[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 60 (Tuesday, April 19, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Page S2135]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
INVESTING IN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, on April 12, 2016, the Appropriations
Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations held a hearing on violent
extremism and the role of U.S. foreign assistance. We heard testimony
from four distinguished witnesses, including my good friend and partner
in humanitarian work, Bono, the lead singer of U2 and cofounder of ONE.
As I said at the hearing, there are millions of people who may never
know Bono by name or have the privilege of listening to his music, but
their lives are better because of the profound impact his advocacy has
had on the world's efforts to combat poverty.
At the hearing, Bono testified about what he called the three
extremes: extreme ideology, extreme poverty, and extreme climate. His
testimony was powerful. It complemented the opinion piece he wrote that
was published in the New York Times on the morning of the hearing in
which he highlighted the importance of investing in international
development in a way that empowers local populations, including
refugees and other displaced persons.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
a copy of Bono's article entitled ``Time to Think Bigger About the
Refugee Crisis.''
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, April 12, 2016]
Bono: Time to Think Bigger About the Refugee Crisis
(By Bono)
I've recently returned from the Middle East and East
Africa, where I visited a number of refugee camps--car parks
of humanity. I went as an activist and as a European. Because
Europeans have come to realize--quite painfully in the past
year or two--that the mass exodus from collapsed countries
like Syria is not just a Middle Eastern or African problem,
it's a European problem. It's an American one, too. It
affects us all.
My countryman Peter Sutherland, a senior United Nations
official for international migration, has made clear that
we're living through the worst crisis of forced displacement
since World War II. In 2010, some 10,000 people worldwide
fled their homes every day, on average. Which sounds like a
lot--until you consider that four years later, that number
had quadrupled. And when people are driven out of their homes
by violence, poverty and instability, they take themselves
and their despair elsewhere. And ``elsewhere'' can be
anywhere.
But with their despair some of them also have hope. It
seems insane or naive to speak of hope in this context, and I
may be both of these things. But in most of the places where
refugees live, hope has not left the building: hope to go
home someday, hope to find work and a better life. I left
Kenya, Jordan and Turkey feeling a little hopeful myself. For
as hard as it is to truly imagine what life as a refugee is
like, we have a chance to reimagine that reality--and
reinvent our relationship with the people and countries
consumed now by conflict, or hosting those who have fled it.
That needs to start, as it has for me, by parting with a
couple of wrong ideas about the refugee crisis. One is that
the Syrian refugees are concentrated in camps. They aren't.
These arid encampments are so huge that it's hard to fathom
that only a small percentage of those refugees actually live
in one; in many places, a majority live in the communities of
their host countries. In Jordan and Lebanon, for example,
most refugees are in urban centers rather than in camps. This
is a problem that knows no perimeter.
Another fallacy is that the crisis is temporary. I guess it
depends on your definition of ``temporary,'' but I didn't
meet many refugees, some of whom have been displaced for
decades, who felt that they were just passing through. Some
families have spent two generations--and some young people
their entire lives--as refugees. They have been exiled by
their home countries only to face a second exile in the
countries that have accepted their presence but not their
right to move or to work. You hear the term ``permanent
temporary solution'' thrown around by officials, but not with
the irony you'd think it deserves.
Those understandings should shape our response. The United
States and other developed nations have a chance to act
smarter, think bigger and move faster in addressing this
crisis and preventing the next one. Having talked with
refugees, and having talked to countless officials and
representatives of civil society along the way, I see three
areas where the world should act.
First, the refugees, and the countries where they're
living, need more humanitarian support. You see this most
vividly in a place like the Dadaab complex in Kenya, near the
border of Somalia, a place patched together (or not) with
sticks and plastic sheets. The Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees is doing noble and exceedingly
hard work. But it can't do everything it needs to do when it
is chronically underfunded by the very governments that
expect it to handle this global problem.
Second, we can help host countries see refugees not just as
a burden, but as a benefit. The international community could
be doing much more, through development assistance and trade
deals, to encourage businesses and states hosting refugees to
see the upside of people's hands being occupied and not idle
(the World Bank and the Scriptures agree on this) The
refugees want to work. They were shopkeepers, teachers and
musicians at home, and want to be these things again, or
maybe become new things--if they can get education, training
and access to the labor market.
In other words, they need development. Development that
invests in them and empowers them--that treats them not as
passive recipients but as leaders and partners. The world
tends to give humanitarian efforts and development efforts
their own separate bureaucracies and unlisted phone numbers,
as if they're wholly separate concerns. But to be effective
they need to be better coordinated; we have to link the two
and fund them both. Refugees living in camps need food and
shelter right away, but they also need the long-term benefits
of education, training, jobs and financial security.
Third, the world needs to shore up the development
assistance it gives to those countries that have not
collapsed but are racked by conflict, corruption and weak
governance. These countries may yet spiral into anarchy.
Lately some Western governments have been cutting overseas
aid to spend money instead on asylum-seekers within their
borders. But it is less expensive to invest in stability than
to confront instability. Transparency, respect for rule of
law, and a free and independent media are also crucial to the
survival of countries on the periphery of chaos. Because
chaos, as we know all too well, is contagious.
What we don't want and can't afford is to have important
countries in the Sahel, the band of countries just south of
the Sahara, going the same way as Syria. If Nigeria, a
country many times larger than Syria, were to fracture as a
result of groups like Boko Haram, we are going to wish we had
been thinking bigger before the storm.
Actually, some people are thinking bigger. I keep hearing
calls from a real gathering of forces--Africans and
Europeans, army generals and World Bank and International
Monetary Fund officials--to emulate that most genius of
American ideas, the Marshall Plan. That plan delivered trade
and development in service of security--in places where
institutions were broken and hope had been lost. Well, hope
is not lost in the Middle East and North Africa, not yet, not
even where it's held together by string. But hope is getting
impatient. We should be, too.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I see my distinguished colleague on the
floor.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
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