PROCEEDINGS
MR. PASCUAL: Good morning, everybody. My name is Carlos Pascual. I am the Vice President of the Brookings Institution responsible for the Foreign Studies Programs, and I would really like to welcome you today to the Brookings Institution for this event on Darfur.
The event is being co-sponsored by Brookings and the Brookings-Bern Project on Internally Displaced Persons. This has been a very creative and innovative project which we have housed here at Brookings, and it is co-directed by Roberta Cohen who is one of our Senior Fellows here, together with Walter Kalin who is the Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons.
One of the things which this Project has done is to produce guiding principles on internal displacement which were presented to th e U.N. in 1998, and they are the first international standards for the treatment of internally displaced persons. Brookings was responsible for organizing the process for developing them. Then a team of international lawyers actually did the drafting, and since then they have been recognized by the World's Summit Outcome Document, by a number of U.N. Resolutions, and a growing number of governments which are in fact putting in place laws and policies to actually act on these guidelines for IDPs.
Those guidelines are being put severely to the test in Sudan, in an environment in Darfur where 2.5 million people at least have been displaced, there have been hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the numbers of deaths have been numbered in the range of 200,000 to 300,000. Indeed, it is not just a question of Darfur, but it is an issue which spills over to the entire Sudan. It influences the capacity of Sudan to effectively move forward with a comprehensive peace agreement, and as we have seen in the news even this morning, can have impact on the situation in Chad. So it is not just a localized issue, but one that infects an entire nation, and possibly several nations, and an entire region.
We are very lucky to have with us today to be able to address this issue the Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick. In the event today we will have two parts. We will first have the opportunity to hear from the Deputy Secretary in his comments, and then following that, we will have a panel with three distinguished experts, Francis Deng, Ken Bacon, and Bill O'Neill, and I will introduce them a little bit later, who will follow-up with additional commentary and give us an opportunity for further exchange.
Deputy Secretary Zoellick took his position as Deputy Secretary in February 2005, but all of us have known him for a much longer period of time. I think everybody is well aware of his tremendous efforts and work as the U.S. Trade Representative, and in particular, the tremendous contributions that he made to the Doha Round in which the United States was a leading voice for the liberalization of international trade regimes.
He has served in a number of different administrations, and previously during George H. W. Bush's Administration, he served as the Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs, and a Counselor to the Department. He has served in senior positions in the Department of the Treasury, he has served in the private sector, he has been an academic, and he has been part of the think tank world. He is truly an intellectual and a practitioner of public policy.
I can say from personal experience from having worked under him in the State Department that he is also tremendously dedicated to addressing the issues related to Sudan. Very soon after he came into office he immediately started holding meetings with senior people in the State Department, USAID, and other departments, to really understand the dynamic of change in Sudan, the complexities of issues in the South, and the complexity of the issues in Darfur. He has traveled to Sudan a number of times to engage the leaders of the region and try to urge them on to a viable and comprehensive peace for the entire nation, to build peace in the West in Darfur, to sustain the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in the South. He is someone who approaches these issues with tremendous integrity and personal commitment, and a great deal of intellectual integrity, willing to ask the tough questions to understand what needs to be done and how to make an impact.
With that note, Bob, I just want to say thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to hearing your remarks.
MR. ZOELLICK: Let me say how much I appreciate the opportunity to be here, to thank Strobe Talbott, prior Deputy Secretary of State, for the invitation. I know he has done a fine job with Brookings as an institution. Indeed, I was reminded of that as I came in because I have also been spending a fair amount of time recently on President Hu's visit, and as I saw Jeff Bader here who was a great colleague dealing with China when I was at USTR and I think one of the foremost people in the United States on China, I was worried I had come to the wrong session and I was supposed to be talking about China.
I particularly wanted to comment on the role that Carlos has played, frankly, on this and many other issues. He taught and helped me a great deal when I started at the State Department, and I expected that the group that he assembled here would be able to help us further. I have had an opportunity to work with the panelists who are going to be following me, and I could not thi nk of a better group to help shed some light on what is a very challenging subject.
I also appreciate all of your strong interest. I have dealt with a lot of foreign policy issues over the course of some 20, maybe 25 years now, and I am not sure I have one that has generated as much interest across a wide spectrum of Americans as this one has. So I very much appreciate that, and I think it is particularly timely because I think it is a very important moment for Sudan and the region as a whole.
Let me start briefly by sharing a little perspective on Sudan, because I think it may give you a context, at least from my thinking. The problems that we are struggling with have very deep historical roots. In trying to summarize those, I believe that our core challenge is trying to reconcile and reorganize Khartoum's relations with the peripheries of Sudan.
Khartoum, as many of you know, was settled by soldiers, administrators, traders, its lifeblood was the Nile, and its orientation has been traditionally towards the centers of development and learning in the Arab world, Cairo, Damascus, Saudi Arabia. Its relations with the rest of Sudan have been one of ruler, manipulator, exploiter, and, indeed, this is a tradition that runs across not just the current Sudanese independent government, but it goes back to colonial periods and even pre-colonial periods. If you look at the history of indirect rule, this, too, followed this pattern of a center with the periphery and how it would manipulate the regions for the overall good of the center.
Southern Sudan and the long-standing conflict between Khartoum and South Sudan, represents the sharpest example of this long-standing struggle. It has tribal dimensions, it has religious dimensions, it has dimensions between Arabs and Africans, and, of course, it has a very, very sad history of long-standing and terrible violence. But there is an analogous problem that you see in Darfur, which has gotten much attention in the United States, but it extends beyond Darfur. These are also issues that relate to Khartoum's relations with the East, with Beja, and also parts of the North.
The fundamental question that we are struggling with is how do we try to reconcile the metropolitan center with the peripheries in a new fashion? As Carlos alluded to, there is a recognition, especially in Africa that how Sudan comes to terms with these questions is going to affect many others beyond Sudan. Keep in mind that Sudan is the largest country in Africa. It has nine neighbors. It has overlaps that are tribal, religions, Arab and African. From this perspective you can see that the Comprehensive Peace Accord that was achieved in January 2005 represents a potentially critical historic change. In referencing that, I have to pay my respects to the work of Senator Jack Danforth, also the late John Garang, also those in the Sudanese government, that took some very courageous steps in changing this long, historic pattern.
Obviously, that accord ended a 21-year civil war which produced millions, not hundreds of thousand, but millions of deaths. Equally important, perhaps even more important, is that the CPA offers a constitutional framework for all of Sudan. It starts out with elements of wealth sharing and power sharing and security, but the key is that those are transitional elements looking towards a pattern of development, integration, elections, and an opportunity for democracy and unity. I said potentially historical because there are two critical challenges. First, the CPA, as many of you know, is a very complex agreement, and it needs great care in its implementation. Second, we have this problem that you cannot separate the North-South divide from other splits within Sudan, and most striking over the past years, has been that with Darfur.
A word on the CPA and its implementation. My sense is that the record is mixed. It is not a small achievement that it has survived the death of one of its key founders, Dr. John Garang, who as many of you know, played a critical role not only in the course of the civil war, but in negotiating the peace. On one of the trips that I took to Sudan last year, I was at the inauguration of the new Government of National Unity in Khartoum, and when you could see Dr. John Garang there, you could see in a sense hi s vision, because his vision was not for the people of the South, but it was for trying to accomplish a democratic, unified Sudan. So the tragedy of his death is not only one for the many of you I know who have worked with him and strived with him, but it was a real challenge because the nature of his leadership created a crisis in the South. Salva Kiir, one of his top military commanders, stepped into his position, and I do not envy his job because it is an extremely challenging assignment to try to recreate the cohesion not only of the movement, the SPLM in the South, but also then to help start to create the government of Southern Sudan, and then as part of a Government of National Unity, to promote this vision of Sudan.
I had the chance to visit both Rumbek and Juba in the South on different trips. This is not a challenge of reconstruction, although you see the signs of war, it is a question of building. This is the most basic situation. The challenge is trying to take a political movement, a military movement, transform it into a government, bring together other players in the South who were in conflict, and this is an area where Salva Kiir has made some important progress, as part of that system. It is a question of reconstruction, it is a question of the basic infrastructure, and it is a question of development. And while much of our focus has been on meeting basic needs, we also have assistance programs that are vital to trying to create the self-sustaining nature of this regime, for example, a road system, and demining in the South, education, and health. As in the case of many developing countries, Southern Sudan and Sudan as a whole has the mixed blessing of oil. It is a possible source of resources and revenue, but it also a danger because it runs the risk of the cancer of corruption.
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