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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Roger Winter,
Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance
Promoting Democracy in Difficult Settings: Lessons Learned
April 29, 2002
Thank you, Richard. It is a great pleasure to be here on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development and have the chance to speak to you about democracy and the important role it plays in our overall development strategy.
Some of you are old friends and colleagues. I look forward to meeting others and hearing your views.
This conference is a tremendously important one. I wish to thank the organizers for all the hard work that has gone into preparing for it. More importantly, I want to thank all of you for the work you have done with USAID over the last several years, not only through CEPPS, but other programs, too.
Today's roundtable comes six months into the war on terrorism and six weeks after President Bush announced the creation of the new five billion dollar Millennium Challenge Account. It is a good time to gather our thoughts and our energies and think about what we have done well and what we must do better in the years ahead.
I am somewhat new to democracy as a professional discipline and to the particular community of democracy and governance organizations assembled here. But these are issues I have thought about and wrestled with for many years.
My background is in humanitarian and conflict issues worldwide for more than 20 years, with a heavy focus on Africa, in countries like Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi. I have seen too often the consequences of governance failures - up close, sometimes too close. What happens to real human beings caught up in chaos, conflict and civil war is incomprehensible to most Americans. I and the overwhelming majority of those who work in the DCHA Bureau are committed to doing our best to change the grotesque "failed" state formula.
As head of an NGO for more than two decades, I also served as an election judge in Howard County, Maryland, and also as an election observer in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda.
Fourteen years ago, I was in Kampala, when the subject of the U.S. presidential elections came up at a conference I was attending. "Oh," my Ugandan friends said, "President Reagan will never give up power." "Yes, he will," I said. "No, he'll cancel the elections." "No, he won't," I countered, "that's against our Constitution." "Well, then he'll change the Constitution," they assured me. "No, he won't. We have a system for making amendments, a legal process." "Well, then, he'll call out the Army and engineer a coup," they told me. "No, " I said. "George Washington solved that one 200 years ago. Our military will not be part of any coup."
Still, my friends were unconvinced. It is not that they opposed democracy. It was, in fact, their most passionate wish. But they had never experienced a government that had honored a Constitution, let alone a commitment to "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
That conversation has always stayed with me, because it highlighted a simple but important lesson. We Americans have a faith in democracy that seems almost naïve to people in the developing world. This skepticism is not all that surprising. It's a function of their history and their experiences - some of which has been particularly brutal. All this affects people's expectations, their view of what is possible.
Our mission goes beyond developing institutions. We have to help people change their expectations. For every man, woman and child has a right to honest, competent, representative government, accountable to the voting public.
There are no universal preconditions for democracy. We have seen that nations with little experience in democratic government can achieve it, provided they pursue polices that promote development, such as encouraging individual liberty, economic growth, a functioning, independent legal system, and a broad, open civil society
Together with you, we at USAID are deeply committed to helping them do so.
We have a very experienced team of people in USAID. But we need your input, too. You -- your ideas and experience -- are a huge asset that our country as a whole can draw on, and we in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance certainly intend to keep doing so.
In country after country, violence and civil strife have destroyed decades of development work since the Cold War ended. Two-thirds of the countries where we have USAID missions have undergone major conflicts in the past five years. And, as a study by Paul Collier of the World Bank suggests, half of them will see more conflict within the next five years. Further, USAID lacks missions in many key failed or weak states, such as Somalia, Burundi, and Sudan, where terrorism may be bred and conflict is virtually a norm.
It is easy enough to describe the horrors that conflict and failures in governance cause. We can count the casualties and the metric tons of emergency supplies we ship. We can measure the costs in the medicines and in the faces of the children who have lost their parents. We can debate the causes in the papers and in conferences like these.
But how do we prevent these tragedies from taking place and help resolve them when they do?
We know some things: Democracy, good governance, conflict mitigation and management are each important parts of the answer.
We know, too, that resolving humanitarian crises and restoring the status quo in a collapsed or failing state is often an invitation for another round of violence. So we are learning how to focus on conflict prevention and management techniques. And we are using emergency humanitarian assistance more wisely so that we reward actions that defuse tensions, not spread them.
Much of this is a relatively new art. But we have learned from our experiences in places like northern Iraq, Sudan, Bosnia and Kosovo and now Afghanistan, and our conflict office is working today to incorporate them into our overall work.
Our aim is to design our emergency, transition, and democracy programs so that they work in sequence and support each other, giving people incentives at every stage to make the right decisions and establish the security, economic growth and political reforms they need for sustainable development.
That in a nutshell was USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios' goal in creating our new Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.
I am sure you agree that democracy-building is not only about elections and political parties, important though they are. It is also about helping states consolidate their institutions; make the transition to more democratic governance; and sort through the complex issues of conflict and disaster, so that they can take advantage of our assistance and begin building better lives for their people.
In our new bureau, democracy will not be subordinate to our conflict and humanitarian efforts, as some of you have heard. Instead, democracy is being elevated in importance. It's not only the first word in our Bureau's name. Humanitarian assistance is indispensable in saving lives, but, in the end, it is maintenance. Democracy-building and conflict management are potential solution to the challenges we face, particularly in what you might call "difficult settings." I'm thinking of Burundi, Afghanistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Colombia, and Jamaica to mention a few. And we know that solutions will not come fast. Long-term commitments are necessary.
At the same time, I want to be very clear with you that we will not neglect democracy assistance in countries that are neither in conflict nor failed states. In case you doubt me, let me remind you what Secretary of State Colin Powell said last year: "America stands ready to help any country that wishes to join the democratic world."
Do I look like somebody who wants to contradict our Secretary of State? I don't think so. So let me make myself absolutely clear: USAID stands ready to help any country that wishes to join the democratic world. And we absolutely need your help to do it.
USAID-wide, we have asked for $963.6 million in democracy-related programs for fiscal year 2003. Of that, $273.2 million will be for our programs in Eastern Europe and Eurasia; $178.6 for Asia and the Near East; $117.2 for Latin America and the Caribbean; and $125.5 for Africa. Another $239.4 million will go to other U.S. Government agencies to support their democracy activities, and $29.7 million will be for various centrally-managed programs.
This does not include the Millennium Challenge Account that the President announced on March 14. If approved, this will increase our foreign assistance by up to $5 billion a year, a 50 percent increase in U.S. development assistance starting in 2004. That is one of the largest increases in the 40 year history of USAID.
While the details of how these funds will be allocated have not been finalized, it is clear that the Administration has made a major, new, and historic commitment to international development. And the emphasis the President placed on democracy and good governance should please everyone in this room, for it speaks directly to your mission and your expertise.
"Good government is an essential condition of development," the President stated. "So the Millennium Challenge Account will reward nations that root out corruption, respect human rights, and adhere to the rule of law." In short, we will reward performance, not promises.
The strong performance of democracies, and democracy assistance, over the last decade put it firmly on the development map. This is reflected in President Bush's statements at Monterrey financing for development conference. "Liberty and law and opportunity," he said, "are the conditions for development, and they are the hopes of mankind."
Elections provide people a means for expressing this hope, but good government and accountable institutions are what sustains it.
As you all well know, the last 25 years have witnessed the greatest expansion of democracy in human history. Suffrage has been broadly expanded, and the process of holding credible elections made great gains. Today, 62.5 percent of the world's population lives in electoral democracies of one sort or another.
The people and organizations present in this room played an important role in this phenomenon. Through CEPPS, you have been our partners in more than 50 countries. Over the last two years, more than half of our election and political party assistance has been implemented through CEPPS. With USAID and State Department support, you have gone to the hard places and lived with the danger.
I would like to make special mention of several people within your organizations who died while working overseas - John Alvis from IRI, Nazif Muliqi, the NDI Kosovo Civic Forum Project Coordinator, and most recently, Sothene Issenghe, the deputy director of IFES' Office in Kinshasa. To their colleagues, friends, and families: please accept my condolences on behalf of the Agency.
Today, you have the chance to look back at your work, remember your colleagues, stand by your achievements, and share your lessons. There is much for which to be proud. You also have the task of looking forward. As you think about democracy and governance over the course of the next few years, let me urge you to consider a few issues.
First, we need to work together to improve the quality of the electoral competition. In a recent report for us, Larry Diamond concluded that the presence of democracy in the world today is broader, but also thinner than a decade ago. People are increasingly disillusioned with their new democracies. Elections may often be a legitimating façade. Governments are failing to protect human rights, control corruption, and address economic and social problems.
In failed states too, we need a secure enough environment to allow for elections to take place, and the political space to allow for the free expression and assembly. The creation of this environment, in contexts like Afghanistan, will determine whether decisions that are reached in elections will endure.
Second, we need to focus on helping governments and political leaders to govern in the public interest. Too often, we've seen that political parties and electoral authorities place their private interests above those of the public. As long as they do this, the benefits of democracy will only trickle down to the friends and families of public servants and political parties.
Third, and finally, we want to focus on greater accountability and transparency in political conduct. I'm sure you all agree that elections on their own are a blunt instrument for holding politicians accountable. Political parties need to be more accountable, campaign finance needs to be more transparent, and legislatures more responsive.
We all know that democracy is an evolutionary process and that there are vast differences among countries that some call "democratic." Our challenge is to match our strategies and our resources with the specific conditions of each country.
There will be nothing easy about any of this. But I know you are the kind of people who do not shrink from challenges. Neither are we. We are proud of what we have accomplished together, and we are looking forward to working with you in the future to address the challenges that lie ahead.
Thank you. And now I would be happy to take a few questions.
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Last Updated on: January 02, 2009 |
