EVENT
Remarks By Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights
Good morning everybody. This is an awesome assemblage of individuals who have devoted their lives to preventing mass atrocity and genocide. I am particularly moved by the steps taken by both memorials to evolve into living memorials that commemorate the unspeakable pain of the past and channel the emotions these memories generate so as to turn people toward preventing genocide in their own time. I am attending this gathering along with National Security Council Director for War Crimes and Atrocities, David Pressman, Stephen Rapp, Ambassador at Large for War Crimes, and his deputy Diane Orentlicher. The presence of several senior administration officials here today is but one measure of President Obama’s determination to prevent mass atrocity, his recognition that this requires a broad international coalition, and also his conviction that governments do not have a monopoly on good ideas. If mass atrocity and genocide were easy to eradicate, people of good will would have done so long ago. But gatherings like this one remind us of the force of our convictions, the strength of our numbers, and – above all – the concreteness of the mechanisms and policies we must put in place. That is what I hope this conference takes on. What, concretely, should we – we governments, we advocates, we historians, we educators, we museum curators, we citizens, we NGOs – what should we be doing – and what should we be doing differently—in order to further reduce the likelihood of crimes that shock the conscience.
I will answer this question in a parochial way – focusing on what I know best now: the United States and the three ways we have recently shifted our orientation to improve our responses. I urge other governments represented here to partner with us in taking parallel steps in their own countries, or in sharing with us their insights on the mechanisms that they have put in place, which we are eager to learn from.
First, we governments must make fresh, strategic commitments. A fresh strategic commitment is not the same as saying “never again.” It is not the same as joining consensus at the 2005 UN Summit along with the other UN member states on behalf of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It is also not the same as voting for a Security Council resolution that includes a reference to R2P. All of these steps are worthwhile. But a fresh, strategic commitment is one that requires internal deliberation, one in which a head of state or foreign minister communicates today, in 2010, in writing or in a speech his or her prioritization of these issues so that diplomats and civil servants see that this is a here and now commitment with real and present implications for policy.
In his National Security Strategy released earlier this year President Obama made clear that our effort to responsibly end the war in Iraq and defeat al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan must be matched with a vigorous commitment to prevent mass atrocities. His National Security Strategy included the most detailed summation of the US government’s approach to mass atrocity that an American President has given to date. The National Security Strategy may not be a document that everyone in Paris is reading, but it is a document that is widely read in Washington, and the President’s discussion of atrocity and genocide prevention sends a critical message around town and to officials throughout our government. It also sent an important message around the world – mass atrocities can’t just become priorities for remembrance in their aftermath. Signals must be sent prospectively in order for resources to be allocated and political will to be mobilized and harnessed.
Second, we governments must organize ourselves in keeping with our stated priorities. President Clinton has rated Rwanda as his greatest regret – and he has often expressed bewilderment as to how 800,000 people could have been killed without him ever having been directly asked to make a decision, without a single Principals Committee meeting. And yet in the years since Rwanda, while the United States Government created an important office at the State Department – the Ambassador at Large for War Crimes – it did not develop a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency, “whole of government” mechanism specifically designed to prevent and respond to mass atrocities and genocide. I entered the Obama administration in January 2009, having worked with Barack Obama as a Senator and during the presidential campaign. It did not take long working at the highest levels of government to see that the White House lacked a single, dedicated, senior person or persons who woke up every morning, and went to bed every night thinking about preventing, responding to, and punishing mass atrocity.
In March this year President Obama took the unprecedented step of creating the first-ever NSC position with responsibility for coordinating and supporting the Administration’s policies on preventing, identifying, and responding to mass atrocities and genocide. He filled it with one of the most able public servants we could find, a lawyer who had served in the Clinton and Obama Administrations in different roles, and one who more importantly had lived and worked in Rwanda and Sudan. As many of you know, in order to keep fighting and be effective on this range of difficult issues, the commitment often has to be personal. For David Pressman, our NSC Director for War Crimes and Atrocities, it is deeply personal.
On President Obama’s instruction, we are preparing to build lasting systems that will not disappear in 2012, 2016, or beyond. The reason organization matters is that accountability matters – bureaucratic accountability matters. If everyone is responsible for preventing mass atrocity and genocide, there is a risk that nobody is responsible. It is important to have individuals focused on ensuring that the President doesn’t look back on his presidency and wonder why he wasn’t informed or presented with decisions. Structure and organization increase the likelihood that options will be properly presented. In short, governments can improve their ownership and responsiveness to mass killing, but it requires a level of governmental organization that matches the methodical organization characteristic of mass-killings.
Third, and very related, governments must work to systematize “prevention.” While much academic work and significant government resources have been applied to improving early warning, history has shown that an absence of information is not the primary problem. Indeed, we know a good deal more today than we used to about how poverty, environmental pressures, poor governance, and state weakness raise the risk of civil conflict. We even have a variety of products by Government and non-governmental sources designed to alert us to when a situation has reached the tipping point, when a crisis may devolve into conflict. Historically, policymakers have possessed significant knowledge but have been held back by competing policy priorities, limited understanding of the country at risk, disincentives for speaking out, political concerns, or other factors.
There is no reason we shouldn’t have systems in place designed to routinize our response to indicators of mass atrocities. The structure and organization I have described makes it much easier to ensure early engagement on these issues. Working with our regional colleagues at the NSC, we now regularly convene a wide range of departments and agencies for discussions on how to prevent violence in some of the most difficult and challenging places in the world. We take advantage of what we know about when ethnic violence and atrocities take place – we are extra vigilant in the run up to and aftermath of elections and referenda, and of course in the wake of coups or other severe political or economic shocks. These “whole of government” meetings focus on prevention, and they drive the development of plans and responses, separate from day-to-day bilateral policymaking. These plans are then fed into the traditional bilateral policymaking processes. When we see something from Human Rights Watch, the Holocaust Museum, the Washington Post, the UN, our own embassy, etc., we rush to make sure that we have the latest and most reliable information and that we are considering all the options. And the meetings we chair around preventing violence in a particular country include representatives from the Treasury Department, Justice Department, State Department, the US Agency for International Development, DOD, all facets of the intelligence community, among others. Together we begin making plans for situations that have not yet happened.
I will give you one very concrete example. As most of you know, in fewer than 60 days, the Southern Sudanese will vote in an independence referendum. Well, while there is much that can go wrong in Sudan before or after January 9, I have never seen the US government devote so many high-level resources to preventing violence rather than responding to it. We have received very firm instructions from President Obama that, two million people died in the North-South conflict the last time, and we need to do everything in our power to try to convince the parties to choose the path of peace. It is not unusual for President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary Clinton, National Security Adviser General Jones, and now Tom Donilon, Admiral Mullen, and Ambassador Rice to be making calls around the world on a matter of huge importance to the President. What is distinct, in this case, is that these calls are being made ahead of an event that could trigger population movements and violence. Again, none of what I have described this morning is enough in and of itself to prevent atrocity or conflict, but such measures do succeed in making the parties feel watched – itself a possible deterrent.
So Strategic commitment, Organization, and Prevention, or SOP – a Standard Operating Procedure for making Never Again real.
My fourth and final point is that it is extremely unlikely that even the modest steps I have described would have been taken if not for the advent of the modern anti-genocide movement, comprised of students, religious groups, and citizens from across the United States. The kernel of this movement appeared for the first time around Bosnia, but it didn’t activate for Rwanda. However, because of Darfur, which reached its peak killing period around the ten-year anniversary of Rwanda, the movement has been broadened and institutionalized.
High school and college anti-genocide clubs have mobilized divestment campaigns, forcing state and university pension funds to divest themselves of tainted holdings. People of all faiths have marched on the Mall in Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. Letters to the editor have been written, funds for refugees raised. Members of Congress, hearing from their constituents, have traveled to Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Congo, and Darfur to talk to the survivors of mass atrocity and to mobilize US governmental efforts back home. Such films as Hotel Rwanda, and such exhibits as the Holocaust Museum’s Sudan exhibit have made energized citizens of today to recognize that “never again” is a society-wide responsibility.
The truth is that the cause that brings us together today must become politicized. In democracies all over the world, a universal truth holds. Policymakers and politicians respond to public pressure. It was the outrages that occurred in the fields around Srebrenica that united a divided international community and brought about the NATO intervention that probably prevented the deaths of tens of thousands more innocents. It is the citizen and Congressional pressure on Sudan that brought this issue to the immediate attention of a freshman Senator from Illinois and convinced him to visit the refugee camps in Chad on his first trip as a Senator to Africa. And it is President Obama’s knowledge of the issue that has led him to assert day-to-day leadership on Sudan in the run-up to the January 9 referendum. Grass-root and “grass tops” pressure works. It broadens the circle of people inside government who focus on a given issue, and – even when you are pushing on an open door as you are in this White House – the noise you make creates a more permissive environment for your partners in government to push a prevention or response agenda.
But the other remarkable consequence of this pressure is one I have only recently come to fully appreciate. Your reporting and advocacy on Sudan pressures the US government, but it also pressures the Government of Sudan. You rightly call on the Obama administration and other governments to spotlight abuses, but in so doing you spotlight abuses. You are engaged in prevention every day. You are providing accountability. If you doubt this, just get a readout of any of our official encounters with culpable governments and militia officials around the world, individuals who complain incessantly about your work and your claims.
For that, and for all you do, I know I speak on behalf of my colleagues here, on behalf of President Obama, and – these days – on behalf of the people of Sudan – when I say thank you.
Questions:
Jean Marie Ndagijimana [through interpreter]: I’d like to particularly thank Mrs. Samantha Power for her brilliant presentation, in particular, what she mentioned about the Rwanda genocide and conflict. I’m from Rwanda. I’m the president of the International Federation of Rwandan Associations and of course, I’ve been monitoring the question of the genocide from very closely. But Rwanda is not the only one on the book. There’s all the great lakes region and recent news teaches us that there have been some terrible events in the neighboring country of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a report that we call the mapping report has just been published by the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. It was published on the 1st of October and unless I missed something, Mrs. Power did not mention this. I know it wasn’t necessarily the object of this question today, but I would like to know, what is the official position of the American government? I heard what Mr. Rapp had to say in Kinshasa and another of his colleagues, the Deputy Secretary of State, but I feel these two declarations were not sufficiently strong to encourage people in the region to go to peace and give up on gratuitous crime. Personally I find this unsatisfactory. Will the US government really support this report and follow the recommendations of the mapping report, to give international pressure that will make it possible to prosecute and judge the perpetrators of these massacres, which have been qualified as war crimes and even genocide crimes, if a tribunal is created?
Geoffrey Harris: My name’s Geoffrey Harris. I’m an official of the European Parliament and, Samantha, was very pleased and amused by the importance which we attach to bureaucratic organization in the dramatic subjects that we’re discussing here today, because we’re observing in Brussels the establishment of a European external action service, which hopefully will enable Europe to play a more significant role in the future on matters of this kind. That leads me basically to my question, which is fairly simple: looking out on the world from inside the White House, do you feel that the initiatives which you and the President have initiated with your input, have received sufficient international response? And since we’re in Paris, do you have any particular message to Europe? I’d also be interested in your views on how successful you feel the re-engagement of the United States with the United Nations has been, in particular the Human Rights Council, but I think you have more than enough questions already.
Juan Bronco [through translator]: Juan Bronco. I would like to thank Mrs. Power for her presentation. My question concerns the situation in Sudan and the referendum on the 9th of January. We would like to know if the Obama administration has a plan B in case the negotiations prior to this referendum were to fail. And the second question, with respect to the diplomatic isolation of the President of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, what measures does the Obama administration intend to take to strengthen that isolation, where it seems to be weakening, as we’ve seen in his recent visit to Kenya and Chad?
Gareth Evans: Gareth Evans, Australia. Co-chair of the Global Center on Responsibility to Protect advisory board. Samantha, I want to really congratulate the US for this step of establishing a focal point within the NSC, directly related to these issues, someone, David, whose job it is to respond to these situations, but how has it actually worked? Let me give you one specific case: the response to the emerging situation in Kyrgyzstan in June this year. What’s actually going on within the system? What happened at the time? What’s happening now in terms of ongoing preventive activity? As I’ve moved around recently in the UK and other European capitals, my impression is that everybody was, even though there are similar focal points in a number of other governments, everybody was studiously studying their fingernails when this particular event erupted, and yet it seemed to satisfy every known definition of an exploding responsibility to protect-type crisis, or atrocity prevention crisis. How did the system work inside the US and in terms of your cooperation with other relevant governments, including Russia, in that situation?
Enzo Levre: Enzo Levre from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Last month on the 18th of October, Hungary has finally launched, along the initiative on the Center for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, which looks at being a sort of easy to use generalization of the prevention of genocide worldwide. I think we’ve been, in talking also to you and many of the people that are today in this room, my question would be more at what could be the response of the US government on trying to have an international center, and so an international support from different governments to this initiative that Hungary has taken, but has an international, I think, background? Thank you.
Samantha Power: Okay. Thank you. Very, very thoughtful questions and comments. Maybe I’ll just work backwards. On the Hungarian center, I’m learning more about it. To be honest, I had a couple of visitors in Washington, came to see us to tell us about it and we’re intrigued, supportive. The more, the merrier. Maybe I’ll segue to the other question about Europe and the appeal. It would be terrific if there were, in addition to the network being built, which I think builds on the work of—I see Andrea Bartoli is here and Gareth and others at the Center for the Responsibility to Protect—if there was a way to also have government, point people in each of the governments, so if the network could become part of either a collaboration or some kind of interaction with the various governments that fund the center, that support it, but where there’s a policy piece to it. And it may be, now that I’m no longer on the outside, I’m on the inside, I’m a hammer and everything looks like a nail. I’m looking for people who do versions of what David and Steve and Diane and others within the Obama administration do. I know from what I said at the very end of the presentation, that the work of nongovernmental centers, that the research and the motivation also of young people, as was mentioned here, is being done at the memorial and is done every day at the Holocaust Museum, these are critical pieces. So it’s really a kind of hand in glove situation, but I’d love to know more about the Hungarian center. Again, beyond a preliminary conversation, I don’t quite know enough.
And again, to the European piece, I do find it somewhat mortifying the degree to which I appear to relish talking about bureaucracy. I’m sure if I lived in Brussels, I probably would stop doing that with the zeal that I do today. But when I worked on “A Problem from Hell” for six or seven years and interviewed hundreds of US officials, that was the piece of the US response that I really wanted to understand. Why is it that people who go into government, many motivated by the Holocaust, and now younger generations, motivated by Rwanda, what happens structurally where those values which they bring to work every morning, and now I know firsthand, which they have with them during the day, what happens such that those values don’t coalesce into a more robust policy response? So I began a journey, a long journey, into trying to understand bureaucracy and incentives and who’s in meetings and who’s not in meetings and who’s got cachet and who doesn’t and so forth. So I think there’s a lot to it, if you can have patience for it and find ways to make the machine embrace or adopt these values.
As we’ve seen, and I’ll get to Gareth’s question in a second, it can be very powerful. What we would value most, and we’re cobbling it together in an ad hoc way, but is the equivalent of what you would have, let’s say, on a cross-border active aggression. Our foreign minister, our secretary of state would know exactly who to call. The calls would happen very, very quickly. The response would be immediate. If you had warnings that such an invasion were about to occur, the systems all around the world would be prompt and so forth. Now that President Obama has decided to create a kind of node, which is really just a coordinating node. The real work in our government is done out in the capital areas of the system, but the beauty of the coordination is that it can agenda set. It can put something on the radar sooner than it might otherwise be on the radar. So if there were individuals who could be identified in other countries, my counterpart, David’s counterpart, somebody who could similarly agenda set, somebody who preferably was close to a head of state or close to a foreign minister who can move policy in rapid order if needed. It’s very, very challenging, bureaucratically, what I’m describing, but some kind, then the sort of hotline model for atrocity and genocide prevention I think would be more apt.
In terms of Kyrgyzstan, it’s a great question and some of it I probably can’t go into too much in terms of the detail of how we responded. I can’t overstate how different it was that there was just one person in these senior meetings who was thinking—there’s so many interests at stake for the United States in Kyrgyzstan, so there were I guess I would say two values to having myself and David integral to that response. The first is that we were monomaniacal; we were focused on OSCE and what was going to happen. Was there going to be a future ramp up? What are the range of tools that one can bring to bear in order to deal with that specific challenge? We had in our regional colleagues huge appetite for that conversation. It was the conversation they wanted to be having as well. But the second point then is not just the prioritization, because I actually think in that case, given how much suffering had gone on and given how much our Bob Blake and Michael McFaul were engaged in trying to respond to that suffering.
The second comparative advantage or value that we were able to add is just knowing from other areas of where atrocities had occurred, what are the kinds of things you do? How do you think about the media, the mono-ethnic media messaging that is going on? Working with Diane and Steve on a range of commissions of enquiry. Within a couple of days, having a mapping of all the commissions of enquiry that had been created in all kinds of other venues and being able to put that on the table and say, “Okay, here’s a menu, a kind of policy menu.” So it’s not just the single focus, which in that instance, our whole government would have brought to bear, but it’s actually just having that lateral understanding which isn’t applicable, but it at least gives you a sense of the right questions to ask. And so tangibly the things we focused on, and I think succeeded in doing, President Obama and President Medvedev had a meeting, really I think about two weeks after the major spike in violence, and Kyrgyzstan was central to that meeting. Again, given the priority that our regional colleagues placed, it would have been probably anyway. The effort to get the police assistance group mobilized.
Right now, it’s still not clear where that’s going, but moving that through the OSCE, again, working with our regional colleagues and with our European friends and friends in OSCE to move that. And then Ambassador Rapp and David Pressman spent a lot of time with people at the Human Rights Council, with Mr. Kilunan [sp?] who had been asked by President Otunbayeva to undertake this commission. He was kind of new to the commission of enquiry business, so really bringing the best practices to bear from all kinds of other experiences. Again, maybe Kilunan would have gone out and found the resources that he needed on his own, but you had this sort of aggressive effort, White House led to ensure that he was able to draw on the institutional memory that many had acquired.
So then on Sudan, if I could just turn to that, the plan B is certainly in the works, in the sense that all UN agencies, all relief departments of all concerned governments are actively undertaking contingency planning, from a humanitarian standpoint. We’re working with UNMIS to make sure that whatever asks, whatever needs they have that are meetable in a short timeframe, that we support them in so doing, and we’re very pleased that we were able to consult recently with the Russian government who were about to move some helicopters out of Chad and instead now have decided to move them into southern Sudan, which as you know, helicopters are always a major shortage and sadly, that lack of mobility is often a critical enabler, in a way. Lacking that mobility, the peacekeepers in many, many countries are not able to prevent the violence that we would like them to prevent. So this contingency planning is underway, but the absolute priority, the number one contingency plan, the number one policy tool at our disposal now, and all of us have it in our hands, is prevent this thing from going bad in the first place. So we’re working with the parties, as is Thabo Mbeki and as it President Meles of Ethiopia, really pressing the parties when there’s an incident to come out immediately and say, “This isn’t what it looks like,” or “Cooler heads are going to prevail here.”
We are especially concerned about the fate of southerners in the North and northerners in the South and are again working with both governments through our envoys and our embassy staff and through our international colleagues to ensure that both the government of south Sudan and the government of Sudan is taking very seriously the fate of vulnerable populations within their midst. So the main policy, and it’s one that we all have to band behind, is that this just can’t go wrong, it can’t. Hope is not a policy and you have to do all kinds of contingency planning to ensure that it doesn’t go bad, but in the end, we all recognize that the parties are going to have to make the right choice here. And we have laid out a package of incentives for the government of Sudan and a pathway for the government of South Sudan that we think is very attractive and that should be part of the incentive, cost-benefit analysis or whatever, the various actors are undertaking. But in the end, they have to remember what that war was like and seek to avoid it, and we will do anything we can to support that effort.
In terms of the diplomatic isolation of President Bashir, I think that President Obama has been very outspoken on the occasions that President Bashir has traveled. You mentioned, I think, his trip to Kenya. A grave disappointment that a party to the ICC and one that is working in close collaboration with the ICC, would have had Bashir visit in the way that he did. Clearly, this is a tactic now by President Bashir, is to travel and to show that he can, but I think again the United States has been very firm and in the end, these things always tend to end the same way. In most of the prior cases, whether with Charles Taylor or President Milosevic and so forth, there were periods in which the various leaders sprung into and out of prominence in different ways, but in the end, the indictment is out there and we’ve been very supportive of the courts’ efforts to deter future violence and to hold people accountable.
And then lastly on the Congo, I would just say I think our government’s been clear on the mapping report. Steve and others can talk to you about it if there’s more to be said on that. I think we’ve been very clear that the allegations in the report are serious and have to be taken seriously in that the parties need to basically do what any national government that is concerned about preventing human rights abuse and so forth would do. The other thing I would say is that there are a number of at large individuals who’ve been indicted for war crimes in the Congo and we’re very focused on trying to ensure that they also end up behind bars and are trying to work with the Congolese authorities to see a more forceful response to their being at large. We’re also working with MONUC in the hopes that the responses can be more forceful in light of the tragic rapes and killings that have gone on in recent months in such close proximity to the UN forces. Thank you.
Question: Hi, Samantha. I’ve got two questions, actually. So one of the critiques, positive, in reaction to the success of the anti-genocide movement in the US and the rest is sort of the hopefully next book that you’ll write about, “Problem from Hell: the World in the Age of Genocide or Mass Atrocities.” So I’m curious, what do you think, where should the anti-genocide movement focus its attention, given success in the US and the rest? Should we start building anti-genocide movements in India and Brazil and be more specific if you had to pick where we can get our most leverage or most bang for our buck with limited resources? Where would you suggest we prioritize our time and our resources? Second question is related to the LRA. Given that we’ve got lots of people in this room who have a lot of leverage and influence related to the LRA, which countries like CAR and Chad, I’m curious to hear what you think our European allies could do more to help bring an end to the violence related to the LRA.
Question: I’m curious about the downside to efforts to prevent conflict. What I mean by that is if we take Sri Lanka, you had a civil war lasting several decades and some people wanted a negotiated settlement and wanted the ruling government to go very slowly in its offensive, and others would claim that winning the war and putting an end to the revolt was the only way, was the most humane outcome possible. As Americans, we know our own history during the Civil War, which was extremely brutal, with many dead and many civilians treated very badly by General Sherman, but in the end, it was that brutal warfare and conflict that put an end to some very severe human rights abuses and also political instability. I just want to add one more thing: I wonder what lessons you would also draw as United States government—and it’s a question for the Europeans and UN as well—from the lack of forceful action, the wishful thinking that lead to safe havens which ended in Srebrenica and it was only then that the international community was prepared to act. So I’m wondering when do good sentiments and the understandable desire to prevent further death get in the way of effective action that may be ruthless but in the end, more humane?
Samantha Power: Was that the last or did you want more? Okay. I guess I may be just because of my jetlag, having flown all night, I’m not sure I fully follow the last question. I don’t see—take the Srebrenica example. The right answer surely is that we don’t make promises that we’re not prepared to keep. So that goes without saying and as best you can, you empower citizens to make choices that are their own. The tragedy of Srebrenica is that the people of Srebrenica relied on the United Nations and thought that when a safe area was set up that it was actually going to be safe. But having said that, if there were no UN peacekeeping force there, it’s a pretty extensive body of evidence to suggest that the people who were killed in Srebrenica would likely have been killed in Srebrenica. In other words, it’s unclear exactly what the deterrent would have been and indeed, I see good intentions go awry in the question. I get that, but I don’t see the counterfactual, at least, I’m having trouble following the counterfactual a little bit.
So in the Sri Lanka case, I don’t think anybody’s disputing the right of a sovereign government to put down a rebellion within its territory, never mind one as brutal as the LTTE, but the question is, how you go about doing that and whether you observe the laws in war. Again, my government—Louise Arbour is here from the International Crisis Group that has done very important work on Sri Lanka, on the ground there, in terms of what was done. Again, the reason that we have these principles is to stand by them. In the event that they’re just thrown out there, then there can be perverse consequences, but again, I think our struggle is to rationalize and ensure that they are more binding than they have often been.
Mark, your two questions I just throw back at you. The anti-genocide movement and where you want to take it next, I’ll state the obvious which is that emerging centers of influence and emerging democracies are a critical piece of the picture in terms of how democracy and human rights are going to be promoted around the world, and how atrocity is going to be prevented. They’re incredibly powerful voices and countries and we’ve seen—I was with the President in India just last week and just the incredible power of that democracy and the values that Indians enjoy at home and the vibrancy of the domestic conversation, and I think with our backing of India’s aspirations for a permanent Security Council seat in any reformed UN Security Council, our hope is of course that India would step up. It’s already one of the leading contributors to peacekeeping, is already present in Congo and other places where atrocity happens. So there’s an institutional memory within the country that I think one could tap, but we’re excited to work with India on the Security Council, and of course, Brazil is a Security Council seat holder as well, so certainly we would love to see both those countries who have been great peacekeeping contributors, Brazil also in Haiti, but for there to be more of a domestic conversation in those countries is always welcome. I think maybe I’ll leave it there. On the LRA, yeah, I think it would be important to make a priority of the LRA. I’m not going to get into specifics about what the Europeans should do on that. Thanks.
