U.S. INSTITUTE OF PEACE

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR SAMUEL W. LEWIS, PRESIDENT

ACCOMPANIED BY CHARLES E. NELSON, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

BUDGET REQUEST

Senator HARKIN. Next is the U.S. Institute of Peace and Ambassador Samuel Lewis, President of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The Institute is requesting $11.9 million for fiscal year 1992, an increase of $3.5 million over last year's level.

Ambassador Lewis, it is a pleasure to welcome you here. I want to commend you and the Institute staff for all of your ongoing efforts, especially to educate the Nation during the recent crisis.

Now, more than ever, the Institute has a critical and lasting role to play in shaping the future debate about conflict, conflict resolution, cultural barriers, and successful conflict resolution in the Mideast. Your work at the Institute has been vital to understanding these issues in the past, and I look forward to hearing your plans for the Institute in this and other areas during our time together today.

I yield to Senator Specter.

Senator SPECTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I join the Chairman in welcoming you gentlemen here. Ambassador Lewis has done outstanding work in the public and private sector and is a very forceful advocate for the U.S. Institute of Peace. I have participated with Ambassador Lewis and had occasion to visit him when he was Ambassador in Tel Aviv. I had a chance to meet with him very briefly yesterday, and I expressed the regret to him that we couldn't offer him more money in the public sector. I would like to see him back in public life, and he commented that he could do more good on his private pursuits, and I will defer to his judgment on that.

I express my regret that I cannot stay. We are moving on a Desert Shield package today and I am ranking Republican on the Veterans Affairs Committee, and I have to go to the floor shortly. But I did want to come by especially to comment here and to express these words of admiration for the U.S. Institute of Peace and Ambassador Lewis.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator HARKIN. Thank you, Senator Specter.

I associate myself with the words of Senator Specter. Thank you. Please proceed.

Ambassador LEWIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you very much, Senator Specter.

Mr. Chairman, I first would like to start by expressing again our tremendous admiration and gratitude for the support that this subcommittee has given to the Institute of Peace. This is the fourth

time that I have had the privilege to appear before this subcommittee, and you and your colleagues have helped us to grow from a very tender and not very well established plant as a new institution to a strong adolescence. And we have matured a great deal in these 4 years with your support and encouragement to the point where we have now great breadth of capacities to contribute to our Nation's vocation of being a more effective peacemaker in this world, and not just a more effective warmaker when the occasion requires.

We are presenting our budget this year at a very special time in world history. Kuwait is liberated and the war in the gulf is over, but the stable peace in that region is not by any means assured. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the cold war has ended, but the political wars remain unabated and, indeed, perhaps are intensifying. And in other parts of the world there are many intrastate and international conflicts that continue to bedevil nations from Southeast Asia to Central America.

There are also some constructive trends. Democracy is beginning to take fragile hold in a lot of countries where it has not been common. And certainly out of the gulf crisis, it is clear that the United Nations may now be able to play more of the peacemaking and peacekeeping role that the charter framers originally planned for it, if we are smart enough to build on the experience of the gulf United Nations effort. All of these trends suggest that our work at the Institute, as you have just said, is honestly more timely and more needed than ever.

FUNDING REQUEST

We are seeking, as you said, an appropriation of $11.918 million for the next fiscal year. That has two major components; $10.243 million is for the programs we had planned before the military engagements began mid-January in the gulf, and that figure includes the funding necessary for the new Spark M. Matsunaga Medal of Peace which Congress authorized right at the end of the last session in 1990.

It also includes $1.675 million for the Institute's new special program in Middle East peacekeeping and conflict resolution, which we have established to respond to the extraordinary challenge of turning this region so riven by war into a more stable and enduring arena of peace in the years immediately ahead. With a victory in the gulf war, I believe that the next 18 to 24 months will be a very critical time for the United States and for some other countries who seek along with us a more peaceful, prosperous, just and stable Middle East order. But the obstacles are enormous, and I will not repeat them here. My statement goes into the details, and I assume that my full statement, Mr. Chairman, will be entered in the record. So, I do not want to take a lot of time reading it, but I do want to continue by hitting a few of the highlights, if I might.

SPECIAL MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM

The war has changed so much in that region that major diplomatic initiatives-which President Bush and Secretary Baker have already begun to launch, and initiatives by others in our allied coa

lition are inevitable, initiatives not only to restore the status quo, which can never be totally restored, but to try to knit together a stronger fabric of regional peace and security in the gulf, the peninsula, and between Israel and its Arab neighbor enemies. We believe very strongly that we can help the administration, the Congress and the American people to think through and get some insights into how immediately to deal with this urgent agenda. We are doing this by adding this special Middle East program and having it coordinated by a senior Middle East expert who is joining our staff on detail from the State Department: Ambassador Hume Horan, who is one of the most distinguished experts on the Arab world in the Foreign Service and who served previously as our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Cameroon.

Ambassador Horan, working directly with me, will be coordinating and directing this new effort. We are redirecting funds immediately in order to launch a series of activities under the new program without waiting for our fiscal year 1992 appropriation. For unless we can become useful and helpful in the next 3 months on many of these urgent diplomatic agenda issues, we will miss a great opportunity to be of service to the Nation. After September 30, continuing the special program will really depend on our obtaining the sizeable additional funds we are asking for next fiscal year, but in the meantime, we are starting. Indeed, we have already started, and we are going to squeeze and slow down other activities to make it possible, as painful, frankly, as that will be for some of our ongoing projects.

Now, the new program has several component activities with differing time horizons. I have consulted in putting together this program with the policy planning staff at the State Department, with the White House National Security staff, with some key members of the Senate and the House, and with some staff members of the Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I have been encouraged by all of them to bring the Institute into this challenge and use our rather unusual ability to gather experts from the private sector with experts from within the Government in some small, highly policy relevant working groups, not to produce books a year or two hence, not to produce a lot of scholarly papers to be published some day, not that I have anything against good, solid research and scholarship. Much of our regular program does go to support more basic research into issues of conflict resolution, origins of conflict, negotiation theory and the rest. But the challenge right now is to get people together to focus on four or five of the agenda items that the administration is attempting to think through, and will admit quite frankly in private that it needs additional ideas.

So, we are gathering these groups of anywhere from 15 to 35 people, from around the country and a few from abroad, people who have been in government, scholars who have experience in working with policy related issues and the best experts one can find. We are going to call them together to meet under our leadership briefly over the next months, and we are going to produce intermittent products from these efforts, short, policy relevant kinds of papers. We will feed those to the Congress, to the administration, and to the public, for all of our work is public. Out of these

groups, I am convinced some very important insights and ideas will come that can be a support for the activities of our old line agencies. And certainly the impression that I have from looking at what other people are doing is that none of these issues we are addressing are ones on which there is any excessive thinking going on. Let me just quickly tell you what the five groups are that we are initially pulling together.

MIDDLE EAST PEACEMAKING EXPERIENCE

The first one is on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. It focuses not on what the solution ought to be for the Arab world or for Israel. Lots of people have designed solutions. Ultimately the people in the region have to come to terms with the solution. Our focus is on the history of past U.S. efforts to be peacemakers. We have had 45 years of experience now of being involved in efforts to bring peace between Arabs and Israelis, and no one has really ever sat down and tried to examine some of the experience from those efforts to show what approaches work best and which ones work least well. So, we are bringing one or two scholars who have done a lot of research on the history of previous peacemaking efforts, back even before World War II, along with about a dozen of the actors who have taken part in the major diplomatic efforts the United States has launched and been involved in since the 1967 war, to pit the scholars' conclusions against the experience of the practitioners. Then we will supply the lessons from this group within the next 6 or 8 weeks to our State Department, our U.N. Mission, our Congress, and our public.

Senator HARKIN. Excuse me for interrupting. Is that something you are doing right now?

Ambassador LEWIS. We have started. The first meeting of this group will be on April 3. The scholar is already gathering the material. We have already gathered the group. In fact, the first three study groups I will speak about are all started. The other two will start before long.

U.N. PEACEKEEPING

The second group deals with the immediate question of how you design the best peacekeeping operation for U.N. forces in the gulf. Everyone understands right now we are going to have to have some kind of U.N. peacekeeping to follow on to the American forces as they withdraw, and this is an active subject being debated right now in New York.

We happen to have at the Institute this year the leading expert in the world on United Nations peacekeeping operations, Gen. Indar Rihkye, who is a distinguished fellow with us at the Institute right at this moment. General Rihkye was for many years the military advisor to the U.N. Secretary General on peacekeeping and himself headed a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Sinai before 1967. He is from India. He is working now, starting the day before yesterday, with a group he has drawn together of one-half dozen Americans and about one-half dozen foreigners, all of whom have been involved in U.N. peacekeeping efforts at one time or another, reviewing the lessons of past U.N. peacekeeping operations and fo

cusing them into a design and some suggestions which we will start feeding to key officials on Monday of next week. Their focus is on things to avoid as you design this force, things that must be done if it is to be an effective force, sequencing of decisions, and many of the lessons about force composition and mandate drawn from previous U.N. enterprises in the Sinai, in Lebanon, in the Congo, and elsewhere. That is our second group.

General Rihkye will be with us for the rest of this fiscal year. This project will again be a continuing effort, but we are starting it immediately to have some useful impact on the decisions in New York at the Security Council over the next month.

ARMS REDUCTION

The third group deals with Middle East arms control and arms limitation, one of the four challenges that President Bush put to the Congress and to the people, and the one, frankly, that I myself feel the administration has the least idea about how to proceed. We have had encouragement both from ACDA and from elsewhere in the administration to see what we can come up with through this study group to see what lessons from the European arms control history, which is very rich, may or may not really apply in the Middle East environment.

We had our first meeting of that group last Monday, and it was highly successful. We have assembled an outstanding group of about 25 or 30 people, and we will be meeting about monthly. This group will put out, once again, short progress report type suggestions. We are not trying to design a magnificent big policy. What we are trying to do is take a mixture of scholars and practitioners, rub them together over a sensible agenda on a current, vital issue, and then, taking whatever good ideas come out of these sessions, feed the ideas into the public and administration debate quickly and informally so that they can fertilize the thinking of the Congress and the administration and the public. That is the concept, and I think it is one that has not been used in the same way by any of the think tanks in Washington or elsewhere that I am aware of.

LEGAL STRUCTURES

The fourth project will begin on April 16. It is a much longer, broader investigation. This effort is designed to draw the lessons of the gulf crisis and apply them to the U.N. system. It will examine what one can do from what one has learned out of the gulf crisis to strengthen not only the international legal structure against aggression, but also to strengthen the functional capability of the U.N. Secretariat and the Security Council to establish standby forces in being for future crises and to react as a genuine collective security mechanism one step beyond what was done in this case. We made real headway, I think, in the gulf crisis, thanks to President Bush's leadership and his decision to go through the United Nations. I think it was a marvelous decision for the history of the United Nations and the future of peacemaking, if it is followed up. But following up requires thinking carefully with a number of experts about what can be done as the next step to pre