MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Chris Padilla, Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, discusses the obstacle that China creates for peace in Darfur, the unraveling at the United Nations for a transitional peacekeeping force, the recent demonstrations against the United Nations in Khartoum, and the controversy the U.S. government faces in balancing counter-terrorism intelligence with negotiating peace in Darfur. Padilla also talks about the recent Resolution in the Security Council urging Kofi Annan to speed up the planning process to deploy a United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur and the progress of the Abuja peace talks.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum's Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Chris Padilla. He is Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. He provides foreign policy advice to Deputy Secretary Zoellick and has been centrally involved in formulating United States policy on Sudan and the Darfur crisis. Chris, welcome to the program.
CHRIS PADILLA: Thank you Jerry, good to be with you today.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you first, your boss, Deputy Secretary Zoellick is the number two official in the State Department, and he is also the lead United States government official on Sudan. What percentage of his time is being spent on Sudan?
CHRIS PADILLA: A considerable amount of his time; the Deputy traveled to Sudan four times last year. As he often reminds us that more than he has been to any other country in the world. That is more than he has even been to New York. He spends a good part of almost everyday working on Sudan issues. Just this past weekend, he spent time over the weekend making phone calls to senior officials in Khartoum and staying in close touch with our observers at the Abuja peace talks in Nigeria. He spends a lot of his time on it, as do I.
JERRY FOWLER: What other major issues is he primarily responsible for?
CHRIS PADILLA: The Deputy also works very heavily on East Asia issues, particularly our relationship with China. He works as well on issues regarding North Korea; of course, the issues of Iran, Iraq, working for peace in the Middle East are all important priorities. I think the amount of time he spends on Sudan, and the number of times he has been there reflects the deep interest of President Bush, and the Deputy has met frequently with the President on this subject. He attends numerous interagency meetings on the subject, and he also makes sure to raise the issue of Darfur in his discussions with other governments, in particular with the Chinese. Just yesterday, for example, we had the Chinese ambassador in to meet with the Deputy as we prepare for the visit of President Hu Jintao to Washington next in April. We discussed Sudan and Darfur at some length. It is never far from our minds.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me just pick up on the reference to China because I think it is fairly obvious that one of the obstacles to United Nations action has been China and its close relationship to the Sudanese government. Is Darfur going to be on the agenda when the President of China comes in April?
CHRIS PADILLA: Yes, it absolutely will be, in fact, we made that clear to the Chinese ambassador yesterday, that Darfur will be one of the subjects that we will plan to discuss. I think that it is too soon to say that the Chinese have been an obstacle at the Security Council on Darfur. We had a resolution that the Security Council passed this past Friday, a United Nations Resolution, Security Council Resolution 1663 that passed unanimously that urged the Secretary General to speed up the planning process to deploy a United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur. I think partly because of the Deputy’s contacts with the senior Chinese officials that he regularly works with, we were able to answer the questions, to overcome some of their concerns, and we were able to win Chinese support for that Resolution at the end of the day. Of course, there is a lot of hard work of diplomacy yet to come, and when we seek the Resolution to actually authorize and deploy the United Nations force. I do not think we can be overly sanguine about what we are going to face on the Security Council. We are going to have a lot of hard work to do with China and with Russia, with African members, and others, but I think the fact that we continually raise this subject with the Chinese and others at the senior-most levels of our government does help to lay the groundwork so that when the time comes to take those votes in the Security Council we hope to have the Chinese and others with us.
JERRY FOWLER: Do you know whether President Bush has raised Darfur with the President of China, up to now?
CHRIS PADILLA: I do not know. I know that he plans to raise it with him when he visits in April. The previous visit of President Hu Jintao, as you may know, was scheduled for last fall, had to be postponed because of the Hurricane Katrina situation. What I can tell you is that the Deputy Secretary has discussed it with the Chinese; he discussed it with Premier Wen Jiabao when we were in Beijing in January. I attended that meeting. We have had discussions on it with Secretary Rice and others, and as I said, it is on the agenda for President Bush’s visit with Hu Jintao at the end of April.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us turn for a minute to the United Nations and diplomacy in general around Darfur. If we look back over the last three months, it seems in January the African Union agreed in principle to a transition from the African Union force to a United Nations force, and Secretary General Kofi Annan had an op-ed in the Washington Post that said this transition is inevitable, and then the United States had the Presidency of the Security Council in February. On the first day of the Presidency there was a presidential statement that talked about a transition to a United Nations force, and there were hopes that there was going to be a Resolution providing for that transition before the end of February, and then things seemed to kind of come unraveled. As you said, on March 24th there was a Security Council Resolution that did not establish a transition but called for planning of the transition. What happened there? Why did things seem to go downhill after the promising start in January?
CHRIS PADILLA: What has been consistent throughout this is the United States pushing for a transition to a United Nations force as soon as possible. We welcome the African Union statement in January; we, as you said, used our Presidency in February to try to push forward as quickly as possible; and it was the United States, I can tell you, that was working very hard this past Friday and in the weeks leading up to that, to push for the statement in UNSEC 1663. There is no question that we and others—Europeans also—believe that it is important to move as soon as possible to a United Nations force.
What I think happened in the interim is that we saw the government of Sudan and some other countries, most notably Libya, working actively to try to prevent the African Union from requesting a United Nations force transition. What they were doing—and you saw this in the demonstrations that were in Khartoum—they were taking a position that was essentially anti-United Nations. I think that was a mistake and we told that to the readers in Khartoum when we met with them in Brussels and Paris shortly before the African Union meeting on March 10th.
JERRY FOWLER: A mistake in what sense? It seems to have accomplished their goal of slowing everything down?
CHRIS PADILLA: Sudan should see that having increased security in Darfur is fundamentally in its own interests for a couple of reasons. There has been a deeply troubling spark in violence in Darfur since about last September. That has many causes. It has causes in continuing activities of the Janjaweed, continuing activities of the Sudanese government, but also in fighting among rebel groups, and the new element of instability along the Sudan-Chad border. The point we have made to the Sudanese government is that no matter the cause of violence in Darfur, it is the Sudanese government that is going to take the blame. Whether people are in camps, killed, whatever the proximate cause, whether it is because of a rebel attack or a retaliation or tribal warfare or what have you. What we have said to them is that it is in your interest to have better security in Darfur, and the African Union forces have done a great job, but there are only 7,000 of them in an area the size of France, or Texas, depending on your perspective, and we need to transition to a United Nations force. It does not do the Sudanese government any good to be perceived as anti-United Nations, and I think what we saw after our meetings in Europe with Vice President Taha and Vice President Kiir just before the African Union meeting was the Sudanese government moving off that position a little bit. They did say that they could accept a United Nations force after an Abuja peace agreement is reached which is different than what they had been saying the previous few weeks which was, “No United Nations under any circumstances.” Things like putting militia groups putting bounties on the head of the United Nations’ Special Representative, we made clear these things were just unacceptable. What I think we saw was an organized campaign of resistance and we have had to do some hard work of diplomacy to overcome that. We also have to overcome the risk that particularly those that I would describe as Islamists in Khartoum can try to portray a United Nations peacekeeping force as someone how being a reimposition of Colonialism or a western takeover of Sudan. Neither of those is true but if you looked at what the people in the streets of Khartoum were saying; they were trying to make this an issue of America or the West and it really is not an issue about America or the West. It is an issue of people suffering and dying in Darfur and how we can best get the security improved for those people who are suffering.
JERRY FOWLER: You refer to people in the streets of Khartoum, and there were some demonstrations around this diplomacy that we are talking about, anti-United Nations demonstrations, but to what extent does that really matter? Sudan is a police state and they have a long history of manufacturing demonstrations. There is no connection between the existence of a demonstration in Khartoum and actual public sentiment.
CHRIS PADILLA: I think the best way to describe what we saw in Khartoum was certain factions particularly the more Islamist factions in Khartoum—and there are Islamist factions in the government—trying to manipulate public sentiment, and I do not know enough about Sudanese politics to know how many people were in the streets of their own will and how many looked suspiciously like they might be soldiers but the point remains that I think it is important for us to recognize that there are—I believe—some in the Sudanese government that genuinely do want to try to reach a peace agreement in Abuja, who do want to try to find a solution to the problem of Darfur and to bring Sudan out of its international isolation. There are, however, clearly others who want to use the prospect of the United Nations force as a way to try to make this issue about neocolonialism or the intervention of the west, and we have to be aware of that and that is why I think what we have tried to do in our diplomacy is to keep coming back to the fact that people are suffering in Darfur and the situation there is extremely tenuous. When you look at all of the factors that I mentioned before, whether it is the instability in the Chad-Sudan border or the fighting among rebel groups, there is a very thin line between what we have today and a potential humanitarian catastrophe. That says to us that we must act now to improve the security situation, and the world I believe stands united in believing that the way to do that is to deploy a more robust United Nations peacekeeping force as soon as we possibly can.
JERRY FOWLER: Just in those last couple of sentences you talked very eloquently about acting now and saying that the international community was united in that and then you talked about deploying a more robust peacekeeping force as soon as we can, which is not the same as now. I think one thing that is very frustrating to people is that the Security Council seems to be taking a series of half-measures, and has throughout this crisis without regard actually to the situation on the ground, which by all accounts now is steadily worsening and has been for a few months.
CHRIS PADILLA: I understand people’s frustrations. We share some of those frustrations. The process of moving the multi-lateral diplomacy to get the world united behind a United Nations peacekeeping force and finding countries that are prepared to devote troops to that force is not an easy process. I wish it would move more quickly. The United States, I can tell you, is doing everything we can to move that process as quickly as we can. Having said that I understand peoples’ frustrations though, I think that the most important thing for us to do is to be determined and persistent. I can tell you that the United States is, and this is an issue where we are really joined at the hip with our European friends. When Deputy Secretary Zoellick was in Europe a few weeks ago, he and High Representative Solana, of the European Union met together with the African Union and with Vice President Taha of Sudan and delivered a very strong, very unified message. We will continue to push; we will continue to try to get this to happen as soon as we can. I understand that people wish that it would happen yesterday, but it is the nature of trying to bring the world together that takes us a little bit of time, and what we can do as a government is to continue in our determination. What concerned citizens can do is to keep the focus on this issue. I cannot tell you how much having the eyes of the world on Darfur helps us in our diplomacy. The fact that people express concerns, that they write letters, that they post signs outside of their churches and synagogues, that gets noticed, and it helps us, and it helps us to build support with the Europeans and others.
JERRY FOWLER: You point to the issue of not making a United Nations force look like a Western intervention; the political sensitivity of that, but at the same time, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has said, and I think a lot of people would agree, that to provide protection on the ground you need a force that is mobile, that is able to move around, that has a fair amount of capacity to respond quickly, and that capacity generally resides in Western militaries. How do you square that circle between what you need and these political sensitivities that you are talking about?
CHRIS PADILLA: You square it very carefully. The Secretary General has correctly pointed out that a peacekeeping force in Darfur is going to need a lot of support; not just in mobility, but from what we have seen with the African Union is that you really need to have a quick communications capability, you really need to have the ability to communicate intelligence quickly. Just as an example, it has been our experience that African Union peacekeeping forces while very well intentioned might not know necessarily that attacks are planned on certain villages or that there has been a Janjaweed retaliation for something; or if they have the information they are not necessarily able to move it up their chain of command quickly enough to be able to respond or to deploy proactively to deter an attack. These are the kinds of things that we need to provide help with, and we have asked NATO to provide that help to the African Union now during the transition period, and to provide it to the United Nations on a going-forward basis. How exactly what the nature of that help will be is something that we are working between military planners even as we speak. The Deputy Secretary meets frequently with his counterparts at the Pentagon; we discuss with the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just last week. I cannot tell you exactly what the support we are going to provide will look like other than describing in general terms that it will be things like logistics, transport, communications, intelligence, training, but the folks who are more expert in that than I am are studying it and will have recommendations ready to go by the end of April.
JERRY FOWLER: President Bush started speaking very strongly in mid-February about the need for NATO’s stewardship of a mission in Darfur—I think that was the term that he used—and the response from other NATO countries was less than enthusiastic, and then the Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, was here last week and at least in his public comments did not evince too much enthusiasm for greater NATO involvement in Darfur. Is that changing? Or how will it change?
CHRIS PADILLA: I think it is changing. I think the Resolution, for example, that the United Nations passed on Friday helps to move things forward by making it clear that we are now accelerating the planning for a United Nations force. As result of that, I think NATO has gotten the signals that it needs from the United Nations that it should accelerate its own planning. Part of the problem is that NATO has not gotten a request from the African Union to provide this kind of help, and the African Union has been some reluctant to make that request. Now that we have a United Nations Resolution that is moving this forward to what I believe is an inevitable transition to a United Nations force, I think we have more cover for NATO to do the planning work that it needs to do. The President has been quite consistent in saying that the United States and its NATO allies are going to provide the requisite support for this mission. We are going to tailor that support to do the things that we are best suited to do and that are most needed, and the kinds of support we are talking about are the ones I have mentioned. We can provide—and we have provided in the past—air mobility support. We can provide more real time intelligence. We can provide better, more real time communications ability. We can provide training for commanders to know what their mandate is, how to deploy proactively to prevent violence, how to respond to attacks. That is what we are planning for, and that is what I think our role will be best suited to be.
JERRY FOWLER: I think what we are talking about here is the NATO role in an eventual United Nations mission, and my understanding is that the best case scenario is that nine to twelve months down the road; correct me if I am wrong about that?
CHRIS PADILLA: I hope it is closer to six to nine months.
JERRY FOWLER: Although generally my experience in observing the United Nations is that whatever time period you pick, it is always longer. Nevertheless, whether it is six months, nine months, twelve months, or God forbid eighteen months, what about that interim? It seems the conflict is spilling over into Chad, Chad is very unstable, it was kind of a house of cards to begin with, and now it is being pushed on. What is going to provide security and protection for civilians in the interim?
CHRIS PADILLA: You raise an excellent point. Even as we spend a lot of time working on the transition to a United Nations force, we have to support AMIS and we have to support it now. One of the things that the President has asked NATO to do is to provide support now, in the interim period, to help improve AMIS’s capabilities, to make the 7,000 troops who are on the ground more effective, to multiply their effect, if you will, by providing the kinds of support that we are discussing. It is also important that we continue to provide financial support for AMIS which is why the President’s supplemental budget request asks for $123 million dollars for this fiscal year to continue to support AMIS but also to upgrade the AMIS troops, to bring them up to the United Nations standards. For example, they need to have better weaponry, better body armor. These are the kinds of things that we can do in the interim to strengthen the AMIS force. We have also spoken to other countries about providing additional support and troops for AMIS. At the Arab League Summit that is going on right now in Khartoum, we had reached out to a number of North African countries to see whether they would be able to provide some interim support to AMIS, and I hope that comes to pass, but the important thing if that happens is that is support for AMIS in a transition period, and not an effort to say that we never need the United Nations. I think it is important to be careful in supporting AMIS in the transition, but making absolutely clear that this is a transition.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me shift gears for a minute. We are unfortunately running near the end of the time that we have. There was a tremendous amount of controversy last year when it was revealed that Salah Gosh, who is the head of the Sudanese Security Services and someone who has been deeply implicated in the genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, was brought to the United States to consult presumably with intelligence officials. It has now been revealed that he was in London last month and the press reports are that while he was in London he met with British and United States officials. The first thing I would ask you is whether that is true, and if so, what kind of signal is it sending to Sudan to have one of the top war criminals basically still interacting with United States officials?
CHRIS PADILLA: Jerry, I have not seen those reports, but I will certainly look into them right away. I can tell you more generally that even as we talk about transitioning to a United Nations peacekeeping force, even as we work on the Abuja peace talks which we should make sure to touch on before our time runs out, it is important that we focus also on accountability for genocide. That is something that we are very serious about. I can tell you the President is very serious about that. We have a United Nations Resolution, I think it is 1593, if I am not mistaken, that talks about identifying those accountable for genocide and taking actions against them. We have had, in the past, counter-terrorism cooperation with Khartoum, and I know there are a lot of folks that have been concerned that because of that counter-terrorism cooperation we are somehow going more easily on the issues of Darfur. I can tell you that in the eight months or so that I have been working on this issue day in and day out with Deputy Secretary Zoellick, I have not seen that. I have not seen a single instance where we did not raise an issue with Khartoum or did not press on the government in Khartoum because of concerns about our counter-terrorism cooperation. We have made clear to Sudan that we think it is in their interests to cooperate with us on counter-terrorism; we also think it is in their interest to find a settlement to the situation in Darfur; but they cannot trade one against the other. It is just that simple.
JERRY FOWLER: On accountability, is the United States providing assistance to the International Criminal Court?
CHRIS PADILLA: The United States, as the Deputy has said—and he said this before Congress—is prepared to cooperate with the International Criminal Court if asked to do so. To date, I am not clear that we have been asked to do so, but if asked, we will provide support to the International Criminal Court and its activities on Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: The United Nations also has authorized—now a year ago—targeted sanctions such as freezing assets and preventing international travel by people who are responsible for disrupting the peace process or for violence in Darfur. I believe Salah Gosh is one person whose name has been leaked as being on the list of such people. How long is it going to be before these sanctions are actually implemented?
CHRIS PADILLA: We are working at the United Nations to try to press forward on that. There is also a lot of activity in Congress; you probably know. The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act which passed the Senate contains some language on this. It is important to note that we already have in place fairly significant sanctions against Sudan, against the government, but also against individuals in terms of travel restrictions, visa restrictions, asset freezes and so forth, and we are fully prepared to press forward as we seek accountability for genocide against individuals identified as being complicit in that.
JERRY FOWLER: You did mention the Abuja peace process, and we are pretty much at the end of our time. There have been some reports recently that a peace agreement will be arrived at shortly, though we saw this in the North-South process where it went on and on and on. The most important question is to what extent will deployment of a United Nations force be held hostage to progress in Abuja?
CHRIS PADILLA: It is our view that the two should precede on parallel tracks and not be sequential. That is to say, one contingent on the other because we have spent a lot of time talking about the urgency of the security situation and we have made the point that we think these two should proceed in parallel. It is also important though Jerry, that folks in Abuja not see what we are doing to deploy the United Nations force to improve security as an excuse not to negotiate a peace agreement. Ultimately a United Nations force, even a larger, more robust one, is only a holding action; it is only an interim step towards what we really need to see which is a long-term peace agreement for the people of Darfur that addresses the issue of their participation politically in the government of Khartoum, their share of wealth, and Sudan has considerable wealth, particularly natural resources wealth, and arrangements to provide for the long-term security of Darfur. Those are the three key elements that are being negotiated in Abuja. Even as we push forward with the United Nations we have to energize the Abuja peace talks, and we are doing so. We have got a full-time team in Abuja that is more actively working to try to mediate between the parties now rather than just observing what is going on. We met with Salim Salim who is the African Union mediator of those peace talks when we were in Paris a couple weeks ago, and we urged him to put forward comprehensive proposals to get these peace talks moving. They have been bogged down, and we have been trying to increase the level of attention so that we do not have negotiators bogged down in details, but we would rather have a political push to get those peace talks done. I believe that we are seeing signs from the government in Khartoum that they would like to see such an agreement. The reason for that, I believe, is that they would like to get out from under the international opprobrium that has come upon them, properly so, for what happened in Darfur. They want to rejoin the world, and I think it is in our interests for them to want to do that. One of the challenges in Abuja is that I do not have any illusions that Sudan, that Khartoum, is going to be easy to negotiate with, but they have to have someone to negotiate with. Until just very recently, the rebels have been so disunited that there has not been a partner to negotiate with, and when you are disunited in front of a determined adversary, you are not going to be in the best negotiating position. We have said to the rebels, “You guys need to get your act together. You need to get to Abuja. You need to take it seriously. You need to try to come to a peace agreement.” I hope that those in the United States and around the world who are concerned about Darfur, even as they criticize the government and I understand why, it is also important to put pressure on the rebels. Peace is the solution here, and the rebels should not see what we are doing with the United Nations force as an excuse not to negotiate for peace.
JERRY FOWLER: Chris Padilla is Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick. Chris, thanks so much for being with us.
CHRIS PADILLA: Thank you Jerry; I enjoyed it.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
