All right. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Maria Steffen. I'm a senior policy fellow here at the Institute working in our academy. And I'm also one of the founding members of our Arts and Culture Forum here at the Institute. So on behalf of everyone here at USIP, I welcome you to this Love the Questions Salon that we are cosponsoring today with Genesis at a Crossroads. And we extend a special welcome to those who are not able to join us in person, but who are watching via live webcast today. And we would encourage you all here with us and those who are online watching to join the conversation and spread the word about the messages that will be discussed today using a Twitter hashtag, which is hashtag arts for rights. So if folks here can tweet using that hashtag, that would be wonderful. For those of you who are joining us and entering our beautiful building for the first time today, a little bit about USIP. The Institute serves as our nation's center for research, training, and practice in preventing, solving, and transforming violent conflict by improving the United States' tools for building peace and shaping policy to that end. USIP pursues our national and global interests to help transform violent conflicts using active nonviolent means. And we happen to be celebrating our 30th anniversary this year. Appropriately, and this will be of interest to this group, USIP's founding legislation calls on us to meet, and I quote, the national need to examine the disciplines in the arts and humanities with regards to the history, nature, elements, and future of peace processes, and to bring together and develop new and tested techniques to promote peaceful economic, political, social, and cultural relations in the world. Today's gathering certainly helps us to advance that mission. The USIP Arts and Culture Forum is guided by the conviction that serious peacebuilding does and should incorporate the arts in their rich and varieted forms into all of our strategies and initiatives. Thus, we are absolutely delighted today to collaborate with Genesis at the Crossroads, an organization whose mission of using the arts and education to creatively advance peacebuilding and to advance peaceful means to resolving conflicts closely aligns with our own mission. I would encourage everyone at the outset to remember to fill out their event survey card that they receive coming in. That's very helpful for us in terms of our programming here, so please fill out those cards. I would also like to note we're pleased to have on the panel a former USIP Jennings Randolph fellow, David Tolbear, so welcome back to USIP David. So to tell you a little bit more about Genesis at the Crossroads and to introduce today's salon, I am very pleased to introduce the founder and executive director of Genesis at the Crossroads, Dr. Wendy Sternberg. Thank you. Thank you, Maria. Thank you, George Lopez in the back of the room from the USIP. We are also delighted to be here. The US Institute of Peace, people really worked very hard. There's somebody in the room who really lobbied for the US Institute of Peace to be open and to be a beacon of light in the peacebuilding community. So I am really happy to be here with all of our panel. I'd like to thank our sponsors at the outset, and that is the British Council. We have Paul Smith in the audience with us today, Adventure Travels. We have Davis Polk and Wardwell, and we have Harry Ballin from that law firm that helped support this program. Of course, Modus Hotels that helped house our panel. And last but not least, the United States Institute of Peace. So I wanted to share a little bit about why it's called Love the Questions. It's based off of a real key quote about having a question and pursuing an inquiry and actually living someday into the answer that it's not about knowing everything necessarily right now and that there's a lot of value to the inquiry and to dwell in the question and understand over time we will have answers and those answers will inform deeper answers to questions. So one of the issues about what is a new conversation for human rights in peacebuilding is to actually get present to the old conversation for human rights in peacebuilding. So it's been very mired in a legal framework and it's not that there's anything wrong with that. It's very important to have those things and we're very fortunate to have David Tolbert with us. But it's also where do those things fall short? What are the limitations of the legal framework? And when we open up that world and take a lens looking at human development and we look at other such things as the arts, how do we actually then inform that conversation? When we look at human rights and we add heroes to the conversation, what happens to that conversation? So this is about a conversation which means it's not just a panel sharing their perspectives and their ideas. You have their biographies in the program. It's actually having a conversation with the audience. And the power of this type of program that Genesis of the Crossroads has put together is to actually engage with you as an audience with the panel. So Genesis of the Crossroads, you have all the information in your program but just to give you just a quick overview, we work in three different domains that are all integrated in performance and artistic presentation, in arts-integrated education and also in arts-based humanitarian work. And why is art connected in all those three areas? They're not siloed, like I said, they're integrated because arts create encounter and people can have their political and religious backgrounds, their positions, their ideologies and still with the arts not just convene but collaborate in the true sense of the word come together, create new things together, and all of a sudden what is the other or the enemy starts to fall away and it becomes human-to-human interaction. This is a slow process and we think it can be added to the work of the diplomatic community as we start to look at the human-to-human, enduring connections between people. So without further ado, I just want to run through who's next to me and go down the panel. Nigel Osborne is a foremost wonderful emeritus professor of music from the University of Edinburgh who has been working all over the world in and out of conflict and post-conflict areas looking at where music can play a role predominantly in the lives of children who are traumatized but in adults as well. Now looking at a body of neuroscientific evidence to bolster what was already evident but now have the scientific underpinning to actually see what's going on in the brains in the neuroendocrine system and how this can impact children, veterans, other people traumatized. So we welcome him. And next to him is Dr. Lynette Jackson who's the University of Illinois Chicago professor from Chicago and her career has looked at many different things related to refugees, their journeys, issues of displacement, de-territorialization and looking at what is identity, what do people leave behind, what's the human toll for all of this displacement in the world. Looking at gender issues in human rights in Africa and also recently triumphed with work that helped with reforming the police system in Chicago and brutality in human rights. So we applaud the local global there. David Tolbert who you heard about is a policy fellow from here and also a prosecutor in the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Now the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice looking at fragile states emerging from deep conflict without civil society. You can't just blink and go into a Supreme Court in a justice system and rule of law. You need to understand what fragility looks like and build civil society. And certainly last but not least Alexandra Solomon who's an award-winning radio journalist and producer with NPR's Station in Chicago WBEZ and hosts a program called World View and sometimes actually hosts the program even though she does all the content for it as well. And covered Nigeria, Moldova, 9-11 and some other really seminal events and conflicts in the world. So thank you very much and welcome. There's a reception for those of you that have a red dot on your name tag afterwards from four to five and we'll try and stick to the timetable. And if anybody has any questions don't hesitate to ask us. The hashtag for Genesis is Pound capital G-A-T-C and can also be tweeted along with the United States Institute of Peace. And there's literature on a table outside and I think those were all the things to remark on. Thank you very much and welcome. Alright, so I'm just going to reiterate what Wendy said which is we're going to start the conversation but nobody wants to just listen to my questions for the next hour and a half. So I really do encourage everybody to join in. You know if you've got something you need to say even as we get started just raise a hand and I will be sure to include you. So I wanted to just start today thinking about a situation. Everybody's familiar with the 43 students who disappeared in Mexico in Guerrero State and they're still missing they haven't been found and one of the things that has happened as these students continue to be missing is there's been a pretty vibrant response from the artistic community in Mexico particularly the musicians. Mexico has a long history of kind of highly political artists and musicians and people, Mexican Americans, Mexicans in Mexico have been uploading songs to YouTube. They've sung these songs in the streets. There's many have taken the corrido form which is one of the traditional Mexican folk tunes that sort of a narrative dates back to the Mexican Revolution where people tell the story of injustice. There was a father-son duo actually in Chicago. The father is from Guerrero State. His son is a very well-known musician and the father wrote a corrido and he said to his son but I hear the musician you make it professional they uploaded it to YouTube it's gone viral. There's another very well-known Mexican group called Estocada and they have a song called Lagrimas which means tears and there's the chorus and I'm translated but it's a good translation is essentially we don't want any more of the same lies with impunity we can't wait any longer for the disappeared and this song has become one of the kind of anthems of the movement and there's a hashtag that everybody's been using which is hashtag yami can say basically we're tired we're tired of this. So here's a situation where we see music, social media, a kind of local global reaction to this conflict and yet a public a Mexican public that says we're tired we're tired of not getting justice and this idea of being tired and fatigued I think is also sometimes we hear about in terms of the American public when we talk about conflict especially these protracted conflicts like Syria where it feels like the solution is far in the distance and I just like each of you and I'll start with you David to talk about you know how it is we keep from getting fatigued you're working on a truth commission that's been at it for two years looking at Columbia and the fire so can you just talk about how we keep from getting fatigued and really disengaged from these conflicts what does it take? Yep thanks and it's nice to be back at USIP and to get to warm welcome the premises look a little bit better than they're different than when I was doing my fellowship five or six years ago maybe I like to come back this looks like a much more inviting atmosphere but I had a very good experience there I think you point to a real series of issues with fatigue and I think it's on a number of different levels now we have just I wrote an article for a project syndicate that came out called wrong term for human rights and we actually took this and did a public online debate between the High Commissioner for Human Rights Zaid and Michael Ignatiev and many of you are familiar with we had Fatou Bensouda the ICC prosecutor, a number of other activists talk about this and because if you look back at the 90s there were a lot of atrocities in the 90s obviously I spent nine years at the Yugoslavia Tribunal dealing with the conflict and the after effects of the wars in the Yugoslavia you had Sierra Leone, you had obviously Rwanda these weren't stopped but there was an international response in some way there were tribunals that were established there were new measures, new mechanisms, it was a decade where you had ten truth commissions that were established in addition to reparations programs and so forth and if you look at today we have some very serious kind of, Syria you mentioned but it's hardly limited to that you want to talk about Mali, you want to look in a number of places in West Africa you mentioned Mexico, etc. and we get very little response there's very little response in the state level that the ICC has been in existence now for 10 or 12 years the response is very slow there Syria doesn't of course fall within that jurisdiction but there is both tremendous fatigue I think from states but I think also from those in the media in particular so how do we begin to respond to that I don't think that anybody has a simple answer but to me the question of accountability, the question of justice, the question of addressing these issues really has been driven and has to be driven again by what we want to call, we call it civil society we at ICTJ actually like a broader concept but we call it active social forces which is not just civil society groups in some places like in Tunisia it's trade unions in some countries like in Latin America and in certain parts of the Middle East it's religious groups and so forth so I think that the energy to deal with the fatigue of states and international organizations like the United Nations has to come from the civil society active social forces flat process and what you're seeing in Mexico I think is a good example it may not be traditional civil society it may invade new actors but I think if we're going to deal with some of the tremendous atrocities that are going around the world we can't simply rely on states and international organizations to do the job and so I think that we need to find a way to re-energize these civil society groups and drive the process it was interesting and I'll stop with this I'm not sure what to do with this idea but in our debate, Ari Nyer who has played such a seminal role in the question of accountability he said what you need is a new Rome conference mimicking the Rome conference of 1998 where the ICC was established I don't think he meant by that a revision of the statute he meant to regain and re-harness the energy that existed in Rome and leading up to Rome I was in Rome and there was a more leading up to Rome a tremendous amount of civil society activism I think somehow or another we need to begin to we're at the 30th anniversary of Nuclemas, never again we need to see a much more active and vibrant approach from civil society actors from a broader range of actors I think the media as well and try to turn the page on the fatigue and not let states off the hook not let the UN off the hook at the end of the day this has to be a demand driven process Lynette do you want to I'll let you go, I'll let each of you go at the first question I'm going to respond I guess in a personal way as Wendy said my work really looks at human rights issues both locally domestically and globally so I think that I'll look at two things that I'm focusing on one has to do with migrants and refugees and I do a lot of research relating to people who've been displaced, deterioratorialized from their homes because of conflict, famine, persecution and what and everyone is familiar with the African migrant boat recently capsized off the shore of Malta and every week there's another case of 700, 300 African and mostly African lives lost and it can seem insurmountable and hopeless and I think that if we look at the root causes of these kinds of crises they are ongoing it's not a simple thing you have to look at this long process of converging sort of forces and factors and so it can really seem you know just too much really to grapple with and so how do I deal with that and sort of avoid a sense of fatigue and the way I do it in my research is through storytelling and really collecting people's stories and it's through that that I personally develop a sense of hopefulness and some of it is because when you just see refugees or migrants on the news and you don't hear their voices and you don't hear their stories it just seems like pure victimcy and something that's almost impossible to resolve but when you hear people's stories of survival of strategizing I've found that a lot of the people that I've interviewed are very cosmopolitan, multilingual, resilient see I think that really helps me not get fatigued because there are sort of narratives tell another story and so on that level that's one way I think on the other way in my involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement and Wendy said that I was one of the organizers or leaders of the movement that's not the case in Chicago we recently had a successful movement that resulted in the passage of the reparations ordinance and some of you have probably heard of that John Burge was a police commander in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s who was responsible for torturing approximately 100 mostly African American men and torturing confessions many of these men are still in prison the reparations ordinance that passed provides some form of reparations for these men I mean it's only about $100,000 but in addition to the sort of monetary amount there's also going to be a torture justice memorial education for eighth and ninth grade students and also admission of the survivors and their families to community colleges and so this is an example of how you fight fatigue through hope by recognizing some of the small successes and some of them that may be primarily symbolic I mean certainly a lot of these men are still in prison $100,000 is not going to do much you can't repay people for 20 years of their lives that were lost but still they create a sense of hopefulness and also and as David was saying the power of civil society when it gets its mind to change things the power of grassroots social movements when people organize together the movement for reparations in Chicago involve people from all different spheres Amnesty International a group called Project NIA which focuses on restorative justice a lot of young people were very instrumental in that process as well and so I fight fatigue through just finding these sort of examples that create a sense of hope I know personally you are a person who is difficult who does not get tired and you can't help all over the world but what do you think is at stake? I was lucky enough to participate long on a film by a French Canadian Quebecoise director called Helen Doyle sounds unlikely that she is a French she is Helen and wonderful film called Les Massages The Messengers and the film was about the shortcomings of our media in communicating information and of course let's put it into perspective we have heroic journalists and fantastic people in the media but on the whole we are not well served in learning about things we need to know and her thesis making a film was actually the arts communicative arts theatre, literature, visual art were the ways now in which information was being communicated not just factual information but emotional information one of the great dangers in our planet is a kind of evolving social political autism autism can be an ennobling thing in an individual it can give great perceptions great sense of detail but for society it is disabling and so creative arts are one way of sharing empathetic information not just this has happened to me but how do I feel and can I share that feeling somehow then I can begin to act and they will begin I answered your question from understanding emotionally a problem we only act through emotion even when you think it has been created by a limbic impulse a brainstem impulse we think because we feel and so we get people feeling maybe we get them thinking and acting finally it's energizing art creates and generates energy gives you energy you don't get tired anymore you revive and also it's durable I am in my country it's a little story I remember in 1999 working with children on the border of Albania and Kosovo we just had another wave of refugees over the border recently burnt out of their towns I think they were from Jakovar region if I remember and I remember working with some kids in this little tent we were writing a song of course they didn't want them to write a song about their great suffering I wanted to write about how they felt and where they were in a sense a kind of not a cheerful song but a resilient little song and they composed the music I hope and then they said can we sing it to our parents and I said of course you can go and find them obviously the camp was such they weren't going to get lost so about 20 minutes later a group of parents arrived and we sang the song and one of the fathers came up to me and said he was slightly tearful this is not a sentimental story but he said listen three days ago we lost everything our house was burnt down we had to take to the roads and mountains we just arrived last night we've lost absolutely everything we have nothing but you can't burn down a song can you? that is our durability there are a lot of things that I want to follow up with and I want to take first David's civil society re-energizing civil society but I actually wanted to throw this to Lynette because Lynette you mentioned the reparations that have that have taken place in Chicago where because of this energetic civil society movement that is pushed not just local authorities but international authorities, national authorities they've actually seen some form of justice why do you think this particular movement was so energetic and how can we take that model could we apply it to other cases are the lessons that we can learn from that particular movement immunity I think that this movement was so successful because it lasted for a long time the duration really is a 20 year long movement you had people who sustained their commitment to seeing justice in the case of many of these people who were falsely imprisoned some of the people Alice Kim who was involved was also involved working with the prison exonerees and getting certain prisoners who were on death row exonerated and ultimately in 2013 the end of I'm sorry not 2013 but the government the previous governor sort of eliminating the death penalty in the state of Illinois so I mean it's been a long process it's not just the reparations ordinance of the death penalty but I would say that one of the things that really made a big difference is that there was a coalition of different individuals and organizations legal clinics NGOs that really came together and I think that culture and the arts was also very central yesterday because we were speaking to a gathering of young people I actually and it was a video of a group of young performers from a group called kumba links and kumba links produced this song and this spoken word performance on John Burge who was the police commander and in their performance and these are all kids from 14 to 18 years old they spoke about human rights issues they talked about all the different instances of torture that are occurring under the American flag from Guantanamo Bay to Chicago they really applied different human rights and international law concepts to their approach to domestic issues as well as looking more expansively at global issues and so I sort of feel that there were a lot of different spaces that utilized culture and particularly spoken word poetry to really make this issue more poignant for more people but crossing different types of communities to work together I think is what really made the reparations movement so successful in Chicago and also on an academic level I'm an academic primarily and so often we think of academics as not directly involved in these kinds of things certainly policy unless but in this case I don't think I've seen a situation where so many people from such different communities came together to really see this happen and then another thing that made I think it's successful was that Rahm Emanuel was forced to run off election and so part of it was he really needed to do something to gain a certain level of legitimacy I'm in this case so I think that some of that was just came at the right time but the most important thing has to do with the persistence and David I'm curious where you see you mentioned that this need to re-energize civil society and you work on the issue of transitional justice where you victims are able to address their grievances ideally seek some sort of accountability where do you how important is it then for example talk a little bit about the level of importance that the acknowledgement in the case of Mexico we have these songs because people want some sort of acknowledgement from the government about what happened could you talk about the importance of acknowledgement in energizing the civil society I just got to make one footnote to the whole comment about civil society talking about acknowledgement because I think in addition I talked about the demand side but I think Nigel's comment reminds me of how important innovations are and they primarily come from civil society if you think about accountability mechanisms which is what I primarily deal with where did the idea of truth commissions come up from I mean to some extent very civil society driven there are lots of ways of capturing evidence of mass abuses that's generally civil society interesting that was at a conference recently and met someone who was putting cameras on trees in places where atrocities occur that actually has a deterrent of impact on the crimes happening to begin with so I think it's important from a kind of demand driven side but there's so many innovations that come from civil society and I think about when I was not in civil society like I am now but it was a UN official and even in a court Eric Stover, many of you know him came to me and said we really need to do something you don't have victim participation at the Yugoslavia Tribunal but you do have witnesses that come what is the real impact on witnesses that come here what is the experience they get out of that that actually applies not just to an international court it applies through other processes what is the impact on reparations what's the true impact that was for example a civil and we did a really interesting study which I think still stands a test of time you can find it online or maybe USIP bookstore and it really informed me because I was in charge one of my areas of responsibility was witness protection and actually informed me as a public official of what to do how to make a better witness protection program how to be more responsible to victims because at the end of the day we really have to be about the victims now if I come to the question what is the role to our work and across the board with respect to human rights abuses I think it is fundamental and it is really the starting point because if you have mass crimes mass abuses that go unacknowledged by the authorities you will develop a long term wound that's not healed and this can be actually I talk about transitional justice and these justice processes being intergenerational you can have the kind of reverse intergenerational revenge motives and so forth without acknowledgement there is a good example that we are talking about this week Friday is the 100th anniversary anniversary is not the right word the beginning of the Armenian genocide that remains unacknowledged I have a piece that came out today that calls on the president of Turkey to acknowledge the genocide this is the first step let's don't be cute about it and talk about the terrible things that happened in 1915 there was a genocide 1.5 million people perished in that genocide and that kind of acknowledgement is really a fundamental building block for a society that's going to be based on the rule of law where trust in the state is established because otherwise the state and the history of the country is based on a lie or a tissue of lies because you don't acknowledge it now in this country we have a number of crimes and abuses that aren't acknowledged obviously the founding of the country was based to some extent on a genocide of Native Americans African Americans and the issue of slavery remains largely unacknowledged you walk around Washington DC and I know the Smithsonian Institute has now built a wing that addresses some of these issues but you certainly see a lot more monuments to former Confederates or former slave-olders than we do to the issues of slavery and the issues of deep injustice I think there are a number of ways that acknowledgement can happen but a public apology is an important element of it monuments, statues recognition of these abuses is really critical and when we talk about transitional justice I think that acknowledgement of accountability are very linked at the end of the day by acknowledging you are taking on a form of accountability even if there's no one left to prosecute and let's face it many of the perpetrators will not be prosecuted I spent nine years at the Yugoslavia Tribunal many consider it the most successful international justice experiment or process we prosecuted 121 individuals in the form of Yugoslavia there were probably a couple of hundred more that were prosecuted there were 10,000 perpetrators alone in Bosnia there were 100,000 victims at least 10,000 perpetrators we have to find, we have to think about how we address the roots of these issues look I believe these people should be prosecuted I spent a lot of my career doing that but we have to do more and I think one of the keys in addition to wide accountability which I would consider truth telling exercises and criminal justice prosecutions reparations acknowledgement is really a key both for moving forward and it has a reparative effect so I think we need to acknowledge the importance of acknowledgement Nigel you mentioned earlier how music helps in terms of resiliency can it help have you seen the arts help on this idea of acknowledgement how have you seen the arts well I think also for a start the statues that David is talking about if you want to create something that captures human experience you only have art to do it in actually if you're going to use electronic media you have to use them artistically think of the wonderful around the world of Nelson Mandela who they did manage to acknowledge that's given rise to some wonderful pieces of art around the world there's a joy in two respects there's a joy aesthetically you look at them and think wow how beautiful and at the same time you have the satisfaction of taking that capture of experience I thought also it can be I was very impressed by the clip that the net played yesterday I haven't seen it I would like to celebrate it in a different way that clip is three kids from Chicago I imagine first of all their choric speaking would embarrass an ancient Greek chorus in Delphi it was so perfect coordinated the movement of the cabaret it was straight out of the most interesting extremes of physical theatre and hip hop it was kind of synthesized there there was too more than break dancing actually and when they went from recitation into song with perfect pitch perfectly tuned thirds what's interesting for me is that by their hard work by their aesthetic discrimination and their care to create something of beauty and skill and human achievement they also make an authority this is the point I'm coming to to that statement there was a real authority because of the hard work the humanity the human grace that had gone to making it and that meant that when they came to utter two words that journalists would have to hesitate to write institutionalize genocide the kids said then it had a vessel to carry it a vessel of dignity of human accomplishment and authority yes I'm standing for this and I'm thinking and I'm feeling for it so there is that too I'm not preaching something Protestant ethic it's not the work it is the accomplishment it is the human grace of making something beautiful as beautifully as you can and then it can speak I was on a panel with everybody yesterday where the media came up quite a bit and you each mentioned it now Lynette you referred earlier to a lack of narrative stories in terms of knowing who these migrants are who try to cross the Mediterranean Nigel you also mentioned the media as playing role I'd like you each to talk about what you see have there been instances and there's a lot of media now there's the traditional media we have social media there's a lot of different kinds of media have we seen instances where the media has successfully reported on a story and we've seen it lead to change is there an instant that you can think of and then I have a follow up to that with regards to the media but has there been a case where you feel like the media has done a good job in terms of shedding light on a story I could start with if you want to start if there isn't one that's okay okay we did talk about this yesterday and we were focusing more on the bad examples in the media because of the corporate control of the media and the fact that we don't really get a lot of diverse voices I think that my examples are going to be more from social media and I think that certainly it comes to the kidnapping of the Cheabot girls I mean without the hashtag and without it being sort of publicized through Twitter much of the international community wouldn't have known about it and certainly wouldn't have known about it as rapidly and perhaps very little would have been done about it because it's not always you know I don't make the mistake of thinking that this is only about the international community coming to the rescue I mean I think in the case of the Cheabot girls you also had the government of Jonathan Goodluck who didn't come to the rescue or didn't sort of provide a secure environment in the northern parts of Nigeria so the hashtag campaign was really instrumental in making you know the authorities at least acknowledged to sort of use David's concept that this is something that was occurring otherwise they could have been which is often the case certainly when we talk about black and brown people they remain invisible their struggle and their suffering remains invisible unacknowledged and certainly unaddressed so I would say you know that's one example certainly when we talk about Ferguson, Missouri here in the United States again you know the sort of Twitter hashtag of Black Lives Matter which was started like with the Cheabot girls by some young women really was mobilized and you know spread like wildfire and I think that in a lot of these instances that's really been the catalyst for an awareness a growing awareness and then I have to say the mainstream media has followed I'm sure I could think of some examples of mainstream media I think a lot of my examples are probably going to be more in the form of documentaries you know on POV I just saw a brilliant documentary about homeless children so I think that the media is really involved in that way but I find that in terms of the mainstream media the major network news programs in particular I would say that they are often you know Johnny come lately in fact Nigel was focusing yesterday on the importance or David of people sort of young people becoming journalists because we need more sort of investigative and brave journalists and creating these sort of a new or other avenues for news because most young people don't read the papers or watch mainstream news networks and even I who's not young you know I get my news through alternative sources also so yeah David yeah I mean I think that I mean it's important to understand that media is can be used for very negative or very positive purposes Hitler obviously used film and media to very bad effect there are also you know great films that are out there many of them alternative films or that don't get the kind of publicity they ought to Human Rights Film Festival every year produces some great films or it brings the public great films that document so many different atrocities I mean if you want to understand I spent some time working on Cambodia if you'd like to understand the situation in Cambodia there's a great film called Enemies of the People and I don't know how many of you saw that but I mean it really gets to the underlying roots of the way and I think in war zones there are reporters who do incredible work I think of some of the reporters in the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia uncovering crimes documenting crimes bringing into the public attention which ultimately puts pressure on policymakers to intervene and so forth so I think media is you know it's a double edged sword but to have a human rights activist understand the power of media one of the things that I think is really challenging from the field that I work on is that you're conducting processes and measures and mechanisms however you want to describe it and you're doing it in one sense in the name of victims I mean a truth commission is done to establish to get to the truth to establish a record of what happened also to uncover that history trials for crimes against humanity and genocide and war crimes are really important for the people who've been affected by this same thing for other steps and frequently there's a big communication gap now I experience that really deeply you know where you're in the Hague and the crimes are a long way away this is an earlier time when you didn't really have social media how do you begin to communicate what's going on in a courtroom or in a truth commission or information about a reparations program and that's where I think activists and others had to be very savvy and we ended up in this rather bit point you can imagine trying to get a bunch of lawyers to realize that they had to communicate to the public because their ideas to be their briefs and their evidence but it led to I think what was quite successful in outreach program where we actually went out and took a judgment and described it and went through the witnesses and so forth and the power of that I can remember very distinctly going to Birch Cove and there was a the case was finished and someone who called himself the Serb Adolph so you can imagine the kind of crimes he was convicted of he actually was so proud of it he documented and blowing the brains out of people and photographed and so forth but showing how that process worked out in the courtroom I think it also applies to a truth commission and so forth was really powerful and when the victims names were read out there's form of acknowledgement there's form of vindication and they're sitting on the front row and the power of that was so great so I think that if we're human rights activists need to understand let's don't just have the ones who are abusing media and these processes using them I think those who are looking for justice and supporting human rights need to be much more adept so some of the few obvious things forgive me first of all is the corporate nature of the media and the pressure to sell news and that has this inevitable effect we move on from the latest hot spot to next I mean why don't they divide it up between them we flip channels but no they all go to the same place the media circus travels and ignores the place that they were last this is the worst this is not always the case but it's the worst case scenario another phenomenon which I've seen in my time is a kind of globule growing around the western media and it's probably done more harm than anything else in the world much other parts of the world we act badly to that a globule of self satisfaction arrogance we know the truth we're the best all this kind of rubbish and that added to the fact of moving from place to place to not being long enough to find out how wrong you were or even get some idea of what people really feeling or thinking then we get a kind of a travelling circus of ignorance is what happens very often and we really do have to be critical of that we should be more vociferous about it demanding more of our media seeing for example being assistant daddy kingdom the degeneration of the BBC has been so sad to watch in my lifetime it was so much better the story of how these things are going to collision when I was working in Sarajevo during the siege I had a very good friend wonderful fellow Scott journalist Alan Little wonderful man Alan was one of the heroes along with people like Ed Valiarmi Maggy O'Kane the journalist Stefani there are a number of journalists who I would describe as being superheroes of truth Alan was one of those very much but Alan's reports from the siege half of them ended up on the cutting room floor this was his editor back in broadcasting Harris now why was I have who shall remain nameless but why was he doing this this actually wasn't some secret little room in broadcasting house everybody imagines that our security services control the media and they don't this was self censorship by something oh this might be a bit risky this might not go down so well on the 6 o'clock news too much blood here some brains on the pavement we can't show that and so all of that got cut away so we were not informed of the cruelty of that situation and then interest into the stories this Alan invited his editor to Sarajevo at the end of the war and his editor had a minor nervous breakdown old fashioned way of explaining some kind of psychic psychological collapse Alan Alan I'm so sorry Alan I didn't know Alan this is terrible and the guy saw that sitting in his office in London trying to massage things to suit his cute little media organization not to disturb anybody's breakfast too much had you know taken the truth that people needed to know had people known the truth of the siege of Sarajevo we would ended that war much earlier for sure had people seen the truth that David knows about you know we and as artists and human rights actors were trying to stop it but my god the public would have been on the streets had they seen half of what we saw and it was taken away so these are the things that we have to deal with with our media we have to be much more critical and have much more ambition for our media the death of Yugoslavia of course is a brilliant brilliantly done between Alan and Mara Silberg great films you all mentioned sort of this importance of information and a kind of quality truth in this case accurate information more in-depth information the spread of information via social media and I just want to sort of take that and thinking about that I'd like to know what you all think about the role of young people one of the interesting things about the reparations in Chicago is this requirement that students be taught students in the public schools at least in the city of Chicago where these particular atrocities took place be taught about what happened under in the John Burge years and David mentioned the Armenian genocide the centennial this Friday and the state of Illinois the few states in the U.S. that actually passed a law a few years requiring that the word genocide be in textbooks and we see this kind of come up all over the world in terms of how histories are for our own textbooks what they talk about in terms of our own American history you know there's many instances I'm curious what you all think is the role here in terms of education and informing our young people in the direction of conflict Nigel yes I think that it's massive responsibility because in informing we also should not try to shape I mean the feelings of people and young people it seems to me that we need some kind of regeneration of a responsible education of information and that goes together also with of course the means to understand that information so you know the retreat from our capacities to analyze and think that we're finding and by the way the suppression of creative arts in many worlds doesn't help creative arts helps people to think and evaluate and feel things at least so that needs to be entirely responsible to be done for furthermore we have huge responsibilities for educational development in those areas that we have damaged and the someone who tries to work in that getting money for that is very hard we have a massive hypocrisy about this my work in trying to reconstruct in various areas that have been flattened some of them by our own weapons my God isn't difficult to get any money the program I'm doing in Syria for example is being funded by a refugee from Goldman Sachs a way friend of mine a man who made a lot of money and decided that there were things he should do in the world with it I have no institutional support for anything I do in educational development in post-conflict zones not a dime from any governmental or any other agency occasionally in Bosnia the British Council helped us at various stages but we've had practically nothing so we need to be looking very carefully at how we look at educational development and not fulfilling the places that we've that we've destroyed or been part, party to it seems to me that also for young people we have a huge putting the winds in the sail of the little boat exercise we have bred too much fatalism and cynicism my generation is responsible for that this is unacceptable our role of our generation is to give hope and dynamic and to say yes you can change it you can absolutely may have to work hard but you can do it so the empowering of people to know and the regenerating of civil society one of the problems of civil society I know I'm going to convey a few things it got confused with the neoliberal expansion of the NGO as the state retreated in neoliberal economics then things were put into that but the NGO or the private initiative didn't always work and it actually hijacked a space that had been civil society so we were much more effective pre the neoliberal re-colonization phase before I worked with the velvete revolution I worked with Solidarity in Poland we were much better before we were NGOised we got to be very conscious that that took away some of the potential to change so we got a great deal of revaluing to think about about this through education empowering young people sorry I confused too many things Lynette I mean you work with for me as an educator I think that what's really important is addressing the silences so when we talk about human rights one of the students yesterday talked about how she wondered why there was so much attention to the horrible massacre at the Charlie Hecbo and the protests and the marches and heads of states and just a lot of international attention was directed at that tragedy whereas when it comes to the Ethiopian Christians who were just massacred a few days ago or certainly the situation in Garisa got quite a bit of attention but you know what I mean, often there are a lot of silences or anything that happens to Palestinian people there's just media silence and we don't hear about it and in some instances as an academic there's even certain censorship if things don't comport with a dominant discourse we mentioned yesterday that we talk the United States focuses on human rights abuses in some places and not other places and a lot of this certainly during the Cold War it had a lot to do with our Cold War interests refugees were recognized if they were fleeing communism but not if they were fleeing dictatorships that perhaps the United States supported they were called economic migrants often the way that these dominant discourses roll I feel like as an academic or as an educator in general our role is to respond to some of those silences but also teach young people a certain kind of media literacy so that they can look critically at these media sort of representations look between the margins and I'm not picking on the media I want to make it very clear very diverse and we all know that there's so much that I do read so I don't want to make it sound like all I do is look at social media but we have a lot of choices so we can be selective but in general I think that what gets out there and what is most publicized and most vocal is really just a narrow piece of the world and human experience and so I see that there are a lot of silences that can either reinforce or interrupt and I would say that that for me is one of the main things I try to do as an educator David I know you don't work directly with young people well yeah I've got two comments one along the line of education which we do some on and then one that we haven't addressed that's the child soldier phenomenon which is a lot more complicated than is portrayed in the media and I did I had the privilege of talking to the making presentations at the UN Security Council on this and I I think that the idea that youth are one dimensional it just as false as a lot of other ideas and you have some very complicated cases with the child soldier phenomenon obviously if a child is nine that's one situation the child is fifteen and a half that's a very different situation and we try to treat them all the same I'm not advocating of course for criminal responsibility until the statutory age but to simply put all those under sixteen in the same lump is I think counterproductive the question of agency the question of what's the level of responsibility because the way you interact with that responsibility is going to be quite different between a fifteen and a half year old and a nine year old and I think we see this a lot in our field kind of reductionism about difficult and challenging issues and we reduce it and simply say anybody under this age is treated that way that's actually a prescription for problems down the road because if there's no kind of responsibility whatsoever what is that fifteen and a half year old going to be like a twenty five so I think there's some pretty serious questions there that I don't think that have been tackled quite appropriately and need a lot more study and I think places like USIP could contribute to this discussion we've been working with some of these issues with USIP I think in the role of education I think it's really really a critical aspect I grew up in the south I started my life in segregated schools you know you wouldn't believe what were in the textbooks in those days I mean incredible stuff I mean it would be banned now and rightly so you know even a couple of years after integration started I can remember looking at the textbooks and think how could they possibly say this so the role of education and educators vis-a-vis youth and children is really important Tom Bergenthal who many of you know has such an incredible story himself surviving Auschwitz the International Court of Justice he's underlined a million and a lot of forums he thinks education around human rights is critical and I wonder how many 18 year olds or 21 or 45 year olds or even people my age if you ask them in the US and a lot of other places what is the convention of human rights what is the universal declaration of human rights do any of them have an idea I mean I think as citizens and a society that at least gives lip service to human rights so we talked a little bit about this yesterday not just about civil rights in the US but the universal declaration of human rights the international covenants which have been signed up by virtually every country in the world not even to mention economic and social and cultural rights or the inter-american convention or the European convention these are such important mainstays for society to be first of all civil and to also ensure that it's democratic and there's no real awareness you can certainly take a master's degree on international human rights but it seems like to me you should be able to get that as an 8th or 9th grader as well and I think we're sorely lacking in that area Can I just come up quickly on child soldiers just to say work quite a lot for child soldiers and friends Samite and others in North Uganda and just to say that this is really a plug for your wonderful institute which is creative arts and sport offer a huge amount of hope music and soccer and these kids are so biddable I mean this is crazy people have a really weird reductive view as David was saying and a reductive view also of capacities some kids come wanting to be human again wanting to play and those that have got toughened out they'll break down eventually giving enough fun, giving enough joy giving enough other people enjoying themselves enjoying their lives they'll break and become get their humanity back it's really possible just to say there's an awful lot we can do that we're not doing it's very obvious and this reductive kind of weird way that we've turned the world into a series of preserved exhibits we're looking at this in formaldehyde no this is an extremely tractable situation often young human beings have great potential and let's work with them for that potential it's really possible on that note I just want to open it up and make sure we have a chance to get to everybody's questions do we have a mic that people are going to use yes okay it's coming here it comes we can just start with the gentleman there in the corner thank you all for coming my name is Henry I'm from the center for international private enterprise as well as the DC coalition for theater and social justice I have a kind of a one part question that has to do with the institutionalization of art in these types of things so if you'll spare with it I enjoy hearing all of your responses to it are you able to is one able to institutionalize the use of art in social dialogue and change or does it naturally as an ephemeral momentary emotional act necessitate being ad hoc are there specific good examples you've seen of the institutionalization of art in not just peace making in crisis situations but also ongoing democracy peace maintaining and social dialogue specifically through the lens of interactive theater would be great from my perspective but I know all of us are here for a wide variety of art but theater of the oppressed form theater and then right now we're in a very traditional DC setting of panel and audience as this is also discussing art how what might you do with the group here that might make this a little more expressive Nigel yes Nigel take it first especially the group part on the first question do we institutionalize it or does it happen naturally and I'm ramping out of this both of course art inside like a river passing through the place where people live you can go down to the river to drink but sometimes it may be far sometimes it may not be flowing in the right way so we actually transport the water we create aqueducts and so in other words the natural life blood or natural flowing water of art we have to carry sometimes we have to carry it to people so it is a mixture of what is and the best thing happens when they come together which is why for example in my work I always try to work with local NGOs companies and try and work from what I mean also with great care because the role of the foreigners really critical here is not in any way to interfere but to be offering support where it is requested and what people usually want most of me is are we doing it as well as we can do by international standards and I can probably help in some way from that point so yes to both of those in terms of theatre it seems to me extremely powerful I use it the whole time theatre is a way of our enacting our lives so that we can look at it and also where we can actually try and feel how other people feel we can role play as well as a whole series of things that happen and I may have some very extreme experiences of this I don't know if I can I tell you one experience I was it is actually a ghost story I was working in in Kosovo we got our refugees back and we had what we call transitional camps and I was doing a piece of music theatre with a group of them and it was decided they wanted to do it to make a piece of it it was a hotel and who was in this hotel well Bill Clinton was in the hotel and and then so they decided who was there and then they decided there was actually a spider in the basement so I said well who's getting with a spider and they said you ok so so far so good anyway they start dressing me up and I then as a spider and then I get a little alarm when the black balaclava goes over my head because of course I've become a paramilitary and then the guy who's playing the caretaker of the hotel goes and arms himself in the workshop with very sharp instruments so we start life in the hotel the performance begins and I kind of move around as the spiders do and then the caretaker comes after me and takes the most sharp brand-all and sticks it in my throat and so I have this is what theatre's about now now you have and so I had to make the decision ok am I going to run away from this and preserve my life or will I take the risk that he'll burst my windpipe artery and I thought well I'll see what happens I've come so far I can't run away from this I cannot this is theatre this is real anyway he presses, he presses and just at the point where I think he would have done me terminal damage he stops and so I then roll over and pretend to die and he comes up and sees that I'm alright as part of the performance so of course this had become very close to the bone he was taking revenge through me on the people that had molested his family and so on so it gets that close to the bone as a truth from a therapeutic thing however the ghost story is this do you want to hear this I'm a very scientific person I'm not at all superstitious but I was at that time living in Germany I was a professor in Hannover and I was staying in a place with a very great musician called David Wild who had allowed me to stay in his house and I got back from Kosovo ready to carry on with my teaching duties and David said how was it I said fine it was okay and David said something very funny happened when you were away I was sitting here and there was a kind of explosion sound and you know the Chinese vase in your room it's a broken how did that happen and of course you know when it happened now I don't believe a word of that but it did I don't know some spontaneous implosion of Chinese vase occurred but this is the power of theater and the situation right to the bone right literally to the bone to the wind pipe to the artery this is where we go with theater it is a vital source it is a wonderful source of therapeutic opening understanding so it's a please if you're working in this area Godspeed and helped here Pat you're all about wonderful do you want part B did you want to I'm just going to add to what Nigel said and he's the expert on theater but just my experiences in different parts of Africa I've spent some time at a place called Kakuma in Kenya which was now it's a refugee camp but previously it was a famine relief area and I remember in the afternoon spending time with a group called Mandalayawana Waki's Development for Women and they were led by this woman who was very influenced by Paolo Freire the Brazilian educator and specifically the Education for Critical Consciousness and a central component then of development education almost anything that they did with the women in this community called the Turkana was through creating these skits and so every meeting a woman would come with a problem from home or a problem related to her children or feeding and the group would go out they'd select a group of women they would go out and design a skit or play they'd come in and perform it the women would talk to themselves and they would go back and forth until finally they produced a play and presented it to the group and it made sense to everyone so they were kind of creating this kind of group a sense of common sense like yes this is what we do it makes sense other than just having USAID or Catholic Relief Services tell them okay you guys need to do this collect some manure and then we'll tell you what to do next and it made no sense to them because through this message method of skit making and theater it really did have a powerful effect and while I was there this group of women who were involved in Mandalayo they were building latrines, girls, dormitories they had a little brick making factory I mean they were the most progressive productive group in this entire area and through I remember in Zimbabwe in the 80s and 90s community theater was very central in sort of HIV AIDS education and then in kind of is an extension of that education around sexual and gender based violence and so I just found a way in which this kind of theater whether it's theater with the oppressed or more kind of community based theaters really proliferated and became very central as a method of educating but also organizing for development and things like that 30 seconds I can't top any of that I'm going to have to do this because when I was going to be on this panel I told the staff to find a good example for me and we do have one good example there may be more and of course plays an art is not my specialty but in Afghanistan where there's no space really for any kind of transitional justice measure I mean this collection of evidence but you're not going to have a truth commission you're clearly not going to have any impunity reigns in Afghanistan we did some work with a number of civil society groups and they actually put plays together or theater together which addressed the history of Afghanistan and the abuses that have occurred and told that story and we assisted a bit but I actually saw the play they put it on in New York they did it in Afghan or other languages and the the subtitles weren't great but one could certainly get the sense that here is a place where there's no space for justice in the way we usually see it but there was a space for this kind of conversation and dialogue around the terrible things that had happened in Afghanistan and not just in the present period but over a long period and it gives a bit of it gives a bit of hope and space that those kind of civil society actors are wrestling with that story and wrestling with the past in a way that hopefully will lead down the road to something in the future so even I stayed lawyer like myself working in an organization that's really focused much more on judicial and related processes we see the importance of things like theater and actually have worked with them in a number of contexts there's people there's this gentleman another one in the front we'll just kind of move back thank you so much I'm a member for UNESCO since 2000 to document local tradition, culture, music, dance and so on I would like to give a witness for a member of my family the last three weeks of last year spent in a refugee camp in Iraq one of the largest one so he stayed there their night teaching music teaching yoga and then engaging and some interesting feedback some of them were singing children included the songs of their lands they probably left forever and so on so this was a spontaneous no professionalism he's professional in music but also with a larger geographic initiative providing camera for children to take pictures every day as many with a professional camera and organized by a professional photograph so the feedback was overwhelming families, children and so on so back from Iraq we heard that over from this refugee camp close to 50% of the children are unschooled and when you see the documentary about it as a parent you are not the same anymore beautiful children and parents committed to see them they don't know what to do with their time at the same time we heard that United Nations launched initiative and Prime Minister Gordon Brown is in charge of education so then figures came back to us including last week at the World Bank and IMF annual meetings 500 unschooled children the government of Lebanon has to do something they committed the government of Canada committed $10 million and so on but the needs are huge and there's a security problem that is for all of us because those unschooled children are recruited by you know who and what they do with it so my and we heard the same thing about Nigeria last week at World Bank and then the World Bank raised the issue in I think a very serious way you need to train them in the camp as were the children to stay long there and they don't know how many years we need to provide job for them in the refugee camps and the number is huge so the point I want to make there is a mobilization awareness which means also a sense of emergency my question is how given the very prestigious and thank you for the honor to listen to you panel you have would it be possible to think of a sort of emergency meeting like security counselors getting together but this is a high risk and huge turning point there are many issues to address I'm not competent in everything but I learned a lot just documented cultures in Africa so I'm only the strategist so UNESCO mobilized many specialties and I learned that I don't know culture in spite of whatever Sorbonna and others so it means that we have to immerse ourselves in urgency to combine formal education in formal education this what we call cultural creative industries handicraft and so on the opportunities there we are better prepared in Florence we will have 13, 14 May we invited the Japanese to show us how they document handicraft 800 villages and so on so my question is can we have a sort of what emergency meeting with whom can you have because it's yesterday it has to be done sorry for being long but yeah thank you Nigel you want to take that? Can I take it? No it's tremendously important that we are in a cultural education emergency and particularly in the Middle East and there are various things that we need to do to tackle it first of all someone trying to work there I have various obstacles with the international aid community has created obstacles rather than facilitating this work in certain cases got to look at that that's doable and that's changeable the financing of it I mentioned how I am doing it it's a shame it should be done that way this is a responsibility of those governments who have committed themselves to this and yes it is an absolute cultural education emergency because ISIS is doing this you probably know that a lot of Syrian children as they go down to the shelters are now singing ISIS songs ISIS have understood the power of the cultural territory but we have failed to even begin to deal with not that I am prepared to go and fight a cultural war no way I'm not going to make propaganda but I really would like to make some art and culture that gave children openness and breathe space to breathe and be who they are and so do you absolutely right maybe you felt we were smiling away as if that was in some way ridiculous no it's absolutely essential there is a cultural educational emergency and you are absolutely spot on that is something that it would be wonderful to work towards well wonderful to do very quickly okay yes there is a woman in the in the pinstripe in the pinstripe and then we'll get to you I promise it's a follow to that good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is Rosemary Seguero I'm a president of an organization called Hope for Tomorrow we focus on conflicts and violence resolution I'm past here in the US but I'm from Kenya looking at the art and culture thank you so much for your presentation just what he said I was at the the World Bank IMF annual spring meeting which ended recently and I studied this organization because my son was martyred in Kenya in 2004 and my nephew was a victim also martyred in Kenya in 28 election so that's why I took the course of talking about violence and conflicts resolution at the IMF and your spring meeting I talked to Director Lagarde about the refugee camps the refugee camps I think you have gone there you see how these people stay and this happened because of political conflicts or tribal conflicts and they ended up in the refugee camps where they stay in a terrible terrible situation and while I was talking to that I come to you where I told Madam Lagarde and you involve us as civil society civil society let us sit on the table not the situations of the crime violence we the women and the children especially in Africa we are in Kenya and TRC where conflicts are women and children are the victims of violence people are there but how do they get into the refugee camps because of the conflicts and violence and how can why can we just get into the refugee camps where we can put up affordable housing in all this money from the world bank the IMF put up affordable houses store houses where these people can stay a lively life schools around them for the children hospitals around for these people all these talks with money and going as you say it get your own funding through the sports and entertainment that can make us different how do we work with you all as civil society are never funded we speak too much we walk too much we are running up and down and nobody even this is to us because we may ask for money so we do the community work by just talking talking talking but we are the people who do most work including the CPOs on the community based organization like that I can't say somebody has never funded me nothing ever everywhere talking about conflicts and violence so thank you so much for your presentation and let's see how we can work even I met the president of economic forum and he talked the same when he visited the world bank in 2013 at the world bank so thank you so much and let's come up with a solution on this especially with the refugee and the children and the women thank you there was a follow up also to the previous question can we just have this woman with the glasses yeah hi I'm Sherry from University of Maryland and for the gentleman who wanted to see art tomorrow Wendy and Nigel will be at the University of Maryland there's a poster out there Nigel will bring his guitar and Wendy I'm intrigued by that photo of you standing in front of a guitar they'll be singing all social activists international social activists will be performing and talking about what they do but I'm also interested you can't look to NGOs with the people who are in this room what is the next very specific step that we can do I'm particularly interested in who I'm at the University of Maryland but a large university we have a Center for Synergy that is geared for arts and social activism to which you'll be addressing tomorrow what can we do now to start is it the emergency meeting where we reconvene and do something but what is the next step to move down this road Nigel you want to go first yes I mean it is absolutely concrete we have a meeting after this meeting and we organize how and where we do this it may be I do not want to put as a guest any request but we would very much hope that we might have a sympathetic ear or for your university but then it would be a matter of planning it in a way that we really do it and get results and no messing around just do it we have to have a lot of media to spread the word and we have to hijack as many influential politicians as we can international community the ambassadors from Washington it's possible but the right voices the right invitations absolutely so after the meeting it's almost like how do we get on the docket on the agenda of the G8 when they next meet because a woman was talking about all the refugee camps in Kenya and when you were talking about the Syrian refugees flooding across the border I mean the neighboring countries are overwhelmed I mean with Garissa people can be critical of Kenya for its lack of security in the northeast but on some level these small economies of services and security in these refugee camps when they're being surrounded by so many different conflicts so I don't really have an answer I think a meeting would be great but at the end of the day you're going to have very deep pockets the G8 nations are going to have to say will we prioritize this and we're going to actually fund the UNHCR we're going to actually fund these relief organizations in Dadaab refugee camp I've interviewed many people who spent years in these camps and they talk about being hungry every day so just in terms of basic resources you know let alone education sometimes they have it sometimes they don't before the early 1990s in places like Tanzania burned in refugees actually had farm lands and could farm and could get jobs so I mean other factors we have to take into account our global changes so the rise of neoliberalism I mean the sort of lack of funding for these kinds of you know social and public goods so it's I'm not making it easier but I do think that first of all we have to make it a priority for our different governments and it's probably going to have to happen at those kinds of big decision making meetings David do you want to add something maybe just a comment I mean I do you're talking about multiple crises both in the cultural and on the you know across the board and I'm not sure that I know the Security Council is not the right forum I'll put it that way I mean that's when I get something blocked and get nowhere but and I think this comes back to this innovation point in civil society I think you create the and you look at the different possibilities whether it's the world economic forum whether it's other international forms but I think your question shows that we have an international system that doesn't really work very well anymore and we need to think of how that's re-energized and there has to be a demand to change it I mean Syria is a very good example I mean we've sat here for how long is it now years no action no action you think about the members of the Security Council why are they there because of the power structure in 1945 something really has to has to change in the international system so that it can be responsive to the kind of demands and the kind of issues that we're facing right now I talked earlier about some of the and in my field and of course it goes much broader but it's failing everywhere it's failing to stop atrocities it's failing to punish atrocities it's failing to have out accountability it's failing to deal with refugee crisis it's failing to deal with security issues and this seems like there's this seems to if we're not at a moment where civil society and other actors really push the demand button I don't know when we will be because the last decade and particularly the last five years or so these crisis are going exponentially and part of this of course is that the world's structure changed and the US is no longer in the position it was in the West is no longer in a position that it was in and we need to figure out how we're going to figure that out today but I think people like yourselves who can begin to push for some different structures to address the needs of 2015 not 1985 or 1945 yeah I think there's a lot of hands up kind of towards the front but is there someone back there that we can go ahead this gentleman oh thank you great panel opportunity I had an experience with the civil affairs when I was in the army and I was in Iraq 2004-2005 and I worked with the reconstruction team which is effort through the State Department the Civil Affairs US Army Command to help issues in camps in Iraq I was assigned to Taji we went out to meet with the travel sheiks and the idea was to help the population, the children whether it was to building a rural school whether it was a clinic whether it was a water station or electrical station we had a difficult time with the sheiks they all fight on each other because no I want the school over here because closer to us then we came out with the question we bring with us a social with music and food and participating in inviting the children giving them gift that equation worked wonderful because the sheiks were more agreeable they were more understanding our concept that we want to drive with the reconstruction team now obviously art is a great tool to access the masses and to voice out the concerns in any country I never saw the US IP in Iraq or having any willing to participate perhaps to bring support the arts or the music the Iraqis they are very much they love art, they love music they love many things and that's what I'm trying to say is I think it is a matter of how to reach with the state of Sparta with the reconstruction teams to go to areas where there are refugee camps but obviously there's something called each country has its specification and they will allow if you go there or not so of course you cannot go to Damascus but in some countries in Africa they might have reconstruction teams already in mind so perhaps I don't know if the board is aware of this concept that the state department does carry on in coordination with the US Army and particularly the engineering corporate engineers my question is this here in the district or any of the counties in Virginia or Maryland there's a lot of ethnic groups from many countries and now having seen yet how the US IP here in the United States have tried to bring the cause or to voice out concerns or those groups perhaps like you say there's a group in Mexico with a great sum of last lacrimas but how about to bring that group here and have a play and a free not cause concert maybe in DC or maybe in Los Angeles or maybe in Chicago so it's actually a program from the US IP to promote the music for a cause I made the mistake by turning it off I probably shouldn't have there we go so US IP for Iraq I don't know that we've supported musical activities specifically but we have been supporting for the past few years a very creative interactive radio show targeting youth and empowering Iraqi youth peace builders called Salam al Shab so that's been a pretty significant US IP investment over the years in Afghanistan we were talking about street theater and interactive theater one of the major cultural activities that US IP has been supporting in the field has been spoken word and street theater around elections and countering election violence so this was involving Afghan women with men reciting parts of the Quran to justify political participation to condemn violence associated with the elections so theater has been a pretty prominent part in that part of the world we certainly see it as our responsibility to infuse the arts theater even work on graffitis and music and drama in our work in the field and certainly we have a beautiful building here in Washington so we try to support arts infused activities documentary films we had a particular event here that was of interest the music of nonviolent resistance in the area of expertise I study nonviolent movements I can't think of a successful nonviolent movement that has not integrally involved the music, street theater, drama it's like you can't think of civil resistance without the arts so we're trying to do this not a huge budget involved at this point but you have to start somewhere create facts on the ground with what we're doing programmatically in the field here in Washington and then maybe one day there will be a super dynamic budget to support arts and culture we've just got a few more minutes so I want to get to as many questions as possible so people could kind of briefly ask your question that'd be great there's a couple of people in the back there there's a gentleman there's another lady I know he's just I'm going to get her I've not forgotten her my name's Lazarus Tumar I'm a member of a newly created NGO to fight for human rights, humanitarian issues and peace my question is we have like an experience back home in my country Cameroon where we used to have a lot of human rights being abused in culture, in music where activists would want to pass a message through music but most often when these musics come out the people in power would not want this music to be disseminated so that people get the message so sometimes even ban his publication and play over the media and sometimes the activists at times they are even arrested a typical example you all know who died in the process of fighting for the rights of Cameroonians so the question I want to find out is what measures can be put in place to enhance the activities of activists wanting to enhance human rights through the use of musics in their various communities because we think that music is a forum of information and through music many things can change and can also give enlightenment to people but we have it as a problem in our home countries where the people in power will not want these musics to be circulated Nigel, do you have instances where you've seen that musicians were able to get the music out even if there was a crackdown? There's a long history of this in Europe where we were circulating music and literature clandestinely on those days in old fashioned tapes and things I think that it's a much more created dynamic thinking in particular the Cameroon situation how can we use the electronic media that we have to outmaneuver the censorship of governments and there are various ways that we can and that's the focus as well as giving as much encouragement as possible to the creative artists willing to do this and giving them a hearing here giving them a world hearing these are the ways we can fight so let's get some of this music out there will be United States will have sympathetic radio stations who will be prepared to play this music and look to the new media as to how for example the mobile phone revolution they're wildly held cellphones and we look at ways there's an excellent way of distributing music and can we use the phone system things of that kind to look at ways of fighting yes it's a well worthwhile struggle but first of all encouraging get some of this stuff here I'm sure you have some copies with you get it to some of the media stations get them to play it then you can sell the guys back home by the way you've been on American Radio this is street fighting but it always works so yes let's just do it there's a she's got the mic and then there's a woman here who we want to get to my name is Sue Dorfman I'm a media strategist and film promoter for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival back in the day as well as a human rights educator and I bring that up because when my son was in school I used to show him films in order to be able to drive home the issues that he was studying in school because I believe that people have multiple intelligences and they bring in information very differently I was able with a team of other parents to be able to bring in programs into the schools in order to talk about race and class and diversity and international issues and voting rights and the rest of it and I believe that just about anybody in this room that has a kid in school go into their schools in some ways in order to bring programs in one of the interesting things that I found was that the classes that came in were not only just the social studies classes but they were the classes for foreign languages because they would use the films in order to talk about the issues they would be bringing in the math classes where they talk about the statistics of it so that I think that we all have the capacity to bring in the programs that address the arts into the school systems for the young people my question for you is if that is the case, what organizations in addition to something like Facing History or Not in Our Town or Speak Truth to Power from the Robert F. Kennedy Center but what other programs would you recommend that people use as resources in order to bring in some of these issues A lot of the organizations that I'm thinking about right now are local I'm Chicago so I'm trying to and certainly Facing History I've thought of that's a national organization let me think about it let them talk and maybe I'll come up with something Nigel, do you have any recommendations otherwise you can think about it I don't know the situation in the United States well enough all I know is that in my country we have fewer and fewer opportunities we make less of this material and the independent filmmakers are starved of finance to generate it I'm afraid but I don't know the situation in the United States well enough to answer that intelligently because I can think of a lot of places that create those documentary films I think and actually you might be able to say something about this because initially I would say have the library order the documentaries but increasingly the public school system is so denuded of resources I mean we're in cases parents actually have to fundraise to sort of pay for art teachers we know how possible that is now but chances are learning what your local sort of community has to offer maybe even the public library system might be an answer but I don't really know of a national organization there are a lot of good independent filmmakers I like pictures make some great films around our issues around Guatemala around international and some domestic as well it would be interesting if somebody could kind of survey those because that would kind of create a bank of those kind of films I'm not sure that has been done by anyone but at least bring them together and if you have enough of these materials then that will create energy to do the lobbying necessary to get them in the school Cartemquan Films is another company independent lens women make films there are a lot of those kinds of outlets but you have to have the resources that's the question in terms of actually purchasing the Ford Foundation also has just films sponsors a lot of important films there may be resources and foundations that could be supportive of this there's a relatively new president who I think is really interested in these issues there's a woman up front here yes we're like everybody is thank you my name is Fazia Sayed and I'm from Pakistan I had the National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage there and I just wanted to share an experience very transformational experience that we have had I've used culture I wouldn't use the word used but I've had culture transform people in their lives recently we celebrated Nawruz in Pakistan from the platform of my organization and Nawruz is welcoming spring it is on 21st of March and several communities in Pakistan had been celebrating that for centuries I suppose by the mainstream people it was never considered a Pakistani celebration and most of the people did not even know that there are communities in Pakistan that celebrate that and they only associated that with Iran and they did not realize that Afghanistan also have several days off and this whole region because 12 of us different countries we got it encrypted in UNESCO and we thought it was official now and we celebrated it was amazing the kind of healing it created for the neglected communities because it was almost as if for the first time they felt the citizens of Pakistan that from a government platform somebody is acknowledging their identity or their celebration or their lifestyle and no political statement was made in terms of these neglected communities who have suffered a great deal of violence throughout the last few decades but the message was received it reminded me of my days I was not part of a neglected community in the United States but I have been living here for several years in my student life and on every Eid celebration which is kind of our Christmas I always had my midterms or finals that life was parallel and then this family life was parallel and they had a disconnect so that is just an example that many communities live their own lives they are not attached to the mainstream or where they see themselves as part of citizenry or a state and then they resent and there are many things that grew up and just a short point I want to make is that not everything has to do with funding it is more of a mental shift and I think people themselves can do a lot state has certainly a responsibility and a function for the owners or other organizations who help out I look at people who need to realize the power of culture and how it is rooted in the identity of people and how they can be more inclusive more than funded NGOs as such I think we are going to have to leave it here I am sorry but I know Wendy wanted just a few minutes to kind of recap some of what was discussed here so go ahead thank you all for the great questions so what a vibrant and rich discussion so this whole idea of urgency I think we all can feel that it is a palpable sentiment in the room and I would say that we have enough for the VIP reception following this to include all of you in the room since some people have left and I encourage you all to be there in this coalition this is not a let's go home and think about it I think it is a now phenomena and so do we have all of your contact information such that we can engage all of you if you look around this room I am sitting looking at all of you so are all of us on the panel it is this beautiful tapestry of humanity in color and ethnicity and background some of you have spoken about Nourouz and Eid and other cultural religious events that you celebrate and the kinds of connections that involve people to people so that is by way of saying you are all invited all invited to be a part of the genesis of the crossroads family connected to the U.S. institute of peace in the work that they are doing look at ways that this network can be so vibrant as to effect change because of all the vibrancy in the room so I wanted to just address a couple of things we started off with fatigue and it is interesting because watching all of you there was a certain lull as the conversation got a bit heavy and now there is energy in the room there is a sense of this collectivism and powerful teamwork and I think it is really important and a lot of you have touched on that so we have a face to your son who was lost in Kenya we have a sense of what is going on in Maryland we have a sense of the Syrian refugee camp and suddenly there is this universality to the conversation so I don't although I think we need to energize the world with lots of things arts are a great way to do that and there were some really beautiful messages that came out of this one was about storytelling and narratives and I think if you look at music a lot of the lyrics are really stories that are told in a way that reaches people we have an ensemble of musicians called saffron caravan and we use a lot of roomies poetry that we put to music and you know it is from a long long time ago but it is timeless in a lot of respects and so how do we bring these things that are so beautiful that are rich and connect us to a modern day context then we looked at this whole idea of persistence and duration and sustained commitment how do we put in a timeline that is not necessarily just about the urgency but these are processes over time prosecuting John Burgess doesn't happen in a moment but with this collective energy it could happen more quickly then this beautiful idea that the arts allow us to have this dignified vessel to carry a message and I think one of the most beautiful things that I heard today was this whole idea of you can't burn down a song that is a line we will be using on our website be this clarion call to the power of music and peace building and then I think we have these things like the 100th anniversary of a genocide that hasn't been called a genocide to the people that it matters most and how do we accelerate that timeline looking at root causes of things looking at this whole idea of awareness and where the arts can play a role in helping with that then we segwayed into a very beautiful discussion about education and I'd like to share just a moment that the love the questions salon we've created is actually a structure for the educational work we're doing that's arts integrated education and in fact as we are working on building a boarding school for global leadership threading art throughout a whole interdisciplinary curriculum that involves the math and statistics as you were beautifully articulating that the salons will be things that the students create about their questions for the world so we did one on how do the arts transcend barriers we brought in Daniel Pollock who played all throughout the cold war in Russia and music transcended the geopolitical environment of the cold war and in fact when Van Klieborn won Daniel Pollock was actually second and Khrushchev couldn't fathom the idea of two Americans trumping Russian pianist but that is indeed what happened so he gave we interviewed him and then he gave a concert so in an ideal world we'd have the funding to have saffron caravan in this room and have it be a colorful representation of where the arts have power they're from Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, Morocco, Israel and India and we had a Pakistani tabla player from DC work with us so this idea that you can take the fatigue and the cynicism and energize it and look at ways that art can create a breeding ground that goes exactly against that cynicism and that depressive, we can never change anything kind of attitude we talked a little bit about addressing silences and I think education is one of the most beautiful ways to do that we are working on a human rights curriculum with Prinzade from the High Commission in Geneva for human rights working with other people from the International Criminal Court and that will likely be available online at our academy for four years but also online and so it can reach other parts of the world and will be a resource recognizing that we can only fit 320 people in this future boarding school but a lot of corners of the world can work on it we looked at a question that I think is really important about selectivity dominant discourses goes back to the whole silence issue and then do we reinforce silence or do we interrupt it I love that question that I think is a really good one to resonate around the room and take out with us the idea of art helping us regain humanity I encourage all of you if you can to go on to the Genesis website I wrote a case for art and culture to be included as part of the 2015 sustainable development goals for the United Nations that needs to be spread around the world and get the million signatures if not 10 million that it deserves to create the mandate at the level of the UN when they say health for women and children matter all of a sudden all the foundation worlds bring money to the table and I think when there's money and a student has an idea or an artist has an idea and an activist you've got to marry the ideas with the money or it gets just it's a dream deferred if you will and then this sense of urgency and this idea of hope for tomorrow so I want to marry those two ideas I know it's the name of your organization and I love that name but I think this whole idea that we can't be complacent anymore it is here and it's now so I think we're at a historical inflection point is something that nobody said those words but I think we're there and we can watch the world devolve we can watch more human rights abuses we can watch Syria continue and have millions of children that are growing up in refugee camps and are relegated to the bottom of society and then we're going to have to deal with them 30 years down the road when they're adults or 20 years down the road so fill in the country I think we've got all these people being prosecuted and the feedback loop back to society is just not happening so I think I am glad that I have lots of shoulders to distribute this conversation on and thank you all for being here