Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Washington, D.C.

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: Good morning. Thank you so much for being here. I want to thank Ambassador Brownback, Dr. Lantos Swett, for their leadership in bringing us together and I want to thank all of you. People ask me all the time, ‘what makes me hopeful about the work that we're doing to protect religious freedom around the world,’ and the answer is all of you and the growing movement that you represent. So, thank you so much for all of your efforts, you've been absolutely critical partners in civil society out front, helping defend the critical right to religious freedom all around the world. I'm so delighted to be here with Administrator Power, someone I deeply respect and had a chance to work with over the years in government, and you've had such groundbreaking work throughout your career as a journalist, as an academic, as a diplomat, and as a policymaker, and we're so privileged to have some time with you this morning. And given your extensive background in all of these areas, I wanted to start off by asking you, you're someone that's done so much work over your career in atrocity prevention, recovery, genocide prevention – this is work that's clearly deeply meaningful to you – so, I just wanted to start off by asking you, what does religious freedom, and the protection of religious freedom mean to you personally, to the work that you're doing at USAID, representing the American people in our developmental efforts all around the world and to our broader foreign policy interests? Why is it such a critical part of our foreign policy and national security? 

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you, Rashad. I'm so pleased to be here and I'm so pleased – yesterday I had no voice whatsoever. Today I have a smidgen of one and I hope it's going to get us through the morning. Rashad, thank you for everything you've done over your entire career and for your leadership at the State Department. It's been wonderful, I think, to be living this partnership between development and diplomacy and to recognize that both have such a critical role to play in contesting restrictions on religious freedom, in supporting those who are standing up for religious freedom, and in brokering – often in very remote areas – dialogues that need to be happening more. Because part of what happens at a time of not only political polarization globally, which gets a lot of attention, but religious polarization is more separation, less contact, less of an awareness or a recognition of how much people have in common, even if their denominations or their religions may diverge.  

You asked about my own personal background. I actually got to work when I was this tall, when I was in my early 20s as a journalist in Bosnia and one of the great champions of a more robust U.S. posture toward ending the war in Bosnia was Congressman Tom Lantos, who was absolutely tireless. So many of the actors on the ground who documented human rights abuses, attacks on people of other faiths were also people who had experienced training programs or been brought together by USAID, by other programs, State Department programs and so forth. At least as the war progressed that became more and more the case that these were communities that were cultivated. So, I saw the good the United States could do there, but it was the most searing experience – certainly of my life – to be living in Sarajevo, you know, a place where one in every two or three marriages was mixed, in fact, before the war. And then just to see people pulverized strictly on the basis of their religion in so far as ethnicity as well coincided with religion, if you’re Croat, if you're Catholic, Serb, Orthodox, Bosniak, Muslim. And to see the mosques, you know, just getting obliterated, and then in other parts of the country to see the Catholic churches firebombed from within. I mean it was, you know, again, such an awakening for a young person.  

And this was at a time when the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed. It looked like, you know, the end of history might be near to some. But here, you know, as societies were redefining themselves, fissures that had existed and never been broached – never mind healed – were exploited by people who spoke in the name of religion and ethnicity. But, you know, exhibited no love of mankind, exhibited no testament to that faith in their actions. So, you know, my own view and how I carry that forward is to just understand the stakes of the work we do. The stakes of the diplomacy we do in order to prevent religious tension from widening into full blown conflicts. The recognition that in places where you see freedom of religion muzzled or restricted, the studies show that that correlates with a much greater propensity for violence, for social conflicts in the first instance, and for violence.  

So, you know, we live in a world right now with more conflict than at any time since the end of the Cold War. I think that has snuck up on people, just how many conflicts are out there. Of course, the front page conflict of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. But, you know, again, in low key ways, sometimes low key insurgencies, often with religious targeting as a feature of that. So, if we can work upstream together, you know, through the kind of interfaith dialogue you do, or in contesting restrictions on religion, or in bringing communities together, or in USAID's case one of the most incredible things we are fortunate to do – in addition to having programing that supports religious freedom – is to be able to call on religious leaders to exercise that freedom on behalf of broader development and humanitarian challenges.  

And so, the other sort of bookend to my Bosnia experience, which was so powerful and got me motivated to try to pursue a career in public service ultimately, and to be able to do something about these challenges. But, the other thing I would point back to is something that we've worked on together in the Obama years, which is the Central African Republic. You know, seeing religious leaders step forward at great risk – personal risk to themselves – to use their voices to try to shelter people who were being targeted by, again, extremists and pretending to act in the name of faith. The Ebola crisis, where it was religious leaders because they were able to exercise, again, that freedom of religion – were able to be out there teaching safe burials we see today in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And recently in Uganda, we were able to curb an Ebola epidemic that could have gotten wildly out of hand in large measure because those religious leaders had the pulpit, because they had the trust of their communities and because we had built those connections over time and were able to channel resources through them.  

And then the last example I give in my current job, which is, again, not religious freedom as such it's religious engagement to produce greater human rights outcomes more broadly, but by having religious freedom these are the kinds of benefits that can be accrued, and that's in the global vaccination drive on COVID. I mean, the world has moved on – sought to move on from COVID for very understandable reasons – but lo and behold, the last many, many checked Africa, you know, most African countries were, you know, under 10 percent in terms of vaccination rates. In just six months, Tanzania has gone recently from June of last year to now from about a 12 percent vaccination rate to about an 85 percent vaccination rate because of imams, church leaders, and others working together, you know, to push the message and to try to promote the safety of their communities. That can't happen, again, when you don't have the kind of relationship between governments and state leaders and faith leaders. And so that is why we can't get the development outcomes we seek either, unless we are at the same time promoting the protection of religion and the promotion of religious freedom.  

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: Yeah, and we saw the same productive role for religious leaders during campaigns for the eradication of Polio as well, and it was oftentimes the religious leaders that were often able to convince skeptical audiences, or audiences that encountered misinformation about the vaccine, and we continue to see that today in the social media world and even a more acute forum. Certainly, civil society is partners in many of these areas that you mentioned, including in the Central African Republic. I know both you and I had a chance to go out there, and we had a delegation of Christian and Muslim leaders as well, and they have, actually, through their efforts, been able to maintain contacts and address some of the continuing issues that we see there over the years. So, governments often times come and go, but civil societies on the work – on the ground – doing the work every single day in maintaining those relationships.  

So, I wanted to ask you how do you assess the state of freedom of religion or belief around the world? In particular, we have been increasingly engaging on the impact of restrictions on women and the unique challenges that they face on top of other forms of discrimination. So, can you speak a little bit to your assessment, given your vantage point at USAID and then the particular impact on women?  

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I think, you know, everyone from Freedom House to the U.S. Institute for Peace and others, and I think the State Department as well, I think have documented some really worrying trends when it comes to the state of religious freedom. There are some big, noteworthy, devastating examples of wholesale denial of religious freedom, like the PRC's genocide against the Uyghurs. We were talking just before we walked in about the genocide as well, committed by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya. And again, there's an ethnic component as well as a religious component, but they're very, very tied up with one another. And in each instance, being a Muslim in those countries is seen, at least for the Uyghurs in the PRC and for the Rohingya, but also other Muslim communities don't have it so easy either, as intrinsically being a threat to the state, being a threat to stability, just by virtue of an identity, an ethnic identity that you're born with, and a faith that you practice and that you should have the freedom to practice.  

So, when you have a country that is not only as large as the as the PRC, but also that is throwing its weight around so significantly as you and I've seen even just in the few years we were out of government, to come back in and to see the extent to which, in perpetrating that genocide, but in seeking to inoculate itself from criticism, for example, at the U.N. and elsewhere, the resources that are being invested to run blocking motions at places like the Human Rights Council or in New York at the United Nations.  

And well, why does that matter? Well, if a powerful country can shield itself in that way – and luckily, it hasn't shielded itself from U.S. laws. Tremendous legislation passed barring the import to this country of any good made with slave labor. That is going to – that means much of what comes out of Xinjiang, because Uyghurs have been, you know, forced, conscripted into forced labor as well as being denied the right to pray, and live, and assemble, and move around and live freely. And so, we have passed those laws in this country, but others – even democracies – have been very slow to raise their voices and to do something comparable. We have broad bipartisan support to stand up against this genocide and to use the tools in our tool kit, but that has not been the case more broadly. And that sense of impunity over something so large scale, so dramatic, you know, it's hard to draw causality, but surely if you are a state leader or a leader of a government elsewhere – whether at the national level or at the local level – seeing that these kinds of crimes, you know, come coupled with full on campaigns to shield the perpetrators of those crimes, that doesn't do – that isn't helpful to create a culture of accountability, which is what we need when it comes to human rights more broadly.  

So, I just use those two examples that are so noteworthy. I know they'll be the subject of discussion here and have been. I will say – because you touched on the importance of tracking also the welfare of women and girls, and the way in which as religious restrictions, as restrictions on religious freedom go up, so too do abuses and discrimination against women and girls – I think, again, that's well documented and where you see women getting doubly persecuted as well, either for their religion as well as for their gender.  But at the same time, I think we should have this conversation among people who are doing so much for this essential cause, taking note of the backdrop, which is of democratic backsliding and human rights backsliding more broadly. Not to say that this doesn't deserve and demand its own concentrated effort, but, you know, you could make a sort of, I suppose, opportunity out of crisis with such backsliding that now you only have about 20 percent of the countries in the world that are considered fully free. I think the number of not free is up to 38 percent.  That’s the highest in about 25 years. This is, you know, on Freedom House's apples to apples, you know, comparison, I think, year to year.  

And against that backdrop, you know, what does it mean if you don't have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the ability to assert your right to that right is circumscribed further. And so, my point here is that I think we as, with privilege of being a government, and you who are so tireless in doing this work day in day out, have to think about the broadest possible coalitions. Because, you know, the enabling environment that where even as restrictions were imposed, there might still have been the ability to come and protest those restrictions. Well, now even that space is shrinking.  

So, I have to just say a couple of quick things about what we, at USAID, are doing – is we are trying to incentivize broader coalition building in the countries in which we work, bringing together people who may have lived over here doing one kind of advocacy work or, you know, and been focused on one very important moral and geopolitical imperative, and using our convening power and our resources to bring people together. And I think that's really important.  

We are also, at USAID – and you mentioned earlier the importance of local leadership – working to invest much more in local organizations. We have tended to go through large international NGOs who are tremendous. Many of you come from some of those great organizations and really want those partnerships to continue. But we also are thinking about the long term and knowing that those of us who have the privilege of doing this work are often passing through, whereas local organizations are there, they’re rooted in their communities and they have credibility, often with their constituents, whether religious congregants or others.  And so, moving resources directly to them, building out their capacity as well to be able to be prime partners with USAID, we think that's going to have a profound effect, again, on the empowerment of these religious leaders.  

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: You spoke about the role of government and in convening many of these actors, and what are the most powerful ways that we've tried to use that convening over the years is in the international religious freedom space. The initiative of the Marrakech Declaration, which is over 300 religious leaders coming together around the world and articulating from within religious frameworks, and perspectives, the importance of the protection of religious minorities in a way that's persuasive locally with their communities.  

Of course, we always advocate for our First Amendment principles – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – but to have that additional benefit, and those documents and declarations coming from within those communities, I think is uniquely persuasive to many audiences. And it's particularly important now at a time when religion is often misused in advancing arguments that are restricting the rights of people. We spoke about women and girls in Afghanistan. Now we have these unacceptable restrictions on women and girls for education, and now employment NGOs, which has a uniquely counterproductive impact on the ability to deliver aid because so many of the NGO workers in Afghanistan are women, so we need to continue to work with these civil society partners to make it clear that these types of arguments that are being made in the name of Islam, and for religion generally, are unacceptable and need to be reversed.  

So we've spoken a lot about the problems that we've seen and some of the tools that we have at our disposal in government and some of our partnerships. We have here in the room an amazing collection of civil society actors, religious actors, what can we do working together to reverse the worrisome trends that we're seeing that you described?  

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I know we're short on time, but just – I do think we've all had the experience in our lives of seeing courage up close. You mentioned the religious leaders in the Central African Republic at a time when people were being targeted explicitly, whether they were Catholic or Muslim, you know, we have voices and contacts and platforms here. I think with the new technology, the sort of post pandemic, now reliance on the virtual, which again seems like it's always been with us, but we really didn't do it that much. We have a chance to lift up those voices, and as it were, just bring so many more people into this cause by showing the Nadia Murads of the world to people who may not have the chance to travel to Sinjar to see the resilience and the fortitude of people who've been attacked by virtue of their religion, and to see their determination to go back and to rebuild.  

And, you know, Nadia is now a Nobel Prize winning young woman, deservedly so. When I was at the U.N. and as Ambassador, we were trying to draw attention to how horrific what ISIS was doing was, and went looking for a survivor to bear witness and to bring them into the U.N. Security Council, which is normally just the purview of governments and people in suits. And Nadia had never done a public appearance at that point. And I credit, you know, the diligence of people at the U.S. mission to the U.N. who just went out and about and just tried to say, how do we bring home the human consequences of these horrors about instances – in that instance. But horrors don't start overnight. They start with restrictions. They start with a denial of –

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: That’s right.

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: – of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. And so, to lift up an individual that you see and you have that experience with, I think will broaden this coalition.  

And then the second thing that, just to repeat what I had said earlier, but to make it more pointed, we have to break down the walls within the broader rights promoting community. And I think that's happening already by necessity because the sense of sort of persecution and the growing repression is forcing that. But those who are imposing – those who are abusing human rights or imposing restrictions are collaborating like crazy right now – they're learning from one another. They're copying restrictions from one country, cutting and pasting them and putting them in another country. And so for us as well, to be as sophisticated as we can be in our toolkit, in contesting these abuses, including by being in coalition with partners that we may not have cohabitated with in the past, because the cause of human rights generally, if we can promote that cause, it will definitely facilitate the struggle that you all have been a part of. And so too, if people who have been democracy advocates or human rights advocates can see this struggle as central to their own, I think, again, there's power in numbers and there's power in the learning that can happen across the movement.  

AMBASSADOR HUSSAIN: Thank you so much.  

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you, Rashad. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for all you do.

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