 Good morning everybody. Welcome to US Institute of Peace. My name is Nancy Lindbergh. I'm the president here. And I'm delighted to welcome everybody this morning for a very important conversation. And a special welcome to those who are joining us online on Facebook Live. And I invite you to tweet your questions for the audience queue in a portion of this using the hashtag Merkley at USIP. So for those who don't know, USIP was founded by Congress in 1984 as an independent, nonpartisan federal institution. And we are dedicated to resolving and preventing violent conflict around the world. And we do this by working with partners in troubled spots to equip them with the ways to prevent and resolve violent conflict. And we also serve as a convening hub here in Washington, bringing together policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to have the kind of critical conversations that we'll be having this morning on the most pressing challenges that we face today. So today we have an important conversation with Senator Jeff Merkley from the great state of Oregon. And Senator Merkley really defines someone as having had a career as a public servant. And he started as an intern with the former Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, who was one of the great champions of US Institute of Peace. And we are grateful to Senator Hatfield, to Senator Merkley, and to the many Oregonians who have been keen supporters of USIP through the years. Senator Merkley is a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Foreign Ops and Related Programs. And he's the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Multilateral International Development and Multilateral Institutions. And in that role, he has worked very closely with the subcommittee chair, Senator Todd Young, to elevate the kind of humanitarian issues we will hear about today, and to look at what are the underlying causes of crises around the world. So having spent much of my career working in these kinds of environments, including 14 years with the International NGO Mercy Corps, I'm somewhat of an honorary Oregonian, but I really want to express my gratitude to Senator Merkley for taking these issues on. He recently returned from an epic trip traveling to Somalia, South Sudan, Djibouti, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That's an extraordinary itinerary. And in those visits, he looked at what are the underlying causes of these humanitarian crises and the looming famine. And in Africa, he held more than 35 meetings with local civil society, refugees living in camps, aid workers, government officials. And I want to just take a moment to give a special welcome to two youth leaders who are visiting with us here from South Sudan at USIP, Nia Changwath-Rambhakti, and Nimi Sho Joy Baggi. So warm welcome to them. I want to commend Senator Merkley for his travel really taking on those kinds of trips to war-torn countries and shining a light on these issues. Somalia and South Sudan in particular have been teetering on the edge of famine for the last several years. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been cycling through conflict for the last 40 years. And we see now more than ever that violent conflict is really driving these kinds of humanitarian crises. I am really struck by the fact that a decade ago when I was doing this work, 80% of our humanitarian aid went to victims of natural disaster. A decade later that's flipped and 80% goes to victims of violent conflict. This is a long-term commitment of the US Institute of Peace on how to reduce violence, particularly in fragile states where countries have weak or illegitimate governments. Congress plays a vital role in how America addresses these issues. And so voices like Senator Merkley are absolutely critical. So we are honored to have him here today to share his views on these issues. With that, please join me in welcoming Senator Merkley. Well, it's a pleasure to join you all this morning and certainly to be here at the US Institute of Peace. When I first came to Washington, D.C., it was 1976, summer of 1976 as an intern for Senator Hatfield. And I had a chance that summer to read his various books he had written and become familiar with some of the projects that he cared about. And he cared tremendously about issues of conflict in the world and resolving them. He had been with the first group of Marines who had gone into Hiroshima in Japan after the nuclear bomb had been detonated, and he had seen the enormous, enormous devastation that had occurred there. And so doing, he worked incredibly hard to curb the role of nuclear weapons to advance the conversation about resolving conflict. And certainly a piece of that was his desire to establish an institution to advance the cause of peace an academy for peace and that was the root of the creation here of this organization that has done so much good over these decades. And certainly I wanted to recognize that the this is not just a building in which conversations occur but also an organization that is supporting good work in different parts of the world and particularly several programs in Africa regarding conflict resolution. So please that that is the case. So it was a real desire of mine as a U.S. Senator to be able to join the Foreign Relations Committee but I wasn't able to do that until this legislative cycle. And so I'm pleased I was able to do that and return to some of my core interests when I was considering what to do with my life. I was uncertain. I had skills in math and science that had taken me into the university but I was curious and interested in the rest of the world and the human experience. And in that time that I was here as an intern for Senator Hatfield in 1976 I was struggling with this question of public policy and how I understand how you could build something tangible like an engineer but what about policy? Can you put yourself into a future in which you can affect the rules by which we guide our societies? And I proceeded to drop out of college the following year and stay here in D.C. and intern with a variety of groups and to do so to ponder what I was going to study when I got back to college. I figured I was two years in and didn't know what I was doing and it was time to figure it out. And what I came to conclude was that I would throw myself into third world economic development and that's what I studied as an undergraduate and then I studied in graduate school. I worked a summer with the State Department of India. I had lived as an exchange student in West Africa. I worked in villages in Mexico and the way I was going to pursue my life was doing as much as I could regarding third world poverty and conflict. And then just as I was getting out of graduate school I was interviewing for a variety of positions with the fellowships and I was offered a fellowship with the Secretary of Defense to work on strategic nuclear policy. Completely different world from third world economic development but at that point it was just minutes before midnight in terms of the doomsday clock for the atomic bulletin scientists and I felt the biggest threat to the planet was at that point nuclear war so I felt a moral obligation to step into this unexpected opportunity and did so through the 1980s. So that is a long journey back to being on the Foreign Relations Committee and back in trying to be engaged in third world economic development issues. In November of last year I put together a congressional trip to go to Burma and Bangladesh to respond, have the United States Congress respond to the ethnic cleansing that was taking place in Burma. It was a situation where Anson Suu Kyi had given a speech to the United Nations in September of last year and said we have nothing to hide we invite the world to come and see what is going on in Burma in Rakhine State with the Rohingya and I took her up on that and then the day before the trip our plans to visit the villages were cancelled as they were cancelled for so many international organizations. We were still able to go to Rakhine State to go to the capital of Sitwe to hold a lot of conversations to see the Muslim quarter which was quite striking and then we went to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Well, that trip in November was one piece of responding to major challenges in the world. The trip in March to Africa was another. It's become very apparent that there's so much going on in the world whether it's war in Syria whether it's denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that the issue of famine in Africa the four famines is just getting lost and yet here were reports of the four famine regions of Yemen and North Nigeria and Somalia and South Sudan some 20 million people at risk of starvation. So that's why I embarked on this trip was to understand better and draw some attention to it. I invited a lot of colleagues to go as well and discovered that there wasn't a great appetite to go to difficult regions of the world. So I went along with my team member Laura Up-to-Grove who is here, feel free to and maybe just have you stand and wave to people feel free to follow up with her on issues involving foreigners and it's Laura who developed the most intensive travel schedule for a codel with every second occupied with meetings and as I was standing seeing the pictures here from Kachanga refugee camp in DRC it brings back a lot that's going on and it's in DRC that USIP has an initiative to support the prosecution of economic and environmental crimes which is terrific and in South Sudan USIP is working with the SUD Institute to train civic leaders and so the places I was going are certainly being touched by the work being done here in this building. Basically, what we saw was the combination of the impact of conflict and corruption and climate chaos and I use the term climate chaos as a little bit more vigorous description of what's going on in the world and simply climate change. In South Sudan and DRC we saw that the main driver for family-like conditions were conflict and corruption and Somalia climate and conflict in Kenya the food insecurity driven by climate chaos and that food insecurity is both a cause and a product of the conditions of conflict. In DRC we saw a country that is abundant in minerals and natural resources it's estimated to have the potential to be able to produce enough food to feed 2 billion people and yet 8 million estimated 8 million individuals in DRC are food insecure and I think about how DRC really has had much difficulty throughout its history really going back to kind of the first colonial disruption King Leopold and all that went on with western interaction with DRC at this time and now in just the Kasai region conflict has displaced over 1 million people and there are mass graves there are mass graves with children two UN investigators including an American Michael Sharp were killed while investigating the crimes committed in Kasai a couple stories that struck me from this location we flew up to Kachanga by helicopter because it extremely difficult to get there by road and also this refugee camp had a lot of security which I'll come back to later with kind of the number of gangs or militias that are moving through villages in the area but as I went from hut to hut in this refugee camp and one of them was just a very kind of almost made out of some type of woven fibrous stock and there was a fire inside and so it was just absolutely a cloud of smoke inside but out came a woman a young son come out he was disabled and he had a crease in his skull that went inch and a half two inches deep from a machete a machete had just completely crushed his head and he was disabled as a result of that and kind of a reflection if you will of the type of conflict that was occurring and in that area in that area you have these large number of militias many of them stem back to the Civil War that took place in Rwanda and when the Tutsi came back down many of the Hutu went over into the eastern part of the DRC and remain and if you have some guns and some machetes you can go from village to village and raid and so some estimate there's 70 such groups 140 such groups but it's really complete chaos producing a tremendous number of refugees and there is a child soldier reintegration center in Goma that where I spoke to some former child soldiers and particularly one young man 17 years old who told me his story and he was in a village in that region and one night one of these militias entered the village and a couple soldiers from the militia on that couple members came in and basically said to his mother hand over $2,000 and of course they didn't have $2,000 there in the village and she was killed then the father and the father found everything he could possibly find and the value handed over and then he was killed and this young boy was hiding in an adjacent room and the soldiers came through and found him and were on the verge of killing him so he was 14 at the time when they said no no he's old enough bring him with us and so he went he was taken away with them and he proceeded to try to escape and while he was caught he was brought back he said another they showed him what they do to those who try to escape and while he didn't give details my understanding was there were horrific consequences that he witnessed and at that point he did not try to escape after that and for three years he was a part of this militia going village to village compelled to be there under threat of his own life trying to find to go out to a highway with three other individuals to try to say a highway but some road of some sort to try to stop a car and steal from it and two of them had guns two of them didn't he had a gun the other person who had a gun was the person who had killed his parents so he told me that he made the decision of what he was going to do he shot and killed the soldier that was with him the team member was with him who had killed his parents he said he told the other two young boys you can either come with me or not come with me but I'm escaping and there had been pamphlets distributed in various places by the blue helmets in which he had been able to observe how to find them and he went and he found them and they got him to this camp and I tell you this story because it's it's just symbolic of the results of the chaos that comes from this type of conflict and a very very difficult challenge as to how to take it on but thank goodness that we are funding we in the United States are funding operations like this center for former child soldiers so that conflict disrupts the ability to improve conditions for millions of people in South Sudan another country rich in natural resources you have yesterday the anniversary the anniversary of the seven years of as a new nation but it's been over five years of civil war between President Kier's forces and the supporters of former Vice President Machar the some peace talks have been held and held in places Ethiopia and Sudan Uganda that there is not there is not at this point good news that there's some resolution of this situation and more than six million in South Sudan face severe life threatening hunger over four million have fled their homes this makes South Sudan the world's third largest source of refugees behind only Syria and Afghanistan there in Juba I went to the Guri nutrition center and met with three women and these three women are standing there with their babies in their arms and one woman proceeded of course all through the translator to describe that her child had HIV and the second woman described how her child had malaria and the third described how her child was infected by malnutrition and I just thought here we have HIV and malaria two of the great scourges of the world and malnutrition and why were they there they were there because their husbands had been drawn into the conflict between the president's forces and the former vice president's forces and the result of that conflict is their husbands had disappeared they didn't know if they were alive or dead and without the support of their husbands they had to flee to be able to have any possibility of nutrition also think about the chaos in South Sudan from going to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya where many of the refugees are coming out of South Sudan and I met a woman who had with her 13 children and she told me her story and her children were not just her children but they were the children of her and her fellow wives of her husband and her husband had disappeared not to return and so when she decided that she had to flee with her children the other wives said take our children as well and try to save our children so she fled with her children and children of the two other wives of her husband and made it to this refugee camp and they had not yet been assigned a place to a place to reside they were still in the processing of figuring this out and so she had no idea what awaits her and her family but just the fact that they were there together she also said that she was at great risk because her husband's brother felt that by her leaving with the children it was unacceptable and was trying to kill her and bring the children back and so the complexity of the situation of war and famine at this refugee camp they were measuring the biceps of children with a tape that basically had different colors on it and if the bicep was tiny so tiny that when they put the tape around it it was in the red zone it was basically a way to say severe malnutrition and was in this room with these mothers holding their children and it was one child after another and all I could see is every time they measured a bicep it was the red zone in other words child after child with severe malnutrition they were getting a plumpy nut which is another product being provided to help provide food enrichment recovery but certainly a reflection of the challenge the UN commission of inquiry has chronicled some of the massacres and violence committed by President Kerr's forces and I heard a lot of stories about that and they're in South Sudan also used by child soldiers and the report identified more than 40 senior military officials who have carried out war crimes against humanity let's turn to Somalia and conflict in Somalia met with President Formaggio who came actually to the State Department enclave because the State Department is not allowed to go out of the enclave and it's actually something that they wanted me to send the message back here to our State Department to our leaders to say let us out of the enclave the State Department representatives of every other country are allowed out of the enclave the Americans are not because of our assessment of the risk but they said they couldn't really do their jobs I was astounded that the President was willing to come to the enclave to meet with me but Al Shabaab is a real challenge in that country the conflict there and one of the things that came up that the the President is new there he was very engaged in policy discussions in a way that I did not encounter in many other countries and including talking about the impact of the charcoal trade and how charcoal was a source of funding to Al Shabaab so not only was the country being deforested because of people needing to cook their food but Al Shabaab was making charcoal to export and that export was helping to fund the terrorist operations the challenge there was that in the last 30 years they've lost 80% of their trees which actually I'm probably getting my head myself into the climate impact here but it is tied in as all three of these pieces are tied in between conflict and corruption and conflict in DRC in South Sudan I met with UN peacekeeping missions two of the largest in the world I saw really the key role that they're playing in Somalia with MSOM the African mission for Somalia the African Union peacekeeping forces are helping and working to help the government in Somalia regain territory, maintain control over civilian country civilian centers and it's critical that the United States continue to work with these peacekeeping efforts turning to corruption the 2017 transparency international list of the most corrupt nations has put South Sudan as second only behind Somalia so in two of those countries that I was at certainly a huge impact. One member of the South Sudanese parliament has described the nation as lacking any and all regulations to combat frauds and malfeasance among government officials in South Sudan half the population faces severe life threatening hunger more than a million children acutely malnourished there when I visited the world food program packaging center bagging and rebagging and rebagging food and why were they putting food inside one bag inside another bag inside another bag it was because they were going to drop the bags out of a plane to provide food around the country and why were they going to do this they were going to do it because first the checkpoints from both the government forces and the opposition forces are basically a series of obstacles for delivering food and I found it just a source of deep frustration that the government forces indeed are not well enough controlled that they are also involved in these checkpoints these points of extortion and so here is the country that they govern in desperate need of international help and yet they are turning that help also into a source of corruption so to be able to deliver the food they are dropping it out of planes and partly the condition of the roads but also very significantly these checkpoints and you have the challenge of corruption in DRC many describe this as a country where elections are governance in any sort of democratic form is long gone there was supposed to be an election in 2016 it was postponed to 2017 2017 was postponed and Ambassador Nikki Haley went over and said this needs to happen and so there was a commitment to do it in December of 2018 of this year and when we were there in March the major point of effort was to prepare for these elections for the U.S. to try to really encourage and so the acting Chargé Jennifer Haskell who happens to come from a little town in southern Oregon Roseburg where I was as a little child two Roseburg kids over there in DRC she wanted us to hold a series of meetings related to the elections and really encourage them to be held and one of the issues was how they were going to do the voting in remote parts of the country and the election commissioner was determined that this is going to be done through an electronic voting machine and the story we kept hearing is these machines being purchased from South Korea at many multiples of what their normal price was kind of just a piece of the corruption and then the second is that using an electronic machine in remote villages makes no sense at all how's it going to respond to the humidity to being exposed to the rain and individuals would be coming to that machine who have no idea where touched an electronic device before and then I held a meeting with a group of advocates some of who had participated in a demonstration of the machine and they had difficulty using it and they were urban college educated individuals so what sense is it makes to be running these voting machines out through all these villages the election commissioner was determined that this is the way it was going to happen another concern was the credibility of the voting roles and so that was something that was significant amount of conversation about and the conference of Catholic bishops had volunteered with their extensive network to really be involved in this effort and their offer had not yet been taken up but hopefully will be so I don't know if the elections will occur this December but if they do I think there's going to be a lot of issues with it and when I had a dinner with civil society leaders they were not convinced even if elections were held that Kabila would step down there would be a transfer and you think about how these different issues interrelate and we hope for one symbolic advance like a free and fair election but that could be just a moment in time in a long course of trying to find a path forward to a better place let me turn to climate so this is an issue that is perhaps the most significant planetary issue to confront our generation in my lifetime the amount of carbon pollution in the air has gone up by almost 100 points within a year or two it will be 100 points so here's what I'm talking about when I was born the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 314 parts per million and now it's almost 414 parts during the 200,000 years of kind of human presence the points have varied just a few points in the course of any generation completely different situation now the curve is accelerating upwards at the time I was born the carbon pollution was going up a third of a point per year now it's going up 2.5 points per year in the last 10 years while I've been in the U.S. Senate we have seen half the coral reefs around the world die or be deeply damaged in my state we see warmer winters that are great for pine beetles and terrible for pine trees we see forests that are drier and with more summer lightning strikes and so we have forest fire season that is much longer and more devastating we have a billion baby oysters that died in 2007-2008 because the Pacific Ocean is 30% more acidic than it was before we started burning fossil fuels so those we have to artificially buffer the water for baby oysters to survive now in Oregon and off the coast of Washington you see the impact certainly as an additional deeply aggravating factor in Africa and in these countries we were visiting and what has the U.S. done it's veiled out of the Paris agreement formally not till 2020 but effectively abandoned its world leadership on this incredible challenge of climate chaos carbon pollution and our support for the Green Climate Fund which I've worked intensely to try to get additional money to and was successful after the Republicans took the Senate but while President Obama was still in office we were successful but not now the combination of the control of the Congress and the control of the Presidency so our pledge to assist other countries including countries of Africa in terms of responding to the challenges of climate is unfortunately being unfulfilled when I was in Somalia and speaking with President Fremajo and he was we were talking about the impacts of climate and he was also saying the impacts of the micro-climate changes and he said because of all that deforestation the precipitation and moisture that comes from those trees that no longer exists putting off moisture and then feeding additional rainfall and other parts of the country was also disappearing I hadn't actually heard anyone talk about that type of micro-climate effect except regarding the Amazon in Brazil but the fact that he was concerned about that and thinking about that I thought was a strong point it's one thing to have one failed season because of drought it's another to have year after year after year because there's no longer any seed stock and if you plant it and the next year dies and the next year dies you're basically in position of having to abandon agriculture and flee somewhere adding to the challenge the challenge of conflict and the challenge of hunger and I mentioned one thing that he raised was a driving force behind the acceleration of the deforestation was al-Shabaab selling charcoal internationally as a form of raising money so this isn't just a problem for Somalia in Kenya in the Horn of Africa they have grown hotter and drier recent research says the region dried faster in the 20th century than any time over the last several thousand years in Kenya there was a lot of conversation about a Chinese coal plant a plant to burn coal and produce electricity now this is a country that has very little electricity produced from fossil fuels currently in fact it is aiming at having 85% of its electricity come from renewable resources by the year 2020 two years from now and it's had enormous potential for geothermal with the great rift valley where the continents are separating and you have a lot of hot rock just below the surface makes no sense in the world for Kenya to be building a coal plant and it makes no sense because they don't have the coal for one they do have some low-grade coal reserves far away but no transportation system to get them there but shouldn't the US be doing everything possible to help with renewable energy rather than supporting the creation of a coal plant and I say supporting because even though it's a Chinese plant US companies are involved in some of the transactions and there's various varieties of support the sale of parts from those US companies the and let me just say China back home they're engaging in tremendous amount of renewable energy they're determined to put out more renewable energy by 3030 than all electricity generated in the United States of America but they are also at work on over 100 coal plants around the planet this is where again American leadership is needed to call this out and change that direction so while we need to have folks on the ground working on renewable energy with individual nations we also have to have the leadership in the world to take this on well all of the involvement we have there in regard to these challenges it's important because human life is at stake it's an issue of moral leadership it's also a matter of national security because hunger and the impacts of climate chaos certainly drive instability and the growth of extremist groups there's also national security issues that we have in the context of the role of other major nations and their influence in the region and there's certainly the economic side let me just mention a few things that I'd like to see one is for the State Department and the executive branch of the United States to be really intense about having our leaders on the ground at the time that we were there in March the US did not have an ambassador in Somalia we did not have an ambassador in south Sudan we did not have an ambassador in DRC we did not have an assistant secretary for Africa we should have we should have those important positions filled we now do have an ambassador in South Sudan we do have a nominee for the DRC we do not have a nominee yet for Somalia and we do have an assistant secretary for Africa not only important that we fill these positions they're filled with very capable experts and utilize the expertise that our foreign service where people have dedicated decades to developing the knowledge and ability to address the issues in different parts of the world. Second, we need to maintain robust foreign aid funding. The administration has proposed a 30% cut to our foreign affairs budget. Let's not do that. And so far, there has been democratic and Republican support for maintaining the funding. Let's make sure this US Institute of Peace keeps funded because it was, I think it was zeroed out in the President's budget, I believe last year, not this year, good. Because we held a lot of conversations about that a year ago. In one of the things I saw in DRC in Goma was a Heel Africa Health Center where it was a phenomenal center responding to violence against women. In that refugee camp that I was in in Kachanga, we heard about how the daily trips out of the refugee camp to collect wood were enormously perilous for women because they were so vulnerable to being attacked, to being raped on those trips. And that type of chaos, there is a tremendous amount of violence against women going on. And this center that the US was funding, this Heel Africa Center, was a phenomenal center of assistance to women who had suffered abuse. And also, it was our funding that was involved in that Child Soldier Reintegration Center. We should be doing more of this, not less. Or the Gurri Nutrition Center in South Sudan that where the children's biceps were being measured and US food was mattering. What I was here in Kachanga, and you saw on one of those other pictures the bags of food and oil, I said, how often does this sort of distribution occur? And they said, once a month. And I don't think it was a coincidence it was happening on the day that Laura and I happened to be visiting. And then I said, well, did it happen last month? And they said, well, no, because we didn't have enough supplies. I said, did it happen in January? They said, no, it didn't happen in January either. So once a month was the goal, but they don't have enough supplies. That's an issue of how much funding we're able to put into our support of the World Food Program. So it really comes down to mattering. And so I decided we should send a member of the US Senate there every month so that there would be a distribution every single month. Met with organizations that were working with renewable energy, including micro grids like Bee Box. And again, there's a group that's doing good work, but a little of assistance from the United States can really help. We should then think seriously about things that affect corruption. I was very, very disappointed when the Senate used the Congressional Review Act to undo the resource extraction rule that said companies have to reveal the payments that they're making for resource extraction. That sort of transparency that was part of Dodd-Frank, that's very important to being able to take on corruption. Now the way the Congressional Review Act works is it can be raised as an issue, gets 10 hours of debate, and if one side yields back their time because they want to shorten, then it's five hours of debate. So it can be raised at five p.m. in the evening, debated for five hours, voted on, and reversed, done like that, with no chance for anyone to know that it's happening, or to be able to weigh in on something that has a significant impact, in this case, an impact on corruption around the world. So we need to fight for transparency and support transparency, not the opposite. We need to support power Africa effort, but make sure that we're supporting renewable energy because unfortunately some of the projects are in fact fossil fuel projects. We need support the Millennium Challenge Corporation. I had seen on an earlier trip to Africa enormous impact in which a country was really doing everything it could to meet the required standards for transparency and several other required standards in order to make sure it would qualify for a second round of Millennium Challenge. And we need to lead by example and recognize that the last thing we should be doing is rejecting those at our borders who are coming, fleeing persecution to submit a claim for asylum. And I was just out at that border at Hidalgo and watched as our border guides blocked every family who was trying to assert asylum. They let through people with visas and passports but couldn't get one step across the center of the Hidalgo Bridge. And that's the example we're giving to the world right now. When I came off that bridge and went into the port of entry through the doors, I asked if anyone was there who was asserting asylum. They said, yes, there is a family here. I said, can I speak to that family? So a woman came out with a baby in her arms and she told me about her plight in Honduras where her family had a loan they couldn't repay. The private bank is how she described it. Had a relationship with the drug cartel that ran the neighborhood as an enforcer. And the family was told that she would be killed if they didn't repay the loan. And she thought she was safe until she delivered her baby. So with eight months pregnant, she fled, delivered her baby in route going through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States, got to the bridge in Hidalgo and was turned back time and time again from stepping onto US territory at the official port of entry. And so I said to her, how did you get across and in through these doors? And for a moment, her entire face lit up and she said, ah, she says, I was rebuffed time and time and time again. She said, I noticed that on the car bridge where there's multiple lanes of cars that there were people out there washing windows and for tips. She said, so I went and I asked if I could borrow a squeegee and I washed windows, starting on the Mexican side of the bridge until I had crossed over into the American side, gotten clear across the bridge and then she was on American territory, asserted her asylum claim and got in the door. But here's the kicker under the change in the definition of asylum that our attorney general put forward just a few days ago. She will not qualify because she is a victim not of an official government, but of an unofficial government, a drug cartel that runs her neighborhood, a so-called gang under the Jeff Session rules. She had her little girl in her arms. She said her little girl was a San Francisco Dias, 65 days old, Andrea. And we need, as we work with the issues across the world regarding refugees, regarding climate. We need to set an example. We need to be a leader on climate, but we also need to honor the refugee convention and proceed to give people a fair chance to assert their asylum claims here in the United States of America. The, coming back to Senator Hatfield's involvement and establishment of this, he also planted a tree on the capital grounds in 1985. And as he was doing this because he loved trees and he wanted to set in, he thought trees are a contributor to a healthy world. So he planted this tree. This tree is an interesting story in and of itself because it's a tree that's been extinct in North America for millions of years. But if small grove was found in China and he had heard about this and he arranged for this tree to be planted and as he was planting it, he invited Senator Kennedy to come out and join him. And the two of them planted the tree together and Senator Kennedy said, our work on the nuclear freeze movement, this should be known as the peace tree. And I've been spreading the word that the peace tree, which is just a few feet short of being the tallest tree on the capital grounds, that when it becomes the tallest tree on the capital grounds, we'll have a newer era of peace in the world, a new support for taking on conflict, new support for taking on climate change and may that happen very soon. Thank you. Can we, Nancy, do we have time for a little bit of dialogue? Senator Merkley, thank you for that compassionate, thorough, deeply based in understanding the complexities of the situation overview. It's important to have people like you go visit those kinds of places. You just took us through a landscape filled with complexity, chaos, conflict. I wanna just ask one quick question and then we'll take a few questions from the audience before you have to run off. Bright spots, did you walk away with a sense of hope from any of these travels? Well, one bright spot was the new president of Somalia who is also a US citizen. And just as he was speaking about the policies and the challenges, he was clearly immersed in the issues in a way I've seen with very few leaders. And who knows how we'll evaluate his leadership a year or two down the road, but certainly that was very, very refreshing. He had a certain earnestness and determination about him. Another was really the renewable energy picture in Kenya, where Kenya is close to being completely free of fossil fuels, to fend off that coal plant and continue to invest in both geothermal and solar. And I think also just when I met with, in DRC, with the citizen advocacy groups, many of them putting their own why is it risk, but how many of them there were, how determined they were, how organized they were at wanting to strive, dedicate all their efforts to a better different future for the country, a country or future in which all of that, those incredible minerals could be harvested for to have a very significantly affluent nation rather than one with the vast majority suffering in great poverty. We're gonna open it up and take a couple of questions. We've got a mic here. Is there, you want to, right in the middle row there, Ellie? Gentleman in the blue shirt. And then is there anyone else? We'll take just a couple right down here. Thank you for this opportunity, Senator. First of all, you have to note your speech was preceded by piano music. Beautiful, very peaceful. A hypothesis that a person I respect has about global warming and who may end up fighting it because the corporations, whether it's Google or Exxon, have experts who know the climate change is real. It's to their benefit if they get out ahead of it, producing better solar energy. I'm gonna ask you to be short, sir. Oh, okay. So if you have any idea, this is even a possibility. And while you have the microphone, the possibility that companies like Google would advocate to take on climate? Even Exxon, even Exxon, yes. Well, actually, I mean, a number of the major energy companies, oil companies are advocating for a carbon fee because they feel something's going to happen and they'd rather have the orderly, knowing what it is that's there rather than a series of conflicting chaotic policies. I'm not sure, really, though, how much that is public relations and how much of that is sincere. And in the Sheldon White House is making the point that a whole number of companies that have adopted kind of very progressive-sounding climate positions are funding trade associations that are doing everything possible to stop renewable energy. So that's a point that we should recognize that if a company's really sincere, it can't just simply put in their public materials, we're doing X, Y, and Z, and we're buying more renewable energy. It also has to say we're not going to be part of a trade association that is sabotaging those very efforts. And we'll do two quick ones. This one and then someone over here, right here. Go ahead. Hi, my name is Rochelle and I'm from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you, Senator Merkley, for being here. I wanted to ask, in light of, in recent times, we've seen a lot of threats to healthcare in a lot of these disordered settings or in settings of conflict, whether by explicit attacks and violence on healthcare systems or by crumbling infrastructure that's threatening the ability for healthcare systems to reach people. So I'm wondering in your visit to these five countries, if you got any sense of that or if you heard any stories or experiences about that. And before you answer that, let's just take one over here and we'll do both at once. I'm Samantha Tafoya from Search for Common Ground and I wanted to ask a question about the reintegration programming you spoke about in the DRC and if that is more of a countering vile extremism or developing interest in, I guess, on the American part and if you see possibility for that sort of support elsewhere in the horn. So health centers and reintegration center. The health centers I visited several, I can't really compare them in time to what happened before. There are cases where malicious have rated the health centers for the, they want the supplies because they have their own set of, well, injuries from the conflict so on and so forth. So they aren't a sanctuary that can count on being set free and apart from the conflict aggression itself. Of course it's very hard to get healthcare workers to go in and doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners who to be there in sufficient numbers for to meet the need in many of these locations and often the supply of medicines is significantly short. So it's, no, it's a challenge but I can't really judge better or worse. I will say that the effort to take on the great, let's see what's the right word, the great diseases of the world but malaria and AIDS and tuberculosis and have resulted in significant strengthening of the healthcare architecture in some parts of the world but okay, I exhausted what I know on this which wasn't much. I arranged to do a drop by of one health center and it had a list, I had a sign outside that had maybe 15 organizations that were contributing to making that healthcare center work including the United States. So let's keep up our part of that deal but much more, much more could be done. The center on child integration, if I understood your question, was it simply about taking care of some of the kids and giving them a shot or was it about reducing violence? Was that in general, was that the question? Well, so, but you also represents the child integration center, okay. Well, so that center was solely dedicated to those young men and giving them a shot at catching up on education, kind of decompressing from the enormous world, intensity of the world they had lived in where they were essentially compelled to be part of raiding villages, shooting, killing people, rape, escaping from all of that and developing a different future for themselves. So the young man that I met with, I asked him, what do you want to do now? And he said, I want to be a mechanic. And we followed up with our delegation there, our leisure, say are there mechanics programs that we can help tie in to that program? Obviously, unemployment is high to begin with, so it's so much of a hurdle to just recover from what you've been in to escape it but then to catch up on education and to be able to find a trade in a world where there's a lot of folks who haven't gone through the same dire circumstances who also aren't finding jobs. So it's really difficult. More broadly, I inquired about how do you put a stop, how do you try to stop what's going on? And the answer was incredibly hard. The blue helmets don't try to follow the militias through the jungle. They're like, they know the jungle better than we do. We can go in into villages and say, you can strengthen your ability to reduce your vulnerability to them. And if you're attacked, let us know. Here are resources, but they really can't go in and compete in the middle of the jungle. And so it's pretty much what, you know, the use of phrase from America, the Wild West, absent of rules and controls. And none of the people we talked to had any clear, effective strategy that they thought could put an end to it except to make the villages themselves somewhat more resistant. But you have a village and then you have a group of militias sweeping in with guns and machetes. It's pretty hard to fend that off. So, and then economic development, yes. I mean, we're involved in many economic development projects, but they're modest and they're scattered and they're here and there and they're all good and we should do more. But it's not massive. Senator, I wanna just give one last question before you have to run away to our youth leader from South Sudan. My name is Nyashankwath. I'm a current South Sudan youth leader here at the US Institute of Peace and I work with an organization called Assistant Mission for Africa in South Sudan. Senator Mekli, my question is what do you think is the obstacle to implement to the intervention of the US and the international community in making sure that the peace being implemented in South Sudan? Thank you. The barrier to finding a peace accord. That may be a bigger question than you can tackle in a minute, but the important. So I know that there are experts in this room but probably know a lot of the details of the negotiations that have been taking place in the various cities. And I'm not one of those experts. As I understand it, one of the challenges is the former vice president who is the nominal leader is it doesn't have all the connections with the opposing forces because he's been out of the country in South Africa and the opposition has split into many pieces, maybe into several militias. So there isn't a firm ability to control what happens. You also have folks on both sides, the government side and the resistance side that are profiting significantly from the current state of chaos, including extracting money out of international organizations delivering food. So as long as those in charge are benefiting and the friends right around them are benefiting from the chaos, that's a real problem because they may not have the determination to end the chaos and so that's just to scratch the surface response and I wish we could spend an hour to have those who have a lot of knowledge and experience contribute to answering your question but it's my hope that here are the day after the anniversary of South Sudan's founding that when we get to the 10th anniversary, three years from now, that we'll be at a different point where the civil conflict will have been resolved. The international organizations will be free to provide assistance, which will mean more economic development. Maybe there'll be really much stronger foundation for the building of civil institutions that can carry the country forward. That would be a wonderful hope for a few years down the road for South Sudan. I'm so glad you're able to be here. Senator Merkley, thank you for your leadership. Thank you for caring about these issues and being a voice in the Senate for these issues. We will invite you back three years from now to headline an event of celebration and please join me in thanking Senator Merkley. Thank you. Thank you.