Jamie Rubin: Senator Clinton, thank you for joining us on WIDE ANGLE.

Hillary Clinton: Thank you.

Senator Hillary Rogham Clinton

Jamie Rubin: During your time as First Lady, you took up this issue of trafficking in women and trafficking in general. What was it about this issue that struck you and made you take it on?

Hillary Clinton: Well. Jamie, the fact that this is a modern-day form of slavery was shocking to me. When I realized, because of my travels and exposure as First Lady, how prevalent it was, I determined that we should do something about it. I went to Beijing to the UN Conference on Women in September of 1995, and spoke out against a long series of abuses that were human rights violations of women’s rights and among those, of course, was trafficking. And then, in the time after the conference, when it did become an item that was of higher interest on the national and international agenda, we followed up. In 1996, I went with my husband to Thailand for a state visit. I went to the north where I met with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], trying to help young girls who had been sold by their families into prostitution, trafficked into the brothels, mostly in Bangkok.

Jamie Rubin: So they were sex slaves, these girls.

Hillary Clinton: They were. They were 10, 11, 12 years old. I remember going to a hospice and meeting a 12-year-old girl who had become very sick because of AIDS, had been thrown out of the brothel, had found her way back to her family, who didn’t want her, and ended up in this hospice for dying teenagers and adolescents. And both I and my staff, led by Melanne Verveer, who was responsible for the work on issues like this, began talking about it with everyone we could find in the White House and the State Department. In 1997, we began something called Vital Voices, and we brought together women from the former Soviet Union in Vienna. And what I found was that it was a huge problem, not just in a country in Asia, like Thailand, but also in Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet Union. And then the administration, under my husband’s leadership and under Secretary Albright’s leadership, really made this a high priority, which led to our involvement in international conferences with the Secretary of State, the President, and other high officials, raising this with governments around the world.

Jamie Rubin: This was new, for an American government to take this issue on.

Hillary Clinton: It really was. When Madeline Albright became Secretary of State — after the announcement and when she was confirmed — I went over to the State Department. And we had a joint meeting where we talked about women’s rights as being really important to American foreign policy — and not as some kind of marginal luxury that maybe when we didn’t have something better to think about we could worry about. Because where women have rights, as we have found in Afghanistan, and in many other parts of the world, the countries are more likely to be stable, they are more likely to be pro-democracy and understand the values of the West and America. And so Secretary Albright particularly took this to heart. And because of an interagency process that was set up after Beijing to see what the United States needed to do to implement the platform for action that came out of that conference, we began not only looking abroad, but internally. And we discovered that somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people, mostly women, are trafficked into our country every year as well.

Jamie Rubin: Were there bureaucratic steps you took inside our government to get the Justice Department, the State Department, to make these high priorities?

Hillary Clinton: Well, I didn’t do it. The administration did it, but I strongly recommended that there be a position in the State Department, that the Department of Justice begin to focus more on not only protecting the victims, but prosecuting the perpetrators. All of this led to the passage of legislation in 2000, The Trafficking of Victims Act. And that was a tremendous step forward, that the United States would take this position against this horrible crime, would put resources into training police and other law enforcement officials, would make it a priority for U.S. attorneys to prosecute, and would try to provide some resources to help victims. Because once you find a brothel, a sweatshop, someone who is held in domestic servitude, often that person doesn’t speak the language, they are afraid; they have no place to go. So money was put into programs to try to help protect and provide assistance to victims too.

Senator Hillary Rogham Clinton

Jamie Rubin: So there is this law now, The Victims of Trafficking Act that was signed by President Clinton in 2000. You are now a Senator; you get to monitor the implementation of laws. How do you think it’s going?

Hillary Clinton: I think we’ve made a lot of progress, and I want to point out this was a bipartisan effort — colleagues in the Congress like Congressman Chris Smith in the House, Senator Sam Brownback here in the Senate. So this was a bipartisan effort that led to the legislation, and we’ve made progress. There have been something between 50 and 100 prosecutions. That’s not a lot, but at least we’re beginning to go after the perpetrators. Programs around the country have been given funding to help train police officers and provide victim assistance. We have maintained a spotlight on this issue in bilateral discussions at the highest level. The State Department has –

Jamie Rubin: They have continued to do that?

Hillary Clinton: They have continued to do that, and I appreciate the Bush Administration’s commitment to this issue. So we’ve made progress. Have we done everything I’d like to see? Of course not. And there will be a reauthorization of the legislation, hopefully this year or next, that we can try to improve on and learn from what has happened in the past. But we still haven’t yet raised public awareness. Not only here in the United States, but around the world, so that people understand the horrible nature of this crime, and that they don’t just view it as a cultural artifact or a way of someone looking for a better life and maybe being mistreated, but no harm done. They’ve got to understand that this is really at root a criminal enterprise that crosses all boundaries.

Jamie Rubin: When we’re talking about the smuggling of people and essentially slavery, other countries have been less helpful than the United States in trying to put a stop to it. Do you think that we should use this law as provision to name them, to shame them, to sanction them? How should we approach that problem?

Hillary Clinton: Well, we need to start raising the profile of the issue. And we do issue the names of countries that don’t cooperate on drug running and criminal enterprise having to do with smuggling drugs. We talk about countries that have porous borders when it comes to arms trafficking, when it comes to terrorism. I think trafficking of people should join that list, that hall of shame, so that we do shine that spotlight. There are many brave law enforcement officials, civic groups, and NGOs inside a lot of these countries who are trying to prevent trafficking, who are trying to get the word out to young women who read an ad that promises a good job in a rich country like the United States or somewhere in Europe. And we need to make it clear with the highest level of public attention that these are bait and switch operations and to try to provide support so that people inside a lot of the countries that haven’t given enough attention to this can bring pressure on their own governments.

Jamie Rubin: So if you had your way, there would probably be a little bit more attention from this government, the Bush Administration, in shining that spotlight on other countries.

Hillary Clinton: I think it would be helpful. I understand there are many other issues that we have to negotiate over with many nations. And in particular now with the war on terrorism, we need to keep the involvement and good offices of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Jamie Rubin: Particularly in the former Soviet Union countries, which are a problem.

Hillary Clinton: That’s right. But I also think that we could raise this. In the two and a half years that I’ve been in the Senate, the Vital Voices initiative has continued to work on this under the leadership of Melanne Verveer, and we’ve had a number of delegations of people from some of these countries. They’ve come to my office so that I could greet them, and they are proud of what they are doing to combat trafficking. They need a little more help. They need some positive reinforcement, and the United States is the place from which that has to come.

Jamie Rubin: And money?

Hillary Clinton: I think it would be useful to look at how we could help build up some of the law enforcement resources and the public awareness campaigns in some of these countries.

Jamie Rubin: This trafficking issue is part of the broader movement of peoples. After the end of the Cold War, we projected this image of openness to the world and now they all want to come, and we’re shutting our doors and they’re having to go to smugglers to sneak through our borders. Isn’t this ironic, historically, that we’re now sort of shutting down at the very moment when the world has become more and more free?

Senator Hillary Rogham Clinton

Hillary Clinton: Well, I think that 9/11 had a lot to do with that. We do have to have more secure borders. We obviously understand that. This kind of criminal trafficking of people is part of a much larger set of questions about how we’re going to secure our borders, and how we will continue to be open, but in a vigilant way. So much of the trafficking, though, that happens in the world doesn’t come in and out of the United States. It goes in and out of many other countries. That’s why the international convention, why bringing this to the attention of international agencies, Interpol, the UN, is all part of attacking it. And border control is one thing, but we know that very committed smugglers can get around nearly any kind of security. We’ve seen that across our own southern border, where people are looking for a better life and they come. So I think there’s a lot we need to do on an international basis. Yes, we have to protect our own borders, but we have to make the trafficking of people as big a crime as the trafficking of drugs.

Jamie Rubin: September 11th has been one factor, but another has been the new politics of asylum. In many countries in the world, politicians have used this issue to try to encourage the closing of borders. What’s your response to these politicians who have really demagogued this issue?

Hillary Clinton: Well, I regret it, because this is a serious concern. This is modern-day slavery, and it should not be confused with any other cause, legitimate or illegitimate, that a local political leader might seize on. So I regret that it would get caught up in closing the borders to people who are refugees, who are looking for asylum, who are legitimately in need of protection, of another safe haven. That is not who we’re concerned about when we talk about trafficking. We’re concerned about people who either are forcibly taken from their homes and sold into either sexual slavery or other kinds of servitude, hard labor –

Jamie Rubin: Farm workers.

Hillary Clinton: Farm workers, domestic servants. There’s a tremendous trafficking of domestic servants. We’ve had that problem even here in the Washington area, where people have escaped from basically being imprisoned and forced to work literally around the clock. So we have to be clear about what it is we’re trying to prevent. And then bring to bear, not only world opinion, but sanctions, criminal law enforcement, other kinds of actions that will try to prevent this from being a growth industry for criminal enterprises around the world, which it currently is, unfortunately.

Jamie Rubin: This trafficking in human beings, like trafficking in drugs, like trafficking in piracy, like a number of different new transnational crimes, this is the dark side of globalization, isn’t it?

Hillary Clinton: It is. It’s the dark underbelly of globalization. Now that we can move goods and people with such ease all over the world, it is very hard to know what it is that we are transporting, where it’s supposed to end up. This is true for human beings, it’s true for drugs, it’s true for weapons, it’s true for terrorism, it is something we have to come to grips with. I think we should be looking at trafficking, not only as an evil, in and of itself, that the world has to combat, but as part of some of the problems that we face because of globalization. Who would have thought, before September 11th, that hijackers could use credit cards, modern commercial airplanes, and box cutters to wreak such havoc? I really think it’s time for the world community to come together internationally and start setting out rules for the 21st century. After World War II, the leadership at that time really put into place the United Nations, Bretton Woods, other kinds of institutions that did a very good job, I think, on balance, for about 50 years. But circumstances have outpaced our international understandings and cooperation, and we have to begin to take a hard look at that. And I think it’s one of the pressing challenges for world leadership.

Jamie Rubin: Because these traffickers are using the same interstices of government, of ideas, of borders, of the Internet, of communications, of financial transfers, the same across the borders as other criminal networks.

Hillary Clinton: That’s right. It’s one of the oldest forms of trading, unfortunately, people being, in the distant past, seized in war or as bounty and put into slavery. It’s as old as human history, but it’s using all the most modern of technologies in order to perpetrate this evil.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about the demand. Let’s face it, the 50,000 or so enforced workers in this country are in the sex business or they are helping to pick farm crops at rock bottom … [as] slave labor. So can we do something here to make the demand drop?

Hillary Clinton: Well, we have to, and I think the idea behind the 2000 legislation signed by my husband was to get the criminal justice system actively involved in going after people who were either supplying or using trafficked human beings. And, as I say, we’ve done some of that, but nowhere near enough. There has to be a real concerted effort. What you are doing with this program, what others need to do in the media, in law enforcement, is to make it clear that this is a crime. That we will punish to the hilt of the law. And we’re not going to rest until we do everything possible to eliminate it from our shores, at least.

Senator Hillary Rogham Clinton

Jamie Rubin: Can you talk a little bit about, you’re senator from New York now, about how this issue affects your state?

Hillary Clinton: Well, we have the global crossroads in New York City. And much of the rest of New York is equally diverse. We have people coming in and out constantly, major airports, all kinds of ingress and egress, so it’s an exciting, dynamic place. But as a result, trafficking of all kinds of contraband is something we have to be constantly on the watch for. There are a couple of programs in New York City that take care of victims of trafficking. They are very effective in trying to help victims get some assistance, recover from the experience, so we know it happens in New York as it happens everywhere in our country. And it’s something I’m going to keep the focus on. I’m going to be actively involved in the reauthorization of legislation, and we’re going to try to come up with some new ways of going after this problem.

Jamie Rubin: Last year, the United States allowed in the fewest number of legal refugees in decades, 25,000 rather than the 70 plus thousand we usually let in. What accounts for this and is it acceptable to you?

Hillary Clinton: Well, this is a very big concern of mine, because New York, as you know, is a city and a state of immigrants.

Jamie Rubin: Home of the Statue of Liberty.

Hillary Clinton: It certainly is, and I’m very proud of that. But since 9/11, both for legitimate reasons, we had to get control over our quarters. And I think for some political demagogic reasons, we have slammed the doors on so many people. We have not helped in reunifying families; we have been very miserly in taking care of people who wish to apply for citizenship. It’s been an abrupt change. I understand that, because as the senator from New York, we were also the place attacked on September 11, along with the Pentagon. So we want to be safe, we want to be secure, we want to take care of the people who already live in New York, but there has to be a better balance than what we’ve reached. And that’s going to become increasingly a big issue in a lot of parts of the country.

Jamie Rubin: The issue of women being enslaved, girls being enslaved, is really one of the most powerful aspects of this human trafficking crisis. Could you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen and why you think this is so important?

Hillary Clinton: Well, the vast majority of the human beings trafficked are women and children, mostly girl children, often very young, put into brothels as sex slaves or domestic servitude. It’s just heartbreaking and outrageous that, in the 21st century, we would see anyone treated like that. But it particularly reflects the continuing disregard of women’s rights and the way that women are considered somehow less than human in many parts of the world and how they are used for sexual purposes without any regard to their human dignity and rights. I consider this part of the unfinished business of women’s rights. There are many, many issues that are still a long way from being resolved, places where women can’t vote, can’t drive cars, can’t inherit property, can’t count on getting an education. But this is perhaps the most fundamental outrageous misuse of women, and to me it’s an issue that speaks volumes about how far we still have to go in making sure that women’s rights truly are human rights and are respected everywhere.

Jamie Rubin: Senator Clinton, thank you for joining us.

Hillary Clinton: Thank you very much.

JAMIE RUBIN: Professor Armstrong, thank you for joining us.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Nice to be here.

JAMIE RUBIN: We saw one reality in the film, the reality of two families living in Pyongyang. But there’s a different, perhaps less attractive reality outside of Pyongyang. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, this is one small slice of reality in North Korea. This is a privileged class of people. Just the fact that they live in Pyongyang means they’re privileged. Only a small percentage of the population is allowed to live in Pyongyang. Most of those are people who are members of the party and have good jobs. And people in Pyongyang are well fed, relatively speaking. They have decent housing and access to good education and so forth. Most of the rest of the country is not like that. Most of the rest of the citizens of North Korea are living pretty Spartan if not quite grim lives of inadequate services and food and so forth.

JAMIE RUBIN: In prison camps and slave labor? Is that real?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: There are probably prison camps in North Korea. After all, North Korea based its system on the Soviet Union very consciously and from what we know of that system, prison camps were quite widespread. No one knows exactly how many prisoners there are, how many camps there are. One estimate is that there are perhaps 100 to 150 thousand political prisoners in camps in North Korea. We certainly have heard a lot of defectors’ testimony in recent years that paints a very grim and even horrifying picture of life in those camps. So that is another part of the reality of North Korea.

JAMIE RUBIN: The families in the film, they seem to really show devotion to Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea. How real is that devotion?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I think for those people it is very real. And in fact, for many people in North Korea, devotion, even worship, if you want to put it that way, of the great leader and his son, the current leader of North Korea, is genuine. This is a kind of attitude that’s instilled into people almost literally from the day they are born. From a few months old they are taken away from their families for most of the week. And from the beginning of school at the age of five one of the first things they learn, one of the first sentences school children in North Korea are taught is, “Thanks to the great leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung.

JAMIE RUBIN: So it’s almost a god-like worship there.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Yes, it is. And that makes it unique. Of course, other societies, Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao tried to impress upon its citizens a similar kind of veneration of their leader. But none of them did it so consistently, so extremely, and for such a long period of time as the North Korean leadership. And when you have no alternative, when you have no other source of news, no information that tells you otherwise, people would simply have to believe it. Or certainly they could not say publicly that they didn’t believe it.

JAMIE RUBIN: They don’t have anything to compare it to.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: That’s exactly right.

JAMIE RUBIN: And when they talk to the camera and they talk about America and they talk about their views of their daily life, are they free to criticize? Is it conceivable that they could complain about their country or their status or their livelihood?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, it’s certainly not conceivable that anyone would say this publicly in front of a camera for foreign journalists. I have heard stories from others who have gone to North Korea, and I myself have come across in my visits to North Korea private conversations with people who very quietly say something that might be obliquely critical of their situation about their leadership. But no one would say that publicly. They would be in big trouble.

JAMIE RUBIN: We talked a little bit about their isolation. Maybe we could compare that to Eastern Europe — the East Germans and the Czechoslovaks, they were able to watch West German TV. How does that compare to what North Koreans see? Do they know any other world than the world that they see on Korean television?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Most do not. There are some people who probably get broadcasts from radio across the border in China or in South Korea. But if they’re ever caught doing that, they would be punished and probably go off to jail or prison camp.

JAMIE RUBIN: And that’s just a tiny percentage.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: And that is just a tiny percentage. The radios and televisions are fixed on the state-run channels. It’s a crime to adjust your set to show anything else.

JAMIE RUBIN: So it’s like George Orwell. They have to watch.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: It’s a bit like that. One would assume, and one hears from people who have come out, that there are people who doubt what they see, who will say that this doesn’t jibe with what I know of reality around me. But they are not allowed to get outside information and news to really compare that. So it’s not at all like Eastern Europe in the 1970’s or 1980’s.

JAMIE RUBIN: Let’s talk about that for a moment. Some outside analysts and some even in the Bush administration have suggested that we can provoke the collapse of North Korea, that if we give them a little outside access, if we put the squeeze on the regime, if we sanction them, that somehow we can provoke a collapse. How likely do you think that is?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I think that’s very unlikely to work at this point in time because of the very closed nature of the regime and the degree of, I think, genuine support that the people have for their leadership. How much would it take to get people to [rebel] against the regime? Well, look, in the late 1980’s we had a famine in North Korea. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps two or three million people, ten percent of the population died of starvation. And the regime is still there. What would it take to get the regime to fall? And could we take the responsibility upon ourselves to evoke anything that catastrophic?

JAMIE RUBIN: So you can’t envisage that a quarantine or a real sanctions policy will cause the collapse of the regime.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: No, not in the near term. In a future North Korea that was more open, in which people did have outside information and were able to question and criticize, then maybe that could happen as it happened in places like Romania and Albania after the fall of other Eastern European Communist states. But to impose that kind of sanction regime now, given the nature of North Korean society and the regime that’s in place currently and expect any near-term dramatic change or collapse I think would simply not work.

JAMIE RUBIN: So that’s unrealistic.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I do believe that’s unrealistic.

JAMIE RUBIN: Some people have suggested if the Chinese would agree with the United States to put a real sanctioning policy on North Korea to cut off the supplies they provide to North Korea, that would provoke change in the policies of the North Korean leader. Do you agree with that?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: It’s theoretically possible. It is also possible that if China opened up its borders and allowed any North Korean who wanted to flee to come into China, that that would also provoke a rapid change or collapse of the regime. The problem is that the Chinese are very unlikely to do that. Because the last thing they want to see is a flood of North Korean refugees coming across the border into their country in a collapse of North Korea and what that might mean for their security.

JAMIE RUBIN: The Bush administration has put great stock in having the Chinese work with us in these negotiations, in fact, to host the negotiations, on the assumption that it’s China that has this important leverage. Do you think China will use leverage against North Korea, including cutting off assistance?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I think China will and has used some leverage over North Korea. And this has helped bring North Korea to these talks. But I do not think it’s the case that China feels itself on the side of the U.S. against North Korea. They want to maintain reasonably amicable relations with North Korea. And it seems to me they see their role as being a kind of honest broker between the U.S. and North Korea.

JAMIE RUBIN: Do you think the Chinese would work with us in any sanctions policy that had as the objective to provoke the collapse of the Kim Jong Il regime?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I have difficulty foreseeing the Chinese agreeing to such an action. I think that certainly there are things that the Chinese don’t like about North Korea’s current policies. And they certainly don’t want to see a nuclear-armed North Korea with a large arsenal that would be a destabilizing force in the region. But as I said, I think what really concerns them even more than that is the unforeseeable effects of a North Korean collapse. I think they would agree to pressure to get North Korea to change its behavior, to be more open, to enter into a negotiated settlement with the U.S. But not to lead to a collapse.

JAMIE RUBIN: So if China has to choose between living with a nuclear-armed North Korea or provoking the collapse of North Korea, they’re going to choose the nuclear-armed North Korea?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I suspect that would be their choice as would be the choice of South Korea today.

JAMIE RUBIN: So in your view the United States, the South Koreans and the Chinese don’t really have joint objectives in these negotiations, or joint willingness to take it as far.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: There are different degrees of willingness, to what extreme they will go. There are three very different perspectives in the issue and how it should be resolved, yes.

JAMIE RUBIN: Let’s talk a little about the prospect of war. Many people have suggested that the United States and North Korea may move towards actual military conflict in the not too distant future. What is your assessment about the willingness of North Koreans, average North Koreans in the military, in the civilian population, to fight the United States on behalf of their leader? Will they support Kim Jong Il to the end?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: The one group in North Korean society that Kim Jong Il has been very careful to cultivate the support of and that he has made sure are well supplied with food and so forth is the army. You know, in a certain sense North Korea is a military regime, the military along with Kim Jong Il effectively runs the country. There is, I think, a great deal of support for Kim Jong Il within the military. Certainly front line soldiers are not in the best of shape. There’s perhaps a certain amount of discontent among the soldiers who see their families suffering and who might not get enough food themselves. But within the officer corps, within the elite of the military, I think the support is quite strong. The system of command that controls North Korea in my view is still quite effective. And the army would fight if provoked by the United States.

JAMIE RUBIN: So if you compared North Korea and Iraq, for example, where much of the Iraqi army and the regular army and the police just faded away during the last Gulf War. How different would that be in your view to a real military conflict between North Korea and the United States?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: North Korea is not Iraq. And I think it would be a grave mistake to assume that it is. North Korea, first of all, is a country that has in effect been fighting a war against the United States for 50 years. The entire population is inculcated with the belief that the U.S. is the enemy. They must be prepared to fight the U.S. at any time. And it is a country under siege, under continuous war mobilization. And an army that from what we’ve seen in the Korean War and their maneuvers could actually fight quite well. There are problems of surprise and so forth. I’m not saying that they would prevail over the U.S. But they would put up a much tougher fight than the Iraq army.

JAMIE RUBIN: So this would be an ugly, nasty war?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: This would be an ugly war that could result in hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.

JAMIE RUBIN: We saw anti-Americanism in the film where the families are even blaming the United States for the lights going out. Now why is that? Why do they think that Washington turned out their lights?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, the U.S. is a convenient enemy. Certainly for the regime it reflects criticism that might come against them from the population to say, well, it’s really not our fault. We’re fighting this struggle for life and death against the United States, and they’re out to get us. And any problem we have is because the U.S. is so hostile to us. There might be some people who have doubts about that. But that’s all they’ve ever been taught. And that’s probably what most of them believe.

JAMIE RUBIN: So they really believe that America is their enemy? Even the average North Korean who knows very little about us?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Certainly every North Korean I’ve ever met has expressed that belief. There is a separation, however, between what they see as the hostility of the U.S. government and ordinary Americans. And there’s a great receptivity of American NGO’s and individuals who come to help the North Koreans. And I’ve seen that firsthand with groups I’ve assisted when I’ve traveled through North Korea. But they feel that the U.S. government is indeed the enemy, particularly they see a greater hostility with this current administration. But it’s been quite consistent.

JAMIE RUBIN: When you see them believing the United States is the enemy, why are they learning English in schools?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, the U.S. is the enemy, but English is the international language. So they’re getting kind of contradictory messages from the leadership. They have to be prepared to fight the U.S. But they also have to learn business. And this is something quite new and recent that indicates there’s a certain change of mentality about economic issues in North Korea if not these political and geo-political issues.

JAMIE RUBIN: You talk about a willingness to change economically. But clearly North Korea is not behaving the way China has or Vietnam has in maintaining their Communist government, but changing their business mentality and their economics to so-called free market economics. Why haven’t they followed the Chinese or Vietnamese?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, mainly it’s because of the security situation they find themselves in, that would be too threatening to the leadership to have a serious opening up because of all these sorts of currents that would come into the country that might turn people against the regime.

JAMIE RUBIN: So it’s the security of the regime. So they’re worried about their survival.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Exactly. I mean the bottom line for Kim Jong Il and the North Korean leadership is the survival of their regime and of their personal power. And so if they saw economic change as assisting that then they might push more for economic change. And in fact, we have seen some strong indications I think that North Korea was beginning to take steps toward economic reform and opening –

JAMIE RUBIN: A couple of years ago.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Yeah. And particularly last year there were some economic changes that seemed to show that they were really serious about gradually but in reality opening the door economically.

JAMIE RUBIN: And what stopped those reforms?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, essentially it was the conflict that emerged with Japan. In September Kim Jong Il met Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi and seemed to think that this would lead to a big breakthrough diplomatically with Japan which would lead to a big influx of cash from Japan which was his real goal. That actually backfired. And in fact the negotiations toward diplomacy between Japan and North Korea have stalled. But the real problem then was the conflict with the United States. So those moves toward opening are on hold essentially until a resolution to this current crisis is reached.

JAMIE RUBIN: Well, let’s talk about the nuclear crisis. North Korea is obviously a very poor country. And yet they seem to be spending much of their scarce resources on building a nuclear weapon. Why do they want a nuclear weapon? Why is that so crucial to the regime?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, what’s crucial to the regime is their self-defense and what they see as a very hostile environment, particularly vis-a-vis the United States. And over the last ten years or so they seem to have become convinced that a very good way to defend your country without utilizing a lot of scarce resources is nuclear weapons.

JAMIE RUBIN: So it’s defense on the cheap, nuclear weapons.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Exactly. It’s a deterrent as they see it.

JAMIE RUBIN: When they put forward their nuclear program as a bargaining chip, if you do this we will stop developing nuclear weapons, that suggests that they are prepared to give it up. Do you think North Korea will ever give up their nuclear weapons capability?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: I think that they will give it up for the right price as it were. I think that they will always want to have some reserve potential to develop a nuclear deterrent if necessary. But in the meantime, I think they would be willing to freeze or even dismantle their current program or most of it in exchange for some kind of security insurance that they would not be threatened in the same way as they see they are now by the outside and by the U.S. in particular.

JAMIE RUBIN: They signed the non-proliferation treaty that said thou shalt not develop nuclear weapons. And yet they did. Why shouldn’t the United States see their development of a nuclear weapon as blackmail?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, it is so far not actually the development of a nuclear weapon but as it were, the threat to develop a nuclear weapon. And it seems to me that there are probably two different schools of thought within the North Korean leadership. One is that we need this nuclear deterrent at any cost because we’ll never be able to trust any agreement with the United States. And the other is that the nuclear program is most useful as a bargaining chip. And I think that there is not complete consensus, I suspect, within the North Korean leadership about how to use that. But the trend now, much more than in 1994 –

JAMIE RUBIN: That was the last time the U.S. and the North Koreans negotiated an agreement.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: With the last agreement over North Korea’s nuclear program is that the North Koreans seem to be farther along and more serious about developing a nuclear arsenal.

JAMIE RUBIN: Now they’re more serious.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Now they’re more serious. And in the meantime they’ve seen India and Pakistan go nuclear without any serious repercussions so they probably feel that they should be able to get away with it, too.

JAMIE RUBIN: Well, let’s talk about trust. They don’t trust the United States. But many people believe if we were to get an agreement with North Korea to stop developing nuclear weapons, it would require extensive inspections. Any time, anywhere U.N. inspectors could run around North Korea to test whether they have weapons. Can you envisage this police state allowing inspectors the run of the place to prove they don’t have nuclear weapons?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, that would be a very difficult thing to pull off. I do think that the North Koreans would open their country up considerably, perhaps not as much as outsiders would like, but much more than they have been in the past to inspections of nuclear facilities. Again, within the framework of an agreement that gave them a greater sense of security and of economic connections. It would be very difficult to reach this agreement. It would take some time. But I think it could be done.

JAMIE RUBIN: Tell us a little bit about this phenomenon of the mass games where they put incredible effort into this pageantry. Is this something unique to Kim Jong Il’s North Korea? Or is it a tradition there?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, this is something that North Korea has practiced for a long time, going back to the late ’40’s when the regime was founded. They borrowed some techniques from actually holdovers from the Japanese colonial period — a kind of these sort of fascist pageantries. And they learned a lot from the Soviet Union in putting on these public spectacles. And North Korea also followed China — under Mao, which had similar things. But North Korea carried this to an extreme — that no other country in the world has done. Everything is perfectly choreographed. Everything is on a monumental scale. And this is characteristic of North Korea. I mean everything needs to be in its place. Everything needs to be lavished to show the outside world that everything is very tightly controlled.

JAMIE RUBIN: Do North Koreans or Koreans in that part of the world have any tradition of understanding the outside world? Tell us a little bit about the history of this peninsula.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, you have to keep in mind that Koreans in North Korea have never experienced anything but authoritarian rule. And that’s unique. Even other Communist states in East Asia had some exposure to Western countries, to democracy and so forth. North Korea never had that. They went straight from a very isolated and very authoritarian Confucian kingdom in traditional times which was quite resistant to outside pressure and influences to a monarchy. But which was called the Hermit Kingdom by the Westerners because it was so isolated even compared to other East Asian countries, which were also isolated. It went straight from that to colonization by Japan from 1910 to 1945, which was very harsh, very militaristic, and also very isolated, certainly had no elements of democracy at all. And then from there to Stalinism, to control by the Soviet Union, essentially a kind of adaptation of a Stalinist system to the North Korean environment. That’s all the Koreans in North Korea have ever known. And there has never been any exposure to liberalism, to democratic systems.

JAMIE RUBIN: Let’s talk a little bit about the nuclear challenge the Bush administration faces. You say that you think North Korea is prepared to give up its nuclear program for the right price. What do you think their bottom line is? What does the United States have to do to eliminate this nuclear threat?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, I would put it this way. What does North Korea want at this time? And I think what they want, what they’ve said they want, and I think it is probably what they really do want is two things. Some kind of security assurance that makes them feel that the U.S. is no longer the kind of hostile power that it has been, whether it’s a peace treaty or other sort of guarantee from the U.S. Of non-aggression. I think that is a genuine desire and would go a long way toward alleviating their concerns. And the other is, as they put it, the U.S. not hindering their economic development. In other words, North Korea is on the verge, I think, of serious steps toward economic reform. It has a long way to go. But it’s prepared to begin on that road.

JAMIE RUBIN: So a lifting of economic sanctions.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: And so they want the lifting of sanctions, assistance in joining international financial organizations, economic aid and trade and so forth. I think that is what they want. And I would say that if they reach an agreement with the U.S. and other countries, that gives them the opportunity to get those things in a very concrete way then they would be prepared to dismantle their nuclear program.

JAMIE RUBIN: But paradoxically you’ve suggested that if we open up to North Korea, if we lift sanctions, if we penetrate their society, that’s the most likely way in which the regime will change.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Exactly. And they seem to be willing to take that risk. So it’s a risk on both sides. Are we willing to give them that opening which will help the regime in the short run in order to have serious and positive changes in the long run, which might not take very long given a regime that has been so isolated and may be so brittle, it might not take much of an opening to really get things to happen very quickly there.

JAMIE RUBIN: So you think North Korea’s regime can collapse but not by containment, not by sanctions, but by opening up to the West?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: It might not collapse immediately. But it could certainly change in what most people would see as a positive direction much more likely through opening than through pressure.

JAMIE RUBIN: Let’s say we can’t come to an agreement and North Korea goes forward with its threat to test nuclear weapons. By the way, do you think they will test nuclear weapons?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: They’ve been threatening to. And they may do that.

JAMIE RUBIN: Well, let’s say they were to do that. And the United States were to follow through on its declaration that this is intolerable. That would mean a military strike. Do you foresee that possibility?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: It certainly is a possibility. And the North Koreans in a way have been preparing for that contingency for 50 years. They are a country prepared and constantly talking about it, thinking about what it would mean to fight a war with the United States. It’s not like Iraq. It would be a much bloodier and much more destructive conflict.

JAMIE RUBIN: The logic of attacking North Korea’s nuclear capabilities envisages an air strike on one of these facilities, and then North Korea not responding because they would fear a war which would end their regime. Can you envisage North Korea not responding to an American air strike?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: No. I cannot imagine that North Korea would accept an American air strike and not retaliate. Exactly how they would retaliate we don’t know. Most likely they would send artillery against the South. They would try to hit American bases, possibly even in Japan. But they would certainly strike back. I can’t imagine a scenario in which they would not.

JAMIE RUBIN: And if the war got worse could you envisage North Korea using nuclear weapons if they have them?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: In the circumstances where they felt that that was the only alternative to destruction, then they might very well use nuclear weapons against local targets, that is against American facilities somewhere in East Asia. But they would certainly hold that possibility in reserve.

JAMIE RUBIN: President Bush has spoken very strongly about his views about Kim Jong Il. He said, “I loathe Kim Jong Il.” Some of his officials have followed that up with very, very direct attacks on the leader. What impact do you think this kind of personal attack on the leader has on their willingness to negotiate an end to this crisis?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, it certainly doesn’t help matters. The North Koreans respond usually immediately with nasty words about the U.S. and sometimes about the president and other top leaders. But in a way, perhaps the North Koreans see this as the U.S. finally being honest about the way it –

JAMIE RUBIN: So it’s true what they’re saying, these officials, largely?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: And that it doesn’t matter. In other words, that the North Koreans — the way they deal with things follows the logic that what you say is one thing. You can’t not help but make disparaging remarks about the other party because that’s the relationship you have. But you can still enter into an agreement that would be mutually satisfactory.

JAMIE RUBIN: The North Korean broadcasts about America — aren’t they vitriolic and spewing out the most nasty kind of language?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Exactly. So they feel that we do that, and now we see the Americans doing the same thing to us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t negotiate and agree on resolving these issues diplomatically.

JAMIE RUBIN: In the film we see an almost unreal description of the Korean War. Do North Koreans understand that North Korea started the war? And why do they think the war is still going on?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: What North Koreans have been taught since the war began, what they said in fact immediately after the war started, is that the U.S. started the war. The U.S. and South Korea attacked across the 38th parallel. It’s almost exactly the reverse of what –

JAMIE RUBIN: Of what really happened, right.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: But since that’s the only thing they’ve ever been taught and most of the people who were involved in the war are now gone, that’s probably what most people believe. So they think the U.S. started the war and that the U.S. could be ready at any time to attack them again.

JAMIE RUBIN: But through none of their lifetimes has there been any military conflict. So why do they really think the war is still on?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Well, fundamentally it’s because Korea is divided. They see that their country, which they think should be one country, is divided into two. The American military is in the South. North Koreans are taught that South Korea is basically a puppet state of the U.S., run by the U.S. military. And that that is the fundamental issue North Koreans are taught over and over again, that unification is the goal, and the Americans are the obstacle. And this is why the war is not yet over.

JAMIE RUBIN: We see a lot of hostility directed against the United States in the film. Is America the only country that gets this kind of treatment? Or are there others?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: America is the main enemy. But I would say that deep down the people that the North Koreans dislike even more are the Japanese.

JAMIE RUBIN: Because of the occupation.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: The occupation and — Kim Il Sung, the first leader of North Korea, came out of this as a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese. And this was their big struggle along with the Korean War, fighting Japanese colonialism. So the two big enemies are the United States now. But also North Koreans are taught to believe that the Japanese deep down are militaristic people who, if you gave them a chance, would also take hostilities against North Korea. So it’s really the Americans and the Japanese who are the enemy. The other Westerners, Europeans, they’re very far away. They don’t really have an impact on North Koreans’ thinking. So it’s really the U.S. and Japan.

JAMIE RUBIN: Professor Armstrong, thank you for joining us.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG: Thank you.

July 10, 2003: Richard Haass discusses democracy in the Middle East with host Jamie Rubin.

Jamie Rubin: We’re now joined by Richard Haass, the new president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has just left his job as policy planning director at the State Department. You’ve pushed very hard during your time there for democracy in the Middle East. Richard, you’ve seen this film. It shows a yearning for independent media in the Arab world. Do you think there’s a broader yearning for democratic freedom?

Richard Haass: I actually think there is. A lot of my information is anecdotal, but also we see it in some of the polls. I think there’s a widespread sense that people want to see more democratic systems. I think a lot of people in the Arab world are almost tired of not being respected. I think there’s a certain level almost — if the word’s too strong I apologize — but maybe shame. So, yeah, I think that there is a sense that they can handle it. They — through their television, through their radio, through their newspapers — they see a lot of what goes on in the rest of the world. There’s much greater readiness, at least in principle — practice might be something else.

Jamie Rubin: You talked in one of your speeches at the State Department about the democratic exception in the Arab world. Can you tell us a little bit about why you think this part of the world has not followed Asia, Africa, Latin America? Not had more democracy in the Middle East?

Richard Haass: It’s a big question. It’s a tough question. Some might even say it’s an awkward question, Jamie. I think it has something to do with, perhaps, the lack of historical experience. Some would say it has something to do with the religion itself, that where in Islam there is not the same concept of a separation, if you will, of mosque and state that there is in other religions. So you don’t have the divides that you sometimes need in a democratic society. Others would point to problems with education, a history of some discrimination against girls and women, I’m not sure.

All I can say is the facts speak for themselves. That this is a part of the world that’s essentially missed out not only on the democratic revolution, but also on the market economic revolution. And clearly the lack of progress on both the political and economic tracts have reinforced each other, but in the wrong way.

Jamie Rubin: Now over time the United States government has tended to be reluctant to talk about promoting democracy in the Middle East. You said in your speech that republican and democratic presidents alike have been reluctant to do so. Why was that?

Richard Haass: I think it was a calculation. I think, in retrospect, it was understandable even if it wasn’t always wise. I think we were reluctant to essentially upset the status quo, to rock the boat. Here it was, we had these countries willing to give us large amounts of oil, not give it but to produce it. We had countries that were willing to work with us, whether the threat was Iraq or somebody else. We had countries willing to work with us on the so-called peace process between Israelis and Palestinians or Arabs. And the general feeling was let’s make sure we have the foreign policy cooperation with them that we want and need, and, in exchange, we will look the other way when it comes to their domestic policies. I think that was the basic understanding.

Jamie Rubin: So now during the Bush Administration under your leadership and Secretary Powell’s leadership, there’s a new sense that we need to push Middle East democracy. Are we worried that the status quo is unacceptable? Why is now the time to do this?

Richard Haass: I’ll admit I did not come into the job thinking that this was something we should push, but for me it was one of the things that changed as a result of 9/11. And I began to think hard and talk to a lot of experts — why were these people coming from these societies? And the more I talked to people who really knew deeply about the societies, such themes as the lack of economic opportunity, the lack of political participation, the real alienation of individuals that these societies were producing, the lack of a good education. And you added all these things up, and I got the sense that we can only deal with terrorism by — among other things — dealing with the societies that were producing radicals or potentially even terrorists. It wasn’t enough just to think about our military responses or the Department of Homeland Security. Yes, that’s all necessary, but we had to get at the root cause. And the only way I knew to get at the root cause was to begin to help these societies reform, to open up, so these young men, in particular, weren’t alienated but instead felt attachments to their societies.

Jamie Rubin: And you’re no longer worried about breaking the status quo, about the stability of these regimes, about whether our client states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, countries we have good relationships with, might have new governments that would be a problem?

Richard Haass: It’s going to happen. They will have new governments down the road and sometimes these will be a problem. We saw just recently, as you know, in Turkey when an Islamic government didn’t give us the kind of support we wanted in the case of the recent war with Iraq. I would simply say that’s the price we’ve got to pay. We will sometimes pay a price of some lack of support or even opposition, but I think it’s smart because otherwise what we risk are, yes, client governments. But, on the other hand, if we don’t see evolutionary change, we may see revolutionary change.

And I think that’s a trade-off we have to make. But I’m aware that what will happen in some occasions is that we will have governments come into power who will give us heartburn that won’t give us the base access we want. They may not have the economic cooperation we want, but in the long run because they enjoy greater support, greater legitimacy in the eyes of their own people, I think they’ll be less vulnerable to revolutions, and less vulnerable to extreme anti-Americanism.

Jamie Rubin: Do you see now the United States, the world, having a moment of opportunity in the Middle East? We have Saddam Hussein gone, the most anti-democratic leader perhaps in the region. The United States is there. There are other developments. Is this a moment of opportunity for democracy in the Middle East?

Richard Haass: I think there is. One thing you yourself just mentioned, which was the defeat of Iraq, getting rid of one of the tyrants of actual as well as symbolic power — also we ourselves are talking about these issues more. But I think there are some other things that are affecting it as well. One is this film, the growth of free Arab media, and that’s adding to the debate. This part of the world can’t remain isolated. Things like the Internet matter. Ideas travel across borders no matter what governments want them to do. And just the other year, you had this Arab report, the Human Development Report provided by the United Nations, and here you had 35 or so Arab intellectuals, real academic experts. And you’re seeing a degree of self-awareness and self-criticism that suggests to me that the situation is more ripe for the kind of democratic change we want to see now than it’s ever been before.

Jamie Rubin: In Iraq, the United States is obviously having some difficulties dealing with the post-Saddam situation — the chaos, the building of a representative government. Is it a possibility that this could send the wrong message that a democratic government in Iraq might be an unstable government or chaos might spread in the region as a result of this kind of change?

Richard Haass: It’s a good point. To me, it just adds to the stakes that we have to get it right in Iraq. If we get it right and if Iraq becomes something of a showcase or showpiece, it clearly has really positive ripple effects throughout the region. It becomes something of a model, an example. It also helps reduce anti-Americanism, so our voice is listened to. Indeed, just as an aside, one of the many reasons for us to push progress between Israelis and Palestinians is again it reduces anti-Americanism and it gives us a hearing on the issues that that you and I are talking about.

But if things like Iraq go badly, if people come to associate democracy with anarchy, with poverty, with instability, you name it, then I think it will be a real step backwards. Because one of the old lines that tyrants or authoritarians use is, “OK, you may not have as much freedom as you want but at least the trains run on time, the electricity’s there, the water’s there, you can walk safely at night.” So to me that’s just one of the many reasons that the stakes are enormous in what happens in Iraq.

Jamie Rubin: With your initiative and Secretary Powell’s initiative on democracy in the Middle East, programs were developed, the Middle East Partnership you developed. Can you tell us a little bit about that partnership and how you hope to make democracy flourish through it?

Richard Haass:The Middle East Partnership Initiative was really what it suggests. There was an increase in foreign assistance in foreign aid. And the idea was to devote resources to those governments and those programs that were making real reform efforts economically — to introduce, say, the rule of law, or something that would give girls real educational opportunity, or something that would help create something, say a new newspaper. And the idea is to target our aid, not just let it go in general in the hopes that somehow a rising tide would lift all boats, but to really target the aid to try to open up these societies.

Jamie Rubin: You mentioned some programs through the Middle East Partnership, could you explain how these programs could really develop more political culture in the Arab world? How would that actually work?

Richard Haass: Well, these are societies that don’t have a tradition of independent institutions. The government tends to be the real funder, but I can imagine a situation where you would have civic associations. We have PTAs; we have think tanks; we have free media. We take so much for granted in this society where the government actually controls very little. It’s one of the reasons that American democracy is so robust, that a big chunk of our society in the economic sector and the social sector is beyond the control of government. Our education institutions are another example. Well that’s what we can do. We can help these societies develop not simply the rule of law which would help stamp out corruption and all that, but we can help launch independent institutions and that’s the key in many ways, that’s the foundation for a democratic society.

Jamie Rubin: But having these programs funded by the United States, is there a danger or a downside that they have a “Made in America” stamp on them, and that they may backfire in some of these places?

Richard Haass: In some cases there could be, and I think we have to be sensitive. Also this is not something the U.S. government should do alone. There’s a role here for other governments, the European Union obviously can have a major role, the Japanese government. Also it doesn’t have to suddenly be our government. Why not American foundations? Why can’t American schools set up special relationships with schools and universities in that part of the world? Why can’t labor unions, why can’t political parties, why can’t the national democratic institutions in this country help? There’s so much that we can do not simply by example, but also by active support.

Jamie Rubin: Real partnerships.

Richard Haass: Real partnerships across the board, and it shouldn’t be limited to the U.S. government, you make a good point.

Jamie Rubin: What other steps can the United States government make? Can the President, the Secretary of State in their conversations with the key leaders in the region, President Mubarak of Egypt for example or Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, should they be directly urging, pressuring these governments to make democratic changes?

Richard Haass: Up to a point, yes. I mean traditionally when American presidents or secretaries of state meet their foreign counterparts in this part of the world, we talk about Israel and Palestinians. We talk about oil. We talk about, in the past, Saddam Hussein, or now we’ll talk about Iran and nuclear weapons, and we’ve got to do all that. On the other hand, we now have to add an agenda item, and we basically have to say this: “As your friend, we want to say we have to help you evolve. Clearly, you are on a trajectory where you are not providing political and economic satisfaction to your people, this is a dangerous situation for your society. And as we learned at 9/11, it’s a dangerous situation for our society, so we have to be partners in this.” So to give you a bumper sticker phrase: I think reform is something we need to do with these governments, with these leaders, rather than to them.

Jamie Rubin: When you look at the billions of dollars that the United States has provided to certain countries like Egypt and other Arab countries over the years — and we still give huge amounts of foreign assistance — should we directly tie that aid to specific progress in developing democracy in those countries?

Richard Haass: I’ll say two things. I think the aid that we give, if we give it say for security reasons and all that, we should continue it. But we want to make sure that we follow the Hippocratic oath and that the aid we give does no harm. So we want to make sure that it doesn’t discourage or undermine economic reform. For example, we have to be careful that we don’t subsidize bad economic practices, so I think that we have to, first of all, make sure our aid does nothing bad, but I don’t think we want to cut it off. What we do want to do is incentivize. What we do want to do is say, “Hey, here’s an extra hundred million dollars, choose ten million dollars — whatever the relevant number is — and we will make this available to you if you introduce this amount of rule of law, or you work with us in stamping out corruption.” So what we will do is essentially begin to target the aid for specific projects that we believe are very much consistent with our reform as goals.

Jamie Rubin: One of the institutions in the Middle East that the reformers there — the members of the burgeoning civil society — point to is the security services, their ability to pretty much do what they want in most of these countries. If we’re giving aid to these organizations aren’t we strengthening the very institutions that are suppressing people’s desires and hopes?

Richard Haass: When we give aid we don’t give it as a blank check. We don’t simply put a hundred million dollars or fifty million dollars in the bank account of the police chief of another country. What we should do is give the aid but give the aid in ways that actually professionalize these groups. For example, why don’t we give the kind of training that we alone or we uniquely can give that would help, for example, institutionalize civilian authority in the military, or really teach police to exercise restraint to follow the rule of law and so forth? So I think we actually make a mistake in places historically like we did in Indonesia. We did it in Pakistan where we get upset with, say, a military coup. For good reason we get upset with a military coup or for the abuse of power by a military. So what do we do? Often our reflexive reaction is to shut down the very sorts of training and cooperation programs that, I think, are our best way to influence the next generation coming up in the police and military services of this country. So when we have problems with these countries, I would say actually expand the training, expand the aid, but again make it conditional, make it focused, make it targeted, don’t just give it but actually work with them.

Jamie Rubin: You’ve made a powerful case for why the United States has a chance to promote democracy in the Middle East. Are you worried that, in some cases, it won’t be in our interests? Could you tell us why you think promoting democracy in the Middle East is in America’s interests?

Richard Haass:It is in our interests because in the long run democratic societies tend to be more stable, they’re more flexible, they’re more resilient, they are much less prone to violent revolutionary or radical change which history suggests tends to be violent and ends up in repression. Also history suggests that democracies made better partners. They tend to be more peaceful in their approaches to their neighbors, partly because people tend to want more normal lives, and the average person doesn’t want a life of strife. But I think we have to be smart and careful in the way we go about it.

We can’t simply have one model of democracy we export and say just because it works here, it’s going to work there. We can’t do it overnight, we have to overcome our American tendency toward impatience. And I would say a key thing is we have to be very careful not to confuse democracy with elections. Yes, elections are one important dimension of democracy and ultimately they have to be included, but they’re not the first thing. Long before you have elections you have constitutions, you have separation of powers, you have strong institutions that the government controls. What you want to avoid are “winner take all” outcomes. And the only way that I know to avoid them is to make sure that the society is robust and that within the government you have certain types of checks and balances, and then again you have checks and balances between the government and the rest of society.

So again, we’ve got to be very careful. We’ve got to be smart because promoting democracy is a tricky business and we’ve got to be very sensitive to the local conditions and simply not try to accomplish too much too soon.

Jamie Rubin: What other institutions have to be created, beyond just having an election, for you to have a sustainable and successful democracy?

Richard Haass: Well, history is comparative. Looking at other countries suggests that economics is real important, a free market. If people are free to make economic and business decisions, that gives them a real stake in independence. For example, throughout much of Asia, in Korea, and places like that, economic evolution was a prerequisite and then a foundation for political reform. It’s one of the reasons I think you’re seeing the emphasis on economic reform in the Middle East, on free trade agreements, on anticorruption rule of law arrangements and all that. I think that’s real important. I think more generally what you want to do is look at education and make sure that education doesn’t simply consist of memorizing text. But you want an education that not only makes people more informed but teaches them to question.

You want a citizenry that learns the culture of questioning what governments are doing. You want to have a free and independent media. Again you had a lot on al-Jazeera in this film that’s important. The answer there is not simply one independent television network, you want to have five or ten. You want to have five or ten independent newspapers and radio stations. You want to get government not to control in any way the Internet. In a democratic society the more you distribute power, the more you distribute authority, the more you safeguard the individual.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about free media and how you build that. Al-Jazeera is obviously just one example, there’s Middle East Broadcasting, Abu-Dhabi TV. But in general there is a perception that most citizens in the Arab world do not read a free media. They don’t see the true facts. They tend to get opinions or conspiracy theories in their media. What can we do to try to change that, to create a responsible professional media there?

Richard Haass: I think the key is television. Based on everything I’ve seen, TV now is far more powerful than newspaper or radio or the Internet. So I would focus on television. I would argue for as many different television networks, satellites, what have you, as you can. I would try to make the kind of things that say, the BBC does, available — independent Western media. We have American networks that are seen around the world, increasingly I think that ought to be good. I would bring their journalists over here. One thing is to train people, to let them see how a truly independent media operates, what’s the standards of professionalism. We ought to either invite young people from this part of the world over to our journalism schools or I would love to see an American journalism school perhaps set up a campus, in that part of the world, to help again inculcate those kinds of values.

So I think there’s lots of things we can do immediately with the current media, but I also think we need to think about the long-term because ultimately media is technology. What matters more is the attitude and the culture in which it operates.

Jamie Rubin: We’ve talked a little bit about the value of a free press, but in certain cases, al-Jazeera, for example, this independent media tends to be an inflammatory media, in certain cases. Isn’t there a risk that some of these independent organs will tend to exaggerate the worst instincts of the majority rather than bringing moderation?

Richard Haass: Sure. A free press is free to be irresponsible. In our society some of our press is irresponsible. I think that comes with the turf. The best way I know to protect or guard yourself against that is to have more than one television network, more than one newspaper. Ultimately, if you have variety people will begin to see what can be trusted and who can’t.

Jamie Rubin: In the appeal of these independent television stations, we’re clearly seeing a yearning for unfiltered news, nongovernment-controlled news. Where do you see a yearning for broader political freedom? Have you identified places where things are changing?

Richard Haass: I’ve seen all sorts of experiments. There was a book many years ago produced about the States, in this country, and it was called LABORATORIES OF DEMOCRACY. The theme of the book was that at the state level was where you could see interesting things happening, interesting experiments if you will, which then ultimately would make their way into the federal government. We’re beginning to see that around the Middle East. So one’s seeing different, let’s say, experiments with municipal elections in a place like Morocco or one is seeing some very interesting political changes throughout the smaller countries of the Persian Gulf, the Kuwaits, the Bahrains, and so forth, the United Arab Emirates. Where one’s not seeing as much change is in the big places, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and so forth.

But to me what’s interesting is the smaller places, these smaller experiments — and I should include Jordan in them as well. What I think you’ll see is perhaps some mimicking ultimately that some of the bigger countries who are more cautious are going to watch what happens elsewhere. And it’s possible that over time we’ll see them beginning to introduce, in part because their own people will also see these changes going on elsewhere and there will be a positive imitation effect.

Jamie Rubin: Saudi Arabia is probably the case that most often comes up in this regard, their leader, Crown Prince Abdullah has called for a reform package. Why is he doing this? Is it self-preservation? Is it that they really want to give more democracy or political reform to the people? What’s your sense of his motivation?

Richard Haass: I think Crown Prince Abdullah is a wise man. And I think he’s taken to heart a lesson in another book I’ve read called THE LEOPARD, where one of the characters says to another, “But don’t you understand, uncle, things must change if we want them to stay the same.” And I think the Crown Prince understands that if Saudi Arabia in the future is going to bear any resemblance to Saudi Arabia today it’s got to change. The level of corruption can’t continue, the lack of political liberty can’t continue, the lack of free media can’t continue, the lack of real economic opportunity can’t. This is a country that used to be one of the world’s wealthiest, and the standard of living has declined regularly and dramatically over the passed decade or two. Unemployment now is rampant.

So here is a gentleman, the Crown Prince, who clearly understands that this society will either begin to reform gradually, will evolve, or it will be ripe for revolution. And the last time there was a massive revolution in the Middle East it was Iran, and for the last several decades the people of Iran and indeed the people of the region have paid an enormous price.

Jamie Rubin: What are the obstacles? How hard is this going to be in this part of the world?

Richard Haass: Extraordinarily hard. As you might expect, the obstacles are all those who have a stake in the status quo. He was clearly blocked by other members of the royal family who don’t want to lose their advantages, their patronage, their positions and so forth. This has been a pretty good system, shall we say, from their point of view. Often you have conservative people like you do in any society who are afraid of change, could be for religious reasons, could be for philosophical reasons. But, by and large, those who are advantaged in any society tend to oppose — maybe that’s too strong of a word — but at least be wary of change.

Also, there’s not an awful lot of good examples out there. It’s hard to point to five or ten, indeed it’s hard to point to even one flourishing democracy in the Arab world. So the argument that if we open things up, we will have instability and everyone will suffer is still a powerful argument, which is why again we need to see some positive examples, hopefully in Iraq, hopefully elsewhere. But I think you have to expect that there will be powerful social and personal and political forces opposed to opening up — be it politically or economically — in Saudi Arabia or everywhere else.

Jamie Rubin: One of the biggest fears for the United States is that if we had real elections in this part of the world, the most anti-American elements, the Islamists, would win. Isn’t that a real risk for us?

Richard Haass: Sure, it’s one of the reasons that you don’t make elections the first step in a democratization process, because the Islamists and anti-Americans will win if that were to happen. And the reason is that you’ve essentially had an absence of political life. Often the mosque is the one place that the government hasn’t been able to control. And if you suddenly take the wraps off, the only groups of people who have been politically active and are prepared to exploit the opening will often be the most conservative religious groups in the society. It’s one of the reasons, therefore, that you’ve got to go about democratization gradually and you’ve got to do it intelligently. And that’s why you don’t hold national elections on day one. That might not be until year five or year ten. But between now and then, you improve the educational system, you set up independent media, or create an environment where independent media has a chance, you train people in political activity, you invite in Americans and Europeans to help and so forth. It’s a real mistake to equate an electocracy with a democracy. It’s a very, very different thing.

Jamie Rubin: But in the end there are Islamist groups that are strong and they can win these elections and put in government that will be hostile to American interests, won’t they?

Richard Haass: For sure, we just saw it in Turkey where you had an Islamic party win an election. In Pakistan, you recently had Islamic parties win several of the provincial elections and do very well at the national level. And I think what you’ve got to say to yourself is two things. One is if they win, have we made sure that you can’t have a situation of one man, one vote, one time? Have you built in enough bulwarks so that they still have to duel with independent sources of opposition in and out of government? That’s the key thing it cannot be a winner-take-all situation.

Secondly, you do have to be prepared sometimes to take some criticism. I think in our long-term interests in institutionalizing democracy around the world, we have to accept that it’s going to mean that we’re going to get governments who are not going to be clients. They’re going to be real democratic countries, which means they’re going to disagree with us. By the way, that’s what happens with our European friends and that’s what happens with our Asian friends. So we don’t have clients, we don’t have rubber-stamp governments out there, but in the long run you avoid revolutionary change, you tend to avoid the dramatic black-to-white changes. So if it means you have to put up with some static, you have to put up with some friction and opposition, but I think on balance that’s a price worth paying for us.

Jamie Rubin: Isn’t it odd that the places where we have the worst relationship with the governments, like Iran, we have the best relationship with the people? And good relations with the government, Egypt, we have the worst relationships with the people? Why is that?

Richard Haass: It is odd, and it’s worrisome and I take it as a signal. And I think the reason is that a lot of the people are frustrated by their lack of political and economic opportunity in these countries. And I don’t think their own government could do it to them, could survive, quite bluntly, without the support of the United States.

So they tend to blame us, also because often they don’t have the freedom to criticize their own governments so it’s much easier to stand up in the main square of town and shout anti-American slogans. But I think behind that is a feeling that if the United States had a different policy, that their own governments would react differently. So I actually think we are held accountable for the lack of freedom. In the long run that’s bad because that will create a kind of alienation against the United States and that’s not healthy for us.

Jamie Rubin: Reformers in the Middle East often talk about inconsistency, that governments that are our friends we tend to minimize our criticism, governments that are our enemies we maximize our criticism when it comes to democratic issues. Aren’t we still doing that today even with your best efforts and the best efforts of Secretary Powell? Don’t we tend to go easier on our friends when it comes to democracy?

Richard Haass: There’s possibly some inconsistency but I think in foreign policy at times inconsistency is a virtue. Normally with your friends you have a whole number of issues and a whole number of stakes, and you don’t often have the luxury of bringing down the entire relationship simply because you disagree with what they’re doing in the area of political reform. You may be working with them on all sorts of security and economic projects, but where our foreign policy gets interesting, but also difficult, is how you balance your various priorities. When you have countries where governments who are adversaries you don’t have the same complexity, you’re against them in all sorts of things they’re doing, and you also tend to be against what it is they actually are, so in some ways it’s simpler. So I wouldn’t say it’s not inconsistency out of hypocrisy, it’s more an inconsistency out of really policy necessity.

Jamie Rubin: You pushed the idea of political reform in the Middle East by the United States government you’ve now just left. Are there any regrets you have? Any things you wish President Bush, Colin Powell, the government as a whole had given a higher priority to or done more to achieve these objectives?

Richard Haass: It won’t surprise you, I wouldn’t quite answer it that way. I’m actually pleased that this issue is now on the agenda, and I think what remains is to really implement it. And what that means is putting the resources in year in year out and creating a real compact between democrats and republicans, Congress and the executive branch so we do this not simply for one or two years but for ten or twenty years. It also means that when the president or the secretary or others go to a foreign country, this issue gets real prominence on the agenda, it’s not somehow lost, because we’re so focused on the Palestinian question.

It means speaking out publicly. I think it’s important that diplomacy not simply be private or secret. I think the people of these societies need to see what the United States thinks, what it is we stand for. I think we pay a price at times for our silence, which is then interpreted as a kind of hypocrisy. But, no, I’m actually impressed how far we’ve come. A few years ago this stuff wasn’t spoken, and ironically enough it maybe took 9/11 to give us a kick. OK, we’ve learned our lesson a very hard and expensive way. But I think over the last two years, you’re beginning to see the institutionalization of this kind of a policy — the new millennium challenge assistance initiative, which will give much greater amounts of foreign aid to countries which institute political and economic reform, the Middle East Partnership Initiative. You’re seeing new people in the U.S. government who actually now have the full-time job of implementing this sort of a policy. So I actually think we’ve come a long way pretty fast, and the real challenge now is to essentially institutionalize it and for a long time.

Let me give you a slightly different answer, also. During the Cold War, we had a real battle for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world. Well, think of this in some ways similarly. We now have a battle for the hearts and minds of people in the Arab and Islamic world. We have to try to encourage concepts of open-mindedness, of moderation, of liberalness in the classic sense, of toleration, so people are willing to accept differences, and when they have differences, not turn to force. In order to try to create those kinds of attitudes, I think we’re involved in a long, long struggle, where we’ve really got to get inside these societies and work with citizens throughout this part of the world in having them build institutions and begin to change their societies from within. We can help this process but this needs to be a long-term American foreign policy priority.

Jamie Rubin: Richard Haass, thank you for joining us on WIDE ANGLE.

Richard Haass: Thank you.

Jamie Rubin: Senator Mitchell, thank you for joining us here on Wide Angle. We’ve just seen a very powerful film about ethnic violence, religious violence in India. Why do you think the American people and the American government should be concerned about this kind of extreme violence in India?

Senator Mitchell: If there’s a lesson from 9/11, it is that what happens in rural parts of the world can have an effect here in the United States, on 9/11 the dramatic, violence, tragic event of which had its origins half way around the world. In fact, in a place very close to India, in Pakistan. The relations between Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, of course, is part of the larger conflict between India and Pakistan. They once were part of the same entity, divided when they gained their independence from Britain. And still was the subject of considerable tension and violence as this show has demonstrated, but complicated, compounded by the factor that both India and Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons. There is a lot of attention these days to the Middle East and Iraq. It is a credible argument that what is happening in India and Pakistan is even more critical to our future, given the numbers of people, given the explosive nature of the tensions and given the possession of nuclear weapons. So I think Americans should care a lot about what goes on on the Indian subcontinent.

Jamie Rubin: In the film, we see the extent of the hatred that seems to exist between peoples as much as between their leaders. Even during the Cold War, the American people and the Soviet Union’s people were not as angry at each other as perhaps their governments were. When people suggest that nuclear weapons might be used in anger in the Indian subcontinent, do you think part of it is the dehumanization of the other populations?

Senator Mitchell: Yes, of course, it is. I think there are two factors involved. First, of course, the dehumanization of opponents is not unique to that conflict, nor is it new in human history. I was a very young boy during the Second World War and I can still recall the dehumanization of Germans and Japanese here in this country. A few years later, after I graduated from college, I went to Germany as a young man, as an U.S. Army intelligence officer and I can recall thinking I was surprised, gee, they’re just like us.

Jamie Rubin: (Laughs)

Senator Mitchell: This wasn’t what I remembered from my earlier days, as a kid during the Second World War. So dehumanization is a part of conflict and has been throughout human history and will continue. The second factor, which is I think what makes it hard for Americans to understand, is that almost all Americans think of themselves first as Americans. They don’t think of themselves as first Protestants or Catholics or Jews or some other religion. But as you saw in this film, and as is the case for much of the world, many people tend to think of themselves — their primary identity — is as a part of a religious group. They are Muslims, they are Hindu, and then they are Indians or Pakistanis or some other group.

So I think that it is a difficult, complex circumstance where religion is in some cases, not even the dominant factor feeding conflict, but it is a very important factor.

Jamie Rubin: The United States has played a role, and certainly you have … and we’ll get to that in a moment … in conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Balkans and the Middle East. How important is it that the world’s only super power, the United States, plays a leading role in trying to make peace in these kind of situations?

Senator Mitchell: Well, again, the lesson of 9/11 is we’re going to play a role, either active or passive. If we sit back and do nothing, uh, we’re likely to be the recipients, uh, of this type of crime and horrific activity because we are the dominant power. Throughout history there have been dominant military and economic power, but I think some historians believe that never has the gap been greater. Never has the dominant power been so dominant, certainly not since Roman times. And with the continuing spread — not just of American influence through military and economic power — but cultural, language and every other way, it’s very clear that for some people, every problem in the world is an American problem. And every grievance, whether real or imagined, however local, is attributed to the dominant power. You’ve traveled around the world and I’m sure you’ve been as astonished as I have that how many people think that everything that goes on is a CIA plot.

Jamie Rubin: That everything is our fault.

Senator Mitchell: I mean, the Americans had something to do with everything that happens.

Jamie Rubin: Right.

Senator Mitchell: Now, we think of this as fantastic and simply not the case, but it’s a deeply held view in much of the world, and in much of the Muslim work. And so I think our position on the world’s stage makes it inevitable that we will be a party to a lot of what goes on in the world and we’re better off trying to take an active role to shape them in a positive way rather than the passive role of being the recipients of 9/11.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk about the Muslim angle for a moment. Right now the Bush Administration in the United States is trying to make very clear that the war against terrorism is not a war against Islam. Do you think it’s important for us to make an example of those times when Muslims are the subject of oppression, as they have been in this film and try to show the Muslim world that we come to their defense as much as we do in responding to Muslim extremism?

Senator Mitchell: Yeah. I think we should do it because it’s the right thing, not so much to make it an example. And in fact, we have done so. The United States intervention in the Balkans — in Bosnia and in Kosovo was largely to protect Muslims from what we and others in the international community perceived as inappropriate activity by others. Violence visited upon them, although of course, it went both ways and there were other complicating factors.

But we have done so, there and in other places and we should make that clear that we defend values: democracy, individual liberty the right of self-determination not religions or ethnic groups and we should have the view that we do the right thing, and hopefully that will be seen around the Muslim world, although I think we have to acknowledge that so far at least that’s not the case.

Jamie Rubin: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about your experiences. Senator Mitchell, you were asked to join and lead an effort in Northern Ireland in 1994 and you spent four long years working on that problem, leading to the famous Good Friday agreement and then worked again in 1999 to save that agreement. Many people credit you with being a decisive influence. Can you reflect with us a little bit about the negotiating lessons you’ve learned from that experience?

Senator Mitchell: Well, first I think it makes an important point that should be repeated in the United States today and that is religious conflict does not always involve Islam.

It didn’t begin with Muslims and it won’t end with Muslims. There’s a long history of religious conflict among Christians and Jews and others. That is a significant factor now with respect to the Muslim world, but let’s not think that they have a monopoly on religious conflict. In Northern Ireland there is a religious factor that has deep historical roots, but it’s not the only factor.

There, there’s a question of national identity, British identity versus Irish identity. There’s a territorial factor, there’s an economic factor, there’s always an economic factor in these conflicts, but in my experience, the principle conviction that I gained is that there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. Conflicts are created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. In Northern Ireland, after years of fruitless negotiations, the public came to believe, by overwhelming numbers, that no agreement was ever possible. People have caught me on the street and said, “Well, thanks, Senator, we appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re wasting your time.” We’ve been killing each other forever, we’re going to keep on killing each other for the rest of time. In fact, we’ve got an agreement because overall, people get sick of conflict. The public became sick of it, women became politically active and demanded action.

Jamie Rubin: The exhaustion factor?

Senator Mitchell: Exactly. Now, it isn’t over. There’s still some violence. There are many problems of implementation of the peace agreement, but I think the path has largely been set and I hope it’s irrevocable toward peace.

Jamie Rubin: One of the hallmarks of your effort there, according to many of the participants, was the emphasis on small steps rather than one giant break through. You’ve been involved in a lot of negotiations — in the United States Senate, and Northern Ireland, the Middle East — is how important is the idea of small, incremental steps rather than a break through?

Senator Mitchell: Well, what you hope, of course, is that the small steps lead to a break through. But they’re essential, primarily, to establishing minimal level of trust. What you find in all these situations is a complete absence of trust in a presence of a total mistrust.

They don’t believe anything the other side says. They assume the worse of the other side. And, as a result, that infects their own actions. And so you have to try to bring them to a point where they’re at least willing to listen to the other side and credit their arguments and trying to accommodate there was another question. And that’s a very important factor and that’s what the small steps do. They help you create — not what I would call really trusting close relationships — but the minimal level necessary to permit political compromise.

Jamie Rubin: To take one step forward?

Senator Mitchell: Political compromise is difficult because you have the conflict between the demands of one’s immediate constituency and the needs of the larger society. We experience it in this country, but we don’t have the overlay of political violence that goes with it. And I think in those countries it’s very difficult for leaders, so they have to get to a situation where there’s enough of a basis that they can move forward without suffering the consequences themselves.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s turn to the Middle East. There’s a report out there called The Mitchell Report. You were asked in the fall of 2000 to try to help stop the violence that had begun in September of 2000 and your report was deemed even handed, it was accepted by the Israelis, by the Palestinians, endorsed by the Bush Administration. But here we are more than a year later and has anything really changed?

Senator Mitchell: No. In fact, it’s all the more disappointing. We were surprised, pleasantly so, by the overwhelmingly favorable response. The Israelis accepted it, the Palestinians accepted it, the Bush Administration, the Europeans, everybody endorsed it. But that has made the disappointment at inaction all the greater.

The fact that nobody has done anything to actually implement it, has been a real source of disappointment for me and the other members of our committee and I think the many people around the world. But I believe the time is coming, and it may soon be here, that the exhaustion factor works. During my last visit there, quite a while ago, both Prime Minister Sharon and Chairman Arafat said to me separately, “Senator, we must end this because life has become unbearable for our people.” Now, the one thing I know about the two of them is they don’t coordinate their messages. But they said the same thing to me within a day of each other. And that was a year ago.

Jamie Rubin: Right.

Senator Mitchell: It’s getting much worse since then. Life is unbearable. Life is unbearable for ordinary Israeli citizens because of the fear of the suicide bombings and other threats. Life is unbearable for ordinary Palestinians. Their economy has been destroyed, so I think they’re soon reaching the exhaustion factor when they’ll recognize that there is no military solution, that they’ve got to take the steps. Either the ones that we’ve recommended or something like them, to get back into negotiation and try to reach a political compromise.

Jamie Rubin: And what role, in your opinion, should the United States be playing in this conflict? Should it be analogous to what you did in Northern Ireland, should it be analogous to what President Clinton did? How important is it that the United States play the brokering role in the Middle East?

Senator Mitchell: It is of critical importance. It can’t be done any other way. There is no government, no entity, no person capable of bringing the parties together and leading them to a resolution of this conflict other than the United States government. That’s the reality. Now, there has to be a determined and intense effort to try to bring them together. To try to develop what I call a work plan, a work plan back to the negotiating table and then away from it. When I first went there, I thought that the most difficult problem to solve would be the so- called final status issues: Jerusalem, refugees, land. I don’t think that anymore. I think the toughest problem is getting to the negotiation table. Getting started, not ending it. One of the tragedies of the deaths that are occurring now is that if you talk to Palestinians and Israelis and I talk to them all the time government officials private citizens. There’s a vast consensus on both sides about that way it’s going to end.

Jamie Rubin: How do you think it will end?

Senator Mitchell: It’s going to end just about the way President Clinton outlined before he left office in January of 2001, in which he synthesized what had happened at Camp David and what had happened in the subsequent negotiations at Taba. And that’s about where it’s going to end, it’s the only way to end and people recognize that. Despite all of the turmoil, violence, conflict, a steady majority of two-thirds of Israelis and Palestinians believe that the only way out of this is through a negotiated two-state solution. It is the only way.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s compare that to Northern Ireland. Is it true that prior to the Good Friday agreement, when this exhaustion factor kicked in, that people also knew what the end point was going be and it was just a question of getting there. So do you think those situations are analogous?

Senator Mitchell: They’re analogous in some respects, but not entirety. Each situation has unique factors and you transpose a solution from one to the other. In Northern Ireland you had a somewhat different situation where the political entity, Northern Ireland, is a part of the United Kingdom. The Protestant majority wants to keep it that way. The Catholic minority wants to make it part of Ireland. What the Good Friday agreement says is that both aspirations are legitimate and can be pursued through political means, but not through violence. That is you have to use democratic, political means. And then it says that the decision will be made by the people of Northern Ireland. That’s a crucial factor. People of Northern Ireland will decide their future. If they want to stay as part of the United Kingdom, which they now do, that’s the case. If they ever decide they want to change, then everybody who’s part of that agreement, agrees that they will help facilitate the change.

Jamie Rubin: Through democratic means?

Senator Mitchell: Through democratic means. Non-violent democratic means. That’s the crucial part of it.

Jamie Rubin: You talked about the majorities in the Middle East, the majorities in Ireland being exhausted or suffering and wanting an outcome, but we all know that the majorities occasionally are pushed by the extremist. In this film tonight, we saw how extremists can stir up the problems.

Senator Mitchell: Yes.

Jamie Rubin: So how do you marginalize the extremists in these cases, and in societies that may not be as democratic as they were in Northern Ireland?

Senator Mitchell: Very difficult and getting more difficult all the time, for a reason that we don’t really like much to discuss. We live in an age of technology, from which we benefited enormously. That television camera, the television screen on which this will be shown, cell phones. . .

Jamie Rubin: The Internet.

Senator Mitchell: The Internet, everything. We benefit enormously. But the reality of human history is that technological developments advance more rapidly and spread more quickly in the art of killing, more than any other factor. And so today, it is possible for a small number of people, without large resources and with relatively small numbers of skillful technicians, to kill large numbers of other human beings than ever before.

Jamie Rubin: Using technology?

Senator Mitchell: Using technology. So what, what happens is that you have to have a bigger and bigger majority. 80 percent doesn’t do anymore. 90 percent doesn’t do anymore. So what you have to do is to begin in the middle with the largest majority you can assemble and then gradually try to move that out to the extremes on both sides, to crowd out the extremist, to deprive them of the traditional community support or tolerance and condoning, which makes it possible for them to succeed in their efforts. It’s very hard to do and what it takes, above all else, is courageous political leadership. That’s a hard thing to come by any place at any time.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk about the ways in which extremism and technology feed off each other. The word normally used is incitement. Do you think in the modern era, with all these new means of communications, the extremists have this new advantage to use the technology to insight the population to anger, to religious hatred, to ethnic violence?

Senator Mitchell: I wouldn’t call it an advantage to them, because everybody has access to it. The President can address the nation and the world through television, each side has access.

Jamie Rubin: But they previously might not have had a way to communicate with everybody.

Senator Mitchell: Well, that’s true. It amplifies their voice that in a way didn’t previously exist. And that’s why you need courageous, political leadership to combat incitement. And we go back to the very beginning of this discussion, the dehumanization. There’s a powerful temptation in conflict to dehumanize your opponent. Incitement is a way of doing that and particularly starting with young people. Their minds are not fully formed, their views are still tentative. It’s much easier to influence them in this way and given the horrors of modern technology as we’ve seen in the Middle East, very young children can become direct combatants in the kind of war that goes on there. I think it’s a critical factor, but it takes strong, political leadership. It’s tough to do. Because many people in your own society will say, “Well, it’s weakness, it’s lack of conviction, it’s lack of principle. Anybody who compromises is seen by their constituencies as weak.

And so you have to balance it with the, the demands of a political leadership. But I think that it’s too easy and too tempting for leaders –you can see this all across the world today — to succumb to the view. Let them go ahead and have the incitement and that will take the pressure off of us.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about incitement. What are you really asking leaders to do to avoid incitement? Is it censorship, pushing them not to say what they really think at critical moments? What does it mean to fight incitement?

Senator Mitchell: Well, first off, of course, it means clear, strong moral statements from the leaders. It’s not censorship. I don’t think Americans, who so prize the right of free speech, can credibly urge others to enforce something other than that in their own society. But it’s the use of official organs to spread incitement and hatred — which does occur in the Middle East. Government controlled media, which, as you know very well, is the case in the large parts of the world is used for incitement. Officials. Many of the people interviewed in the program that you’ve just seen are government officials.

Jamie Rubin: Yes.

Senator Mitchell: Who are supposed to be there representing all the people, but obviously perceive their task as representing only a certain constituency. So I think you begin by saying there isn’t going to be any official use of means of incitement and then you try to spread it. You try to make it first the government policy and then the culture and political norm. And I think it can be done. I don’t think there’s any inevitability about stirring up hatred, although they say it has a long history in human affairs. People can in fact, governments, leaders, private citizens, can, in fact, take effective steps against it.Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about how hard that is and the concept of revenge. We saw in this film, you know, terrible atrocities committed against innocent men, women and children. You’ve seen in the Middle East the way the innocents have been killed

Senator Mitchell: Yes.

Jamie Rubin: In Ireland innocents have been killed. And how do you convince a population not to choose an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?

Senator Mitchell: It is probably the most emotional and most difficult aspect of conflict resolution. It is simply human nature to want to revenge the murder or death of a loved one. In Northern Ireland, I can tell you that the release of prisoners who had been placed in prison for committing what the victims thought were ordinary crimes, what the perpetrators thought were patriotic acts, has been one of the most difficult, emotionally laden, and potentially serious problems, in the agreement. It’s very, very difficult and it’s understandable. But in the end, leaders must say to their constituents that if we spend all of our time on the past, then the past will become the future. And the cycle will be never ending. At some point, a society must turn the page and look to the future. That means, sadly, that there will be unresolved grievances.

That means that there will be individuals who will feel betrayed or unfulfilled. But you can’t resolve every grievance, you can’t satisfy every demand for revenge. That’s why it’s necessary in all of these conflict situations to defuse the violence. You can’t ask political leaders at a time of high violence to make compromise because high violence means high emotion. One of the staples of life in Northern Ireland, when I first went there, was the well attended , highly emotional, highly publicized funeral.

Jamie Rubin: In the Middle East that happens all the time.

Senator Mitchell: In the Middle East you see it now. It happens all the time. Thousands of people whipped into a frenzy of emotion at funerals.

Jamie Rubin: At funerals.

Senator Mitchell: And so you have to bring that down, reduce it, let the emotions subside. But I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty. It’s hard to do and it’s a hard thing to ask politically, too, because politicians want to stay in office and they’re not going to stay in office if they get too far away from the feelings of their constituencies.

Jamie Rubin: In the film we saw the apparent involvement of local government officials in some of these massacres. What role do you think the Indian government, essential government has in disciplining those who might be involved?

Senator Mitchell: Well, first, as you know, my law firm represents the government of India, and while that doesn’t influence my views on this show, I think it should be stated so that you and your viewers are aware of it.

I think the government has an important role to enforce and uphold the law, and to work to see that the violence doesn’t occur. As you saw in the film a high national official was sent to the scene to try to reduce the violence and to make certain that people were not victims solely because of their religious differences.

The central government, in every society, has a primary role in seeing to it that there is not communal violence based on religious or other differences in their society, and as you saw the Indian government sent a high national official to the scene for that purpose. I think it’s an important part of every government’s responsibility.

Jamie Rubin: In your work in Ireland and in the Middle East, you’ve talked about the problem of the demonization of another people. How important is that to stop in a place like Northern Ireland or the Middle East if we’re going to get to the bottom of these conflicts?

Senator, we’ve talked a little bit about the importance of stopping revenge killings, stopping the cycle of violence. Related to that is, is the question of history. Each one of these conflicts has long, long histories. In Northern Ireland, you were probably subject to a lot of history lessons. How do you get the parties to look beyond their historical grievances and look to the future or to the present?

Senator Mitchell: About the time I went to Northern Ireland, the New York Times carried a series of articles on the ignorance of Americans about their history. The answers to the simplest question weren’t known by many people, including many students, and I thought, as I’m sure most readers thought, “Isn’t this appalling? We don’t even know our own history.”

And I went to Northern Ireland, and I saw people who really know their history. They go back to 1691, to 1196, they are immersed in history. And I thought, “Well, too little knowledge is a bad thing, but too much knowledge can also be a bad thing.” And I think that’s one of the problems in these conflicts situations. There is a looking to the past that so roots present thinking and makes it impossible for political leaders to move forward. I guess the way I put it when I’m in Northern Ireland is knowledge of your history is a good thing, but being chained to the past is not. It’s one of the reasons for the spectacular success of American society, in my opinion. First, we’re a nation of immigrants and for many people history means something that happened…

Jamie Rubin: Somewhere else.

Senator Mitchell: Some other place, some other continent, and they come here. One of the reasons for the success of American society, I believe, is that the people are forward looking, and they don’t root themselves in the past. In fact, we’re a nation of immigrants, and people come here from somewhere else, so for them history is something that happened on another continent in another era, and they want to look forward. They’re trying to escape from that. In other countries it’s different. There’s almost a fixation and obsession with the past that hampers the ability to look to the future. And I think it’s something that Americans have to take into account.

As an American who’s been involved in conflict resolution in other societies, I had to learn to adjust my thinking to that. I had to try to begin to understand the manner in which the political leaders in those societies think and how they form their views. Now I tried very hard to nudge them to the future. You can’t just order that. It’s a way of thinking; it’s a cultural thing. But I think it’s clearly an important factor. It’s a vast difference between our way of thinking and that in many other societies, and unless people there look to the future, they’re going to continue to live and relive the past with all of the negatives that brings.

Jamie Rubin: Senator Mitchell, I thank you for joining me here on Wide Angle.

Senator Mitchell: Thanks for having me.

Jamie Rubin: Carol Bellamy, thank you for joining me.

Carol Bellamy: Thank you.

Jamie Rubin: You will be representing UNICEF at the upcoming Johannesburg meeting. Tell me, what will your report to the world leaders be about the state of the world’s children?

Carol Bellamy: Well, it will be that over the last decade, since the conference in Rio, conditions for children have improved, but less than had been expected. Around some of the issues, particularly, that will be focused on in this meeting — for example, access to clean water, better sanitation, health issues — there is some good news. For example, the number of children that die due to diarrhea has been cut almost in half, and that’s as a result of better interventions and more access to clean water. Guinea worm, which is something that nobody really knows about in the United States, but it really exists and it’s very bad, has been reduced dramatically. But far less has been accomplished than had been expected.

Jamie Rubin: So some progress, but not as much as been expected. How do you think these meetings shape up? Is it valuable to have the heads of state of the world sit down together, renegotiate issues they’ve talked about? Do we need these global summits anymore?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I’m of several minds on this. I think that these meetings were crucially important in the 90’s. I think they help set out some agendas, the environmental agenda, the children’s agenda, the population agenda, agenda on women, very important in really targeting specific goals and objectives, and I think that we would not have seen some of the movement that has taken place over the last decade. I’m not convinced that this mode is necessarily the appropriate mode into the future. I think that there are ways to review the progress and look at how you do course corrections. Further, I think that what has become clear as well is merely having a plan of action without really active, aggressive leadership, government leadership, private sector, civil society, you’re not going to get much. So to the extent to which there are heads of state there, I think the crucial element is to get the commitment of this leadership because another meeting with just another plan of action, I don’t think will do much as we head into the 21st century.

Jamie Rubin: We do know what we need to do in most of these areas now, do you think having the meetings makes it more likely that we’ll do what everybody seems to think we should do?

Carol Bellamy: I think we should look for a different mode now. The global meeting era, while very useful and important in the 90s, may have passed its usefulness. I think, looking regionally or sub-regionally, really monitoring what has been achieved against the agreements that had been made in the past, and these are very serious agreements, some of them had been binding agreements, others at least there was a moral obligation to pursue. I think we should look for alternative ways to review and see what success there has been and where there still needs to be work.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk for a minute about some of the dilemmas that came up in the film we just saw, starting with child labor. You’re the advocate for the world’s children. Do you find yourself on both sides of this issue, the child labor issue, in many parts of the world?

Carol Bellamy: Well, it’s a far more complicated issue then I think some people would recognize. We at UNICEF have never particularly been enthusiastic about boycotts. We think the boycott makes the boycotter feel better, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t child labor. Most of the basis of hazardous child labor is really deep, abiding, long-standing poverty, and you can’t just wave that away by passing a law saying “no more hazardous child labor.” That being said, really this is very detrimental to the development of children, and one has to look for ways to begin to make a change. One of the ways is to try and avoid the very youngest children of a family going into child labor, perhaps by assuring that they at least get some education. There are now programs in places like Brazil and Mexico and other places, where families receive a small income if their child is in school. The basic reason is not because parents want to send their children out to work in these terrible conditions, it’s that it is poverty, and they will not survive.

Jamie Rubin: So in some cases, the child laborers are the breadwinners for these families.

Carol Bellamy: They are the breadwinners. Now that is another interesting element. Often the exploiters of children in hazardous child labor, realize that they are better able to exploit children than adults. So very often we will also advocate that if you need workers, use the father, use the mother, not the child. But very often the mother and father will be more demanding of the conditions and more demanding of some improvement.

Jamie Rubin: One of the other dilemmas we saw in the child from Kenya is the desire for education and how some families are split up by the desire for education. What work have you done in this area of UNICEF, in Africa, and do you find that sometimes the battles between the mothers and the fathers that we saw in this film happen elsewhere?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I actually thought, if there was a positive element in the film, it was a recognition by so many that education is a very important key for any kind of advancement, any reduction of poverty. But you do run into conflict, you run into conflict with parents, mothers or fathers who think, particularly for girls, what’s the need for education, she’s just going to get married, or in an environment where the economy is so bad – is there a job after education? There are costs to education, particularly in poor countries, I think in the richer countries, people don’t always remember this, but even the cost of a uniform for the child, even the school fees that have to be paid, these can sometimes be beyond the budget. So parents need to make choices, and very often they will choose, in so many places of the world, that the boys will go to school instead of the girls going to school. So education is, I think, on balance still desired by parents for their children, but parents are put into this painful position of not always being able to support their children going to school, and very often only one child or two children, of many, will go to school. So it is still a divisive issue in families, although less divisive than so many others.

Jamie Rubin: You were recently in Afghanistan, opening schools there. Can you tell us a little bit about the enthusiasm that has accompanied the opening of school in Afghanistan?

Carol Bellamy: This was an extraordinarily wonderful environment, the back to school opening day. It was March 23rd, which is when Afghanistan schools open. This is a country that had been at war for more than 20 years, so the education system had virtually stopped functioning, and certainly during the Taliban era, when girls were prohibited from going to school, there were no girls in school, and teachers were limited because women were prohibited from working, and many of the teachers were women. So, opening day of school, there was a big effort made to try and get kids back into school. It was estimated that there were five million children eligible for primary school. On opening day about a million and a half kids, girls and boys, about 30 percent girls, came back to school, and since that time — unlike other countries, where very often you’ll have drop-off — with the refugees coming back, the fact is the school enrollment has gone up. So, if there is a hope in Afghanistan, and this is a country that is going to take a long, long time for there to be improvements, I think it is that there really is a very deep commitment being made and put into education. Again, a reflection I think of what we saw in the film, which is that the great hope of parents is that their children will have a better life than they had.

Jamie Rubin: Can you talk a little bit about the funds you needed in Afghanistan to open a school, how would you go about doing this? Sometimes people imagine that this is expensive, to start an education system, or build the infrastructure, how do you go about actually promoting education in Afghanistan or other places?

Carol Bellamy: First of all, I don’t always talk about schools. I think you have to talk about learning. Because if you talk about schools, then you think about a big building and it has all the facilities. Very seldom it does. We’re very happy if we can try and assure that there is even the basic sanitary availability there, and maybe access to clean water, that’s what we think is very important for a place where kids are going to learn. Clean water, some kind of sanitary facilities. But what we did, is we tried to help this Afghanistan interim government through the provision of materials. So every kid got a school bag, and you should have seen them walking with these school bags, it was quite wonderful. And in the bag they had a textbook and it was either in the Dory language or the Pashtun language, they had a little slate board, they had pencils, pen, very simple things, a little notebook to write in. We supported the provision of tents, where there was a total destruction of what had been the school or at least a building where�

Jamie Rubin: UNICEF distributed this?

Carol Bellamy: We did and we were supported by the United States government, the Japanese government. I would say they were the two governments with the biggest support. The Afghanistan administration made a commitment to do this. There were non-governmental organizations that helped because they had helped keep some of the informal schools going during the period of time. But the fact is the kids came to school and they actually, they weren’t just sitting in open areas, we tried to do school repair at that time. There’s still much to be done, but I think, if there is a sign of hope for Afghanistan, it is this real desire to get and continue education.

Jamie Rubin: These are hopeful observations, but you must have looked around the world and seen the kind of poverty, the poorest of the poor, that we saw in this film, and elsewhere, and you have a big, big challenge. Do you ever get frustrated by the enormity of trying to deal with a billion people living in poverty?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I don’t get frustrated because we work with kids, but it is extraordinary that we have entered the 21st century with one-sixth of the human population not able to read or write. We’re in the great world of technology, wherever the economic markets may be. Nevertheless, in the richer countries there’s just availability of virtually everything, and in the poorer countries, the elements of poverty, war and conflict in so many places, HIV/AIDS, devastating systems, gender discrimination, girls around the world still confronting problems, 120 million children who ought to be in primary school who are not in primary school – 60 percent are girls — the environmental deterioration that we’ve seen. . . I mean one of the reasons for greater instability in the world today as a result of natural disasters is that the environmental improvements that one had hoped for have not occurred in so many places. And then I could go on and on, corruption, inability of folks to really provide the leadership that should exist, so there’s still an enormous amount to do even as we enter this extraordinary 21st century.

Jamie Rubin: You’re an American. You’re the executive director of a UN organization. Do you ever feel difficulty in justifying the small size of America’s foreign aid budget when you’re working with your colleagues?

Carol Bellamy: Well, it’s a mixed picture. I think it is important to acknowledge that the United States is a major donor to humanitarian and development causes for the UN agencies. It’s the major donor of a number of UN agencies, including UNICEF, and yet if you take a look at the entire budget of the United States on a per capita basis, the United States ranks quite far down in the list.

Jamie Rubin: Isn’t the United States the lowest of all of the major industrialized countries?

Carol Bellamy: I don’t know if it’s the lowest, but it’s certainly one of the lowest. So, yes, it is certainly a contributor, but if you take a look, the Nordic countries, for example, are far more generous on a per capita basis. And yet, we know the studies that Americans think much too much gets spent in foreign aid, but when they are questioned, “Are they willing to put some money into foreign aid?” “Of course.” “Well, how much?” “Well, I don’t know, maybe five percent.” “Well, what would you think of if it was less than one percent?” “Well, we could do more than that.” So, I think Americans are at heart, quite generous, and willing to assist more, and understand that it makes a difference for them. I mean that polio case that exists in Pakistan could be — and I always hate to threaten — but that polio case could be in the United States, 17 hours later.

Jamie Rubin: So, you have a political background, you worked in New York City politics, tell us why if the American people are so supportive, of spending four, five, six times the current budget of foreign assistance, there is no political support for it in Washington?

Carol Bellamy: You know, I don’t think it is a hot button item, quite frankly. I do think Americans are generous. I think they’re willing to help. I think they’re willing to help beyond their cities and their communities, and their rural, suburban homes, but I don’t think it’s a major issue for them, and actually, I think they think that the US does actually more than it does.

Jamie Rubin: So let’s talk about a few of the critiques of foreign assistance, the ones that are made by the members of Congress who appropriate these funds. On one side there are those who say that somehow the foreign assistance that UNICEF might provide in a country like Burma, Myanmar, is somehow helping an anti-American government, do you find yourself often confronting this situation?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I think some of these arguments have merit in a sense that there are governments clearly where there are development programs where UNICEF works. We work in over 160 countries around the world. There are some that are governments that are not pro-American by any means. There are some where we know there is corruption. But what I can say from a UNICEF side, and I would say from other UN agencies, is we try and make sure that the money gets to where it should go. If there is an immunization campaign, a measles campaign, tetanus campaign, a polio campaign that the money doesn’t just sit over somewhere, but that the campaign actually takes place. If it’s supposed to go for schoolbooks, or something to support education, or for hand pumps for a water program, we have to identify that. But it goes to places that are not always the nicest, friendliest, cuddliest governments, I admit that right from the beginning.

Jamie Rubin: So when you’re over there, and you’re overseeing some project with an extremist government who’s responsible for half of the misery in their country, and your programs are operating, how as an American do you feel listening to the views of those governments – without being specific?

Carol Bellamy: Well, this probably sounds a little soppy, but it seems to me the people shouldn’t be penalized twice. First of all, they have a bad government, and then they’re penalized because they have a bad government because then nobody will try and provide any kind of assistance. Long ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, we had this big debate — do you create the revolution first so they can change the government, or do you try to make sure people eat first? Well, I always came down on the side of let’s try and make sure that people eat first, then maybe they’ll be healthy enough to create the revolution. I think our responsibility is to try and make sure the money is used for what it is aimed for, but I really think that penalizing people in countries for bad government is something that’s not in the interest of anybody.

Jamie Rubin: Another argument is that by giving assistance in situations like this, you’re locking in a corrupt and evil government’s permanent situation. That without the upheaval that comes with hunger and strife, they’re never going to change it, so that you’re locking in these corrupt governments.

Carol Bellamy: Well, actually, that one I would take on, because I actually believe that, and again I’m looking at our mandate. We work with kids. If kids get a basic education, that doesn’t mean every kid will be wonderful. It’s like every place else in the world, but if kids get a basic education, they will be better able to make choices about their lives. If they’re better able to make choices about their lives, then some of them will make choices to try and make improvements in their countries. If those children die before the age of five, if they continue to be malnourished, and stunted, if they’re not able to get an education, then you will create a population that will never really have the energy to challenge. That doesn’t mean every kid that grows up will be a wonderful leader in a great democratic society, but unless they get the education, unless they’re healthy enough to be able to get that education, then there’s no hope that they will be able to make choices about their life in the future.

Jamie Rubin: On the other side, you have those who in the context of sustainable development, the Johannesburg meeting you’re going to, want foreign assistance to meet very high standards of environmental and human rights. Do you ever find yourself frustrated by those who impose those kind of standards on aid that you’re trying to give?

Carol Bellamy: Well, we believe passionately in children’s rights, so we think that you can have a rights agenda that transcends just being a soap box finger waving, and really look at the basic right to health, the right to education. What I think is most important is that any kind of development assistance, try and be as realistic as possible. Achieve your objectives within a reasonable framework. For example, at Johannesburg, we are going to promote, it’s our message, clean water and sanitary facilities at every school. That’s something that is doable. It doesn’t exist right now, but it’s doable. It doesn’t say, make the world perfectly environmentally wonderful in the next five years, because it won’t be perfectly environmentally wonderful. But if you can focus on realistic things, and that’s what I would argue to some of those who approach, I think, with passion, and with idealism, but with sometimes an unrealistic agenda.

Jamie Rubin: So let’s talk about clean water dams. The great dam projects get a lot of negative publicity. You judge how many children have access to clean water around the world, do you believe that some of these large dams actually, are the dams that provide that clean water, and that people need to understand that?

Carol Bellamy: Well, they may, it’s harder for me to judge that. I actually think sometimes a well in a village will do more good, because it’s closer to where people are. I think you have to do some balancing. I think sometimes we get into a situation where those who are promoting the dam only see the good, and those that are against the dam only see the bad. Perhaps I’m a compromiser. I think you’ve got to look for how you reduce the environmental impact if you’re going to have a large project that would, let’s say take land because it’s a dam, but at the same time, recognize that there are some benefits that come from it.

Jamie Rubin: Again, as an American, I’m sure you get a lot of questions about American positions. The current one, you’re probably going to get in Johannesburg, is why hasn’t the United States ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. What do you say when people ask you that?

Carol Bellamy: Well, people are absolutely shocked, the average person here in the United States, when they find out that the only two countries in the world that haven’t ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child are Somalia and the United States. Now, obviously if one thinks about the world, and there are some pretty bad places in the world, it doesn’t mean that even a country that’s ratified the treaty is a great promoter of children’s rights. But to think that the US hasn’t done it is really quite shocking. My response is several. One, the US, as I think most Americans if they read the paper know, is very suspicious of any kind of international treaty. The idea is that some extraterrestrial body, in other words, the UN, will intervene and will conflict with state’s rights, or national decisions at the US level. That’s quite apart from the particular issue of children’s rights. It’s just, generally, if we agree to an international treaty, does that mean the UN will tell us what our business is.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s stay on that for a second. You’ve been a local politician, and now you work for the UN, do you think there’s any credence to these fears?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I don’t, and I’m also a lawyer, but it’s been a long time.

Jamie Rubin: And a lawyer!

Carol Bellamy: So I don’t make the legal argument. At least in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, I say, look, the convention has been around ten years, a number of the countries have ratified this for eight to ten years, so let’s take a look, is that happening out there, and look at some of the countries in the North. Let’s look at Germany. Let’s look at Canada. Germany is a federation, has very strong states, not unlike the US, it’s a little different but not unlike the US. Canada has very strong provinces, perhaps as strong as their national government. There’s no indication in either of these countries of the UN coming in and telling some province in Canada what they should do, or some state in Germany what they should do. So, take into account the legal argument, but let’s take a look at what the real experience is. There’s no indication, no experience whatsoever of the UN intervening in the internal matters of an individual state.

Jamie Rubin: But, in terms of the downside of the US not signing this treaty, you don’t think that signing it would make it more likely that American children would be better treated, do you?

Carol Bellamy: Well, no I don’t. But I think it is wrong to assume that because it’s the United States, and such a powerful and strong, and actually wealthy country, that everything is perfect here. There are challenges for children in the US. They may be different challenges, it may not be survival up to the age of five, but certainly the challenges of children in terms of violence against kids, kids dropping out of school, you can find child labor..

Jamie Rubin: But we have domestic laws for that, don’t we?

Carol Bellamy: Indeed, we do, but what the convention allows around the world is it really challenges countries to try to do their own domestic work.

Jamie Rubin: So it’s more the message it sends by not signing?

Carol Bellamy: Well, it’s the message but it also talks about every child, and even in this country we know that minority kids in communities, very often will be less able to take advantage of certain opportunities than non-minority kids. I don’t want to make an entire broadbrush�

Jamie Rubin: But is that going to be effected if there’s a treaty that we’ve signed? Will it be more likely that in that local district with all of the problems that have caused this problem, that this international treaty is going to change things in the United States?

Carol Bellamy: It adds additional encouragement. It adds an additional weapon, if you will, in the arsenal of advocacy to the national government. No, I don’t think that the Convention on the Rights of the Child will make the sun shine brighter in the United States tomorrow, but it is another opportunity for those advocates for really greater equity among children, in this country, as in other countries, to use.

Jamie Rubin: And where would it make a difference? Explain why you think if the United States signed this convention, or ratified it rather, that it would help our advocacy for children in other countries or would it just remove something from the list?

Carol Bellamy: Well, because it’s gone on so long, and the US has not ratified it. I think it is interesting to note that while, and you know this well too, the rest of the world looks at what the US does, even if the US is kind of going on its own it’s very much guided by the US. So I’m at least pleased to report that it doesn’t seem to have taken the air out of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in other countries in the world.

Jamie Rubin: The Johannesburg summit deals with environmental impact on children. Tell us a little bit about how UNICEF helps deal with these environmental issues.

Carol Bellamy: Well, if you think about it children are just that. They’re still developing, they’re still growing, and so they are very much a reflection of what the environment is like. Their bodies are still developing, their immune systems are not fully developed, and so if you are confronting significant environmental challenges, and that can be everything from lack of access to clean water or decent sanitation, air pollution, in richer countries lead paint, it gets reflected very much in children, not only, but certainly it’s reflected there. So, for us, environmental issues, whether we categorize them as simply environmental or health issues or more broadly, they’re very key issues. I think what Rio showed us was the connection of environment to human development, not just whether you have a good ocean, or flying birds, all of which are important, but that it’s totally related to human beings.

Jamie Rubin: When you set a goal about clean water, or safe sanitation for children in schools, how do you go about implementing such a goal? What will you, as the head of UNICEF do, to make sure that happens?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I’ll give you an example actually. A couple years before the Rio summit in 1992, in 1990 there was the World Summit for Children. Among others, it was a goal to say, of the three million people who die every year from diarrhea related effects, and diarrhea basically comes from bad water, you get diarrhea and get dehydrated and die, the goal was to reduce that by a half. And so, countries supposedly left from that meeting, that wasn’t the only goal, there were 27 goals, but that was one of them. How do you monitor? Well in the case of UNICEF, at least when it comes to children, we have over the last decade, working with governments, working with others, every year in conjunction with the government and others, we take a look at what the data shows in a particular country, are they achieving their goals, are they not.

Jamie Rubin: So a kind of name and shame report?

Carol Bellamy: Well, yes, it’s partly name and shame, it’s more peer pressure. It’s to say that okay, you say you’re poor, and you can’t do very much, but here’s another poor country that has done better. So it isn’t ranking in saying this country’s better than that, it’s where all of the countries are. So in fact one of the successes actually over the last ten years is that 50% reduction of diarrhea-related diseases was achieved over the ten years. On the other hand, it’s estimated that there is still over a billion people in the world who don’t have access to clean, potable, drinkable water, and almost three billion, that’s almost half of the public that exists in the world, that have bad sanitation. So, so some goals have been achieved, but others have not.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about disease. Some experts in this area have suggested that if the United States were to increase the size of its budget and other industrialized countries as well, that one really could eradicate many of the diseases that still affect the developing world. UNICEF is in the vaccination business, when you look out there, do you believe that with more money we really could save millions of people’s lives?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I think money is part of it. But it isn’t only money. I think sometimes people think, well if you just throw huge amounts of money. Quite frankly, the world is on the brink of eradicating another disease, one has been eradicated, small pox, the next one’s going to be polio. And this makes an argument for investing money, because it’s made a difference. Ten years ago in 1990, or actually about 11 years ago, there were about 120 countries where polio still existed. By 1999, there were 33 countries, by the year 2000 there were 20 countries, by the year 2001, there were about 15 countries. Each year, because of massive polio immunization campaigns, the numbers have gone down, and polio is likely over the next couple years, to be eliminated. Now, it is clearly costs money. But it isn’t billions and billions and billions of dollars. And in fact, every year, the US and Western Europe have to spend close to a half a billion US dollars just to keep their population immunized, because they want to keep it clean while the rest of the work is going on. So sometimes the investing of the money, if it achieves its goal�

Jamie Rubin: So in the long term we could save money?

Carol Bellamy: It will allow you to save money. Now that doesn’t happen in all cases, so yes, more money is needed, but it’s targeting the use of that money to try and achieve specific kinds of goals.

Jamie Rubin: So what would be some of these diseases that would be next on our list after polio?

Carol Bellamy: Well, there clearly are things that are vaccine preventable. I mean, there are still eleven million children dying every year from totally preventable causes. That might be measles, that might be again, still diarrhea, a million and a half kids still die from diarrhea, even though that goal was reached, it may be other kinds of things that can at least improve the situation. For example, there is factual evidence that if a girl gets a basic education, that’s basically five to nine years, we’re not talking about university, when she grows to be an adult, she will be more healthy and there is a direct correlation between the fact that her children are less likely to die before the age of five. So investing so that girls and boys both get an education is something we know works. It requires the investment, but again I would argue, yes, more money is needed, but it really has to be targeted to the investments that work.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about enforcement. You have these goals, you put out this name and shame report, but in the end, there is no enforcement of these goals, is there?

Carol Bellamy: In large measure, there isn’t. It really is a matter of leadership, and that’s why I say again, I think we probably have plenty of action plans out there. We have a lot of goals, I don’t think the world needs a whole new book of new objectives and new goals, there are plenty out there for the year 2010, and 2015, what’s needed is leadership, and, certainly starting with government leadership. Now, I would suggest, for example, some possible glimmerings of hope. This coming together of some of the African leaders around the new partnership, the NEPAD as they call it, the jury is still out, but it is actually African leaders taking their own initiative. We see similar kinds of activities coming in sub-regions, for example, some of the Asian countries. So what there really has to be is leadership at the local level, by governments, by the private sector, and others, because you’re never going to get penalties, you really need to have the initiative taken. Secondly, I think it’s very important, and I think that this is something that has happened over the ten years since Rio, the growth of Non-governmental organizations and other civil society organizations. They at least are much more vital today, and in many cases they are starting to put much more pressure and holding government leaders accountable.

Jamie Rubin: And so that, in your view, makes it more likely these goals can be achieved?

Carol Bellamy:More likely, but there’s no guarantee. You’re not brought before a court, you’re not penalized, you’re not thrown into jail, and I don’t think you should be. I’m not suggesting any of those things. It really is public pressure, but I think there’s greater capacity in the world today to bring that public pressure.

Jamie Rubin: You’ve played a prominent role in the most recent children’s summit here in New York, and one of the issues I gather was the role of children in this process, the children as decision making participants. Tell us about how you see that evolving.

Carol Bellamy: I’m saying what you would obviously expect me to say, but it was extraordinary. I think it even surpassed UNICEF’s expectation. First of all, of the 181 countries I think, or 179 countries that were present, 132 of them had young people, under the age of 18, as actually official delegates. They were different, but it was really wonderful, it actually brought a breath of fresh air into some of these kind of stuffy UN discussions. Secondly, it was really interesting, we saw in the lead up to the special session, and we’ve also seen in the leaving of this meeting much more activity of young people in many of these countries. And then the young people themselves came out with a declaration, took them three days to come up with, it took the UN about a year to come up with theirs. T hey were very clear, they said things like, we are not expenditures, we’re investments. They said politics and war are the games of adults, the children are the losers. I mean, quite clear in their views. I’m not saying every kid is right, I’m not saying everything they say is perfect, but I really think that the energy of young people back in their own countries is another factor that can add on to pushing these agendas forward.

Jamie Rubin: One of the other issues you’ve advocated is the whole issue of guns and urban violence and child soldiers. We saw in the film examples of the security dilemmas for children in Brazil, and in Africa. What role do you really think UNICEF ought to play in this area?

Carol Bellamy: First, I want people to think about war. When people think about war, I think they think about armies and troops and men in uniforms, maybe men and women now in uniforms, but that is not the face of war in the world today. The face of war in the world today is largely civilian, it’s largely wars within a country, not necessarily between countries, there are just limited numbers where it’s between countries. And, it’s massive disruption of communities, people move from their homes, much more availability of small arms, lighter weapons. Modern technology allows you to use plastic and other things that are so light, they still kill, but they’re light so kids can carry them. Very often, these kids are drugged, and so what you’ve seen around the world because of this increasing conflict in which there are no rules, is just this enormous proliferation of weapons, greater violence, greater instability, greater social unrest. We continue to call for – even if it is a war within a country – young people under the age of eighteen should not be called upon to fight, two much more restriction on the proliferation and distribution and sale of light weapons. It’s just really gotten out of hand, and it’s having enormous implications worldwide.

Jamie Rubin: When you look out over the last ten years for the state of the world’s children, how do you see developments?

Carol Bellamy: Well, kids are clearly better off today than they were ten years ago. They are healthier, there are more kids in school, we’re on the brink of eradicating polio. But if you go back ten years and you look at what the expectations were, they’ve fallen far short of what people thought would happen in this ten years. The fact is far less has happened than it should have.

Jamie Rubin: And when you at UNICEF work on the HIV/AIDS, the health issues, what role does UNICEF play in trying to deal with it?

Carol Bellamy: Well, I think it’s important to understand, again if you go back to Rio in 1992, AIDS existed, but I don’t think anybody understood how devastating the impact of HIV/AIDS would be. It’s not only an illness that kills people, it basically eats apart at societies. So in countries, you’re losing more teachers than you’re able to train. You’re losing health workers, you’re losing government workers – so it influences everything that’s going on. For UNICEF, our focus is largely on three areas: One, trying to prevent in the first place the transmission of AIDS from a mother who may be infected to the baby being born. Secondly, we focus-

Jamie Rubin: Through medical services, or through what?

Carol Bellamy:Well, through several things. One, through the mother understanding what her situation is and making choices about whether she will breast feed her child or how she will take care of her child. Or secondly, through- with the distribution of anti-retro virals, which can help reduce the transmission. So that’s number one. But the mother has to know what her status is and in many societies, the systems aren’t there to do that. Two orphans – there’s already, it’s estimated, while this is a global problem, the orphan problem is still largely an Africa problem. Estimated to be 13 million kids already orphaned – the loss of at least the mother if not both parents. They very often become outcasts in their own society. But you’re going to create entire generations of people who will be just acting out all the time. So, to try and support them going to school, having some kind of extended family help. And third, information and understanding by young people because half of all new cases are young people under the age of about 20, 21, 22. So if they can understand and change their behavior and young people, as compared with old folks like me, are willing generally to change behavior. So unless AIDS is taken on, and we’re just part of a large army trying to take it on, then we’re not going to see any improvements over the 21st century.

Jamie Rubin: What about in education over the last ten years? Have you seen more or less progress than people might have hoped?

Carol Bellamy: Well, it’s interesting. There are more kids in school today than at any time before, but the population growth has kept up with education. One of the disappointing areas is the gender gap, which means that there are still more girls who aren’t going to school than boys has only closed slightly. So, that of about the 120 million children of primary school age, 60% are girls. And we know what they’re doing. I mean, those are the kids in child labor. Those are the kids who are being exploited. Those are the kids who are child soldiers. So many of the problems that the world has to confront, in some ways a more costly way of investing could at least, initially be better confronted if somehow we could assure that they were going to school.

Jamie Rubin: Carol Bellamy, thank you for joining me.

Carol Bellamy: Thank you.

August 1, 2002: Jeffrey Sachs discusses Cambodia and the challenges of international development with host Jamie Rubin.

Jamie Rubin: Joining me tonight is Dr. Jeffrey Sachs. He has served as a key advisor on economic transitions around the world and last December was appointed special advisor to the secretary general of the United Nations. He is charged with organizing an international response to world poverty. He’s also the head of the Earth Institute here at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, welcome.

Jeff Sachs: Thanks very much.

Jamie Rubin: Jeff, we just saw a film that showed extreme poverty in Cambodia. Why is this America’s business?

Jeff Sachs: I think the whole world would sit up at the images that we’ve seen in — more than take notice — be shocked. These are people fighting for survival, fighting to stay alive day to day to get enough to eat, to be able to earn the meager amount to be able to go see a doctor for a life-saving antibiotic. And here we are in the 21st, and you see people fighting for their survival every day. And of course Cambodia, with its population of a little more than 10 million, is an impoverished country. But it exemplifies a struggle that’s much more general. There are hundreds of millions of people for whom every day is a fight for survival . . . for the food to eat, for the way to stay clear of diseases that could kill them, kill their children, destroy their families, destroy their livelihoods.

Jamie Rubin: But for Americans, should we think of this as a moral issue, as the same reason one gives charity at ones church or to people on the street? Or are their national security implications of this kind of poverty around the world?

Jeff Sachs: Well, surely it is a moral issue in . . . in an obvious sense. And it’s even more a moral issue when one looks carefully at all the things that the wealthy countries could [do] to make huge differences to these people’s lives. But it’s more than that. We are in an inter-connected world, where our fates are tied up with the fates of Cambodia, with the fates of Nigeria.

If you thought a year ago what’s the place in the world that could never hurt the United States, you’d look at the map, you’d pick the middle of nowhere, as it were . . . you’d pick Afghanistan. We learned in a very graphic way in this country that in a globalized world society all of us are in this together. And that means Cambodians, that means impoverished Africans, that means those struggling for survival and development in the Andes war . . . war and drug trafficking are the daily fair to those in Central Asia and other parts of the struggling world.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s look at Afghanistan, then, for a moment. Do you think that what happened in Cambodia, ravaged by war, disease, genocide over decades — could that happen in Afghanistan if we don’t stay the course and help rebuild that country, the same kind of poverty that we’re seeing in Cambodia?

Jeff Sachs: We don’t have to deal in hypotheticals. This is what happened in Afghanistan, a society that collapsed, where civil war, political vacuum, warlordism ended up bringing the Taliban, ended up making that base in which terrorism could take hold. In Cambodia, we don’t have to speculate if whether America could somehow be implicated with Cambodia in a common fate. We fought a land war in Southeast Asia. This isn’t so long ago. This is a generation back.

In other words, these are not your hypotheticals – that poor places in the world somehow could threaten the United States. This is the reality. Except we keep finding each time that we are hit that way that it seems to us a surprise rather than understanding that that’s the nature of the world that we’re living in.

Jamie Rubin: But some Americans would look out at this kind of extreme poverty in Cambodia in the film we just saw and said “Well, that’s happening all over the world.” How typical is what we saw in the film in Cambodia?

Jeff Sachs: We were looking at the lives of some of the poorest of the poor in the world. Fortunately, a lot of economic development has taken place in the so-called developing world, which is five-sixths of humanity. The part that’s stuck in this incredible impoverishment of the kind that we saw is probably about one billion of the six billion of us on the planet. It’s about a billion. Maybe by some ways of thinking, one and a half billion, possibly two, who are struggling for survival. I define this kind of extreme poverty as poverty that kills. Not the poverty of inconvenience, not the poverty of jealousy, not the poverty of wanting to catch up with one’s neighbor. But the kind of poverty that threatens to take life. And not just threatens . . . takes millions of lives every year of people that are too impoverished for an adequate diet, that are too impoverished to see a doctor, that are too impoverished to gain access to clean water that they need for survival.

Jamie Rubin: So you’re looking at a billion people out there who need help. Who’s got the resources to help a billion people?

Jeff Sachs: Well, of course, what history shows is that a great part of economic progress takes place within the countries themselves as education spreads, as the technologies that have been developed in modern life take old in other parts of the world. Indeed, in the film we were seeing, a fiber optic cable being laid. Now, the irony was the back-breaking, life-threatening work to lay it. But, after all, let’s remember also that there will be a fiber optic cable there and it will reach Phenom Pehn. And sooner or later, and we hope sooner, it will reach villages in Cambodia and in Vietnam and in Thailand so that it will make a difference.

But what’s also true when you’re looking at such extreme poverty, countries that have been broken by disease, often broken by terrible civil war, by events outside of their country, more recently by dramatic climate change. If they don’t have a helping hand, a hand that can help to provide the education and the urgent needs to allow these system to lift themselves up, then inside of being on that positive path of development, which much of the world has caught, they can find themselves in a downward spiral in which the disarray of society, the conflict, the disease, the lack of education, the displacement of families, the separation of families, even the slavery that we heard talked about in that film can cause a downward spiral that eventually leads to mass violence, unwanted mass migration, the spread of disease, such as is taking place in Southeast Asia with AIDS right now threatening the whole region, including Cambodia.

And if you don’t catch that until you get calamity — that’s when it really comes back to haunt the United States and others. So just viewing this as a spectator sport — if you’re very cynical — or viewing this as a tragedy in which we shouldn’t get involved is a huge mistake, given what we can do. Given our own humanity and our own souls, but given our direct foreign policy, security, public health needs to prevent these kinds of crises from spinning out of control.

Jamie Rubin: But let’s look at the irony of this fiber optic cable now. Here you have jobs being provided to impoverished Cambodias, terrible conditions they’re working under. But the jobs wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fiber optics cable. And yet some of the advocates of helping the poor in Cambodia would criticize this kind of fiber optic plan, because the jobs were not up to Western standards. Where do you stand on this globalization doubt where some believe that by bringing fiber optic cables to places like Cambodia we end up harming the people there?

Jeff Sachs: I think first it’s important to understand the people that we saw were coming from the villages for temporary work, and then they were hoping to earn some money that they would bring back to the village. Cambodia, like many impoverished places, like most of the most impoverished places, is basically a rural agrarian society, with 80-90 percent of the households in peasant subsistence agriculture. The life in the countryside is so shockingly poor it’s hard for us as Americans to understand it. Without water and sanitation, without access to health care, without connections to a power grid, to put a computer online and so forth. This desperation, this is the poverty that kills people.

Jamie Rubin: But would they be better off with kerosene for their lamps, as the man said in the film, or helping build a fiber optic cable that no Cambodians are likely to ever use?

Jeff Sachs: Well, the idea is to understand first how extreme the impoverishment in the rural areas is, to understand why people take back-breaking jobs which threaten them physically. In the countryside, the dangers, the risks to their health, the extreme impoverishment and hungry is even worse in many parts of the country. Now, these jobs were temporary jobs. This was to earn a little income maybe to put the kerosene in the lamp.

The kinds of jobs that are more persisting in delivering income are what also is sometimes criticized here. But in Cambodia, it’s the garment factories, what are called the sweatshops. But those are the places, in Phnom Penh and in the other urban areas, which are providing the first food hold on the ladder out of extreme, death level impoverishment. And it’s getting that foot on the ladder, and then the next step and then the next step, which is the essence of the process of economic development.

Now, what I think is crucial to understand is that some places are in such extreme poverty that even lifting that foot to the first rung is nearly impossible. You have to have enough energy. You have to physically have enough nutrition to get that foot up there. Your leg has to be there. If there are landmines everywhere, that is not just a literate disaster, but it’s also terrible for a society that can’t get to even the first rung on the ladder.

So creating jobs, even humble jobs, allowing the shift from the extreme back-breaking, life-threatening rural poverty, to new sectors to manufacturers, to services, that is the development. But while some free market fundamentalists think “Oh, that can all happen by itself,” and others bemoan it even happening, I see something in between that, yes, that is a foot on the ladder, but we shouldn’t presume that it can take care of itself and we shouldn’t watch millions of people dropping from the ladder from extreme hunger, from disease, from the death of impoverishment while they’re trying to rise. We can help make this a civilized and dignified and much more assured process than it is.

Jamie Rubin: What [do] your recommendations entail in a country like Cambodia, 12 million people with several million living in this terrible situation like we saw in the film? Are we talking about foreign assistance, are we talking about debt relief? What would you recommend?

Jeff Sachs: Certainly when you have a country that’s so utterly impoverished that people are dying of their poverty, you can’t be asking them to re-pay debts that may have been taken on for some foreign policy reason or a World Bank loan or something else a decade or two ago when the re-payment of the loan literally kills. And one might think “Well, the civilized world would never do that.” But in fact, for dozens of countries in the world we’re actually debts at the cost of millions of lives. It’s the most unbelievable thing, but it is a kind of bureaucratic process. Those debts are on the books. Sure, why not collect them? You hear a lot of people say “Well, they borrowed, they should re-pay.” But it’s not so simple when re-payment means that there is no money available for drilling a bore well for clean water in a village or providing antibiotics and immunizations for children to keep people alive. And that’s the real situation. Or fighting the AIDS pandemic, which is sweeping through so much of impoverished world. So, no,

we should not collect debt when collecting debt means death to the people that are re-paying. That’s the first.

But second, what we need to do is help with the countries to find a path to real economic development. It’s not simply transferring money for the sake of doing it, though when it’s a humanitarian disaster, by all means I think Americans just are incredibly generous in those instances. But it’s finding ways to help invest in the future of these countries. The two utterly most reliable ways are investing in the health and in the education of the children in these countries so that we don’t lose another generation to disease and all of the disabilities of those who survive the disease, plus the fact that millions and millions . . . estimated 130 million, could be many more children around the world are not in primary school. They have no future economically unless they get an education. And we can help them do that. And so investing in the future of these countries is what’s utterly needed in addition to not pursuing this incredible folly of collecting debt.

Jamie Rubin: Well, invest is a nice sounding word. But I think we know that means spending money. And that money has to come from somewhere. When you look at the American foreign aid budget, how do you feel? Do you feel we’re spending the appropriate amount of money on these kinds of projects in countries like Cambodia?

Jeff Sachs: The foreign aid budget is shrouded in misconception and mystique. Many people think it’s a quarter of our budget. Many people think that we’re spending many percent of our Gross National Product every year on foreign assistance. Many people remember the Marshall Plan, which was one of the great examples of successful foreign assistance, and it was an act of incredible generosity.

Jamie Rubin: President Bush just referred to the Marshall Plan in the context of Afghanistan.

Jeff Sachs: Absolutely. Winston Churchill called it the most un-sordid act in history. The fact that Americans gave a lot of help to Europe to rebuild Europe after World War II. We did it because we wanted to live in a safe world. And we thought that that was a good way. And it proved to be a marvelous investment. But it’s led a lot of Americans to think that we

must be giving a tremendous amount of money. Where is it going? It must be wasted. And the fact is actually we are giving very little money right now. This is a shock. People don’t really accept it. But what we are giving right now is out of a $10 trillion economy, which means we produce $10 trillion of goods and services every year, we’re giving a total of $10 billion for all of the developing world. Which means one-thousandth of our annual income.

Jamie Rubin: What would that compare to the Marshall Plan? What percentage of our national income were we spending then?

Jeff Sachs: We were spending not one-thousandth or one-tenth of one percent. But we were spending about 20 times that as a share of our income, about two percent of the gross national product in the big years of the Marshall Plan. When you spend one- thousandth of your income, what it’s doing is you’re taking one penny out of every $10. You’re saying “Here’s $10. We keep $9.99 cents for us, and we take one penny and we give for the whole developing world.”

Now, we also take that penny and we divide it. And we give some to middle income countries, who are not as rich as us, but not fighting for survival, and we give only a small fraction of that penny to the countries fighting for survival. Now, why do we do that? Because a lot of our foreign assistance is political, or it’s aiming for a regional problem that may be important for us, but it’s not aiming at helping the poorest of the poor in the world. It’s not really development assistance necessarily even. So if in all we’re taking one penny out of ever $10 for our foreign assistance and we’re living in a world where both for our heart and our protection we should want to do more.

Jamie Rubin: We have a president, President Bush, who said he would increase our foreign aid spending. We have the Congress, we have the American people. What accounts, in your view, for this rather small percentage of the income that we actually spend on foreign assistance? Why?

Jeff Sachs: We’ve got a kind of bi-partisan consensus over the last 20 years to just cut and cut and cut our foreign assistance up actually until the last year or two. This wasn’t really one party or another or one administration or another. There was maybe ideologically the idea that, well, poor people, if they just take care of themselves, they … if they take care of themselves, they can get rich. That is an American feeling. We’d like it to be true.

Maybe we don’t fully understand what it’s like to come out of a devastating, brutal genocide. Maybe we don’t have really a fully feeling of what it’s like as an impoverished country to be facing an AIDS pandemic leaving millions of children orphaned. Maybe we don’t feel really how hard it is when you’re living in a climate subject to extreme drought, which can leave millions of people destitute and many of those dying. Maybe we don’t really know how hard it is when you’re living in a malarial region, where the climate is making so much malaria that children by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands are dying.

We took an easy view, which said “Be like us. You can go do it.” And it’s a great view. In some parts of the world, it may even be true. But we haven’t understood that for parts of the world, for the unlucky parts of the world, whether it’s because of disease or climate or geographical isolation or the devastation of civil war or genocide. It’s not simply a matter of picking yourself up by the bootstraps. If you don’t have help, you can get caught in the most horrendous downward spiral.

Jamie Rubin: So you are detecting real changes now in the Congress and the executive branch and among the assistance groups? You think there’s a change moving towards the kind of explosion in spending that you’d like to see happen?

Jeff Sachs: For the first time in 20 years, the foreign assistance budget is pointing up rather than down. And this is definitely a response to September 11. It’s a response of Americans that are seeing the rest of the world, understanding it is a dangerous world and that we need to invest in many ways in our security. It’s also Americans seeing the horrors that we

saw in the film or of the AIDS pandemic. And Americans respond with incredible generosity. They want to know that the spending can work. They’ve had a feeling that it’s not working, partly basic they have greatly over-estimated what we’re actually spending. But when you can show Americans that that money will really go to immunizations or really help children get into school or really provide clean water, Americans respond, and they will respond in large numbers and I think with generosity.

Jamie Rubin: Now, one of the standard and particularly effectively criticisms of foreign assistance is that much of the money in these big projects goes to governments in the third world or the developing world, and that a lot of those projects involve corruption or bribery or payoffs.

Jeff Sachs: And not just on our side.

Jamie Rubin: (Laughs) What is your view as to whether [there] is a new approach to foreign assistance where that kind of corruption and problem can be avoided?

Jeff Sachs: I’d say that, again, Americans think that since we’re giving so much and we don’t quite see the results, there must be that huge black hole sucking up the money. And a realistic sense would say, first of all, let’s be a little bit more calm and dispassionate. It’s not that we’re losing all that money, it’s that we haven’t really invested that much in many of these utterly needed programs.

What’s also true is that whether a program works or not depends on whether it’s well-directed. Are we giving money to a thug because that thug may happen to be our thug, or are we giving money to a government that doesn’t really need it, but it’s an ally of ours, so we want to give it a “thank you.” Or are we giving money [to] others [who] really try to focus on the great challenges facing the poorest of the poor. When we do that, we actually see a lot of results.

Americans certainly don’t begrudge the pennies that they put in the UNICEF canisters on Halloween night. Because they know that that money is going to immunizations, it’s going to help children in school. If more of our foreign assistance were directed at the health emergencies, at helping to fight AIDS, at helping to fight malaria and tuberculosis, to immunize children, to make sure that in these impoverished countries, half a million mothers now die in child birth because they don’t have a skilled attendant with them, or that there are nearly three million deaths per year from diseases that could be prevented by immunization, if they felt that the money were going towards those needs, I think that they’d be much more eager to support.

Jamie Rubin: You’ve suggested that the Administration and the Congress are now more open to spending greater sums on foreign assistance for places like Cambodia. How much farther do we have to go, in your opinion, to be at the right number?

Jeff Sachs: We’re spending a penny out of every $10 right now. Maybe two pennies out of $10, maybe three pennies out of $10 will be what it takes in the end. It’s not going to be much more than that, in fact, because even that small amount, given how rich we are, would mean some extra tens of billions of dollars a year when combined with the other rich countries’ contributions, which would be sufficient to actually change the course of these countries.

When I headed a project for the World Health Organization in the last couple of years, we asked the question, “What would it take to help provide the life saving interventions for the poorest of the poor to really fight AIDS?” Not just to talk about it, but to really fight AIDS. To fight malaria, TB, the diseases which kill children, the provision of skilled attendants at childbirth.

And we found out something absolutely remarkable: that eight million lives a year could be saved, eight million, if in each of the rich countries another one penny out of $10 was put aside for health in the poorest countries. So for an extra penny out of $10, we could save eight million lives a year.

Jamie Rubin: That sounds easy, but let’s face it, that means a doubling or a tripling of our foreign assistance budget. Do you see any signs that members of Congress, members in the Executive Branch, are prepared to even consider doubling or tripling our aid?

Jeff Sachs: When one starts out with tiny amounts, then a doubling still leaves a very, very small amount. So I think if it were put to the Americans eight million lives a year saved by an American effort in which we set aside another penny out of $10, if Americans believed that that would really work, I think they’d jump at the chance. They know the difference that that would make for their hearts and souls, and also for the stability of the world and for the chance that Africa, that Cambodia, that other impoverished places in the world could have a future. And I think Americans absolutely would go for it.

Jamie Rubin: But would the Congress? I mean, there’s no constituency for foreign assistance. It isn’t like a farm bill, it isn’t like a military program which is built in a specific district. What would transfer the support of the American people into real change in Congress and the Executive Branch?

Jeff Sachs: Well, of course I think the biggest issue right now is that Congressmen think this is a dangerous vote. “How can I vote for foreign assistance?”

Jamie Rubin: To double it!

Jeff Sachs: My constituents are going to be all over me!” And that, I think, is not the right political calculation actually. That may have seemed right five or ten or 20 years ago. After September 11th, I don’t believe that there’s that risk there. I think Americans would like to see the leadership help to steer us to a safer world. When President Bush proposed a modest, and yet historic up turn in foreign assistance. Historic because it was the first time in a generation, he didn’t face a huge cacophony of criticism. He didn’t face the Conservative Right saying, “Why would you ever do that?” In fact it went so smoothly in part because, after all, when we’re talking about pennies on $10, it’s really a small amount. We are spending so much more one week to the next, whether it’s farm subsidies or some other issue, that we’re talking about very small amounts that could change the world in a way which Americans would dearly love.

Jamie Rubin: Now, do you think the argument the President put forward when he made this modest increase that poverty breeds resentment and can breed terrorism is a compelling argument? Do you think it’s true in Cambodia? Is it true in some places or in all places? How, how do you view the poverty-breeding terrorism argument?

Jeff Sachs: People have said, “Well, the terrorists were middle class, even rich, so what is this poverty/ terrorism link?” I think it’s a misunderstanding. Where poverty played its role was in the failure of politics in Afghanistan, which left such a vacuum that the Taliban were able to consolidate power and provide a base for terrorist operations.

Jamie Rubin: A home for terrorists.

Jeff Sachs: So what the president has rightly said: It’s not that the impoverished are the terrorists, but impoverishment creates conditions in which all sorts of ills of immediate concern to Americans can take hold. Deals can be terrorism, they can be drug trafficking, because boy, do we see a lot of impoverished or failed states where you

get the foothold of international narcotics trafficking. They can be the spread of disease, because when you have prominent infectious disease, whether it’s tuberculosis with its new resistant strains or whether it’s AIDS itself, these can spread all over the world if they’re not being attended to in the pockets where you have so much disease burden. So what impoverishment does is provide a general seed bed for all sorts of terrible things to happen. Not just the terrible things in the lives themselves, which could be enough of an argument, after all, because Americans as a generous and humane people don’t want to see that anyway. But it also creates the opening for the violence, for the civil war, for the youth gangs, for the narcotics traffickers, and, yes, for the terrorists as well.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk a little bit about how this aid is spent. One of the most prominent criticisms of foreign assistance is that this money is going to corrupt governments. Your boss, the Secretary General of the United Nations, has said that the first challenge for governments who want foreign assistance is to have good governance. How important is it that this money be spent without the kind of corruption that was associated with it in the past?

Jeff Sachs: Good governance is critical and one individual or crony regime can bring down a whole society. So this is something we know. We’ve even supported some of those, because they were the thugs on our side of the Cold War in some of these conflicts. So governance is critical. The mistake is the blind view that, well, it’s all corruption out there, and therefore, there’s nothing that can be done. Many people think of Africa as just one country, one big country with a mess that can’t be solved, and with so much corruption and so forth, and this is a huge misunderstanding. There are many extremely well governed countries, at least at the low levels of income that are trying desperately to get out of poverty, but don’t have enough to run a health care system or can’t run a school system, because there’s just too much impoverishment or too much disease or they’re overrun by the AIDS pandemic. So we have to think in a lot more sophisticated way. No one wants to give money to a thuggish regime which is going to steal it, but what we have to understand and what my studies and many others have found when they’ve looked at this seriously is that there are impoverished places all over the world that are struggling with democracy, that are struggling with the social expenditure on health and education that are needed but are just too poor to get out of the trap, and those are the places that need the help.

If we were reliably helping those countries and holding back on the others, well, it would be a completely different story. But even the countries that well governed and are desperate for the help and the partnership, they also are not getting the level of help that they need.

Jamie Rubin: Now a lot of people would listen to you, Jeff Sachs, and they’d say “he’s an idealist, but in the real world, the way the famous philosopher Hobbes talked about it, life is nasty, brutish and short.” Do you really think that even with another penny on the $10 that we’re going to eliminate poverty around the world? That we’re going to create a situation where there’s no poor people, there are no people with no medicine and no health care? Is that . . . is that really a plausible long term goal?

Jeff Sachs: I actually don’t think life is nasty, brutish and short, or that it, that it has to be, let’s say. Certainly in our country through generations of economic progress and a lot of help for desperately poor people so their children could go to school or go to, uh, see a doctor or have clean water through all of the efforts that have been made, we were able to eliminate that kind of poverty that kills, and so have many, many other societies in the world, and we’ve learned how to cooperate and we’ve learned how to rise above the Hobbesian war of all against all. We can do this. In fact, the part of the world that’s in the extreme impoverishment that Cambodia is and that many other countries are, that part of the world is shrinking, because economic development is proceeding. And this makes it so utterly possible if we combine our great prowess through the wealth and the technology and the science and the learning that we’ve developed and address it to that part of the world that so urgently needs it, we actually could solve these problems in partnership with these countries. They are desperate for it.

Jamie Rubin: So you think global poverty is a solvable problem at a cheap price.

Jeff Sachs: Just as John Maynard Keynes said in 1930, in the middle of the Great Depression, that poverty could be eliminated in England. People said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Just look at what economic growth can do if we look down to the possibilities for our grandchildren,” as he put it. Well, that was true in England, and it’s true in the United States, and it was true in many countries in the world. We can now do this on the global scale. We can do it if we understand that while a lot of the progress will necessarily come from within the countries, no doubt about it. With a helping hand, we can make this a worldwide process with magnificent results, not only for the impoverished, but for the world that we ourselves and our children live in.

Jamie Rubin: Some of the anti-globalization activist groups look at a problem like Cambodia and this fiber optic cable and, and they wonder whether this is a, a created situation where a cable was being put in, and rather than providing kerosene or foreign assistance for the people who need it, a global project to the benefit of the rich countries was put in place. And I guess the counter argument is that any job in this part of the world is better than no job. How do you balance this problem?

Jeff Sachs: I think first the premise is not correct that this is just for rich people, this cable. This is a cable that Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia will use to hook up to the Internet. Now I’m going to villages all over the world where people are using the Internet. Not very many people because they haven’t had the access; they haven’t been able to hook up. But the idea that this is somehow just for us and not for them is a huge mistake.

Jamie Rubin: But in Cambodia, I think, is the lowest Internet usage in the world. It’s more expensive to use the Internet than it is to provide food and medicine for six months for a person in Phnom Penh.

Jeff Sachs: One will find that the Internet is used in Phnom Penh to help this budding textile and apparels sector to be able to place its orders, to receive the fashion design instructions, and that it will actually be used for business purposes, as well as for a lot of other purposes. In Southern India I’ve been involved with a number of the states in Southern India where Internet use in the villages, in very poor villages, has taken off because it’s quite, quite an amazing thing. And where the scientists there have been able to develop a very low cost way of distributing the Internet within the village itself. It’s experimental, but it’s actually quite amazing.

Jamie Rubin: Some people look at this fiber optic cable project and they say these people are suffering through this terrible work conditions in order for the upper classes, the rich international communications consortium to have Internet usage, when in Cambodia they don’t use the Internet because they’re too poor.

Jeff Sachs: I think first the, the premise is wrong, because the Internet actually will be used by poor people, as well as rich. This is something that we’re seeing in India and elsewhere. But I think there’s a more general point also. The anti-globalizers think that somehow hooking up to the global economy is either so dangerous or so wrong headed that countries like Cambodia should just step back. That’s not really Cambodia’s problem, the global economy. Cambodia’s problem is that coming from a situation of impoverishment and then civil war and genocide. Cambodia was outside of the process of economic development and growth for decades, while costal China, while neighboring Thailand, even Vietnam after the war ended, were able to achieve economic development by joining the world economy. Now what’s true is that if we were to look at any of these countries step by step out of the impoverishment, it’s pretty grim. The lives of the impoverished are grim. That’s why we ought to help to diminish that, uh, extent of suffering and to help make reliable and much more rapid the escape from impoverishment. But there is a way out. It does involve joining the world economy, but it also means a helping hand from the rich that have already made it.

Jamie Rubin: Let’s talk about who can provide that helping hand. Some people say that it’s really not government’s job, that government is not an international social worker, but that much of the money available is in the hands of corporate America or the business community the wealth in the hands of individuals. How do you assign the various responsibilities for providing that helping hand?

Jeff Sachs: It’s also true that in our economic system, business is not primarily philanthropic in its outlook; it’s there to make money. And on the whole we do quite well out of that, because our market based economic system with profit maximizing business, while it’s got its slips, no doubt, has produced an incredible amount of, of productivity and material well being. We can’t look to be out of charity, as it were, or even out of foreign policy (Laughs) or out of security or out of all the interest that we have in this. We can’t look to business to be the source of the billions of dollars that it will take. Only governments acting on behalf of all of our joint interest in living in a safer world can do that. But we can’t let business off the hook by any means. Business has a role, first being a responsible partner in this, and our businesses can act with a lot of impunity and corruption and so forth in those places, and that is to nobody’s advantage, even to our own business. We see over and over again that, uh, the corrupt path is not a way to run a business in the long term. More than that, business in our society has a lot of the technology, a lot of the organization and management skills that are vitally needed for development success. Our businesses, the drug companies, they’ve helped, together with our government, to make these wonder drugs to fight AIDS, the anti-retroviral medicines.

Jamie Rubin: Aren’t they too expensive for the people in Cambodia and Africa to buy?

Jeff Sachs: And if the drug companies are responsible partners with the donor governments so that the companies are selling those drugs just at the cost of producing them, not at prices way above cost, which they might sell under patent protection, but if they’re responsible partners selling at the low cost and the donors are buying at the low cost on behalf of these impoverished people that couldn’t even afford that low cost, well, then you get this kind of public sector leadership together with private sector responsibility in which both sectors contribute to help solve the real problems of the poorest of the poor. So we have to step back from the ideology or the conception that it should be all one or all other, and understand that each part has its own role to play, but a role which fits within the basic character of the public sector and the private sector.

Jamie Rubin: Jeff Sachs, thank you for joining me.

Jeff Sachs: Oh, thank you very much.