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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios
Administrator, USAID
Conflict Mitigation and Management
Presented at the Woodrow Wilson Center
October 15, 2003
This is an important issue for me. Not to personalize this, but I created the Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management (at USAID), because when I was in the NGO community, as vice president of World Vision for five years, I saw how very inexpensive interventions --in fact, most of the interventions didn't cost any money at all -- can have a profound effect on localized conflict.
This office is not going to attempt to prevent geostrategic, World War I, World War II conflicts between states. We're talking primarily here, at least in my vision of this, conflicts within states that may be regionalized or localized and leading into civil war.
We did do a study, when I started, to see whether or not I was on track on this, in terms of how profound an influence conflict has on the development process. We did a study through PPC (USAID's Bureau of Programs and Policy Coordination), and we asked the (USAID) Missions: how many -- there are now 85 of them; we opened six new ones just in the last year -- have had some kind of major conflict in the country, violent conflict, in the previous five years? We did the study in 2001. And two-thirds of them had a conflict of substantial proportions in the country in the previous five years, two-thirds.
You know what happens to the development process when a conflict starts, particularly if it's a civil war. It destroys the entire country. You see what conflict has done to Afghanistan over 23 years.
We have seen in a number of countries since the end of the Cold War a dramatic rise in the number of conflicts and insurgencies. There were an average of five in the 1980s. In the mid-'90s they were in the low 20s. So there was a quadrupling of the number of these conflicts, which, as in the case of Somalia, for example, have been extremely destructive. Somalia still doesn't have a national government after ten years.
So the notion that AID shouldn't have some way of approaching this in a systematic way with technical expertise didn't make any sense. There had been work done by a number of people during the last administration within AID, but there was no office that focused on it. There was a unit within the Africa Bureau that did some work that I had great respect for, but I thought why not create an office like our Democracy and Governance Office that would deal with this? And we put the idea to work when we reorganized. It was the most extensive reorganization we've had in several decades. We expanded the mission of the Humanitarian Bureau that I ran in the first Bush Administration to include the democracy and governance function -- because almost all of these conflicts are governance related -- and a new Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management. It took us a little while to get a director. Elizabeth (Kvitashvili) is the acting director. She is just returning from a country that's had its share of conflict: she was deputy mission director in Afghanistan. We chose her very carefully for several reasons. One is she knows the field. Two, she just came from a country that's probably the premier demonstration of how conflict can affect a society. Three, she gets stuff done and she moves rapidly, and four, she's an entrepreneur in a programmatic and intellectual sense.
We did a report called "Foreign Aid In the National Interest." I would commend it to you, if you haven't read it. It's where AID's moving over the next decade, and one of the chapters is on conflict. And I have to say, I read it and reread it; we read it four or five times, added stuff, took things out, and so it reflects not just the Agency's thinking but also my thinking.
We want an office that has three things available. The first is to collect all of the disparate lessons that the Missions have gathered, because AID mission directors are the ultimate entrepreneurs. They do stuff even if people don't tell them to because there's a need in the country to do it. That's how we train our offices. It's a decentralized system. They have their resources, and they can move stuff around without you realizing it, within the bounds of the law, of course, and the restrictions that are on everything we do.
When I travel to our Missions, I'm always astonished to find something no one in Washington has any remote idea about. Ninety-eight percent of the time it's something favorable. A couple of times I've seen things that I wish I had not known. Most of the time it's simply the mission director responding to the needs of the society and the people we work with in the developing world.
And so we wanted a place to center this expertise. We also wanted a strategy paper done. We want a set of tools available to mission directors in the future that they can more easily access because there's a practical reality in the work we do. If you don't have a mechanism for carrying out your work, then it's hard to do it. And that means contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, investing in the institutions in which you work, and facilitating that so you can move rapidly. This is very important, because time is of the essence in most societies that are sliding into conflict.
We've learned a lot in the civil wars of the 1980s, even before the end of the Cold War. We're actually using some of the things we've learned during the civil war in El Salvador because the rebels regularly blew up the electrical lines and utility plants in El Salvador, and we actually had a system for repairing them overnight so that power would be restored in a couple of hours. We haven't quite got to the point of replicating that in Iraq, but we may have to if the sabotage continues.
I know that the NGOs, beginning in the 1990s -- because I was on the task force that did a lot of work in this area -- began to review what they could do, and I want to mention a few things that I saw, practically speaking, because as some of you may know, I'm a conservative. And I'm a realist. I don't really believe a lot of abstract talk unless the abstract talk has some reality in the field and responds to the reality of the world.
If that's the case and the abstract frameworks that are created are very important to systematizing what we do and then putting it into the AID system so that it [inaudible], that's very important as well.
Let me give you several examples of things that have a profound effect on conflict. We just asked Mercy Corps to do a study using Bob Gersony in Nepal, where a civil war going on. I'm sure some of you are aware of that. And Bob went into the heartland of the Maoist rebellion. No one had been in that area for any part of the U.S. Government, much to my astonishment, to see what's actually going on. And he spent two months interviewing over 200 people, two or three hours each, in the middle of the conflict. He's a very brave man. He came back with some astonishing reports.
One argument made in the interagency process is that AID has spent a billion or two dollars since 1950 in Nepal and there's nothing to show for it. And Bob, who can be very critical of aid programs, and sometimes he'll come back and say this program's a disaster, shut it down, or other times he will come in and say this needs to be completely redirected. You know what he said on Nepal? It's very interesting. He said: You did something in Nepal that had a profound effect and postponed the conflict by about 30 years, and you didn't even realize it, and let me just tell you what it was. The southern part of the country Nepal that borders on India is a lowlands area that was infested with severe levels of malaria. It was uninhabitable, basically. And in the 1960s, AID--or 1970s, AID began a program of malaria eradication.
What happened is our program completely eliminated malaria in that area, and the population pressures, which were severe in the highlands that helped create the civil war later on, those people moved down into the lowlands area, became extremely proficient and productive farmers, and the country has been food-self-sufficient since then.
Now, what Bob said is three things took place as a result of this malaria eradication. You would not think a health program would have any effect on conflict. He said the first thing it did is it substantially relieved the population pressures in the central highlands area where the rebellion started. His estimate is it would have started about 30 years earlier had we not done this. I think it was in the mid-'60s we did this project.
The second thing that happened is the country was food-insecure. It had to import food, and it was causing a severe problem in terms of its ability to feed its own population. By opening this agricultural land up -- and then we ran agricultural programs that were very productive -- we also reduced the pressure on food security, because food security does have an effect on conflict.
When I was doing my research on the North Korean famine, I looked at Japan in the 1930s. Very interesting. There's a very strong case that could be made that Japanese expansion was directly related to food security in Japan in the 1930s.
The notion that you can separate the essential needs of the population from the political system doesn't make any sense. So food security was dealt with because of a malaria eradication program.
The third thing that happened is the AID program built bridges, because this is a mountainous society. We built bridges that are still there that connected various parts of the country to each other, which, if they had continued to be isolated, would have fomented rebellion. By moving outside of their own provinces, which are almost completely inaccessible without the bridges, it led to a calming down of pressures in society.
This is a very interesting study. I had not ask him to do that, but he said, "This is so interesting you need to see it. The AID program wasn't designed for this but it had this effect."
I know there was a tribal dispute beginning in southern Ethiopia when I was with World Vision, and the elders of the two tribes were about to go to war with each other. It would have been quite bloody. Young men were already mobilizing. And when this conflict was about to take place between the two tribes, the elders went to the council that included the tribal leaders, and the tribal leaders, the older guys, said: find a political solution, use this mechanism, this council, that is multi-ethnic to settle it peacefully, and they did. And they agreed to a procedure where the dispute that they settled.
There are other examples I could give you where case studies need to be done. There was a tribal conflict beginning over land in Ghana, and the NGOs, without any government aid, raised $15,000 to get a mediator from a university in Kenya to come out, who had a Quaker background, a Mennonite background, as I recall. He mediated the conflict when the war was about to start.
So I simply want to tell you that there are practical examples where this stuff works, and I've seen it myself. So I'm now convinced, and that's one of the reasons we put the office together. My friend Dayton Maxwell, who's now Director of Planning for the CPA (the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq), was the first mission director in Bosnia, told me a wonderful story, where he was beginning the process of reconstruction in Sarajevo, and the Serbs and the Croatians and the Bosnians all said, We want you to do this reconstruction of the sewer lines, the water lines, the gas lines, and the electrical, but we want to control our own systems. In other words, we don't want them interconnected. Implicitly, the comment was so that they could shut other people down without affecting themselves. And Dayton realized exactly what was going on and said, "We're not putting one cent into any of these systems unless they're all interconnected, so if one part of the system goes down for another ethnic group, then you lose your services as well." And that's exactly how they reconstructed the system. All ethnic groups in the conflict were dependent on the other. I would call that a structural conflict management system.
I could go through a series of things AID offices have done because they're increasingly more observant of the effect of development and reconstruction decisions on the potential for future conflict.
I am very motivated by what happened in Rwanda and Burundi. In Burundi and Rwanda, the two Presidents were killed in the same plane crash in April of 1994, the beginning of April. One started a genocide that killed almost a million people in Rwanda. In Burundi, there was no genocide, there was no violence, and the reason is one we don't know for sure. If something didn't happen, why it didn't happen? But we do know that the religious leaders of the country went to the Government and said, "We'd like to put an hour of programming using religious tradition in our society to tell people to stay in their houses, we're not going to use violence as they are in Rwanda to deal with this." And the Government said. "You can have the whole radio station because it was so afraid of bloodshed."
In Burundi, you had a history of bloodbaths. But this worked. They had ten hours of programming a day for weeks. The head of the parliament, the speaker of the parliament, went with mayors, street by street to the largest cities, walked through the neighborhoods, and said: "Stay in your houses, calm down."
The exact opposite happened in Rwanda. It was a politically orchestrated genocide. And they used a radio station, one of the most infamous radio stations in the late 20th century, because it organized a genocide in Rwanda.
So you have a radio station being used for conflict management and prevention in one country next to a country where the radio station was used to foment massive instability and violence.
And there are examples now we are using ex-combatants to develop programs to teach children about the personal cost of violence.
I could go through Nigeria and the Balkans. I know Fred Schieck (USAID deputy administrator) tells lots of stories about the business community intervening in Sri Lanka because the business community got tired of the disruption of their markets. They did it for commercial purposes, but it had a wonderful effect on the combatants on both sides. The business community acted as a major restraint to force people to the table, the negotiating table, and now we have an agreement. I'm not suggesting that it's solely a matter of the business community, but once you've looked at the interests of the major constituent parts of the society in conflict, whether they have an interest in encouraging conflict or diminishing conflict, you can see whether or not there could be enough political pressure to either start a war or stop a war.
And so we know that these things work. We know that if you analyze things properly, they can have a big effect. There is a book called "Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft" by Doug Johnston and Cynthia Sampson. Doug Johnston was COO of CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), and the book is a series of cases done by historians. They wrote the case studies, some of which were failures and some of which were great successes, where mediation using religious institutions were successful around the world.
And so what I hope will come out of this conference and other series of conferences we have is that a set of disciplines within our work that will tell us when to intervene, how to intervene, using which tools, under what conditions and how to develop those tools so they become part of the way in which AID responds to the crises we are facing.
Thank you very much.
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