[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Page 4574]
[From the U.S. 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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