- In this video, we're going to look at human rights
advocacy in an emergency.
When civilians are being tortured and killed,
and casualties are mounting,
what can you do to stop it?
In December 2012,
a conflict broke out in the relatively unknown country
of Central African Republic.
Rebels called the Seleka began a campaign of violence
targeting the Muslim population.
Philippe Bolopion, the UN Director for Human Rights Watch,
went to document the conflict.
And then he helped to convince the UN security council
to deploy a peace keeping operation
to help stop the carnage.
This is the story.
- Well, the...
The civilian suffering was the most
shocking aspect because as these rebels
took over the country,
they essentially chased down people out of their villages,
they burned entire villages.
They were looting,
killing, raping.
So you would go through entire parts of the country where
you'd be on the road and you'd go through village
after village that were completely deserted.
And all of that was because of a few hundred armed guys
that were completely out of control.
So you would have hundreds of thousands of people
displaced only by the fear of a few poorly armed rebels.
What really struck me once I was there
on the ground is to realize
that the Seleka were not much of a military threat.
They were, just because they had
a couple of pickup trucks,
and a few rusty weapons,
they were able to wreak havoc in the whole country
and scare people everywhere.
But the truth is that any modest military force
could have easily confronted them.
So after being under ground,
we became convinced that it was actually
a good mission for UN peace keeping force.
We know that UN peace keepers are not great at waging war
in very hostile environments,
but they can help secure areas and reassure the civilian
population when the only threat is from
a few spoilers that can be kept in check very easily.
So when I came back from my first trip,
that was the main recommendation that we started working on
is how we can get UN peace keepers there?
Only a few, a couple of thousands of peace keepers
could make a huge difference in this country
and allow people to go back to their villages,
go back to their land,
and restart their lives.
So for UN peace keepers blue helmets to be deployed
on the ground, you need the decision from the UN
Security Council,
which is 15 countries,
five of them who are permanent members
and have a veto power.
The US, France, the UK, Russia, and China.
So you need these five to be on board,
and the rest of the council to be on board
to deploy the peace keeping mission.
It's an expensive proposition.
A peace keeping mission of the type we thought
was needed in the Central African Republic
can quickly run at a billion dollars a year.
And the US and Western countries happen to foot
most of that bill.
In fact, the US pays almost a quarter of that bill,
so the US was clearly a very important target.
I would say the issue that we faced
was that there was simply a lack of interest
for the Central African Republic.
It's not a very strategic country.
It doesn't have huge amounts of natural resources.
When you have an issue like that,
you have to take it with a different angles.
First, you need to secure at least one or a few countries
that are your allies in the Security Council.
That are the countries who are going to
take on your recommendations.
Or maybe they have come to the same conclusion on their own.
And run with it in the Security Council.
Nothing will happen in the council just because
Human Rights Watch or NGOs want something.
It's a state institution,
you need a state to take it on.
So we have to work on the French who were feeling
most responsible for the situation
because of their colonial past.
And because they were what we call the pen holders
in the Security Council.
They were the one drafting the resolutions
on the Central African Republic.
So getting the French on board was key.
Then you have to get the US on board.
And you know, at the time when we were pushing
for the peace keeping mission,
the US was going through a huge financial crisis.
There was a government shutdown in Washington.
So the idea that Congress would be asked to authorize
hundreds of millions of dollars for a mission in a country
that no one had ever heard of in the US
was also a tough sell.
So how do you get a country on board?
It's difficult, right?
Especially when an issue is not in the news.
And the Central African Republic was not in the news at all,
because the world is in chaos.
There were 10 other crises going on at the same time
and people were simply not paying attention
because there was very little coverage.
So we have to first try to get more press coverage.
We did that by writing op eds.
By taking on mission with us,
brilliant photographer and videographer,
who was providing a lot of images that helped
shape the narrative of the situation.
We were talking to journalists.
We had a lot of face-to-face meetings with
government officials.
So on my way back from the Central African Republic,
I stopped in Paris and I had high-level meetings
at the Quai D'orsay, the French foreign affairs ministry.
And in the French defense ministry
to talk to a people who were following
the Central African Republic.
And essentially ring the alarm bell.
The next step was to go to the Security Council
and tell the council members, you need to deploy
UN peace keeping mission.
And to do that and have some credibility,
it shouldn't be just us, Human Rights Watch
or other NGOs saying that.
The UN system itself, the UN secretariat
needs to be behind the idea.
So at the time when I was in the Central African Republic,
the second time around,
there was a mission from the UN secretariat
that had been deployed to make recommendations to the
Security Council on what a peace keeping mission
could look like,
and give them different options,
very light option to a more serious peace keeping mission.
So we engaged a lot with that mission
and we have the contacts,
we knew these people.
Some of them we've known them for years.
And we talk to them about our ideas.
We try to convince them
that, you know, a significant peace keeping mission
could make a difference there.
And they took that idea on board.
They made recommendations to the Security Council
that included the kind of comprehensive
UN peace keeping mission that we thought was needed
for the situation.
The first time I came back from the
Central African Republic,
maybe two or three days after I was back,
I had a meeting with almost all
the Security Council members, at pretty senior level,
to describe the situation on the ground.
So you know, for me to be able to be around the table
with 15 diplomats from the council
and be able to answer all of their questions
and defend our ideas about the peace keeping mission
was I think a turning point for me in the advocacy
of the UN.
It's at that time I felt that
now we had a constituency of diplomats
who were interested about the situation,
knew how it felt to be there,
because when I briefed them I really tried to
not just give them a very dry political analysis
of the situation, but tell them the stories
that we had encountered,
and the things that you could tell were
getting them interested in the situation.
And so from that point on,
I felt that you know, we had
enough of attention and the issue
that we would be able to move it forward.
I would say the US was a tough nut to crack.
They had concerns about the cost,
that were almost over riding everything else.
So maybe a week or two after I came back from my first
trip in the Central African Republic,
I went to Washington with the idea to really work on that.
So I had,
I testified in front of the House of Committee on Africa.
And you know,
explained what the situation was like.
I then went to the White House
and talked to maybe there were almost 10 people in the room,
including some people from the Atrocities Prevention Board,
who were again starved for information.
They had no antennas on the ground,
no clue what the situation was like.
And to come fresh from the ground
and be able to tell them what we had seen
and what we had experienced was I think a powerful tool.
And I also went to the State Department
where the same thing happened.
There were maybe 10 people in the room for the briefing,
and people had seen a few things on the news
but they had so many questions for us.
And the fact that we were able to answer the factual
questions was also giving us much more credibility
when the time came to make recommendations.
The financial aspect is very hard for us to address.
Because the US was having a real budget crisis.
And so the case that I was trying to make
time and time again is look,
the longer you wait,
the more it's going to cost,
because if you go in now before people start
killing each other on a large scale,
you can still with a modest peace keeping mission,
you can still control the situation.
At the end of the day,
that argument had some weight.
They realized the situation was clearly
sliding out of control,
and that it was better to intervene early
on their own accord than being dragged in
a year down the line facing a situation
that would be unmanageable.
So that was a strong argument.
Once we had the French on board,
the US on board, a few of the friendly countries on the
Council on board,
when the UN system was also making recommendations
that were going in the same direction,
we had built enough media attention.
We had a large coalition of NGOs at that point
that was supporting the plan.
And that's when the momentum was there
and the momentum was finally on our side.
We went from preaching in the desert
to actually being a powerful presence at the UN.
A few well equipped, well trained professional
UN peace keepers would go a long way.
To me, this was clearly a situation where
the odds were against us.
When you're trying to attract attention
to an issue that nobody cares about,
it's not good to be alone in doing that.
So part of the plan from day one
was to try to rally other NGOs
behind our proposals.
So you know, one of the first things I did
when I came back from the Central African Republic
is to call my friends from other NGOs,
Amnesty International and others,
and share my experiences
and start brainstorming with them about
what was the best solution to this situation
and how to push it jointly.
Very quickly, we were able to send joint letters
to the Security Council with international NGOs,
African NGOs,
Crisis Action, which is an NGO that helps
other NGOs do joint advocacy was also helping us
get meetings at the UN,
push op eds.
In this country, that had no institutions left,
no police, no army, no justice,
no mails, nothing,
everything was gone,
the only functioning institutions were
the religious ones.
And you know, you had the Muslim population
that was led by an imam that I met
when I was in the Central African Republic,
who was a very peaceful man,
very courageous.
He had been himself in trouble with the Seleka
Muslim leaders because they thought he was not
on their side enough.
And the Christian community was also led by
two religious leaders who were responsible,
and the three of them were really working hand-in-hand
to try to calm the situation down.
They would even travel together around the country
to talk to people
and try to calm down the religious tensions.
So I...
I talked to Crisis Action about trying to help
these three religious leaders,
and try to get them to amplify their message.
So Crisis Action made contact with them.
They paid for them to go on a trip to Europe,
to the US, they even came and testified
to the Security Council.
And they were presenting a really powerful voice.
It was not, you know, a Western NGO
coming lecturing the Security Council about what to do.
It was the religious leaders from a broken country
that were pleading for help
and support.
And so to get them also behind our recommendation
was really a key moment.
Eventually the Security Council authorized the
deployment of a UN peace keeping mission.
Even before the UN deployed on the ground,
the fact that the security council authorized the mission
sent a powerful message to the armed groups in the country.
They knew that the international community
cared about the situation.
They knew that peace keepers were coming,
and that really changed the dynamics.
Then it took several months.
A lot of the UN struggled to find
troops to deploy in the Central African Republic.
It's not the kind of place where people are fighting to go.
So they had to what's called re-hat
soldiers from the African Union Mission,
get them up to speed and up to UN standards.
And so it took some time.
But I would say that it was a game-changer
to have several thousands of UN peace keepers,
eventually close to 10,000, being deployed
in that country
that had nothing.
It really made a huge difference.