The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 45. Dr Comfort Ero: Resolving deadly conflicts & reforming the UN

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

How important is the role of the international community in resolving conflict? Is peace possible in the Middle East? How relevant is the United Nations today? Rory and Alastair are joined by CEO of the Crisis Group, Dr Comfort Ero, to discuss all this and more in today's episode of Leading. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the restis politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alecester Campbell. And we're very, very lucky to have with us today, Dr. Comfortero. And Dr. Ero is the head of the international crisis group. And we talk a lot in the podcast about the challenges of the liberal global global order, the way in which from the 90s, we had an age of optimism to an age now where things seem to be disintegrating around the world. And Comfort's work and the work of crisis group is

right at the very heart of this. This was an organization founded in the mid-1990s, founded because of the catastrophes in the Balkans and Yugoslavia, dedicated around the world to producing incredibly detailed high-quality research in conflict zones. If you wanted to know a few years ago about exactly what was happening with tribal groups in the northeast of South Sudan, you would go to the crisis group. If you wanted to know exactly what was happening in East Timor in the late 90s, you would go to the crisis group. If you wanted to understand the Balkans, you'd go to the crisis group. And Comfort is the president, so she's the boss, but she's also been part of the creation of this organization. She was a relatively early employee. She led on their programs in West Africa

out of Sierra Leone. She then worked for the United Nations mission in Liberia. She's somebody with a deep academic training. So she was trained in the UK. She's British, but her parents were brought up in Nigeria. And she is somebody who combines, I think, a real dedication to influencing policy, shaping policy, making the world a safer place with a commitment to ground truth. So comfort, welcome. Let's start with where we are today, the day on which we're speaking and how you would describe the world today, literally today, compared to how it was. when you left university and the world that you saw in the 90s?

It hasn't pander in the way that it was described to me. I left school when I was told that I was the generation of the future, the era after the end of the Cold War, where key institutions and one that I aspired to work at, the United Nations, the ideal of we the people, and dealing with peacekeeping, peacemaking, that these institutions were ripe to respond to conflicts. They were ripe to respond to peace building.

And also that these were institutions that were entrusted and there was trust at the center of them. I think today I look at a world that is going in the wrong direction. I have struggled with the numbers that we're seeing since the end of the Cold War. We've never seen figures like this except for the Rwandan genocide. Last year, set aside Ukraine was the worst year in terms of human suffering and deaths. And we can name Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan, which you're familiar with.

And this year, I think it's gone further in the wrong direction because just astonishing figures around children, for example, the most innocent of people. now being caught in the crossfires of great power politics and in revenge and in pain. And the idea that this is what we're dealing with in the 21st century when my generation was told that we would be the generation that would turn things around.

There's a sense of failure, to be frank, a sense of hopelessness, a sense where the horizon looks bleak and dark and the sense in which you don't know where to go but I cling on to hope as well, which is why I do what I do. Tell us a little bit about your own life and your own childhood, your life before you were, I guess, 20. A little bit about your parents' inferences on your life, where you lived, how that helped to form you. Look, my parents are in a sense, your classical immigrant parent.

They found themselves here. They came here from Nigeria to study. my father, electrical engineering, my mother initially teaching and nursing and specialised in pediatric ophthalmology. One of the most famous high hospitals, Morphil's eye hospital. I grew up on the children's ward of Morphil's eye hospital and I saw my very first eye, so to speak at the age of about six or seven. And, you know, our mother insteped in us the value of our eyes. And in fact, my mother used to tell me off as every good Nigerian mother does with her eyes. You know, somebody would say, but I never saw your mother talk.

Okay, she did. She used her eyes. And I knew when she was calling me stupid. I knew when she was telling me behave yourself. I knew when she was saying, you're doing okay. She was minimal with her words, but her eyes spoke volume as well. They both believed in education. My father was an educationalist.

He was very clear. My mother used to say, oh, let's take the children on holiday. My father would like, I am on holiday. I'm in the UK. I'm not at home in Nigeria. But myself, my two siblings, It was made very clear to us that there's one thing that can't be taken away from you, and was your education.

And for me, particularly as the only girl, middle child, my parents were pretty clear. And my father did chart the classical male father career that he thought I would take. I was going to do medicine. And then I took a turn and guess what made me take a turn? It was the 1989 sort of the beginnings of the end of Thatcherism. and I was asked if I wanted to come out and get involved in election campaigning and all those kind of things so very quickly started doing all those things going out you campaigned for labour I'm not going to reveal my political I'm getting the vibe I'm getting the line but nonetheless I got caught up in very few people say I got to

1989 the end of thatcherism decided campaign and I was campaigning for thatcher my father had some key that my father had lots of books because my father was an educationist he always bought our school books, and he would take our list of books to read, and he would just literally go out and buy all the ones. But there was one thing he consistently bought, which is books of politically or historically significant women. So I grew up with one book in the living room, apart from Goldemere and Gandhi. I grew up with Thatcher's book. That doesn't say anything about my father's political lenience.

But it said a lot about how he viewed women, and he was very clear to me about about your independence. As a woman, your independence as a woman was bound by your education. That you get educated, nothing can be taken away from you because you chart your own course. And so I didn't do medicine. My dad didn't understand it. He said, well, what else are you going to do? The only other profession he could possibly conceive of was the law. So in the midst of doing my first degree, he registered me, and I still wasn't interested. They still didn't get it. And then he said, well, you do your master's. And I did it in international relations. And he still wasn't figuring it out. and I was still registered to do law.

I deferred it several times, but my father seemed to have a way with the law society that maintained that. And then, well, he said, well, you're going to be a lecturer then, because what else could you be? You know, if you weren't going to do medicine, if you weren't going to do law,

then you'd be a lecturer, which was what my father was. And then he said, well, and to be a lecturer, you have to get a PhD. And, you know, I grumbled and everything, and I had a very good friend who said to me, you're lucky, because your parents are prepared to invest in you

and invest in you getting educated, take it, grab it while they're still alive and get educated and do whatever you want after because it's not many children who are blessed with parents who care about their education. Now, unfortunately, my father wasn't alive to see me get the PhD, but my mother was,

and when I got a call a year after I was, I got graduated, somebody called the house and asked to speak to Dr. Eero, and I said, unfortunately, he's passed away, and they said, I would like to speak to his daughter. And I was like, oh, yes, that's me. That's me.

That's me. I'm the daughter, yeah. Listen, tell me about your name. Oh, comfort. I don't think I've, I don't know. I don't think I've, I mean, I've signed many, many thousands of books in my life, as has Rory. And I love it when I find something they say, can you sign it to such and such because, oh, I've never heard that name for. But I can honestly say to you, I've never heard that name before.

And on that, no, expect a signed copy at my door of your book. He'll be there tomorrow, be there tomorrow. And yours, Rory. it's my maternal, my mother's mother's name, Comfort. And, you know, as all children from those connoonial past, you know, they do land with an English name at one point. My English name is Comfort, and I have a host of other names that are non-English. What are your other names?

Comfort, Equace, which is the Binis side, Edo State of my father, and Abusola, which is the Yoraba side of my mother. my full name is Ayaru, Ero, which is my father's name. And the same goes on with my brothers as well. I mean, the other tradition is that your grandparents and the most significant people in your family also name you as well. So... Am I right that you went back to Nigeria partly during your childhood? What was your sense coming from Britain to Nigeria?

What struck you as a child about what you loved about Nigeria and what you missed about Britain? So I could only answer that on hindsight because I was a child. I mean, there was a baby when I went to Nigeria. I mean, my parents did what all good Nigerian parents did at that time, which is to take their children back, get them steeped in their heritage, the Nigerianness. And in fact, I was convinced that my mother was the one in Nigeria, which was her elder sister. And I used to call her mummy all the time. I had no idea that this wasn't my, you know, and then she had lots of sisters.

Just to explain that. So your parents remained in Britain. Yeah. And you were sent back age two or something to be with their family, their extended family in Nigeria, until you were what age? I came back at the time of infants, the last year of infants. Do we still call it infants? Pre-primary school, I guess. My older brother came back in time to go to primary school.

And I was brought up on my mum's side by her sister and her siblings. And we lived in my uncle, my mum's elder sister's husband, was in University of Lagos. So I grew up on the campus, Lagos campus, and my aunt was working for the African-American Institute. She was also a museum curator. And in fact, she influenced, I mean, it's hard to tell my story and the decisions I took without talking about my aunt in Nigeria because she influenced it. And so even though you came back to Britain when you were six,

you stayed very close to your aunt. I stayed close to all of them, particularly on my mother's side. So I call my aunt in Nigeria Mommy Campos. We tend to call people by their location. So my cousins will call her Mamae Kedja, because the Kedja is one of the government areas, boroughs, if you like, in Lagos. But because I grew up on campus, I grew up on the Lagos campus. I called her and her husband, Mommy and Daddy, Campus.

And then my mom's elder brother, we would go and hang out and play with them and their children in Ibados. But they came from Canada. So I would call them Mommy and Daddy Canada, because that's how I identified with them. And then I arrived in London. I was told them we were coming back to London. and I saw my parents as mummy and Daddy London and I was told, these are your parents? I was like, oh, who are these people?

So I felt blessed. I felt that I had several parents in my life. Comfort, just tell our listeners a little bit about what the crisis group is. We already gave some of the kind of key things that you look at. But for example, we talk a lot on the podcast about what's going on in the United States. Looking at the sort of scale of political polarization there, it's not impossible to imagine all sorts of conflict that we wouldn't see as a conflict maybe in that we think about some of the issues in the Balkans or South Sudan and so forth.

But is that a potential crisis that you would look at and seek to try to prevent? Yes. And in fact, in our nearly 30 years of history, Alistair, a decision was taken in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident for crisis group to formally work on the United States as a conflict actor. Now, let me step back a bit. A decision was taken soon after Trump's coming in power that we needed to look at the United States in terms of do no harm, in terms of its use of force and within the context of the war and terror and never ending conflicts. And so the trustees sort of instructed us, so to speak, to start looking at the US overseas and its foreign. policy. We took a tilt in 2020 to look at the United States' domestic politics and reverberations, because what did we see? We saw language that we would see in other conflict zones. So

looking at civilians who were protesting on the street, Trump was using language of battlefields, of enemies of the states. And these were citizens protesting in the name of justice, inequality. And we have an indicator, Alistair, for example, when we're looking for country, that are going to go through election crisis, where we think that the elections will be usurped, will be challenged, where we think that various actors will seek to delegitimize the vote. We use this kind of indicators to look at other countries.

And our boss, my boss at the time, Rob Mali, asked that curiously, if you try to overlay this within the United States, what would the scorecard look like and everything turned red? And in fact, the January the 6th, incident, Alastair, that I really is familiar with, was sadly a vindication of what we had forecasted that there would be a run on the country, that there would be a challenge to the elections, and that there would be some kind of attempt to delegitimize that as well. So that's why we are, where we are.

So coming back then to where we are today, what happened between the 90s and now? You're part of a crisis group, which was set up by these sort of heroes of ending war, people like Richard Holbrook and Mark Malap Brown and all these figures who were very much part of a vision of a UN liberal global order. What happened to it? What happened to the idea that we still had in the early 2000s that the problem was that the world wasn't intervening enough, that we turned our back on Rwanda, that we had a responsibility to protect, that was going to be this global order that was going to make the world ever more peaceful and prosperous. Where did it go wrong? This is a good question, Rory, and I've just come back from our board meeting in Oslo, and this was a

central theme that today we are, what we are witnessing is a crisis in peacemaking and also at the same time that we see a new generation of conflicts emerging. And basically, I think what we found is that, particularly after the Arab Spring, I mean, let's backtrack a little bit. I mean, I think one, one thing is clear to me, the era of negotiator settlements, finding peace deals, that there are only two that we can cite in recent times, Colombia in 2016, the ending of the FARC, and then 2014 Mindanao in the Philippines. Those are the only two that we can mention. Can I, speaking to you from Dublin, can I put in a pitch for Northern Ireland? I was going to come to that because I'm walking backwards.

And I think the only other one in my time that I think holds credibly, and I think when you look at it within the guise of crisis group, and we never worked on Northern Ireland, which was interesting, Alistair. That for me was a sort of a classic example of contemporary post-Cold War and the Cold War. And it gave people a great sense of optimism. So I gave people a great sense of optimism. They said, you know, I've brought peace in Northern Ireland and now I'm going to go around the world and create peace and 30 other places. But soon after the Irish peace agreement, then things started to fall apart. And it was very first tested in Syria when suddenly you saw that the principles of peacemaking, peacekeeping were no longer holding truth. Leaders said that in the name of

responsibility to protect all those key doctrines and suddenly they're fritted away and I think the very first damage was in response to 9-11 and fast forward you know people are invoking 9-11 again in terms of of Israel, Palestine. So I think that was the first death of that's liberal democracy. Intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq? The way it went, it went wrong, notions of state building, notions that you can't impose peace, that you can't use the military or strong arm the military to fix the problem. The notion that you can go in and bomb a country, even despite the atrocities of that country, the notions that the United States and its notion of democracy could easily be transported, I think, died a death in Iraq and Afghanistan,

which you know well, Rory, if everything I was saying is wrong, then we wouldn't be where we are today, which is, you know, 20 years wiped out and the return to Taliban also. The notion of democracy and human rights, the fallacy of that, particularly in Africa as well, and now suddenly we see. see that all those ideas suddenly looked very frivol, come 2010 in the midst of the Arab Spring as well. For our general listeners, because we have many, many people in many different countries around the world, different levels of knowledge. Could you give us a sense of half a dozen conflicts that maybe people aren't focused on happening

at the moment in the world? Do you think people should focus on more? You know, when I became interim vice president in 2021, I was told, welcome to your new job, Myanmar, the coup. Myanmar was at the top of the headline in February 2021. It dominated the first three years of my transition. And it slipped down the radar. That's the other one.

And tell us what's happening in Myanmar now. I think you've got a situation where the coup leaders are entrenched, suppressing resistance, trying to push ahead with elections. But you've got leaders who are using the most brutal tactics to sideline, to cartel, to oppress people. And you're seeing heavy human trafficking in the region. first heavy refugee flows. And you remember Rory Alistair, we had the Rohingya crisis as well. And you had flows of refugees going into the border regions of Bangladesh. And today you've got a country

where it has been able systematically to ignore the international community, to it's resistant to the pressure of sanctions, resistant to ideas of intervention. And it's been able to maintain its power, partly because the international community has decided that it has not, sees no options. It's not prepared to go into sort of log-aheads with China. And it's also largely because we are talking at a time of great power politics. I think one of the factors that has undermined the ability to deal with crises like Myanmar is because of the US-China tension. Let's just very quickly maybe give us examples of four or five other conflicts that continue, and then maybe we'll get into this question of great power politics.

He's another one. I think so you were talking about an era sort of post the Cold War. It's funny how certain crises come back onto the agenda. So Haiti sort of back on our agenda is about three or four times in the span of 30 years. You've got Yemen also in the Middle East region. Sudan, I've heard you, and I have to give credit to your podcast, for continuously bringing in places like Sudan and the Sahel, which should be a strategic importance in a way to the West onto the agenda.

the DRC, one of the longest-running intractable conflicts on the continent. And then, you know, I mentioned other unknown ones like the Central Africa Republic as well. And then, you know, we've got, well, it's not a small one. I think it's quite a big one. The South China seas and Taiwan. I wouldn't put that as an off-the-rader conflict. I'd call it quite significant. Comfort, what, when you, you said some things there about several of the governments you just mentioned and several of the regimes, for example, Myanmar. And you were very, very clear and very, very forthright and very critical. What are your relations like with governments where you're going in and you're trying to make an analysis and do you work at having good relations or do you just think

that your job is to speak truth to power and to help people prepare whatever the government is? It's both those things and I think that that is crisis group's sort of unique power. We're not a name and shame organisation, Alistair. We spend our time as you suggest, providing, of rigorous field-based analysis. So we don't parachute in those countries. Our analysts are either working in those countries, long historical presence in those countries. They also work in the regions as well.

Our job is not to, as I said, name and shame, but to find a pathway to peace. It's about getting stuck in the politics, the grey area. So we don't see a black and white. We're trying to seek a compromise. we're trying to seek solutions that requires us to engage, to understand the dilemmas of the actors involved. My very first job is to build trust with even the most problematic actors, even actors who've got blood in their hands, even actors that have committed the most atrocious crime. My job is to find or to shape the politics of peace, and that requires me to engage with you.

So I spend my time understanding, bringing your perspective into my analysis, In the end, I'm going to come up with policy options. And those are policy options that you may not like, but then nonetheless how we understand a way out of the crisis. One of things you said in talking about why we have been unable to address Myanmar is great power competition. Tell us about the way in which the world has changed and why great power competition matters as a way of explaining conflict today. I should say it's always been there. It evis and flows.

It can exacerbate certain conflicts. And there's certain conflicts that become proxy to great power policy. I mean, it was great power politics. It brought us into two world wars. So I don't want to make it sound as though it's new. I think what is new is we're no longer living in an era of unipower where there's one dominant, dominant power, the US. You know, we're no longer living in that bipolar US, Russia. It is the era also of Asian geopolitics of US-China competition. And it coincides with a period where institutions that we would normally rely on, either United States, nations or the European Union or other regional bodies are brittle, lack in legitimacy are often not seen as able to respond to those crises because they are caught up in that geopolitical crisis as well. Talk to the UN. You, I believe, began working for the UN when you were very young. It's one of your first jobs. Yeah. Well, do you mean the association? Or do you mean the UN itself? The association. And I say proudly that I was probably, well, self-declared longest intern. I believe

I was the longest interlain. I mean, if there was a Guinness Book of Records on internship, I probably would get it, I think. I don't know, but at least in my world. And your internship started in. 93. I was in between finishing my master's and then getting ready or trying to figure out whether I was going to do a PhD or go to law school. So there you are. It's 1993. And you're starting to intern for the United Nations Association. What has happened to the UN during this period? I mean, 93 to 2023, it's quite a neat period to look at 30-year period. Yeah. What's happened in 30 years?

I mean, it's what we struggle with every single day. I think what we've watched is that in the theatres of wars, civil wars, interstate conflict, war and terror, in the midst of that, and I would even say that the first salvo of the crisis that faced the UN was in Shrebanichda, where you, Alistair, Rory, would know, in Rwanda was the other beginning of the death knell. So even in that glorious era that everybody talks about, they were already probably with peacekeeping and question marks about the UN's own ability to peacekeep. But then suddenly in the 2000s, we saw a resurgence of the United Nations going into places

where I first started in Sierra Leone, in Liberia. And one of my former bosses who also was president at Crisis Group, Jean-Marie Geheno, came up with this innovation of partnerships where the regional bodies would rehat in the form, for example, of the West Africa body and working partnership with the UN. And there was a moment in which the region and the international body would work in concert to help rebuild and bring peace back. So you would, for example, get peacekeeping troops from African countries, part of African regional groups, working alongside the UN. Yeah, working and they called it rehattin. So, for example, despite, and I think concerns about its sort of the heavy-handedness, for example, of Nigerian military or other regional bodies, countries, Ivory Coast, despite the controversies of their interventions.

intervention in Sierra Leona or Liberia, the UN saw them as useful tools because it was Africa in the lead. And this was also the era of African solutions for African problems. I leave aside what I think about that. All is to say is that there was a period of a sense in which the UN was on the right path. It started to go in the wrong direction in the midst of 9-11. And it further took a knockback because all the triumphalism of that period was started to sort of die within the context of the our spring and then we get to Libya when doctrines, peacekeeping, responsibility to protect, all those things that we championed were, were seen for seeing for what they were. They were misused.

There was double standards. There was hypocrisy. We talk about those things today, but they're already there, Rory, in 2010. They're already there exposed. A spotlight was shone on them in the midst of Libya, in the midst of Ivory Coast and in the midst of the Democratic Republic. We already saw that the system was brittle, was fragile and was being called into question then.

Comfort, I think lots of people sort of see the United Nations almost like a body that sits above global politics, when in fact all the United Nations is a collection of all the countries of the world with all the tensions and divisions that exist there. Do you think that the system, the basic foundation of the United Nations with this permanent five, which seems a bit odd given where real power lies around the world today, but you've got that permanent five fundamentally divided, US, UK, France most of the time, and then Russia and China in a very, very different place. You expose your nationality there.

Sorry, but you know what I mean. You know what I'm saying. And all with this power of veto, then all these other organizations that in groups, so you mentioned G7, there's the G20, there's the BRICS. Rory and I talked on the podcast recently about the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road initiative, which seemed to me was being used almost to form a different kind of global, powerful alliance around China. is the United Nations as a kind of legitimate accepted form of global authority?

Do you think it's gone? No. And it's not dead. And in fact, and I made that very clear when I gave my sort of acceptance speech at the United Nations. If your entry point is the Security Council, then yes, you'll be forgiven for questioning its relevance going forward. But the UN is more than the Security Council. I think there are important agencies that are doing vital work as we speak today. They're at the front line, for example, in the...

in trying to get trucks into Gaza, then you've got important agencies that are doing work on climate change, doing work on environmental issues. You know, you've got other bodies that are doing sort of important vital developmental work like UNDP as well. So I think you've got to look at the entirety of the UN.

And when I worked in the UN, I, in Liberia, Rorya, I began to appreciate the rest of the UN family that does the sort of work behind the scenes that doesn't often get heard about and where the job is largely thankless. You know, our entry point, your entry point, all our entry points tends to be the Security Council. And so if I was to focus on that, then yes, it's inevitable,

and there's certain things that are inevitable with an intergovernmental system, which is what it is. There's also something inevitable and dysfunctional about a body that, in the end, is controlled by five countries, who, by the way, the only claim to be on that, on the Security Council rested with the triumph in which they brought, not to be undersold with the Second World War. The world is radically different from the end of the Second World War.

There are other powers that are vying for claim. Just on that, I mean, we were sort of thinking about this in relation to what would happen if suddenly the Security Council booted off Britain and France, which seems pretty reasonable the way the world is changing. But brought him. He's not sure. Show his nationality there. Brought in Britain, brought in Brazil, brought in India, brought in South Africa.

And when we began talking about it, Brazil was being run by Bolsonaro, India's being run by Modi, South Africa has problems of its own. It didn't exactly feel to me as though the inclusion of those great regional powers was going to suddenly lead to a human rights respecting pro-democracy, liberal global order. If you're going to judge them on their democracy, then you're opening the door to reach size those other five permanent countries as well. Yes, sure, sure, sure. But, I mean, number one, that even in the regions of these countries,

there's no consensus on who's going to represent them as well. So, for example, in Africa, there's a real contest. You know, the continent has its own superpowers. The continent has its own hegemont. So Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, also, and Ethiopia, all vying for status as the representative of the continent. And also, I think, with Asia as well, and there is that tension. I think China would guard jealously.

And in fact, where there is consensus, so I talked about how dysfunctional the P5 is, but where there is consensus is that they jealously guard their right to stay in that position. So when Biden opens the door to reform, it is a reform that keeps us at the table and intact as the P5. This is not about one of us off and the other one, you know, and a new person in. There is a question today as to how you right size the Security Council, how you bring in another two or three. but there's no question about those five going off the council. The other thing that worries me a bit about the UN, I mean, you gave a very lovely moving account

from your perspective in Liberia of all the wonderful work that UN agencies do. But of course, those us who worked with UN agencies, they also can often seem the most unbelievable bureaucratic horrors. Yeah, well, it's always nice to start off with a good story. But with every large organisation that you do run up against bureaucracy, and when you are in the deepest, far-flung northern, bit of Sudan, you know, or South Sudan, all the places where you're so familiar with in Afghanistan, you're caught up with filling in all these forms and checking boxes and everything.

It becomes ridiculous because your simple job is to focus on how you're going to get the wells fix, how you're going to get the trucks to the next village, how you're going to do the water world, how you're going to get that child that is caught in the crossfire of a rebel What stuff is sorting this out? I mean, you know, I have friends working for the UN and Afghanistan who have to use browsers to access a form of internet explorer that ceased to. the issue in the 1990s, needs seven signatures to go on leave, can't resign from the organisation because they can't, maybe you can load the forms in the right way. I mean, well, you saw last, I think it was last week in the midst of all the tragedy of Gaza. I think you saw somebody from

the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights, right, was quite a letter. You know, that one feels as though that person resigned for other, that, that resignation was coming, but it all sort of crash landed and all his frustrations and sadness and concerns were all laid to bear as a result of Gaza. So that was probably his tipping point. So just quickly to explain to listeners, this was a blistering resignation letter from a senior official in the UN Human Rights Organization, New York, saying that he was completely horrified by the Israeli bombing of Gaza and that he felt he could no longer remain in the UN. but I think underlying it was also years of frustration with the bureaucracy, the nonsense, the hypocrisy that sadly is embedded in so much the UN system.

Yes, but everything. It was a letter that you were reading 75 years of failure. But I go back to that classic first-degree essay that we are all asked to sort of answer when we're doing international relations. If the United Nations did not exist today, would recreate it. Yes, as a child of children, that, have suffered the colonial legacy. And as a child coming from countries who fled,

who had to flee, or were told not to go back because of the civil war, as a child who saw and listened to stories of people who fled other countries and who has friends who are refugees, I would recreate the United Nations for that, for that reason, to safeguard those rights, even if it appears to be a fallacy today, even if it appears that it's been smashed up today on the high halter of geopolitics, I would recreate the UN, a better one, where this self-entitlement that you can continue to sit at the helm of the security council is then equalized in a different way. Right then. We'll be back in a second. So let's just take a quick break.

Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarach here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest Is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling

to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

And we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Now, we've got, as Roy said earlier, lots of listeners in different parts of the world,

but a lot of our listeners are in the UK and you are like Rory and me, you're British. I'm from London. Okay. You have a United Kingdom passport. And I just wondered what you made of the British standing in a lot of the issues that you deal with now. We talk a lot about, you know, getting rid of diffid, about scrapping the 0.7% development, Brexit, I think, sort of undermining our power. And at the moment, a really horrible debate around one of the themes that you've just addressed, which is immigration, which, let's be honest, is going to get worse for the world, particularly with climate and all these conflicts. So what's your assessment of your own government?

You know, when I was coming onto this podcast, it's like, I'm going to have to do everything in my power to avoid. Talking about Brexit. Talk about the UK. You know, when you were asking me, Rory, to sort of chart my own history in the course of sort of international politics and the glorious area or not and everything about the UN, there's another story about the UK as the champion of the United Nations and these core principles. And I would say that those core principles is what bound. both sides of the political divide, whether you were conservative or whether you were a Labour, there was a sense in which the UK was seen as a reliable, trusted, go-to actor. And I remember my first sort of coming to crisis group, and even before then, the importance

of knocking on the door of embassies, of getting the perspective of the UK officials because they were very succinct analytical. The foreign office for me still the go-to place, partly because some of my colleagues have come from there and I've gone back to there and everything. So there was a clear sense of Britain's standing in the world. And I mean, I'll be candid that that's been lost. And I think there is a concern about how the UK is viewed internationally. There is a sense in which the UK is sort of lost at sea, that what we trusted it for, what we understood it for,

about protecting some of these key principles and doctrines are, I wouldn't say completely gone, but there's a sense in which we're struggling to claim our rightful seat at the table, which is why people are questioning why the UK still sits at the table of the UN. I've got to say, I'm going to say, if that was you being very, very diplomatic, I'd love to hear the full version, but I got a very, very clear sense of where you were going. Now, listen, we've gone around a fair few issues, but maybe. as we come towards the close, I wonder if we shouldn't just spend a little bit time and what's happening now in Israel, Palestine.

Mm-hmm. So I'm going to give you a magic wand, and you're going to go in, and you're going to try to bring some sort of peace to that place now. How do you even start with all that's going on? Well, it's a good question, Alistair, and if there was a magic wand,

we wouldn't be where we are today, so I think we should just acknowledge that. I think that if we can't answer the question of what to do about Hamas, then it becomes very difficult to understand how you deal with Israel's own sense of security. And I don't think we should underestimate the trauma, the pain and the horror that Israelis see today that their security and that deterrence that they held on to for so long has been shattered. So I think before you can ask them to stop the bombing, we've got to be clear. how you restore that and that requires us to do with Hamas yet at the same time and for me it's about how do you stop the bombing because the statistics just on the children alone and the pummeling of Gaza and the pummeling of innocent people and so a way forward alistair requires us to

recognize the pain and the harm and destruction on both sides so I just want to say that at the very beginning. Now, the difficult question is how do we begin to chart a political way forward? You know, you can to a certain degree, and who knows whether Israel will be able to do this, it's unpredictable, it's uncertain, but you can maybe to a certain degree, decapitate, degrade, downgrade, Hamas. And there are all question marks about that. What you can't do is that you can't get rid of an ideology because it continues. And we can't ignore the context in which this happened, which is Palestinian aspirations and rights and political rights. However, I've got to make it clear that this is not of justification for Hamas and did. And what Hamas did is not, you know,

what happened on the 7th of October was not done in the name of those aspirations. But nonetheless, this is the reality that we're facing as well. So what would it mean for Palestinians to have a real sense of statehood or nationhood? What would be the minimum requirements? I mean, I think there are two things. number one is the whole leadership of on the Palestinian side as well in relation to the Palestinian authorities. I think there are question marks as we try to reconceptualise what a Palestinian state looks like. There's that pillar to be dealt with. But there is also the sense in which Israel today is moving more and more to the right. And put Gaza to the side for one minute, you've got the whole settler violence unfolding in the West Bank, where every single day

the rights of the West Bank, which we often saw as the base for the Palestinian, has been pummeled, has been attacked, and it's been encroached upon. So even that becomes a challenge. And how do you address that question of the West Bank before then you get back to the wider issue of Gaza and then the whole issue of the rights of the Palestinians as well? Do you think there's any realistic chance of preventing the building of more settlements? I mean, I was talking to an Israeli friend yesterday who really did not want to be drawn in any idea of saying,

okay, enough settlements, we have to have an agreement on no more settlements. Instead, he was saying, you need to understand that, you know, this is a place where Joseph was born, or this is a place where Abraham was buried. This is part of historic Israel. Is that mindset actually remotely compatible with trying to create a two-state solution? No, not now. If you're talking to me about where Israel is now and in the last two years, it's increasingly far right when you listen to the key leaders,

whether it's Benghivir or Smodrich, and even the young people, they call themselves the hilltop use. They're the ones who are committing most of the violence today. There is no interest, there's no appetite. So how do you put a pause on that settler violence? And then how then do you begin to do with just the basic fundamentals of dealing with the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank? again, there's a whole different prescription needed today for dealing with Gaza, but just in the midst of everything else, what we've seen in the last two weeks is as the bombing is taking place in Gaza, you've got this subtle violence taking place and that's off the headlines. And it's been suffocated because of what's happening in Gaza.

And you asked me, Alice, at the beginning, about how do you keep certain things on the radar of international actors? And I think this. is one that we have to continually bring on the radar. My colleague brought it to the spotlight two days ago when she highlighted that in the midst of Gaza, we were seeing settlers taking advantage of that and using it as a means in which to go after and then continue to pursue that settler strategy. When we were talking earlier about 9-11 and some of the actions that flowed from that, I got a sense from your sort of body language and the way you were describing things that you have quite a critical view of the impact that America and Britain, as a result of our

response to 9-11, has had on the rest of the world. Yes. And I'd like you maybe just develop that a little bit. And also, does that mean? So I think I probably sit here, and I think Roy maybe does as well. And we think, well, the two-state solution, if it's ever going to be possible, it's never going to happen unless the Americans really put the energy in there. But do you actually think it's going to be other countries closer to there that are now more

powerful, whether it's Saudi Arabia, whether it's Qatar, whether it's some of the regional powers there, that their influence is perhaps going to be greater if we're ever going to get any progress on the Israel-Palestine question. Yes, partly because the US itself, its supervisory power, its ability to cajol, to influence, to a certain degree, is there for Israel. And there's a sense in which Netanyahu and the Israelis will listen to Washington, but up to degree. But we are talking in the moment, Alistair, where while the two-state solutions was increasingly seen as bankrupt, and quite frankly, we have to resell that idea of a two-state notions as a process back to the Palestinians who may not trust that as a process going forward. But why that

was sort of set aside, and the aspirations of the Palestinians were set aside, another process called the Abram Accords or normalization was going on. So economic deals and they came alive really under Trump. With places like UE. With the places like the Emirates, Morocco as well. And on the eve of the 7th of October attacks, the process, the normalization process between the most significant country in the region, Saudi Arabia and Israel, the train was out of the station.

So I think the weaving, the netting of peace in this back together requires the involvement of Arab countries. And in fact, although it's highly unlikely, Alistair, that Israel will outsource its security to anybody else. One has to ask that question as to whether the future of Hamas and what it becomes, politically at least, can sort of be also nurtured by the region, that you sort of need the region and Arab countries to be the guarantor of what comes after as well. Can I, as my sort of final step, bring you back to Africa, one of the great apparent miracles of

the late 80s, 90s, was the explosion of democracies across Africa. And of course, in just over 12 months, we had six coups, military coups, where elected governments were toppled and military governments have come in. Give us two or three reflections on that. What lessons should people draw from that? What does that mean for the future democracy in Africa? What is it that really matters about those coups? In fact, there were seven. I was just quickly doing the maths as well. seven coups in the last three years. That tells you about the state of play on the continent. And I'll tie it back to Alistair's question. I think what we've seen in the last few years is that a number of crises, whether it's Ukraine and the fallout from that, now Israel, Palestine,

and the fallout of that, I think COVID-19, climate financing, the question marks about institutions, the bankruptcy of, I think, the liberal democratic process, all of it shone a spotlight. First, with the fallout of the war on terror and then the Arab Spring and now again. And I think here the fallacy of democracy has been exposed. But I want to qualify what I mean. Yes, fallacy democracy. Yeah, I want to qualify what I mean because there's an assumption that what is happening on the continent equals the death of democracy. And in fact, it's not.

It's a dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy that is taking place on the continent. it's question marks about this performative democracy that I go through the motions every four years only to get something that is quite questionable where there's still a shrinking of the political space where governments themselves are only checkboxing these are elections that are signed off considered legitimate by external actors

I put the West in that camp and then what happens after you get a flurry of international assistance security sector reform that does work that solidifies a regime that is seen as questionable by its citizens as well. I mean, I've often said you can't eat democracy. If democracy doesn't lead to jobs, the promises of jobs, of education, of a different lifestyle, people begin to question who is it that is sitting in the statehouse. And they've watched 10 years of intervention in Mali, for example, 10 years of hyper-militarization in the Sahil. We are defenders of the security first approach, because for you to get to governance and do all those

kind of things. You need to get security back. But you've got to do the hard work of politics. You've got to give people the hope to live for the next day. And what we're seeing in Mali, what we're seeing in Guinea, what we're seeing in Sudan. And Sudan is the saddest of all of that because we saw a revolution taking place in 2019. And instead of doing the hard work of ensuring that Prime Minister Hamdok, who was given the most difficult task, Rory, of trying to turn things around in Sudan. While the military were able to continue to have access to the largesis of the state and the paramilitary forces, who were the coup proofers, were also able to continue with their gold mining, Prime Minister Hamdok was left with the most difficult job, which is to weave

together a very complicated, fragmented society, which is to fix the problem of the economy, try to bring livelihoods back together, back to do with displacement and refugees. Meanwhile, the army and the palomilitary forces were able to continue to carry on as business as usual. So this is the challenge on the continent to convince people about the quality of democracy. And the one other thing I would say, Rory,

is that there have been different surveys that have been held on the continent in the last year or so, whether it's the Open Society Foundation or UNDP. This is where UNDP is good, despite what you said about the UN earlier, or even Afro Barometer. And they're all consistent

about people's desires for democracy, 66%. But they wonder about the type of leaders at the helm, so much so that one young kid says to me, Comfort, what's the difference between a rigged election and a soldier in power when the difference is very marginal for that young child who sees no prospects and no hope going forward? Comfort's been lovely talking to you, but we've done a fair or a few regions of the world,

and it's all been pretty gloomy. just give us something to feel happy and bouncy about as we close. Yeah, I mean, I can't do happy and bouncy, but in every tragedy there's always an opportunity. So I don't come out of this feeling rather bleak and hopeless. For example, as we speak, there's this innovative. I mean, I think it's going to be a challenge for them, but there's this interesting, ad hoc, innovative approach

that Kenya is pursuing to help deal with Haiti. But it needs to work with an alliance of countries to make sure that the political agenda is not lost in the process of trying to sort of bring force into Haiti. The Maduro government, as you know, Rory in Venezuela, has been less and less inclined to pursue a democratic path and electoral process. But only a couple of weeks ago, we saw this agreement in Barbados between the opposition in Venezuela and the Maduro government. And I think we have to keep an eye on that process to make sure that we do get to a process where there are sort of democratic elections in two years' time as well.

And I think there is still a sense despite the fact that people preach about the demise of the United Nations, nobody's calling for the death of the United Nations. There may be alliances. We may be in an era of clubism where everybody wants to go into different directions. And it's true there is a lack of inconsistency about international relations. But if you're looking for consistency, then you don't come into work in international relations because, you know, the transactions and trade offer are crucial, but my job is to look for opportunities and I spend a great deal of my time looking for even the smallest window. And if I can push it ajar a little bit further, then we'll take it as well. Thank you very much, Comfort. It's been a great, great pleasure. You've covered

an incredible amount of the world. We're very lucky to have you on the show. We're also lucky to have have you running crisis group. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's a real pleasure. Thanks for not come. I love to talk to you. Thank you. So, Alistair, let's start with the question. what she thought about her politics. Well, I agree with you that you're unlikely to get radicalized in 1989 because you really think you've got to get out and maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, in, and I thought her assessment of the UK, well, I mean, it was a very mild version of what you and I think, which is that we've really damaged our standing in the world. I thought what was great about her was that she's got this very internationalist mindset and she sort of has a kind of breadth of

experience and knowledge that was, you know, obviously rooted in a lot of values, but I was struck by how clearly part of her thinking about the things that are going wrong in the world do relate to America, 9-11, Iraq, Afghanistan. So that's something that I was also intrigued by, and maybe if we got on again at some point to talk about, because it doesn't seem to me that the answer to the problems of the world is going to be just the UN. The answer to the problems is going to be the US and other Western powers getting more involved. I think that the risk is, in fact, we've learned the wrong lessons that, yes, there were humiliating messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we've responded by going to the other extreme and going into a period of

isolation, not really being involved in the two-state solution, not really checking Russia over Crimea. Oh, and also, the big one, which he did mention, not engaged. in Syria? Not engaging in Syria. And the other example she gave is not engaging in Sudan after the civilian government took over not really supporting them. So I think the story in a sense is a very complicated one, which is that somebody who clearly feels passionately conscious of the harm that the UK, the US and others have done, both her experience of the colonial legacy in Nigeria, her experience of 9-11, her sense, intuitive sense that regional solutions are preferable to the Security Council weighing in.

But that has to be balanced against the fact that she's also reminded us that since the US withdrew from the world, the world has just got more and more dangerous since 2014, every year, more conflict, more internally displaced people, more refugees. So that's one of the big questions.

I mean, what would it mean to recreate a liberal global order? And what is the way in which the US can re-engage in the world, notwithstanding all the baggage of the past? I mean, I suppose the other thing that she was projecting was this, I mean, I hate the phrases, but people roughly know what we mean, global north, global south, that she sees herself probably as something of a spokesperson for the global south having endured a lot of the kind of, you know, the damage of some of the things that we're talking about. I guess the other thing that I found very interesting in talking to was this tension that there must be between wanting to be

both an analyst and a player. Yes. In a sense, what the group is doing is going in and analyzing a place and analyzing a problem, but also trying to influence it. And that's very, very difficult. And that does put you into difficult positions. So she talked about, you know, she'd be in the room with people who, you know, and she's thinking, well, yeah, you've killed a lot of people, but I've got to sort of talk to you. But how do you get that balance right? You must have had this a little bit, but give directly in terms of getting the balance right between analyzing the place that you're in, but also trying to influence it.

It's unbelievably difficult. And I mean, I think she's an exceptional appointment for Crisis Group, and she comes with so much credibility. But the thing that I particularly love about Crisis Group is their brutally detailed analysis of what's happening often at a very, very local level in a country. Well, by the way, on that, I was very surprised that one of the first things we talked about, I just sort of threw it out. I don't know why he was thinking about it, but about America, and she sort of straight in there and say, well, you know, America's a bit of a basket case right now, I paraphrase. Right, right, right, right. Brutal. Brutal.

And that had been done by her predecessor, Rob Malley, who in fact, careful listeners will realize that we've just been talking about the podcast this week because he's been suspended from the Biden administration because of his dealings with Iran. I think crisis group is a wonderful organization. It's a sort of foreign office for the world. I mean, what it does is provide traditional political reporting with people who speak local languages fluently have deep cultural understanding on areas that other people aren't covering. And I think if you're a Scandinavian country or many of them. the middle powers the world, who can't afford to have huge diplomatic networks. Crisis group is that network for them. But at the same time, there's the problem of influencing. So how can you, on the one hand, say the military government in Myanmar are a bunch of horrifying, murdering, human rights

abusing, rape endorsing, arson endorsing, and in the case of their treatment of the Rohingya, profound racists, and at the same time, sit down at the table with them and expect them to want to negotiate with you. And the second problem, as with every organization, and I think it's one of her challenges she has to deal with, is the question of funding. She has to find people to support it, and some of that will be governments. You know, the British government, maybe, I was interested she didn't want to talk about how she voted in Britain. And that's presumably because she has to keep her really good relationship with British governments of all political complexions. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I got the feeling that was the one part of the interview,

she was really struggling to say, not to say what she really thought. I sensed the vibe. Yeah, I said she's more on your side, I think. But it must be, for somebody like her, an internationalist really believes that foreign policy matters, really believes that the UK has a special place in the heart of all these different parts of the world that she knows. And she said, you know, we've slightly given, well, not slightly, we've given it up, we've given it away. And yet at the same time, she is the first British head of crisis. That's a great achievement. You know, we had big Australian political figures running it, huge figures from the UN running it.

And she's the second woman, but the first woman of colour, as it were. So, no, no, she's a very, very impressive woman. I'm really, really glad that you got her on. Very good. Great. Well, thank you, Alistair, and have a great day. All the best. Bye-bye.