally see as valuable, then that it could reinforce trust if they see a lack of discipline, if they feel that it's punitive or coercive then that can undermine trust. And ultimately what you want is cooperation from the population, voluntary cooperation with the disease control effort. What security forces in many countries often represent is not cooperation but coercion. And so that's the kind of the line that must be walked if security forces are involved. And so I just wanna give a couple examples of how that has played out in past outbreaks. In Liberia, we saw both the good and the bad in 2014, early on in that outbreak, there was an attempt by Liberian security forces to quarantine the neighborhood of West Point, which was one of the heavily affected, at the time one of the heavily affected parts of the capital of Monrovia. And that attempt to quarantine the neighborhood forcibly backfired hugely, it led to riots. I believe at least one person was killed in those riots and it greatly undermined the actual disease control effort going on in West Point. So it set the response in Monrovia back considerably because it was an attempt to coerce rather than to induce cooperation. Later on in that response, we saw the Liberian military work with the US military to build Ebola treatment units. And that was a big value of the engineering capabilities that the Liberian military had supported by the US military were very valuable in doing that, providing that functional support to the response. So the good and the bad, I think in Congo as well, it's been an even greater challenge that in Congo, the Ebola effort has been trying to control the disease within an active conflict zone. And so there are all sorts of different security actors around there are non-state armed groups, there are quasi-terrorist groups, there are Congolese national military, there are UN peacekeeping forces. So it's a very security heavy environment and very complex. And I went out there almost exactly a year ago, I was out there and I talked quite a bit with both the response personnel and with local civil society. And what was really interesting was where, so there was a definite view amongst a lot of the civil society actors I talked to that yes, they saw an appropriate role for the military, but they were also very, very wary of the role of security forces. So I had a one meeting with about 200 representatives of Congolese civil society in the town of Boutembeau where people were standing up and yelling, we were not protected by the UN peacekeepers when we were being slaughtered during the war. Why are they doing more to protect the Ebola responders than they have done to protect us? Aren't they here to protect us? So people were very angry and very jaded at what they saw as the kind of revealed priorities of the international peacekeeping force that they would protect the international responders more than they would protect the Congolese civilians who were there supposedly under their mandate. But at the same time, I think we also heard from civil society leaders and religious leaders that they recognize the importance of the disease response effort. They recognize that the Ebola response teams needed protection and they saw that as a legitimate role for security forces. Where that became illegitimate or where that undermined trust was when the security forces would go from protecting responders to enforcing the public health response. And so when the military was used not just to provide sort of ambient security for response teams but actually to enforce contact tracing, enforce quarantine in some cases, and that we heard multiple reports of this, the Congolese military and security forces would pull people out of their homes and take them forcibly to Ebola treatment units to be isolated if they were a suspect case, sometimes on very thin ground. That hugely undermined trust. And so I think what is an interesting parallel both between the Liberia examples and the Congo examples is where security forces are playing a value add role in supporting the public health response in a way that doesn't coerce people. That is a value add and that can reinforce trust or at least doesn't undermine it. Where security forces play a role in enforcing the public health response, particularly if it's a coercive role and especially if they are not trusted by the population to begin with, that can dramatically undermine trust and dramatically reinforce this perception as we saw in the Congo that ultimately the Ebola effort was not about disease control, it was about political control. And that was how it was seen by much of the population there. And so I think there's, it can be very delicate striking that balance between what's a legitimate value add and what's going to undermine trust. And so having a feedback loop with the population about that is very, very important. Jeremy, thank you. And you talked a lot about trust between the local population and security forces. I'm interested in Isioma's experiences in Nigeria because Isioma, it sounds like you have been talking with the police and I wonder how has that been going? Have they made any changes that you've requested? Just tell us about that trust relationship. Yeah, thank you again, Sira. Just as Jeremy noted, it's partnership, partnership, partnership. And those who require a whole systems approach. Through partnership and networks, JSD has been able to improve collaboration between and amongst stakeholders to build cohesive communities against COVID-19. We also have a USIP working group who are also working from the side of the policymakers to help them understand their actions and its implications, you know, I mean from different perspectives as to avoid unintended consequences or assumptions. What has that yielded us? When the police, we try to encourage them to enforce the law in a nonviolent way. So we started by working with police management to decongest the police cells. And I speak to you now, there is a standard order by the IGP that every police cell must be decongested. And of course, indiscriminate arrest and detention has also been stopped as we speak now. For the community, you know, part of the message that the public health agencies are giving out is the need for frequent, for a regular washing of hands. This means that they would need water. And as I had noted, most communities do not have water, they depend on water vendors. We are able to work with facilitators, community stakeholders to advocate for water for these communities. And as I speak to you now, the governor of Plato State, his excellency, Simon Lanlong, you know, as part of palliative measure, has ordered free supply of water to these communities. Serah, this is the only state, as we speak now, in Nigeria that is offering free water for its communities to help fight this pandemic. Curse of JSE Advocacy through its partners, emphasizing the word partnership. On the front of the sexual and gender-based violence, like I had noted, prior to this pandemic, we had networks of service providers, you know, supporting the police to fight against, to respond effectively on gender-based violence. So using that networks, we have been also, we are able to use the networks to support the police and of course the communities. We have been able to recruit counselors to offer psychosocial supports to families who are traumatized, who are going to tensions, domestic violence. And even for the six that I mentioned, six cases that I mentioned that were abandoned, that the men abandoned the women and the children, we have been able to get them to come back. And when we asked them, but especially I asked one of them, why did you run away? They said they could not face their children and wife, you know, crying for hunger. But we have been able to persuade them to come back. And through government cash transfer, we have been able to at least them to qualify and they will be getting their own cash transfer. This is what we are doing with the police and of course with the community as much as we are able to continue to build, work through our partnerships. Thank you. Great examples of how civil society can change the behavior of security sector, police and military in their own towns. But you certainly have your work cut out for you and especially having to work from home and engage with the police and military. Speaking of the police and military, Albrecht, you discussed how security sectors are responding to COVID around the world. And it sounds like they have a really positive role to play and a big role, but are they actually trained to be responding to a health crisis? Thanks, that's a good question. I mean, I've also agreed with Jeremy's conclusions from the Ebola crisis. There we actually started that kind of work and we were looking at the role that security forces were playing in and there we found that they were clearly not really prepared and were also not trained to. I don't know if this situation has changed in West Africa, for instance. Our focus now in the Asia Pacific is a bit more positive in part also because in that region of the world, natural crisis and disasters are quite regular and periodic. And so they're used to respond to crisis management and natural disaster management, which is part of their traditional task. So they seem to be better prepared, but at the same time, we have not yet seen the kind of really dramatic outbreak in Southeast Asia and South Asia and in parts of East Asia yet. Many of the countries are at a very early stage. Once we come to crop management, quarantine control, all of that, then we'll probably see some of the problems. And here we see the need for training certainly within the military, but then also between the military and the other security forces they're working with like the police and border guards and so on. And then between the military and health providers. And that's where we also, we drew some conclusions back from the Ebola crisis that was that standard operating procedures must be updated to include health crisis. And to a large degree, they don't include those now. Then training has to be provided on those. Training on crisis management, on health related matters, on medical and public health concepts, because quite often there is no common knowledge on each other's concepts. Training on how to use protective equipment and to provide, for example, peaceful quarantine control that respects human rights and fundamental freedoms. So there's a lot of need for training and VC that in large part that this should be integrated into what we consider in your security sector, reform activities and programs that do take place in a lot of countries and that we're also calling for. Thanks. I have a question. We have lots of questions coming in on our YouTube chat. Please audience, if you do have questions, go ahead and send them there. And we also have on Twitter the hashtag COVID and conflict. You can join the conversation there. And I believe we have somebody monitoring that for questions as well. So our next question goes to Amani. Can you discuss any particular challenges in the matter of coordination in Syria responding to COVID-19, in particular with regard to ceasefires and non-state actors? Yes. So just to clarify, for us as a humanitarian agency, we don't interface with armed actors, government of Syria. We do that through our facilitator, so UN OCHA for example. But with the ceasefire around the time of COVID, it was actually completely unrelated to COVID. That was because of the onslaught of attacks in Northwest Syria happening from December, where I mentioned there were over a million people displaced. So that ceasefire took place between government of Syria, other armed actors, government of Russia, government of Turkey, essentially deciding that to reach some type of agreement to stop attacking this particular area so that there aren't any more displacements now moving towards Turkey, moving towards Europe. And so I'd like to say it was because of the threat of COVID that was very real, but was actually entirely unrelated and it took far too long. But I think in terms of, as I said before, armed, the non-state actors that are in Northwest Syria have sort of, I don't know how else to say, sort of stayed in their lane in terms of allowing the response to continue, but that has obviously not stopped any type of infighting and the shelling from government of Syria with them. Thank you. And that and ask you about your own organization's work. Has COVID, the onset of COVID affected your ability to work cross-border at all? Yes, to a certain degree. For us, we, you know, the core operations we provide our health and protection. And so we are still able to cross-border, you know, and there have been certain privileges in moving medical commodities, medications, obviously in partnership with the WHO. What has been affected are a lot of the sort of essential services for individual case management, for gender-based violence, for young mothers, for example, a lot of our response and prevention activities that occur in group settings for child marriage. And so a lot of these essential group gatherings or even individual sessions have had to be either delayed or finding another virtual sort of platform for that, which we know is very difficult considering, you know, limited connectivity and just not necessarily having a safe space when, you know, you can't provide these types of services intense to IDPs in camp settings. Okay, great. Jeremy, our next question comes to you, which is about how the US can build trust around the world that's needed for a coordinated international response to something like COVID. Yeah. One of the really concerning and disappointing things we're seeing in this crisis right now is that there is not the sort of international cooperation and the sort of international leadership that I think we've seen in previous outbreak crises. You know, there is really a, there's a dynamic that every country is pursuing its own, kind of its own ends right now, rather than working collaboratively together. And that creates a real problem because that competition makes resources more scale it makes them more, it makes them cost more, it prices out countries that don't have the resources that a country like the US has. And so, you know, what I would ideally want to see right now would be the United States trying to lead a global effort to address things like PPE supply to ensure that resources are going to countries that are suffering from bad outbreaks of COVID, rather than, you know, rather than the kind of sniping and fighting that we're seeing right now. I think that, you know, the fighting and the war of words between the US and China, the war of words between the US now and World Health Organization, well, it's a pretty one-way war of words in that respect. But those, you know, those dynamics are just usually counterproductive because what we, you know, what we need is a consistent global effort that is coherently addressing this outbreak wherever and whenever it is occurring because until it is extinguished everywhere, we're not going to be fully safe anywhere. And I think instead, you know, we see this really intensive competition for limited global supplies that is undermining trust. And I think, you know, in the US case, it's particularly, it's particularly a damaging to our global reputation when what the world sees of the US is competition for the sort of PPE supplies and testing supplies and so on that every country needs. And so while the US is out there outbidding them in the market and competing with them, China is actually shipping flights of PPE from its own production to other countries around the world. So, you know, from China, they're seeing solidarity and from the US, they're seeing competition. And that is not, I think that's IA, that's not what we should be doing, but B, it's certainly not normally the kind of image that any US administration wants to project to the world, particularly one that put so much stock in competing with China for kind of reputational dominance. So I think it's just a hugely, it's a hugely unfortunate situation right now and one where, you know, that gap of local leadership when the, or a global leadership when the US doesn't step up to try and take ownership of leading a global issue, it opens space to others, but it also leaves a lot of chaos. Thank you. And Frances, I think you wanted to respond to the cross-border question. Yeah, I just wanted to reinforce Imani's point on Syria and point out that this is a trend we're seeing globally, that the pandemic is in really concrete ways making international assistance, humanitarian assistance more difficult. It's making international mediation and support to peace processes more difficult. This seems like a sort of self-evident statement, but when we think about the really important ramifications of that, they're huge for some of these conflicts we're trying to resolve. For example, in Somalia, in our collection, we chronicle how the international community as a Somali government has cut down on travel. Most of the international community that was assisting a dialogue and political state-building process has departed that has obvious ramifications. In Afghanistan, there were peace talks underway between the United States and the Taliban that were meant to then transition into a broader inter-Afghan dialogue on the nature of the state. It's now unclear when those talks can happen. So I think we're seeing a broader trend of the pandemic really stymying and slowing down these really important peace processes as well as assistance as Imani describes. So what I take away from that, that we as the international assistance community and diplomatic community need to do is really think creatively and quickly about other modalities of support, expeditionary support, remote support, the technology involved. I think there's some really concrete things that we need to be thinking about in this new somewhat normal and how it can help de-escalate conflicts. Frances, while I have you, somebody asked a question that I think you might be able to respond to, which is how to build trust in the security forces in states like Iraq where sectarian divides make it difficult to trust certain groups where different groups within that security force can't trust each other. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a real challenge and without being specifically deep on Iraq, I will say that these trust deficits obviously predate the pandemic and are now being exacerbated by the crisis in many places. I would also say that fragmented authority in general in many of these places is exacerbating those trust deficits. We've seen reports of, not specific to Iraq, but populations believing that other factions aren't looking out for them in emergency response, et cetera, and aren't looking out for them in protection. So I will not discount the challenge of that. I think the sort of the prescriptions are probably back to best practices of security forces building trust in general, which was adhering to many of the guardrails that we've heard about today. Any response in the name of the pandemic being actually time limited and focused on the pandemic response rather than being a clear cover for expansion of authority or militarization of governance overall. But those are really, they're really, really hard challenges in the middle of a crisis compounding a conflict. Great, and I wanna ask Albrecht, can you chime in on this divide within security forces, perhaps with your experiences from Myanmar? I think we're grappling with right now in Myanmar and where our partners also tell us. And we see that, I mean, the big problem with the peace process is the deficit of trust. I mean, it's very hard for parties to come together, especially the military and the ethnic armed groups. So there are huge trust deficits between the military and the civilian government, which is now being also instrumentalized in a way in a year of elections, where nobody really wants the other side to look particularly good. And then of course, the military and ethnic armed groups. And in some of the areas where there are, where there is armed violence, the ethnic armed groups are supporting the local population, but they're competing basically with the military who is also trying to do something similar. I see it personally, I mean, if you're really optimistic as an opportunity for in particular the military to build some, you know, better reputation, trust within the population, show that they can actually work with the civilian government. And then that will help them in the long run, especially if they continue to support the civilian government beyond the coming election. And it could also help the peace process alone, but the instrumentalizing, politicizing, taking advantage of perhaps access to resources is not something that will get, you know, the country around the peace table. Yeah, well, let's bring in Amani here because the whole region of course, has ethno-sectarian divides. And I would love to know what you're seeing in the Syria context. Yeah, I mean, I really like how Francis said it, there definitely is a trust deficit, I mean, across the country. And I think just in terms of sort of the general population having faith, whether it's government of Syria or different state actors sort of effectively responding to this, it's, you know, quite poor just because I think they've seen how time and time again, civilians have been part of the collateral damage of this conflict. And so health priorities have always ranked quite low, you know, with over half of the population needing just basic, basic health services. So it doesn't really say much when now there's a pandemic that essentially is affecting more and more people. I think what is difficult is sort of in different pockets, really collaborating, you know, sort of a coordinated health response that does follow international guidelines and practices. I know WHO and agencies like ours are working very hard to build that trust with communities. Because we know that most people do not put that faith in a lot of these non-state armed groups, the government of Syria. And so the responsibility really falls on civil society, humanitarian actors, and different UN agencies that are operating in Syria. Great, thank you. And just a reminder to our audience, we have about 10 minutes left. So if you have questions, do send them into the YouTube chat or you can go to Twitter. It's hashtag COVID and conflict. So I wanna go to Isioma now. Somebody sent in a question about what happens in the aftermath of COVID-19. And I know that you're just starting to deal with the actual pandemic now, but eventually there will be an aftermath and it's best to prevent, right? So what do you do in the aftermath to deal with terrorism and other insecurity in Nigeria, particularly in those border areas where the government isn't so strong? Is there anything that you are thinking, you and your community are thinking about doing now? Thank you very much, Sarah. Even before now, we have been working on those issues, talking about trust building, you know. Sorry, I don't know how much time I have, but I would love to comment on that. Trust building and of course, pills building, what we are doing now, how I agree, it's flowing down, what I agree with Amani, it's flowing down a lot of work we are doing now, but like I keep saying, pills building cannot win. So what we have done amid this pandemic is to work with CSOs to change their strategy. You know, in the way that they support government in their efforts, in preparedness for the imagine all in response to the emergency. Trust building is a very long journey and we have experienced it. When I say we, Justice and Security Dialogue Program of USIP, we have experienced it. For the past three years, we have been involved in building trust between communities and government. And I give you a very simple example. When we started in 2000 and sustained in Just Play Two States, there was this community that police officers, dare not go in with their uniform. If they go in, they will be lynched. Even the police station there was burnt down by yachts. It was that bad and then JSD came in. How did we build the trust? It took a very long journey, gradual journey. We would start engaging piece by piece with different stakeholders to understand what the underlying problems were. You find out that what they say is a problem, it's not actually the problem. And we began to look out for the commonalities among these divided communities. Once we found that common ground, we were able to facilitate the dialogue among them. And as I speak to you now, the same community that once done, that police station has rebelled it. And of course, police have returned to that community. What are we going to do after this pandemic? In terms of terrorism and all of that. Already, JSD is involved in the office of the vice presidency to respond effectively to the farmer headers conflict, which also is a trans-border crime as you may have observed in the past. Yes, that has been faced with this couple with terrorism. So what we are doing is to ensure that policy makers, because number one, when they give policies, sometimes people don't understand why this comes to be. So our own task is to create awareness, to assist people on the policy. And if there are policies that we feel that are not aligned with rights or that could, rather than yield more positive results, result to unintended and negative consequences, immediately we begin to pull up with the policy makers. This way we will be able to work together and with all of these communities in other times to address specifically common issues that they have. Sometimes these issues, if they are not well managed at that level, they turn violent. So we begin to hold dialogues. Dialogues has been the key. And also, of course, supporting law enforcement, women law enforcement, women in the military, the police and of course other non-state actors, like the vigilante, to dialogue and respond together to issues as they come up. Thank you, Isioma. And my chat function is actually blowing up because we have so many people writing in from our YouTube and our Twitter asking about this trust connection between security forces and the population. And I know a lot of panelists also have things to say about that. So let's go to Francis first. Some global trust issues. My colleague Rachel Kleinfeld has an excellent paper last week talking about effective pandemic response and the key role that trust in government plays. Citizen trust in government plays a miss. I would just add that looking at some global examples, we are seeing unfortunately frequent examples of governments and non-state authorities having an interest in concealment of the virus early on, misinformation or disinformation about the virus early on. Amani mentioned the government of Syria. We've also seen examples in North Korea, in Libya and Yemen of various authorities claiming no cases within their areas. The problem here is obviously when you have a pandemic, you can't conceal the truth forever. The truth comes out with really damaging ramifications for trust, citizen trust going forward for the legitimacy of the authorities going forward. And I think this is going to be a really huge problem that we're gonna grapple with in whatever aftermath or next stage of the pandemic occurs going forward. Thanks, and Amani, do you wanna respond to this issue of trust and community buy-in? Sure, yeah, I mean, I think that's huge and it really is difficult just because people, especially when there's a lot of censorship with information coming in, whether it's from armed actors, from geo-government of Syria, is really being able to understand and recognize as a community or as an individual how serious a threat is. And with the pandemic, what we found is actually a lot of difficulty in risk communication with communities and doing a lot of social mobilization work just to understand how serious this threat is. Because even with conversations with my own family, that's in Syria is like, we've already been through war, bombs have come down on our heads, we're all over the world, we're dispersed. This disease, and we don't even know details of it, we don't know if it's a hoax, we don't know if it's a social construct, is not really what's scaring us right now. It's how we're gonna put food on the table, it's are we going to stay living in a tent for the rest of our lives. So really trying to understand that these people have been through so much now over nine years, and similar to many other conflicts, conflicts is really just understanding and communicating that severity, but also recognizing that this may not be high on their priority list because there are so many other basic and human rights oriented issues that are much more serious than this for them. Thanks, Amani, and Ulrich, you have the last word on trust and community buy-in here. I think SSR, it can be quite useful here, because security sector reform is really all about promoting internalizing kind of good security sector governance principles. And that includes equity, inclusivity, transparency, you know, participation, accountability, all these things that make a security institution trustworthy within the society, because it's all meant to strengthen security provision as a productive, constructive public service, you know, service provided to the people that they are paying for. So pandemic response is clearly part and parcel of our concept of security. You know, be a part of a more traditional kind of national security and human security concept, it's part and parcel of what public security providers have to address. And if that can be done with more focus on human rights, fundamental freedoms, all of that proportionality, I think then also the security sector would be on a better track. Absolutely. Well, we only really have time for, I think one more question, and I'm going to throw that extraordinarily difficult question to Jeremy Kanandike, who I suspect could probably give us a couple of hours on this topic, but it's actually something that I've been struggling with myself, even as a human rights person. And that question is, what is a good example that balances the right of the individual with that of the broader population not to be infected? And of course, that is about government policies, but it is also about the security sector and how they enforce those government policies. Yeah. Thanks for that easy one, Sarah. I think my Zoom is disconnecting, I'm sorry. No, it is a, that's a big ethical challenge and we can't finally fully resolve it here, but I think what we see from past crises is that the, sorry, my kid's talking to his teacher over just over next to me. I think what we see from both this and from previous outbreaks is you need to talk to people, you need to meet people where they are and help them to understand the way that their own individual actions affect and either endanger or help to secure people who are dear to them. And it's been really, really interesting to see how the CDC and the DNIH have approached that in the United States, these parts of these public health agencies, the US government, you've got Tony Fauci going on just about every single television show in the world or in every radio show, just talking to everyone from CNN to Barstool Sports to try and pass these messages. You also see Dr. Robert Redfield ahead of the CDC going on a lot of conservative, leaning and religious talk shows and radio shows. Likewise, passing those messages, so kind of finding the channels that people trust and using different interlocutors to pass messages that people will have more confidence in about why they need to change their behavior. Because ultimately, if you only take a coercive approach to changing behavior, you primarily take a coercive approach to changing behavior, then there will be a backlash to that. Some people may change their behavior because they have to. Some people may be more inclined to resist or they may try to escape the coercion. And we've seen this dynamic play out on the macro scale with some of the lockdown measures that the first thing that happens when a lockdown is announced is thousands or hundreds of thousands of people flee the place of the lockdown that happened in Moscow. Very recently, it happened in Delhi in India. And so, if you are trying to coerce people without having persuaded them, you get a bad outcome. And so that persuasion element is super important and finding the right interlocutors and the right channels for that is super important because different populations will trust different interlocutors. And we saw that in West Africa, that when the main voice people were hearing from with the central government, there was a lot of resistance. When they were hearing it instead on their local radio station or from their local political or religious leader or another local community leader that they trusted, then they adjusted, then they changed their behavior. And so I think that is a really key way. You can't have coercion without also having persuasion. And if you do, it's gonna backfire. Thank you, Jeremy. And I particularly appreciate you showing us the universal difficulty of working from home. I thought perhaps my cats would jump up here. We haven't seen them, my toddler. Yeah, it was a close call with my dog there, but yeah, I managed to keep my screen. It's difficult. Well, Jeremy mentioned that we should meet people where they are when it comes to this issue. And we have met you, audience, where you are in your homes. USIP is going to continue doing events like this because the work doesn't stop just because we are socially distancing. So I hope you'll join us for future events. I wanna thank our amazing panel of Dr. Albrecht Schnabel, Issyoma who is joining us from Nigeria, Amani who is joining us from Kansas City, works on Syria, is usually based in Turkey, and Francis who offered us a great insight on non-state actors, and Jeremy Canandike with the Center for Global Development. Again, the Twitter hashtag is COVID and Conflict. Thank you everyone for joining us and sending in questions. With that, I will close out.