As we watch the strong, the last, the few, the brave come in, i see lots of the faces in the audience. Come on in, dont be shy. There are seats up here. I was fine come i to convince my colleagues to sit in the front seats, except those that are reserved. But you can sit there. All right. So were going to get started here today. First of all i want to note a couple of things. This event and future ones that we are going to be doing under a new initiative here at csis on diversity and National Security. To bring different perspectives, new voices and representation that reflects all of the United States in discussions of Foreign Affairs. Today we have with us for fellows one, two, three, three fellows, one could make it today, three fellows of the program which kick started this series here at csis of the International Career advancement program. An absolutely marvelous unique program out of aspen which has formed the careers of many a Foreign Affairs expert, including several at the table. And thanks to the coterie of 470 fellows that we have come we have begun this program but it is not limited to the fellows to get includes others and youll see in a series of sometimes different events new discussions in Foreign Affairs. We have a hashtag, diversity, and we also have the iccat Alumni Association twitter feed which we are using as was obviously csis. So travis is going to moderate for us today. He is an awesome moderator, and without further ado i will turn it over to him. Thank you. [applause] good morning. Thanthank you, ambassador, for e fantastic introduction, a huge thanks to csis as a whole for gathering us this morning, and a specific thank you to victoria of csis for helping to orchestrate our gathering this morning as well. One administrative note for all of you, we will be taking questions from you guys on note cards. So if you like to have one of those cards, you can raise your hand now and youl you have anor opportunity before the q a starts to get those cards to ask your questions. And so without further ado we will get straight to the heart of the matter here though weve entitled todays discussion south sedan, when war and famine collide, we are clearly away that these are only two strands of a much more complicated situation in south sudan, a much longer and convoluted history of conflict, oppression, and attempts to resolve those issues. One of the things that i wanted to kind of start by pointing out is that even though in the west we have a tendency to mark the struggle in south sedan based on when we begin to engage. So you hear about july nine, 2011. You about july 9, 2005. You hear about intervention such as Operation Lifeline sudan in the late 80s and early 90s, but if you were to sit down with been southerners, now south sudanese, you hear a different take on the ark of the struggle in south sedan. And that art is about a 200 year struggle for them to get to the place where they are. And it essentially starts with rule in that region by the ottoman empire, rule in that region by the egyptians, role in that region by the British Colonial powers, and then rule in that region by northerners situated in the postindependence government at khartoum. But the reason why i wanted to bring it together is that all of those powers who ruled that region had one central principle in mind, and that central rentable was that the region of the south, which is now south sudan, was to be only a region for the extraction of natural resources, was to be only a region for the extraction of human resources, was not to be cultivated, was not to be integrated, was to be isolated and was not to be developed. And that is essentially the beginning of the struggle that they had which essentially made it a place designated for plunder. And successive governments in postindependence khartoum made that very clear. One of the things that happened in the history, specifically around the second civil war in sedan versus the south, obviously, was they designated it something that they termed in arabic, which means the boat of work which was to say they were giving themselves a religious justification to freely plunder and decimate that area for themselves. One of the things that we hear all the time in the west about sedan is and south sedan now, religious justifications, regional justifications, ethnic and racial justifications, all of these are veneers for essentially agreed and the lust for power and resources by specific ruling entities in that country, in that region. The sad irony essentially of the contemporary moment is that for many southerners sacrificed their lives to resist these forms of governance, and found that the Sudanese People Liberation Movement and army, south sedan has become once again the boat of war. This time though without the religious veil in essentially a conflict that is a naked contest for wealth and for power. And again, not for the development and the cultivation of the people of that nation. This all reminded me of the african proverb which states that when the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. And i thought that it would be good for us to take that symbolic metaphor to look at who the symbolic elephants are, what their actions mean for the suffering of the people who are at the bottom of that conflict and to have long bend ignored in this process. And i know that many of you are experts and have given Great Service to try to ameliorate the suffering of those people. And so to get us right into our panel i want to go over to Ashley Quarcoo whos going to give us a readout from the u. S. Aid perspective about the human toll of the conflict and where we are right now. Thank you. Thank you, travis, and thanks to csis for organizing this. I just want to pick up on how travis framed this and emphasize, yes, we are in a humanitarian catastrophe but it is rooted in a political problem, a political crisis. And normally in a system of governance, we have rules for governing how political competitions going to take place. It takes place within a framework where people agree on the rules around that framework. And we dont have that kind of consensus in south sedan pick instead, we have leaders who have decide to go outside of the peaceful rules of the game and to pursue their political objectives through violence that is destroying their country. So thi this is a humanitarian cs of massive proportions, but it is rooted in this political crisis. So just to bring the humanitarian piece of this, were talking about 2 Million People who have fled the country around the neighboring regions. We have two more Million People displaced inside a south sedan. And 200 2000 people are continug to flee the country every day. So thats about one in three people who are displaced from their homes right now. By july, and thats really just around the corner, we estimate about 6 Million People are going to be in need of lifesaving or will face lifethreatening hunger, and about seven and a half Million People will need humanitarian assistance writ large. Just to put this last of in context, thats about 60 of south sedans preconflict population. So this is a massive impact on the overall population, displacement as well as humanitarian of the sudanese. Though we were pleased as im sure many of you were to see last week that parts of south sudan have now been declared famine three, to no longer be in famine, we need remember that the Food Security situation really remains dire, continues to deteriorate across the country. Just to say a word, usaid is helping to lead u. S. Government response to this humanitarian catastrophe. Weve been working aggressively to help save as many lives as possible with our partners. Long before the famine declaration in favor of this year and we will continue to do so. Where reaching about 1. 3 Million People each month with lifesaving assistance. But this is a really difficult and dangerous undertaking, and not just because we are in a conflict zone and theres lots of insecurity. There have been numerous deliberate and brazen attacks on humanitarian aid workers in south sedan. Attacks which are violations of international you managing law. 84 aid workers have been killed in south sedan since the conflict began in december of 2013, and 84, sorry, 17 of those have been since this year alone. Since january of this year. That makes up sedan the most deadly place in the world for humanitarian workers to operate. Thats really shocking. If you think about conflicts that are going on all over the globe, yemen, iraq, syria. So aside from insecurity, aside from i give this willful attacks on humanitarian workers, we are also facing the direct willful obstruction and intervention of the government of south sedan in imposing bureaucratic impediments that inhibit our humanitarian actors and be able to access those people who need their assistance. Its a range of things from imposing worker permits, fees and ngo registration fees that really dramatic increase the cost of delivering humanitarian assistance. And then we see direct detention and extortion, harassment, really egregious acts to deter the delivery of assistance that is going to save the lives of the people of this country, and the fact that the government is taking these actions to prevent this kind of lifesaving assistance is really unconscionable. The u. S. Government expects that are assistant is going to reach the people that need it the most, and we are doing all we can to press all parties to allow humanitarian actors to function with without restriction. Finally just to say a note about kind of the human cost that travis referred to. I mean, you know, there was a u. N. Survey done in 2015 looking at for protection of sibling sites, these are the sites where about 230,000 idp scum internally displaced come across the country are sheltering. This survey conducted in 2015. 2015. He reported over 70 of women have been raped since the conflict began, 75 have witnessed someone else being a raped. Thithis is a weapon, strategy of war at this point. Its a mass atrocity crime and largely perpetrated by soldiers and police. There has been complete impunity for these actions and we can attest that as long as that impunity reigns, as long as the conflict rains we see those kind of strategies being utilized. So i feel like im open the doom and gloom a voice in some of these discussions, but we, as the United States come we will continue to provide assistance. I think that you managing assistance and other assistance that we are providing is critical. It is saving lives. Its really a drop in the bucket when we look at the scope and scale of the humanitarian needs, the civilian protection needs. And ultimately, again going back to the remarks i made at the top, this is a political crisis. It needs a political solution. And until the parties are willing to decide that the strategy of war is either too high a cost for the brothers and sisters or its ineffective for them, if their goal ultimately is to gain power, until they decide, we are going to continue to have these kinds of humanitarian needs. Thanks. Thank you, ashley. Having started with the current use geo official ipod would make sense to follow that up u. S. Official i thought it would make sense to fold it up to get an honest perspective from a former u. S. G oath they shall who has worked on africa and the sedans to talk to essentially where we are with use engagement on south sedan, whether we have our policies in place that make sense for we are in that country at this time. And also to speak a little bit about regional actors, United Nations, African Unions and others. With that i will turn over to linda etim. Great. As ashley was saying, i spent a long time in u. S. Government working on sudan and in south sedan and a lot of the neighboring countries, and so in some ways i have a lot of sympathy and appreciation for the work that a lot of really hardworking people in government are doing right now to ensure that despite what we had seen as a pretty depressing lack of attention on the very important crisis attention, aid continues to flow. People continued to make sure that youre advocating for continued assistance and support to the people of south sedan, even in the face of whats going on with the government. That said, south sudan is not just a political crisis, a crisis of political leaders and the country not owning up to the responsible and not taking care of their people, what we are also seen as a Crisis International leadership. And thats pretty dramatic. The United States knows that we give ourselves a lot of credit for different, important milestone in south sedans recent history come from the sign at the conference of these agreement in 2005 to the declaration of independence for the new country that was finally born. We know that over decades we have seen Church Leaders in the United States and weve seen people from the right and left come together to ask her support of the people south sedan and make it a cause that has been a very american cause. What were seeing now with the lack of attention i think is frankly depressing, and the idea of abdicating the role of you was historic leadership to basically saying it is only the responsible of the parties on the ground, is something we should challenge i think actively, especially folks that are in this room working on these issues. Next, as travis mention, the fact is that just the United States. We had the United Nations, again biggest peacekeeping force on the planet, and weve also got the African Union. Again, most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian assistance, famine, a civil war. And yet these bodies and these institutions whose main job it is to actually make sure that there anything appropriately and actually calling countries and leaders and individuals on the wrongs they are committing have basically also stepped back and said, we will provide assistance our protection within our role, but because of issues of sovereignty or complexities, were stepping back, editing or receipt across board is a lot of people sort of waiting for the other, for somebody else to step up and actually take action on the crisis. When we look at humanitarian workers and deliveries being detained and actually obstructed, thats actually considered a human rights violation. And yet its not a language that we used to speak about it. We havent seen the African Union do more than condemn. We havent seen the u. N. Stand up and said actually these are crimes against humanity. There have been many investigations, but i think is a sort of the language people need to Start Talking about. There was one report where we talked about the potential ethnic cleansing. It sort of reached past the point where we need to go a little bit further. One of the things weve seen with the neighboring countries as well is this i did that theyre refugees. I think uganda has been an amazing recipient of south sudanese refugees, but uganda has been a major problem when you talk about actually coming to resolution of a political crisis. And so on the one hand, again, you see this willingness to engage on how do we accept people enter with the outflow of the problem . But nobody stepping up in our leadership role and willing to take on the really weird causes of what the crisis, of why the crisis is continuing. And until that happens we know that the suffering in this community is only going to get worse. And so i think one of the challenges for all of us is to actually figure out at what point are we willing to actually really push forward aggressive and said okay, we let this go on for over four years now, this war, the last war was over 20 years, may be this is the time to actually say enough is enough and actually takes a more concerted actions to making sure that the people who are responsible for these atrocities are actually brought to more justice. Thanthank you, linda. With linda giving us pretty much an overview of the bilateral use engagement in the region and on south sedan specifically, i want to turn to steven vigil who essential is joining us via satellite. It may not technically be a satellite but i will refer to it in that way. Steve, given your background in u. N. Peacekeeping in south sedan, could you talk to us a little bit about some of the challenges youve seen there, some of the issues, some of the challenges in terms of the protection of civilians which ashley emlyn have talked about . And it also perhaps a little bit from your perspective on the nexus between what the u. N. Mission in south sedan is trying to do related to conflict and how that might be hindered or helped by issues of governance in south sedan . Thats a lot to unpack, but actually prepared i think i could address some of that much of that within the note. Forgive me, im actually going to be reading off of it just in the interest of time because i feel like if not i could kind a strict and i understand where limited on time someone to stick to that. First off, travis, thank you. I want to thank csis for hosting this panel and specifically ambassador mccarthy. Another thing, just in terms of what im going to say, i really want to preface that these are really my views and not the views of the u. N. , neither of my previous employers, south sedan, elsewhere. Im going to share my thoughts on my experience in sedan out insults of entering the birds of 2010 National Election and 2011 referendum immediately post. During part of this. I secured a working group focus on referendum related security incidents. I think its important to look at this particular period were south sedan is today and hopefully this will contribute to some sort of understanding and steps that we taken towards ending the civil war and moving towards peace. I think a lot of the roots of whats already been discussed on the panel, we are already visible this time and for me coming to south sedan during that time, having not had any experience in sedan before, there was a lot, my understanding of what