 Good morning. My name is Bob Perrito. I'm the Director of the Center for Security Sector Governance here at USIP. I want to begin by saying that the first panel set a very, very high standard. So Team B here is going to really have to work hard to keep up. As you can see, we're at something of a disadvantage here because we don't have name plates. So we're like a mystery stealth panel, but we're working on that. The other thing I want to do is I really want to thank Kathleen for inviting all of us to be here this morning, particularly me. It's a great pleasure to work with you, as always. I want to also call your attention to a book sale which is going on outside the door. Welcome. We are somebody. There are three USIP volumes on sale outside, and I would be totally remiss if I didn't strongly recommend this one, which I'm the editor of. Which is a brilliant volume, which deals with the, it's a guide for participants in peace and stability operations. This is an excellent work by Beth Cole and a number of people here at USIP and people at the Army Peacekeeping Center. It's a manual. It's a doctrine on the civilian side of peace operations. And then there's another volume out there that deals with metrics and how to evaluate post-conflict intervention. Our topic this morning deals with security sector reform, and this is a very important day at USIP for the issue of security sector reform. It's the day in which the Institute plans to announce the creation of the center, which I had the Center for Security Sector Governance. And this culminates in effort that began nearly three years ago when we hosted the first panel presentation of what we call the Security Sector Reform Working Group. And the first person to make the first speech was Mike Bittrick, who's back with us this morning. So this is auspicious, and we welcome him back. The USIP Security Sector Governance Center will focus on helping to build professional, sustainable, and locally owned institutions capable of managing security forces in accordance with the rule of law. The center reflects USIP's commitment to improving governance through analytical and practical work on conflict resolution and peace building. For those of you that are interested in security sector reform, the next meeting of our Security Sector Working Group will be held on February 3rd. And we'll go back to looking at an issue we've dealt with before on various occasions, and that's the nexus between security sector reform and DDR. And we're looking in this case at the example of Afghanistan. Our topic this morning is the role of civil society in security sector reform. From the experience of the past decade, it's clear that local ownership is the key to effective security sector transformation. It's also equally clear that local ownership is the most difficult goal to achieve. Whether the problem is the fact that international donors have a way of trying to impose their own agendas under tight deadlines, or that in post-conflict situations in particular it's not really clear often who the local ownership should belong to, this is a major challenge. In this regard, civil society representatives are among those groups that are often marginalized in this process and undervalued in security sector reform initiatives. And this is because security sector reform is often seen as a technical, top-down driven initiative rather than as we've discussed earlier a political process in which the broadest possible people need to be brought together to express their views and thereby help determine the shape of their own security institutions. Civil society can play a critical role in security sector transformation. Civil society in particular groups that represent women can provide a counterweight to the power of interest to the state-centric approach that's often used and ensure democratic ownership of the country's security forces. Today we have a panel of distinguished experts that will discuss the role that civil society can play in security sector transformation and the mainstreaming of gender from the perspective of both donors and capitals and personnel in the field. I'm going to introduce the panel in the order in which they will speak. You have their bios, so I'm going to limit my introductions to names and titles. I commend you to read these bios. They did so last night. These are really distinguished people with very interesting backgrounds, each and every one. Our opening presentation will be by Michael Hess, who is the Vice President for Global Accounts of L3 Communications, which is part of the MPRI mega empire. Our second speaker is Michael Bittrick, who is the Deputy Director of the Office of Regional and Security Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs at the United States Department of State. Our third speaker will be Teresa Crawford, who is the Director of Partners for Democratic Change. And our discussant and cleanup hitter is Betty Reardon, who is a consultant and founding director emeritus of the International Institute on Peace Education at Columbia University, and many, many, many other things. And we are very honored to have her with us this morning and grateful that she's here. So with that, I will ask our speakers to come to the podium and we'll start with Michael Hess. Thank you. Let's see if we get the technology to work here. I've been told already I'm old. So my good friend Chris Holshek, and I wasn't supposed to be using PowerPoint according to my wife. So here we go. But other than that, let's move right along and see if we can get through this quickly. This is a shot in Northern Iraq in 1991. The man that you probably can't see very well there, Fred Cooney. I had the joy of working with Fred in Northern Iraq in 1991 and subsequently had a couple of operations. But I say thank you, Fred, because of what he taught us and what he's reminded us along the way on security sector reform and how to work with civil society in particular. When we got to Northern Iraq in 1991, we were concerned about a lot of issues. And I'll just give you one example of how he helped us frame this context. Obviously security of the camp, security of the town in Zaku in Northern Iraq when we moved back in was very critical. Saddam deployed 300 secret police into Zaku within days of our arrival. He pulled the military out by accordance with the agreements he had made. We hadn't said anything about security police, security sector. Obviously these guys were thugs. I think that's a technical term. And they were inhibiting the return of the Kurds to their regions, into their homes. And so we had to come up with a plan on how to neutralize them and the way we did it was organizing the society. Obviously community-based patrolling was important for that so that we could keep neutralize their effect. And we coordinated that with the British units who were in Zaku at the time so that they could patrol together and thereby neutralize them and make it safe for the people to come back to their towns. That was critical. Otherwise we would not have had a return and the people would have stayed up in the mountains where the death rate was out of control. We were losing somewhere between 250 and 300 children a day. And that was certainly not acceptable. He also taught me a little bit about we were concerned about securing the camps because we had 78,000 people living in a tent city out there. And Fred, how are we going to do this? Mike, that's not your problem. He says, first of all, you don't know who the bad guys are. They do. So leave it up to them. They'll figure it out. Help them organize them, give them the tools. They will know who the bad people are and they certainly did. When ABC came in to televised this, they quickly attacked their interpreter because he was a secret police officer that they had hired unwittingly to be one of their interpreters. So he was absolutely spot on, as always, and he helped us in this. Next we'll talk about national security. After September 11, obviously the national security paradigm changed a little bit. And what you heard the last panel talk about was the inclusion of development into the national security strategy for the first time in 2002. Development is part of national security, folks. It has been, now it's written. So it's important to understand that and reflect upon that and what it means. Both the QDR, Quadrennial Defense Review, and the QDDR, which was recently released, the Quadrennial Development and Diplomacy Review, both highlight the fact that development and diplomacy are part of our national security strategy. And we need to take that into account while we look at this. We hear a lot about smart power, whole of government, those sorts of things. I submit to you we need to take it to another level. These are all important because what Shannon Beebe was talking about, when we talk about smart power, the threats today are a lot different. They are poverty. They are health related issues. AIDS, malaria, those are big issues. Climate change, huge issues. Security, they didn't talk about food security. One billion people, according to FAO, UNFAO, go to bed hungry every night. One billion people. The international community can only feed 10% of those people. I mean, people have to make hard choices every day on who gets food assistance and who doesn't. This is going to be a big problem. And if you don't think it is, read the paper in Tunisia. The riots in Tunisia were started by increases in food prices. That's only going to get worse. But we need to take it to another level. We need to get out here to the whole of society where we started incorporating security into the whole of society. Looking at justice, looking at security, looking at the well-being of our society. And if we don't incorporate those into our structures, then we will fail to bring security in peace. And I think we need to take that hold. This is incorporating the smart power and looking at what we call lines of operation, but lines of effort now. And what those end states are going to be. Notice that the establishment of civil society, security, is critical. It is the first line of effort that has to be accomplished. If we don't have security, we have nothing. We cannot begin the rebuilding of infrastructure, rebuilding our institutions within the society, unless we have a secure and safe environment in which to do those. That means incorporating civil society into that response and into that process to make sure that they have buy-in into that and they have a secure environment. Last, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the history and what is changing in the civil environment. I'll start with Shannon's not here to defend himself on the vocabulary. But the words are changing, so I could talk about him all the time. That's good. Shannon's not here. And you won't tell him, right? He's watching it. 3,000.05 really started the change for the Department of Defense. David talked about the fact that we fight and win the nation's wars. That's what the military does. Well, guess what? They also conduct reconstruction and stabilization operations according to 3,000.05. When I was in the military, it was said that real men don't do military operations other than war. That's what I did. So I wasn't a real man. Now, 3,000.05 says you can be. Right along with that comes NSPD44, which creates the office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization. So now we've got it on the military side. Now we've got it on the civilian side. So in theory, we have a whole of government coordinated effort to get at reconstruction and stabilization. It's a great step ahead. I'm not saying it's there, but it certainly gives you a framework in which to operate under. And it's critical for that. We see this manual down here, 3-07 stability operations. It was written not just by the U.S. Army, but in conjunction with civilian organizations. Interaction played a big role in it. The U.N. played a big role in it. USAID played a huge role in the writing of this manual. And members of the staff of USIP were also involved in it. So for the first time, you're seeing an integrated approach, a whole of government's smart power approach to stability operations. It is recognized that you have to incorporate those civil aspects and take civil society into account when you're conducting these operations. If you don't, your chances of success are diminished. You're going to fail. At the same time, we see the creation of Africa command. Interesting development. They worked very closely with both state and USAID. Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce to create this command. Why? If you think about it, they don't have really military operations to conduct. In the traditional kinetic sense that Shannon was talking about or what David was talking about. But what they do have is a lot of smart power operations. Now, having said that, they say, should these people be doing development? That's not what they were about doing. How much do you think Africa can spend in Africa in a year, money-wise? Give me a bid. Okay, I got all day. Two million. I got two million. Two billion. Whoa! I got two billion. What am I bid over here? 350 million. 200 million. $257 million is what they spend. What do you think USAID does in one year? Yeah, you're on record. 5 billion. I got a 5 billion. Anybody else? It runs about $3 billion. That's just USAID. When you take PEPFAR, when you take all the other programs on the civilian side, it's $9 billion. Do you think DOD is going to take over development of Africa? No. No. It's not going to happen, people, and they don't want to. The reality is development is still done by development professionals in conjunction with their civil military partners so that they can have a unified effort to achieve that. And certainly African militaries play a large role in that, as Colonel Jops talked about. And they will continue. Why, if for no other reason, to improve the image of those militaries? It's certainly something that we did when the wall fell in East Central Europe and something that we will continue to do and AFRICOM takes a huge role in conducting those operations. Last one I want to mention before I get off is the Civil Military Cooperation Policy that was developed at USAID and published in 2008. We had been doing this on an ad hoc basis at USAID for years. And it was time we formalized it and institutionalized it. There was the creation of the Office of Military Affairs, the creation of this policy, and so that you've seen the transition now to institutionalizing. And if we do not institutionalize these things that happen on an ad hoc basis, things that Chris was talking about, things that Colonel Jop was talking about, that David were talking about, if we don't institutionalize these, then we will fail and not do it on a systematic basis. We're seeing it happen. We need to reinforce those things and make sure they are a success. Thank you, Bob, and thank you for USAID for having us. Thanks very much, Michael. We'll ask Michael Bittrick to come to the podium, and we'll remind our speakers about the time of it. We've got less than an hour left, and so we want to make sure we get through all the panel presentations and leave some time for the audience to ask questions. You're asking somebody from the Department of State to be braced here to a time limit. That's right. Having spent 30 years in the Department, I understand what the challenges are, but you know, we're up to it. I will have to put it on fast copy. I'm going to speak. I'm going to thank Michael. I thank you for your sort of bias towards Africa. I'm going to follow that bias because I'm coming from the Africa Bureau of State Department. Oh, yes. Thank you. And although I'm the Department of State, I do have a little bit of DOD still in me from the good old days of my life, so I have one PowerPoint slide to offer all of you. I have to have a picture because I can't do it otherwise. And this is a really good picture. It comes from USAID and other publications, some of you may have seen it before, but it kind of paints, A, in one slide, a picture of what the dynamic should look like as we build the three-legged stool that is our security sector reform approach globally and certainly within Africa. I want to say as a kind of quick mention to what we discussed in the previous panel, we are not, in terms of U.S. policy endeavors and priorities, certainly gender-based violence and protection of civilians is one of those quintessential aspects of our policy as it evolves globally. And nowhere, there's no worse place to be a woman in the world today than where? Eastern Congo. So, security sector reform, civil society, I want to start by saying that we are not going to attain success in these key policy priorities, that is to say, directly confronting gender-based violence and other issues regarding gender in society and in Africa in particular, and also we are not going to be able to affect the conflict mitigation challenge that we face in these places unless we have reformed the security sector, because it is that process of reform that is going to be a key enabler of our ability to protect civilians and confront gender-based violence and deal with these issues in a systematic, institutional, and structural way. So that's what we're trying to do here. I want to make sure I make that plug because really, as Bob earlier, we were just discussing, this second panel is not directly connected to the first. But there are connections, and that's why security sector reform and civil society's role in it are so critical, even as we're reflecting on the mainstreaming of gender and dealing with gender issues globally. We are not going to attain success in our security sector reform efforts unless we do what? We engage in a thoroughgoing $500 million of training and equipping African forces for defense services. Is that what we're going to do? That's going to be the critical aspect of our efforts. And in fact, as one who's been working on this for 10 years, I can tell you that when it comes to security sector reform, our tendency as a bureaucracy within the US government has been to focus not on this civil society's role, but not on creating governance structures that can provide oversight and direction for the defense and police services. But it's been focused on training, equipping police and military. Okay, I'm confessing that to you. It's out in the public now. We have tended to do that, but I am here to say today that we are in fact, and again, understanding more and more of this developmental approach in how we're undertaking these key objectives within US policy and international stabilization efforts, we are now recognizing that if we do not build a three-legged stool, we are going to fail. And we've experienced it here in our country system, the US history. I think in Tunisia today, we have a great example to draw upon as we're looking at the role of civil society in these democratization trends. And I think it's a really exciting period. Within Africa, we do believe very much that continued institution building is going to be absolutely critical, not only the state building challenge, but also in legitimizing, professionalizing, and improving the performance of the security sector actors. Building a civilian management and oversight ethos and capacity is a long-term project, both in the states that are coming out of conflict like South Sudan or Siberia or Afghanistan. But we also, in some of our more stable countries, a reform process is also useful, South Africa, for example. And too often, our emphasis in security sector governance usually comes at the end of our peace conflict mitigation challenge efforts as we seek to exit quickly from a particular country or region. And quick fixes cannot begin to address the cultural and organizational complexities of the government institutions or the time horizons necessary to achieve sustainable results. In Africa, in particular, overcoming the pre- and post-Colonial institutional relationships between state and security institutions and the wider society, it's really the most difficult of challenges. And it makes some of the work in Iraq look easy in some cases. Militaries are seeking to maintain their predominant institutional status in Africa in many places. And then, of course, you have a history of coups and immature civil military dynamic. The political elites across the board have tended to support the status quo, where in policy and budgetary support has kept large military machines in place. Does anybody know why there's 40,000 people in the Guinean Army today? Does anybody think the Guinean Army used to have 40,000? Okay. There are some legacies. In Congo today, there are over 100,000 underarms, over 140,000 underarms. And this becomes not only a blight on the state, but it's something that's unsustainable. And it is problematic to say the least. Let me make another point here. The lack of police capacity to support security and conflict management means that the state must retain larger militaries to maintain power and to provide legitimizing an instrument or tool to affect the conflict dynamic at the local level sometimes. Again, the military can play this role, but is it the right set of tools for a dynamic on the ground of democratization? African civil society actors have not fully apprehended their... And this is another key point. Civil society in Africa has not yet apprehended their role in the dynamic, in informing and providing insight into the process of reforming the security institutions. And one of the things I'm going to talk about is how we are seeking in our programming to get smarter and smarter about that. Some of you may have some ideas in terms of smart programming on that score. It is, in fact, a developmental challenge that we're dealing with. It's long-term and just focusing on very limited equipment train activities is not born a fruit in terms of our long-term, long-term goals and objectives. Now, let me talk to you about specific examples of policy priorities of the U.S. in terms of SSR in Africa, those being Congo, Liberia, Sudan, and then a little bit about our peacekeeping training that we've been undertaking. Let me start. In Congo, we did specific civil military operations training, and we provided Congolese officers with training on appropriate techniques for entering and interacting with communities before conducting our training and military operations. And we actually had a field exercise there where we employed local Congolese to role-play various local actors, and we taught Congolese officers how to approach village leaders, establish relationships, and identify risks before entering a community. That was all part of our training, and we didn't just train, but we also trained the Congolese trainers. So we're trying to provide an institution building dynamic. Another aspect of our Congolese training, we had agriculture unit training. The Congolese said, okay, we want as part of our effort to become more integrated, closer to society, we want to have some agricultural units. So we came in and provided some support like that, and we taught the unit to consult and collaborate with representatives from the university in Kisangani, and we had local experts determine the most effective techniques and best cropping, and of course the military guys. This is not an area where they want to go for the long haul, but in this post-conflict dynamic, we brought that in as a way to ameliorate and improve the performance on the civil side between Congolese military, the Fardik, and the local civilians. Also, we have had, prior to conducting light infantry training in Kisangani, we had a whole dynamic where we had U.S. representatives, Congolese military leaders sitting around the table and discussing with key civil society, NGOs, human rights activists, and journalists what the program was going to do and what our objectives were, what those new norms and values that the Congolese military would be adhering to as a result of the training. I think that dialogue was not only good in terms of inculcating in our Congolese partners a sense of real purpose for the work we were going to do together, but also connecting it to the larger civil relationship. In South Sudan, where we've been for six years, we were integrated and worked closely with our Sudanese partners and they came to us and said, look, we want to integrate, as we're going through this reform and this defense white paper process, we really need to involve not just the military and not just maybe some of our police, but also wouldn't it be smart if we had some more Polar Parliamentarians involved in the white paper process. So again, we brought them together and then a civil society was to have been represented. Don't quote me. I don't know that we got civil society actively engaged in that defense white paper activity, but it's clearly going to be part of the new dynamic given the referendum in South Sudan and the future ahead is going to involve more and more civil society interactions in our efforts. In Liberia, wow, quite a dynamic there. Where ten years ago, nobody would have imagined Liberia could come out of the shadow of war and conflict and under development today we have a totally different dynamic. And why? Why? Well, early on in the peace process in 2003, a woman named Ellen Sirleaf Johnson brought Liberian women to the peace table. General Abu Bakr Absalami from Nigeria, who is the lead ECOWAS negotiator, allowed the inputs of the women at the negotiations in Accra, Ghana in 2003. And as a result of that dynamic, you haven't had an agreement that memorialize certain principles including the fact that the Liberian military would not be oversized, it would be rightsized, appropriate to the needs of Liberian society in a post-conflict dynamic. And today, the Liberian military is paid, support sustained, and barely small in size vis-a-vis some of the other security sector actors in Liberia. And if it wasn't for the interaction, not just of the women, but also civil society more broadly, I don't think you'd be where we are today in Liberia. And of course, we also have, in terms of our programming on the defense side and on the police side, we've brought NGOs in that have worked on both gender and security issues into the training activities. And that has really improved that dynamic in Liberia. We believe very strongly that in order to create legitimacy in these institutions, you're going to have to continue to fold in and work with civil society. Not just in terms of these programmatic interventions, but in terms of your diplomatic approaches. And we're pressing and striving to do that in every way. Again, not just in the context of a Liberian peace process or a post-conflict or a new state-building challenge in South Sudan, but across the board on the African continent. Again, I think because of this mainstreaming and standardizing of approaches in terms of defense development and diplomacy working together, you're seeing a much more thoughtful response. We are going to, at State Department, continue to ensure that the process of security sector form is imbued with greater and greater inputs from civil society. Thank you. Thank you very much. Teresa. So quite often I'm the lone civil society representative talking about experiences working with security sector actors. And it's been a 10-year experience, 11-year experience now, because I'm married to someone who was formerly in the military. So we're constantly doing the civil mill in the house all day, every day. And that's given me lots of opportunities as a person that's been working with civil society organizations in a nonprofit to think about what are some of the key success factors that make interactions between security sector actors and civil society a success. Bob spoke earlier about this local ownership issue and it being a really tough nut to crack. And it's been something that's been really challenging. We think that it's actually not that difficult if you approach the work with certain ideas in mind that you can actually aid that local ownership and foster that local ownership if you're very deliberate in the way you undertake your activities. So I have to say I've learned a lot in the last nine months working with Colonel Job. I'm a director at Partners for Democratic Change and I work with him on the African Institute for Security Sector Transformation. So I've been his partner as he's learned to navigate the civil society world. And he's been my partner as I've learned more about how to affect change within security sector institutions. And one of the things that we found in setting up the institute is that civil society is a very diverse and broad arena. There's a lot of different types of organizations and actors within that field. And the literature says and a lot of research has been done that there's a lot of civil society actors that interact with security forces in a watchdog role. So they're the human rights organizations. They're the organizations doing civic monitoring. And it quite often sets them up in a very adversarial relationship with security sector actors. On the other hand you've got organizations set up associations of widows of security members who died. You've got professional associations of former military or police officers. And they also play a valuable role but they're not really set up to provide any input or there are very few avenues for them to provide input into how a security sector might go about. Undertaking reforms. And so what we identified was that there was actually a big gap in the type of civil society organizations and actors that can provide technical assistance as security sector actors wanted to go through some sort of transformation. Whether it was dealing with minority issues and how they were treating minorities in their forces. How they were dealing with the issue of gender in the military or in the security forces. How they were dealing with lesbian gay transgender issues. How they were dealing with human rights issues. There are very few civil society organizations that either had the relationships or had the capacities to really be a good partner for the security sector in helping the security sector go through this process of reform or transformation. And on the other side there were very few leaders within the security forces who had relationships with civil society, knew who to call on, knew who to reach out to, knew where to find the right expertise. So when Birum was approached by members of the Senegalese Armed Forces and said, look we really need some help tackling this issue of gender, our institute was able to provide that bridge between civil society who had a real expertise in gender issues and the ministry of armed forces who wanted to go through this change process. I have to say one of the things that was most amazing about it was how quickly it happened. So having civilian leadership that made this a priority meant that this process started, the request came in in May last year. The platform was set up in July and they've already gone through the entire process that Birum spoke about in about six months. This radical, radical change in a very short period of time. And I'll run through quickly the sort of ten success attributes that we're finding, not just in Senegal but in the work that partners is doing in Mexico, in the work that we've done in the Czech Republic, in this interface between civil society and the security sector. So the first one we spoke about briefly before, that's this buy-in and support from civilian leadership. In the case of Senegal this was not just the president but the minister of armed forces and the minister of gender. This type of transformation and interaction works best we find when you've got very clear and strong civilian leadership of the security forces who are well conceptualized. The Senegalese know why they have a police force, they know why they have a gendarmerie, they know why they have a military and what the roles and responsibilities of those different institutions are. And the civilian leadership and the direction that comes from both parliament and from the ministries is very clear. So it makes taking on these change processes like gender mainstreaming happen in a very smooth and clear way. Which institutions, it's not bound by personality, which institutions, which offices, which people to be talking to. The second key success factor is just the acknowledgement that there is an issue in the first place on both sides. That there is a debate going on within larger Senegalese society about gender and the role of men and women in their society. As well as an acknowledgement of the issues about mistrust between the security sector and civil society. Being very upfront talking about the issues, the military was saying we're used to doing our own thing and nobody really has much oversight over us in terms of what we're doing very practically within at a tactical level. Even if there is a better oversight at the operational and strategic level. And civil society saying well you never talk with us, how are we going to interact with each other. So being very upfront about those issues. I think the third success factor was that there were both internal and external pressures to make this happen and to make this happen quickly. You now have about 13% of the Senegalese armed forces are women. And they've now gone through several years of being inside the system, have more and more of them have risen to positions of leadership within the military. And so they were exerting some internal pressure for change. As well as external pressures for change coming from the president, coming from the national policy on equity and equality that was from the Ministry of Gender. So some external pressures as well. Very well timed and very targeted external support coming from both AFRICOM in terms of some small amounts of financial support that was matched with financial support. And human resource support from the Ministry of Armed Forces. Very well timed technical assistance from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is part of NDU. Being able to bring General Garrett over, being able to help organize one of the conferences. But in a very low key way. This was not ACSS or AFRICOM taking credit for bringing about gender mainstreaming in the Senegalese armed forces. This was about them providing resources from the American government that could support this process. The fifth sort of key attribute of success was this platform that Birham spoke about earlier. That was interdisciplinary, brought in lawyers and legal experts, academics, civil society representatives with expertise in gender. Former ministers, former generals who were not worried about the platform as an institution continuing. They were more worried about the work. What are our roles and responsibilities? We've got six weeks to get this job done. It wasn't about perpetuating the idea of a platform, but instead giving them a place in which they could debate and discuss the issues around gender mainstreaming. Another key attribute was a recognition from the Ministry that there was technical expertise that they did not have that they could get from civil society. They didn't have to reinvent the wheel. There were most importantly Senegalese women's organizations who could provide technical expertise to them. They didn't have to have some big fancy experts coming from abroad that they had this internal capacity that could contextualize the issues for Senegal. And that we're going to be an ongoing resource to them as they go through all the changes that are going to be necessary over the next couple of years. The last sort of four key attributes were having leadership that was representing the multiple stakeholders both at the top level. So General Cise, who was the former chief of defense staffs, who was also the former minister of interior providing that leadership, along with another former minister, Madame and Jai, providing leadership at this top level. But then the leadership team that helped to drive the platform forward was a representative from a civil society organization, a woman named Har. Birum, a representative from the Ministry of Armed Forces, Kuril Myong. The three of them together modeling that they could collaborate was a great example for the platform that this type of interaction can be fruitful and that they could achieve their goals by working together. And then the last three issues I think are things that Birum spoke about and that I'll reiterate. And that's this process of validation and revalidation, that this was not some secretive, only a couple civil society handpicked groups and a couple of military folks and a couple folks from the ministry sitting in some dark room together and cooking up some change. This was about opening up the debate and dialogue to a much larger group both within the Ministry of Armed Forces and the uniform components within the ministry, but also looking at border security and prison guards, anyone in uniform. And then also opening it up to a much broader group of civil society actors so it could be validated and revalidated. And then the final two is that the analysis that they did was much more nuanced than just a legal analysis. I think civil society has come to the point where we are a good partner quite often in doing some good analysis of legal frameworks and do you have the right framework here? But when you're trying to bring about change across an entire institution, the analysis had to be much deeper than that and civil society got a crash course in how the military budgets and how they plan and how they train and how policy is developed and the whole process that they undertook really tried to dig a lot deeper than just sort of that superficial let's look at the legal framework on the top. And then finally there were good interpreters, there were good interpreters between civil society and the members of the security sector and that came through assist. So that came with people who had experience and understood the language civil society was using when talking about gender and then you had people who understood the language that the military was speaking and you had good interpreters that were able to bridge that gap between both. So what we're hoping to do and I think this touches on what Mike Bittrick was saying is replicating this. So the Sembluzon forces have said you know this went so well, we want you to tackle human rights now, not just within the armed forces but more importantly within the police in Senegal who are struggling with issues of their role and how to do their job and still protect human rights. And so this, we're trying to look at how this particular model and what was successful here can be used on other issues and where it's not going to work. We can't go into Guinea-Bissau and try to take this model and use it there. Missing some of those key success attributes but in a Guinea it might be a more appropriate model and something we can bring in now that they're going through this process of thinking through security sector reform. Thank you. Thanks very much. Betty will ask you to analyze, wrap up and otherwise bring us to an end. I want to start by saying thank you to Kathleen Keynes to USIP for organizing this session and for inviting me to this learning feast. I come to most of these programs as a learner because I spend my life in helping people to learn. So I have to play that role and I have learned a great deal this morning. You come with your base and then you try to bring into your sphere of information and perspective what is offered. I come with something that I began to think about last week when the Congress read the Constitution and where that came from and the document that preceded it which said among other things all men are created equal. They wrote and then when they were drafting that document the wife of one who was managing the finances farm and everything else wrote remember the ladies. Well it took 130 years but they remembered the ladies. So this is as we have been instructed by Mr. Betrich. This is a developmental process that we are involved in that Abigail Adams would not have thought of gender or gender mainstreaming. But she was one of the first to bring the issue into the public sphere and that indeed is what we are dealing with now the larger debate that we were told by Teresa is out there and which is feeding this discourse that we have before us today. There are so many concepts that were presented to us today that I see as essential not only to are trying to come to grips with to understand this issue of gender as the context for the intersection of civil and military sectors. But as we understand ourselves as a member of as a participant in a global society that is rapidly changing in many respects we do not know very often what a day is going to bring in terms of changes in the world. So that we do need to have a readiness to learn and I think a readiness to reflect because that is what I heard Colonel Jump call us to when he mentioned the importance of developing theory upon which to base the policies and actions of so called gender mainstreaming each and every one of the speakers today has contributed that kind of conceptual clarity to the problem. The idea that we have to reflect we have to theorize and try to understand the context as we were told by major a her as being absolutely important. What is the context what is what are the parameters in which we are working. We need also to understand as some were saying as Colonel Walton said maybe it's not always the expert who has the has the answer. But if you can get another perspective someone who is not fully involved and that I think is what has been the role of women in many areas of the public discourse and public debate including security. My first introduction to some of these issues was in 1963 when as a seventh grade teacher. The daughter of one of the parents of the school brought in a letter that had to do with the problem of strontium 90 and baby teeth. That was a perspective about an issue that was affecting children and some of you may have read recently the the obituary of the doctor who did the research on that. And as you all know that led to women's strike for peace that led to the 1963 test ban treaty. So there has always been this civil society interaction with issues around security and ultimately they are heard. And that I think is the one of the major issues that we have to face in terms of gender as the context in which we do this hearing the other. And that gender is not simply a question of men's experience and women's experience. But it is a question of understanding the relationship of those experiences and how that relationships affects the well being the human security of the whole society. Women have been concerned with all of the issues that Colonel Beebe told us comprised human security. And so they are in a sense security experts through their traditional roles and that needs to be I think integrated into the discourse. And I think that's very much the background of one of the documents we've been mentioning today resolution 1325 on women peace and security. And what many of us who were involved in articulating those concerns in drafting that resolution were most concerned about and are still concerned about is women's roles in security. And what has happened with 1325 is why we need to have not so much the watchdog but the outside perspective and the constant vigilance is that 1325 is being used over and over again as a statement about violence against women in armed conflict. Not about women's participation in the politics of security policy. So I think what we have been hearing today about the discourse that is occurring is to me one of the most hopeful kinds of developments in dealing with all these rapid changes in how we maintain our security. Because it means that we are beginning to listen to each other and talk to each other. I hope it won't take 130 years to get action. But when I was thinking about gender mainstreaming I was thinking as I indicated earlier mainstreaming is just making it visible. But mainstreaming isn't enough. We're dealing with a problem that has existed since we organized human society. The relationships between men and women and all that have all the kind of relationships that have come out of that. So I think we have to do more than mainstreaming. We might have to be dredging the riverbed and getting very deeply into what is at stake when you separate people and you make some people just a little bit smarter just a little bit more capable. So they don't always have to ask the others what their perspectives are. So I thank you very much for having been part of this morning. Thank you very much Betty. I'd like to thank all the members of the panel for some really excellent presentations. We're webcasting this event today. Therefore we'd ask you if you have a question to come to the microphones and ask your question. We have about 15 minutes left and I want to exercise my prerogative as the chair here and ask the first question. I spent last week in Bangladesh as part of a Department of Defense delegation looking at security sector reform in that country. So that prefaces my remarks. In many places we've talked about kinetic threats and in many places the kinetic threat really is not the neighbors. It's the security forces of the country involved. Bangladesh has a particularly odious police unit. There was a front page story. Apparently these front page stories appear quite often in which this there was a opponent of the government and community leader who was caught in a quote crossfire and quote with this unit and died as a result. Apparently there are lots of these crossfires and there are lots of people who don't survive them and so the question there at the end of the day was was what do we do about that particular instance. The delegation labored long and hard. We had lots of conversations with leaders and we were talking to people who were sort of inclined to toward the idea of security sector reform. But in the end the message that came out was maybe not so fast but let's give this more time. And so my question to the panel is what do you do with the really hard cases. Do we plunge in or do we wait for the kind of change that we've heard about in Senegal where the society changes and the leadership realizes it and it all moves very quickly. Do we take on the hard cases or do we let them go? We must take on the hard cases. We must diplomatically engage both internationally, regionally. A case of that would be maybe if we look at Cote d'Ivoire today and how Bagbo's security services are now serving to reverse any sort of attempts to not only get past the conflict but to democratize. It is really at these sorts of circumstances contingent of us to work with partners both in Europe, the EU for example, to work with the United Nations which we are doing right now to work with regional and continental in the case of Africa. We work with continental and sub-regional organizations both the African Union and the economic community of West African states. ECOWAS has come out strongly against this process. So diplomatically we can engage and the really hard cases while you're doing that engagement it's hard for you to then to do the institutional reform piece. What we've tried to do is continue programs like the international military education and training program where that allows us to do civil military relations seminars even in countries that are on the edge. A country like Guinea for example. We have gone in and started to engage even though it is a country, well let me speak for six months ago before the elections. We started to engage in Guinea so that we can start pulling civil society around the table with the military and police and other justice hackers. Bring them around the table in these seminars and then start talking about the principles of a new Guinea, a transformed Guinea. And start insinuating into the conversation both within the institutions but also between civil society institutions so that that can progress. It's not easy to do from the US government side because we do have usually congressional restrictions on engaging with countries that are on the edge. But we must engage diplomatically and we must and can be programmatically engaging. If I can add to that I think Mike's point on the regionalization is absolutely critical and if you look at Zimbabwe as an example. And I want to add in the fact of civil society and how you can start building grassroots organizations within civil society so that we can start the formation of the voice and to give that voice some media to communicate. And it's happening, it happens slowly, but you've got to start there. And I think while you're doing that using the regional organizations, the countries that border that Zimbabwe in particular to voice concern and to give a voice for the civil society is absolutely crucial. Thank you. Anybody else want to comment on that? Please, Betty. Very briefly, I agree that the hard cases have to be addressed. But I also think that the way in which we address those cases has to look to what are the possibilities of the future? Where do we want to go? What's the long range goal of any specific step? And what you decide to do, I think, should always be measured against whether it's going to contribute to the kind of fundamental change and not just dealing with the immediate issue, the fundamental change that you're aiming for. Nope. Okay. Please, would you step to the microphone and identify yourself and ask your question. Thank you very much. Sure. My name is Elizabeth Snyder. Can you hear me? My name is Elizabeth Snyder and I am here with my two colleagues, Mary Margaret DeNene and Colonel Walton from the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. And I had talked with Kathleen before coming here and she had asked if there was any time. Maybe I could bring up the issue of gender and security as pertains to our own borders. And I bring these comments and really reflections and requests for resources and frameworks that you have found helpful in your own work. And observing what I perceived as the gender and security issues on the U.S.-Mexico border where I spent the last 10 months before coming to Fort Bragg, I find that gender really requires a holistic approach because when I looked at the dynamics of that situation, gender was really a cross-cutting issue. It was an economic issue in terms of jobs and poverty. It was an environmental issue in terms of environmental degradation in Mexico and the loss of traditional agriculture. Certainly it was a human rights issue in terms of sexual violence and human trafficking. It was also a natural disaster issue in terms of earthquakes and floods. So when I looked at the impact of women on the U.S.-Mexico border, you couldn't really discount any of those things. So I guess that would be my first observation. And my second observation was when I tried to kind of get into the field and bring together multiple stakeholders, I had to talk to the border patrol. I had to talk to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I had to talk to local law enforcement. And of course I also had to talk to the Civil Society organizations. And I guess my third observation about that, and I know I'm really not drawing conclusions. I'm just kind of throwing out observations that I saw as an anthropologist on the border, is that getting back to Colonel Walton's observation of the holistic approach, gender being one of many, is that I saw that the conversations I was trying to organize on the border with all the different multiple stakeholders, language itself was a huge issue. So the minute someone brought up the term human rights, the conversation ended. Because the insinuation was, if an activist community said that to a security personnel, they immediately interpreted that you're saying that I'm violating someone's human rights. So what we all may see as a pretty innocuous term or something that definitely has to be dealt with, can be really shutting down and silencing conversations. I also noticed that biases, which is another topic that came up today, was a huge stumbling block in terms of misinformation and disinformation and misunderstandings and resentments across those different stakeholder communities. And there was one other thing I wanted to mention too. Also just the role of indigenous knowledge, which we've talked about so much. What do those local communities want? What do they already know? What do they have the capacities to bring to the table without having to be trained by the military or anyone else? That capacity already exists. So it's kind of our job, I think, to tap into those strategies and those capacities that are already there. So I would just end there and really, again, not coming to conclusions, because I left and came to Fort Bragg really not feeling like a viable project to resolve some of these border issues really got kickstarted. So I'm looking to all of you as potential resources in that endeavor and I'd be happy to give my contact information or if anybody wants to have some follow-up comments of strategies or frameworks that they found useful. Thank you. Does anybody want to make a comment on that? Or do we have another question from the audience? I'll just say one thing. Partners Mexico has been part of a process of facilitating dialogue among civil society in Mexico about security issues. And one of the biggest things that they've come across and I think is we tend to oversimplify civil society and say civil society is if it's one thing. It's one monolithic thing with one opinion and one voice. And what they've found in Mexico is that civil society is very diverse. You've got the law and order organizations on the one side that are quite happy with the way things have been coming down from the national level. They feel like it's the right path to go to make things more secure in Mexico. You've got a whole other group of organizations saying, wait a minute, what about our civil rights? What about those issues? And that you can't go through a process of transformation in the security sector unless there's dialogue and debate amongst civil society itself before it even starts interacting with parliamentarians or with the leadership of the security sector. And so I think that it's a good example of how we tend to oversimplify as if civil society is going to magically have one voice and is going to talk really coherently to the leadership within the armed forces. It's the single question that I get every single time is can you just give me a database of all the civil society organizations and can you just tell me the one NGO I should talk to that's going to tell me everything I need to know about a particular country. I'm like, guys, sorry, I don't have that in my toolbox. But I could give you some questions you might want to ask of civil society and I could point you in the direction of how you might find ways to engage with civil society, but I can't give you that one definitive list with the exact NGO to talk to. Thanks very much. Do you have a question? We have three minutes so you can have the last question. My name is Claudine Juanilla de Rucco. I just came back from Rwanda. Where I was hosting a behavior change television show is part of civil society to be able to participate in the Rwanda post-rebreeding process. And I would like to point out quickly that what Mr. Bittrick said about the colonial era in Africa really is true that we have that mindset and it's really difficult for people to come and be our partners because we are working on it but still really hard to do and please keep your mind open, people are working on it and we acknowledge as a problem. And about the military, I salute the shift of the military because I want to first share the experience in Rwanda because they are doing this and we are engaging women and I was happy to also be the bridge as a media person and I also confirm what Mr. Bittrick said. Media is really important to be able to be the bridge but in this country sometimes we have a problem of knowing who's going to take the initiative to start that. Is it the media bringing people in or the military is going to come in and take the initiative to engage the media as the media to be the bridge? So we have to think about that. And another thing is the military is not... I'm going to disagree with what you said if I agree with you before, Mr. Hecht. You go in and be the nice guy. The military is not really always the case. We have seen Rwanda military being the most disciplined military being the full experience and the stuff that you understand everything but it's not really given on the silver plate because people have been traumatized and they have been raped by the military and it's not about Smith being nice guy today because for the population it's actually the uniform. When they see you, it doesn't matter who you are. So meaning we really have to work with the civil society to be able to authenticate people about the shift and the participation of the women is no longer... what Abigail said, remember the ladies is no longer a favor, it's a necessity because women are very efficient, people trust them more. Thanks very much. I'd like to thank our panel and I'd like to thank our audience and I'd like to invite a round of applause. And this is a very punctual sort of group here and we're finishing right on time. So thank you very much and we'll see you next time.