New York, N.Y.

SAMANTHA POWER: OK, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please? I’m Samantha Power and it gives me great pleasure to today to be a part of an event that is being hosted by the Council in conjunction with the publication of Swanee Hunt’s new book, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace. The photos that you’ve seen behind us throughout this lunch are photos—many of which appear, that appear in this book—beautiful photos along with captions and quotes from these extraordinary women. The book has a forward from President [Bill] Clinton, who of course appointed Swanee U.S. ambassador in Vienna to Austria. And Swanee and I are colleagues at Harvard University at the Kennedy School, where she has founded this extraordinary program on women and public policy and she manages somehow to run that program, teach at the Kennedy School, run a large and incredibly generous foundation called Hunt Alternatives, and write not just this book, but also plot the writing of two others, which we can expect sometime in the near future.

Before we start—and we’re just going to begin up here by asking—Swanee and I will be in conversation, I hope. I have a number of little annoying announcements that I have to make. [Laughter] Turn off your cell phones and all wireless devices. Those of you who are on your BlackBerries during this event, we will assume don’t care about women. [Laughter] And this event is on the record, I’m told, and we are going to, of course, open it up as quickly as we can to questions and discussion with Swanee; questions from you and a dialogue that hopefully will go around the room.

SWANEE HUNT: Nikki, I will be so embarrassed if my cell phone is on. [Laughter] And I don’t even know exactly where it is, but—

POWER: You’ll be even more embarrassed if your husband is on his BlackBerry. [Laughter] So, Charles, no Blackberry. [Laughter] I’d like to just actually begin by doing something a little inappropriate. Actually, I’m going to do one thing that’s appropriate, which is to pay short tribute to Swanee, and then one thing inappropriate that I think about whether, given that this is an event about Swanee’s book, I could get away with making a plug for something I care deeply about and then I thought, What would Swanee do? [Laughter]

So, I am going to do the inappropriate thing after I introduce this amazing woman. What Swanee is, and she’s many things, but she’s a barrier-buster, obviously, not just at the Kennedy School, where the idea of talking about inclusive security was something of a new idea when she arrive there in nineteen-ninety—

HUNT: Seven.

POWER:—seven. She is an extraordinary mentor to young women; younger women. She—you know, a lot of women in foreign policy, or in the realm we operate in, seem to be very directed, you know, kind of upward, understandably. Swanee manages to be directed in that direction and to want to bring as many younger women as she can with her, which is really special and I’ve been a great beneficiary of that, so it’s great to be apart of this event. And I think the thing that has sort of blown me away in watching, sometimes from up close and often from afar, is the way that Swanee had developed this network of women around the world through initially the Vital Voices Conference that she hosted in Vienna before she returned in the United States just at the end—at the end of her term as ambassador there, and more recently at the Kennedy School through a network called Women Waging Peace.

And, you know, when people at the Kennedy School first heard about this, I think there were some raised eyebrows—“She has lost her mind, [laughter] she’s going to bring people from Afghanistan?” This is pre-, you know, overthrow of the Taliban from Afghanistan, from Iran, from Burundi, from Kosovo; she’s going to have even women just from Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo together? I mean, this is kind of a crazy idea and like all innovative ideas, you know, they all sound crazy to begin with. But I think what the network has done is—for people who show up—many of whom, I think, when they were plucked by you or identified by you hadn’t actually done the conference circuit.

HUNT: Right.

POWER: And so when they showed up in Cambridge—first they were at Harvard—they realized—they looked around, they realized they weren’t alone. There were all these other women in other countries who were waging—not identical struggles, of course, but sometimes analogous ones. They were able to take a Harvard pedigree of sorts back to there societies, for whatever that’s worth.

HUNT: It was a huge lot.

POWER: A lot.

HUNT: A huge lot.

POWER: A lot and, and they were able to actually build a network and exchange ideas, lessons learned. You know, they were sort of walking libraries of insight about advocacy, tactics, and strategies. And they also came away with laptops and things that they really actually just needed tangibly in order to be able to do their work. So, by way of introduction to Swanee, I think that’s really one of the most lasting legacies that she has created and continues to fortify, you know, with every passing day and every passing trip to every new country [that] brings a whole new crop of people who will benefit from these connections and these recourses, and it’s really extraordinary.

Now the inappropriate thing I’m going to do is just tell you something that has nothing to do with Swanee formally, but I think is an example of the kind of inspiration that women like Swanee have supplied young people. But it’s a little bit of—it’s a little off point, so I apologize, but two weeks ago, a group of students at Swarthmore [College] created something called the Genocide Intervention Fund, and this is a fund—they basically reasoned—they launched it April 6th, which was the eleven-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, and they said you know, we know from the tsunami that Americans are capable of great generosity if they feel like there is something that they can do; something very tangible that they can do. And we know that in Darfur, lots of money’s already given for humanitarian aide but what’s missing is a protection force that can actually help women go and get firewood so as to cook the humanitarian aid so as to be able to eat and not have to watch their children or their families suffer and even starve.

So these students reasoned that if the genocide there in Rwanda could kill a million people in a hundred days back in 1994, these students could raise a million dollars in a hundred days in order to pay for flak jackets, radios, and helmets for the African Union peacekeeping force that is there. And their, of course, million dollars is only a drop in the bucket in light of the humanitarian and the security—inclusive security—human-security challenge that exists in Darfur, but if that money is able to be raised, you know, in this short period of time, I think it will send an incredibly important signal to the U.S. Congress, the European governments who’ve been very stingy about Darfur and, hopefully, will lead to greater protection for women who are stuck in these camps. So that’s the sort of inappropriate plug that I think does relate very much to Swanee’s work.

So let me begin, Swanee, by asking you a few questions. And the first question is sort of the obvious one, I guess, which is, why women? I mean, we know you’re one, I’m one, [laughter] but you had a sensibility, a human rights sensibility for sure. Did you—I mean, was it something that you—in going to Vienna—if you and Charles were on a plane to Vienna and he had said to you, “What do you think will grow out of this experience?”

HUNT: Right.

POWER: Would you have had any—would you have self-identified in those days as somebody who was a women’s rights activist first?

HUNT: No. To the contrary, I made the decision that because people would expect me to be working on humanitarian and cultural and women’s enterprises that I, for the first two years, would not. I didn’t speak to women’s groups. I did economic speeches, I talked about politics, the Euro, et cetera. I wanted to establish myself as a competent woman rather than a woman talking about women. But there were some changing moments.

First of all, I had done a lot of women’s work in Colorado: helped start a women’s foundation. My sister, who is year apart from me, she’s in [the] Seneca Falls Women’s Hall of Fame with [astronaut] Sally Ride and [former Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright and et cetera. So she was very much identified with that community more than I was. But in ’94, I hosted negotiations between the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, whom we call the Bosniaks, and the notion was to take a three-way war and turn it into a two-way war, because by all accounts, the Serbs were the aggressors in that war and what had happened is that the groups had gotten too splintered to face off against and defend themselves against the Serbs under [Serb leader Slobodan] Milosevic.

So there were two sets of negotiations that I was hosting—I wasn’t the actual negotiator, but I was the person that was setting up meetings and spending a lot of time with negotiators. And it wasn’t until they were ready to sign this peace agreement that created this federation of the Muslims and Croats that I realized that every single person—it had been about forty or fifty people involved from Yugoslavia—had been men. And I felt—well, you know I try to be culturally sensitive. [Laughter] So maybe, maybe there just aren’t really highly educated, experienced Yugoslav women who could have been part of this. And come to find out that Yugoslavia has the highest percentage of women Ph.D.s of any country in Europe. So that became, now, a real intellectual question: Why they weren’t there and why there were no women in [the 1995] Dayton [negotiations that ended the war in the former Yugoslavia], when by all accounts that I knew from having been there on the ground all throughout the war and afterwards, there were more than 40 women’s associations that were trying to stabilize the country? But our State Department didn’t know about them.

And I knew about them because I was going around meeting with them. They saw me as this woman who would listen and I would write letters back to President Clinton and he would say, ”Put together an initiative and I’ll announcement it at the G-8 [Group of Eight], and try to put together the women’s Bosnia initiative to create micro-loans for—it turns out 60,000 now women have been affected by those loans and it’s been replicated in Kosovo and East Timor and Rwanda, et cetera. So I was doing the women’s thing because that didn’t get in the way of our ambassador to Bosnia and that really pulled me much more into the direction this took. And then, frankly, my good friends were writing books about what happened in the war and how they ended the war, et cetera [laughter], and I read these books and—now, these are people whom I admire greatly, but the books were guys talking about guys. I don’t mean to be overly simplistic, but there were a few women, every now and then mentioned, but I thought, “Wow, what a difference in what we perceived as to what was going on.” Because there was all of this energy being spun by the women there that was being lost to history. So I said, “Well I’m going to do it.” Charles said, “You know, you’ve got to go. You know these women; you’ve got to do the interviews, you’ve got to write it up.” And my son, Teddy, our son who was 13 at the time, said, “Mom, who do you think is going to read this book?” And I said, “Well, honey, probably almost nobody.” [Laughter] And he said, “Well, mom, some libraries—some libraries will buy it and they’ll put it up on a top shelf, but someday somebody will write the definitive history of Bosnia and they’ll have to pull that book off the shelf and those women will be in it.” [Applause] [Laughter] And that kept me going for seven years.

POWER: That’s great. That’s great. Now, leaving aside that these are just voices that weren’t heard, what—when one puts down the book having read these testimonies or these reflections by these women—I mean, have you thought much about—how different would this book look if it was portraits from Bosnia and you had chosen men and women alike? Like, what is it about the women’s experience, do you think, that makes it different, or is it just that they’re not being heard, therefore they need to be heard and it doesn’t matter if they are different?

HUNT: Well, you can always argue a rights issue that if you have 52 percent or sometimes it’s 70 percent after a war, like in Rwanda—I think that 70 percent is women; they have a right to be at the table. But actually, I don’t spend much time with that one because there are plenty of other great advocates for that.

I want to answer your question two ways: one is, would [it] have [been] very different if there were men and women? For one thing, the women, if they had been in that group with those men—it’s amazing to see how women pull back and they do not speak in the same way in a mixed group. And I could have probably gotten their voices stronger if I was interviewing them individually, but there is a value in having them as a cohesive group.

The other question that you didn’t ask, but I want to mention, is that if this were in fact, “This Was Not Our War: Iraqi Women Reclaiming the Peace, Rwandan Women Reclaiming the Peace, Colombian Women Reclaiming the Peace,” you would find probably 80 percent overlap in content—shocking. I’ve now worked in 40 different conflicts, have over 500 interviews.

POWER: Let me—just coming back to Bosnia, because I was going to ask you about Liberia and Iraq and you know some of the other places that you’ve been working on since Bosnia. But, one of your first entrees, as I understood it at the time, was to work with the women of Srebrenica [where, in 1995, Serb troops massacred an estimated 7,000 Muslim men and boys] and that, I mean, among all the crises and the conflicts that you’ve associated with and kind of networked somehow in the aftermath of—I’m not sure that there is one that’s as dramatic as that in terms of the men being completely absent.

HUNT: Right.

POWER: I mean, in other words, Rwanda as bad as it is, and it is so bad, but it’s an equal-opportunity killer, you know, in terms of men and women. And for Srebrenica, it was such a dramatic scene, you know, when those women emerged and it was clear that their men had been left behind and the men and the boys had been just systematically butchered and they were just—those women were just all alone. I wonder if you can talk about those women, because, maybe I’m imagining it, but I feel like they might have been foundational in your journey and what they are like and how they are, you know, I mean how they’ve evolved?

HUNT: Every one of us has these moments that are life-changing moments that set our course in a direction we didn’t think about. [Inaudible], who was a Serb in Sarajevo—a politician—came to me and she was a diplomat at that time in Vienna. She said, “Swanee, you’ve done so much for Bosnia.” And I was hosting the national conferences and doing all kinds of things to try and stop the war that weren’t really women-oriented. She said, “If you would just do one more thing: do something for the survivors of Srebrenica.” And they refused to call themselves the widows of Srebrenica, because they refused to believe that their men and their sons and brothers were dead because the mass graves hadn’t been exhumed.

And by the way, my recollection is that you tried to get that story told and the papers said, the papers here States-side said, “We’ll cover it after it happens.” And you said, “Wait a minute, it’s going to happen tomorrow and the next day.” But that’s another story. So, you feel this with the same passion that I feel about what more could I have done. I went and I met with these women, there were 30,000 survivors—

UNKNOWN: [Inaudible]

HUNT: What? Do I need some water?

UNKNOWN: [Inaudible]

HUNT: Thank you. OK, thanks. [Laughter]

POWER: Can I get one, too? [Inaudible] to follow me around and tell me when I need hydration?

HUNT: She’s on my staff with the Council. [Laughter] I met with these women survivors. They were the women and the children and some elderly folk, et cetera. All of the men and boys, 14 to probably 60 had men slaughtered within a few days’period. They were found with their hands tied behind their back. They had been disarmed before and almost a year had gone by. The international community felt so horrible about their failure. It was a notoriously low day for the U.N., but also for us all. And they dealt with—this is even worse—is when you deal with something to be ashamed about, you deal with it by ignoring it? That’s the worst. And these women were feeling not only then so traumatized, but then forgotten.

And we went down to Bosnia and met with them and they said, “Help us commemorate this.” And so I got [inaudible] and [member of the European Parliament] Emma Bonino and—you know, great friends of mine from the years of being a diplomat, and we put together a commemoration in Tuzla, which is the city near Srebrenica where the survivors have been brought by buses and they had been told that “the boys and men will follow, we don’t have enough buses, so you’ll go ahead and you just wait for them,” and then became—the systematic killing went on.

And so I was talking with these women about how to set up this commemoration of the day, and [General] Bill Nash, who’s been associated here with the Council, said, well—he was a general and he said, “OK, I’ll do this,” because I had gotten to George Jowan who was the SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander in Europe] in Belgium. And I said, “We have to do this, I need protection from troops,” and he said OK. But Bill said, “You’ve got to make sure that it is evenhanded.” And I said, “Well, what does evenhanded mean?” And he said, “Well, you have to have women from all sides.” I said, “OK.”

So I was meeting with these women who were devastated; they were living in burned-out houses, they—I won’t go into it. You all know what a massacre is like and what the—what survivors are living. So these women were talking to me about what their lives were like. They were sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, and they were showing me how—for this commemoration, each one was embroidering the name of each one of her sons and her brothers and her husband and their name and their birth date, and I remember this woman holding up this, like, napkin-cloth, just trembling, and she was shock-white hair—she hadn’t been white-haired before this, and she was crying and she was saying, “We’re going to cover this sports stadium with the names of all these boys and men who must be alive somewhere, but they won’t be with us that day, but we know that—you know, I have three sons and it’s true that maybe the other—the older two were killed, but I had a 14-year-old and he was the fastest in his class, he was the track star and I know that he was able to outrun—but whatever firing squad they had.” And it was all of this [inaudible].

So then I remembered what Bill Nash had said and I said, “Well, would you be able to include here for this commemoration the women who are also missing sons and husbands who are in Banja Luka,” in other words, the Serb headquarters, “because there are a lot of Serb men missing and could we somehow combine this?” And as soon as I said it, I thought, “Oh, what a stupid thing to”—I mean, you don’t say to people who are in that kind of grief—you don’t ask that question. And this woman looked at me and she said, ”Ambassador Hunt, we’re all mothers.“ And I carry that inside of me every hour of every day.

And when you ask, Why women? One of the things that I have found that women are able to do: they are able to affiliate at a woman-to-woman level. That is, their—its own identity. In addition to being a Serb or a Muslim or a Shiite or a Tutsi or whatever, they can also say, “We are women together.” I remember asking one of the women—I interviewed 26 women for this book and they were all interactive, threaded throughout the book—and when I asked Alma, who was a soldier, I said, ”What was different? Did you feel the same way as the men?“ And she said, ”No.“ I said, ”Why not?“ She said, ”Well, you know, we’re mothers.“ And I said, ”Alma, you’re not a mother. You’re 21 years old. There’s nothing motherly about you.“ I mean, I didn’t say that, but [laughter] [inaudible]. I said, ”Oh. Oh.“ But you see that in her consciousness, she watched her mother and she had this different idea, and I don’t mean to get into all women are one way or all men are another way, and you get into this whole essentialist argument and I don’t mean to fall into that trap. But I hear this over and over; that women have a different perspective than most men.

And maybe it’s because of their social roles, because they certainly had different social roles. Maybe there’s some hard-wiring, but I’m not going to give that to [Harvard President] Larry Summers just free. [Laughter] You know? But who knows? I mean, of course there’s hard-wiring difference. I mean, let’s be real. You know, I mean, we’re hormonally different. [I] don’t know how that plays out, but there are stunning differences between—especially the men who are stepping into the power vacuum in these conflicts. And often, you know, I said to [Harvard University’s Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International

Affairs] Ash Carter, who is also up there at the Kennedy School. I said, ”Ash, at some point, you got to admit that the bad guys are guys.“ [Laughter] You know? I mean, by definition. And yeah, can you find 10 percent of the bad guys who aren’t, but yeah—we get so—what shall I say? We want to be elevated in our thinking and sometimes we overlook some of the really simple dynamics here.

POWER: Yeah, I get—you know, I feel like we don’t—the whole point is we don’t know. We can speculate, but we won’t know whether women will make more affable and socially concerned governors until they have a chance to govern.

HUNT: You need some absolute numbers.

POWER: You know, and I mean that in—I mean, just endorsing your—to use a term of art these days—crusade to give people that opportunity to govern and, as you say, the few examples we have seem very encouraging. But most of women’s governance that is going on right now is governing civil-society organs and sort of still clamoring—while the head of something, still clamoring to be in the room with the governors who, of course, control monopolies of force and so on.

HUNT: Well, let me say what is—what all these people are thinking about. They’re saying, [former British Prime Minister] Maggie Thatcher? Yeah. [Former Indian Prime Minister] Indira Gandhi? Yeah. [Inaudible] Women who make it up to the top of a very heavily male hierarchy often do it by being rougher and tougher than a lot of the men so that the comparison has got to be, if you had a woman at the top and half of her cabinet were women and half of the parliament were women, then let’s talk about would there be a difference. And what we do have is some very interesting social science research about where the parliaments were [when] that’s true.

I have a friend, Anita Gradin, from Sweden who was a woman senator. She later was an EU [European Union] commissioner. She was a senator when 12 percent of the Senate was women. She was also a senator when 40 percent of the Senate was women and she said something quite elucidating to me, which was that the same women in the 12 percent actually voted differently when they were in the 40 percent and that makes—when you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world because we’re always trying to figure out how to build your alliances and how far off of a limb—out on a limb you can go before you become marginalized. You know what? When you are in a 40 percent, you don’t have to worry about marginalization if you’re saying we need to cut the defense spending and put it into education.

POWER: What about Iraq? You’ve been there, I know, in the last year or two and have begun already networking with these amazing women. Is it—you know, one of the dangers—you know, we’re all for human rights. Human rights sounds great. But there’s a great concern, of course, that opening things up, opening societies up, moving away from top-down structures to giving people the authority that they deserve and the authority that is needed to hold governments accountable, but that that will actually yield in the short and medium term very illiberal results.

Iraq is a classic case where Saddam Hussein—you know, perhaps the only thing that he was to be commended for was that the gender distribution was better than it is, you know, throughout the Middle East and there was a concern that in—you know, once freedom landed on the doorsteps that those gains—relative gains would be lost. What is Iraq like and what’s your impression of women there? And if you could speak also just about—you know, I mean, because everybody unfortunately is self-identifying or being forced to self identify ethnically and religiously—if you could—you know, are there any differences between how Sunni women feel now versus Shiite and Kurdish women that you’ve dealt with?

HUNT: I’ve done three trainings of Iraqi women leaders and have done these consultations and trainings with about 80 of them and I haven’t done any since the elections, although we’re going over to do some with the World Bank, I think, in a month, and we’ve done some writing about this as well. As I said, the stories that you’ll find in this Bosnia book are very much replicated in their experiences where women will say, ”I have these very different—big differences in 80 percent of how I feel on sharia [the official body of Islamic] law,“ let’s say, ”differences from how this other woman feels, but there’s this other 20 percent where we’ll work together.“ And you see this in our Congress, in the U.S. Congress, where you’ll have women vote the Republican line; all those votes that are—where they get 100 percent of their [inaudible] out and women doing the same thing on the Democratic side, but they’ll come together to fund legislation against sexual trafficking of women and other very women-specific initiatives. So I’ve certainly seen that.

I remember asking [inaudible] and Raja, who were both members of the governing council—we were up on a panel together—and I said something about—I introduced them and was asking them about their religious backgrounds, and I remember Dr. Raja [inaudible] saying, ”Why do people keep bringing this up? I have never thought of myself in those terms. I get so tired of it. Yes, I’m Sunni and I’m married to a Shiite. I mean, what [do] you want me to say? What are my children?“ You know? So that’s what I mean; it’s the same kind of content that you and I heard 10,000 times in Bosnia.

POWER: Absolutely. Now, what about representation of women then in this new parliament? I mean, how—

HUNT: Oh, that is so interesting, because after I did training with some of these women, I flew into Baghdad. This was December of ’03 and I was meeting with [Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority Ambassador L. Paul] Jerry Bremer and I said, ”Look, I have been meeting with all these women and here’s what they say.“ And there were 17 demands that they had for representation. And he said—and he is an enlightened man and I have nothing bad [to] say about him. You know, one of the career Foreign Service [officers], tried and true. And he said, ”Well, yes, I’ll take this into consideration.“ I said, ”Well, look, there were 25 members of the governing council and there were three women.“ Is it 24 or 25?

POWER: Twenty-five.

HUNT: Twenty-five and three women; one was murdered. I said, ”Why didn’t you have more women?“ And he said, ”Oh, look, we aren’t going to get into quotas.“ I said, ”I know you’re allergic to quotas. How could you decide how to have [how] many Sunnis, how many Shiites, and how many Kurds to have?“ [Laughter] You know, there’s just no answer that comes from that. And so why isn’t gender seen in the same kind of way as you would see other kinds of differences? And it’s not. It just isn’t. And it’s not about Jerry Bremer and it’s about the way any of us sees the world. We don’t go in with those kinds of calculations.

So that’s why we have to have a new paradigm, it’s got be a new paradigm for inclusion. How do we figure out who the stakeholders are? And this notion that, oh, what you do is you take the seven warlords and you bring them around a table and they have to put their rifles under the table and then they can divide up the bounty—the spoils and then that’s the peace agreement. Like these seven warlords in Liberia have somehow proved their capacity to put together a peace? This is what happened at Dayton and for all the good that happened at Dayton, it set up a system in which you had to declare yourself, essentially, as an extremist to be able to represent the Serbs. And then I’m going to represent the Croats and I’m going to represent the Bosniaks. And what about if you didn’t think of yourself that way? There wasn’t a place for you.

POWER: Just a final follow-up question on women in the Iraq: so how are they doing?

HUNT: Oh, thank you. [Laughter] You know, I just get started, don’t I?

POWER: No, no. It’s all good.

HUNT: But, OK, here’s what happened. So, the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] said, ”We will not push hard on this.“ And the women said, ”Well, we will.“ And they hosted rallies all around the country and even the women that several of us had worked with training, UNIFEM [United Nations Development Fund for Women] was involved, World Bank, Women for Women International. I mean, I’m not trying to make this my thing, and these women were brilliant. CPA, to their credit, did not get in the way. They may have given them some behind-the-scenes support, but when you have an administration that is making a point of not supporting affirmative action at home, it’s very hard for them to require affirmative action abroad. So you see how the domestic and international playoff of the same—

POWER: And—

HUNT: And so the women got a requirement for 30 percent of the places, but women in Rwanda went further: they took their organizing money that was based on this Bosnia Women’s Initiative that President Clinton announced and [former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] Sadako Ogata got there to be a Rwanda Women’s Initiative and they said, ”OK, well we’re going to do something different. We’re going to set up in every village, after the genocide, a women’s council.“ And I have visited these and women were running for a place to be in this group of like seven women on the council. And then those council members elected women to be in a prefect group and they elected women to be in a national group and then there was that force coming up from the bottom. [Rwandan President] Paul Kagame, who gets this, said, ”I want to set aside 30 seats in the Parliament for women who are coming up in this system.“ The women then said, ”Great, and we are going to save our strongest women to run in the co-ed elections.“ [Laughter] And they now are about 49 percent of the Parliament—highest number in the world.

POWER: Wow, that’s something.

HUNT: It’s cool! [Laughter] It’s cool! And we have researchers. We’ve done 12 case studies—and we have all these case studies probably there’s some copies out there—and then we put—oh yeah, here are copies of some of the case studies. And then we put together a tool kit to do the training for the women and this is really hard-core stuff. This is like, what is DDR: demobilization, disarmament, reintegration. What is transitional justice? What are constitutional rights? What are the models? South Africa has a great model. What’s the language that needs to be written in, in Sudan? We just trained 130 women in Sudan.

POWER: Let me interrupt you because this looks a lot like what the Bush administration is sort of passing out; the literature, it would be passing out in lots of different languages and lots of different countries and what’s in this, of course, is what is in so many of President Bush’s speeches.

HUNT: Right.

POWER: So many of the speeches by [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice, you know, who had been in a nation-building and democratization skeptic, but now like the rest of the administration, is converted. So I want my final question and then I want to [laughter] no, I mean that the—this administration has been very forthright about seeing a connection between security—U.S. security and democratization that it didn’t see prior to 9/11; that is, that failed states make [inaudible] neighbors, that repressive states—if you are repressive to your own people, that’s a decent predictor of how you’re going to behave in the neighborhood, et cetera—you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It turns out, you know, he’s actually not your friend. He will end up being an enemy too often. But these kinds of what are I think intellectual insights, of course are not filtering down through all the Bush administration’s policy, needless to say. But this is the thrust of what President Bush in his second term wants to be remembered for.

So, I want to ask you, again this is my final question, and I want to hear from everyone here. But how does the fact that there is now this overlap between what you’ve been saying and what the U.S. government—Republican or Democrat—a government, and a government that is not popular around the world in most of the kinds of quarters that you’re operating in. On the one hand, I know you’ve told me that they’ve been very receptive to you and very, in a way, generous and a kind of partner; but let me ask you about the women that you deal with, do you—are you sort of branded by association, are they suspicious of you as an American, as it were, sort of a missionary on behalf of principles that are being again talked about at a very high level? And because of the perception that this is the Bush administration’s agenda, are you seeing people on the ground trying to sort of carve out their own space away from foreign donors and [inaudible], you know, democracy promoted—and how do you operate in this universe where there is this kind of overlap in your material and your message?

HUNT: Well, you, what I was saying about this woman saying we are all mothers? They include me under that, too. And I have been treated extraordinarily generously by women around the world who I don’t think see me first and foremost as an American. Nikki, you’ve been with me on lots of trips and that’s certainly not—when I was ambassador, I certainly was. I represented the superpower. But now I’m the Swanee that they’ve heard about from here and there and when I come—and I have invitations to be in probably 15 countries right now and I can’t get to all those places, but when I come, they really see me as more of an ambassador for women worldwide. And the U.N. has been a wonderful partner. The Bush White House has been a very fine partner. The Bush State Department has been, if anything, leaning forward even more than the Clinton State Department on this issue. And I feel—

POWER: You don’t feel the suspiciousness?

HUNT: I haven’t had that experience.

POWER: That’s good news. All right, let’s open it up. Wait for the microphone if you could and speak directly into it. Stand, state your name and your affiliation, and please ask only one question and a concise question at that. We have two questions here. Yes sir? And then a—

QUESTIONER: Hi, Jeff Laurenti at the Century Foundation. Swanee, I wonder if you could comment a bit about the role—since in many of these conflicts there was always at least an undercurrent of a dimension that was religious—of religious communities, many of which have male leadership, but particularly in the Balkans, you had both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Women religious—to what degree did they or could they play a role in shaping a different direction than one of conflict and war?

HUNT: Right, well if you had a chance to see some of the quotes that were during lunch, those were the 26 women in the book and they said over and over that this is not a war about religion; that religion was a tool that was used by the political leaders to try to keep other people away. Outsiders don’t want to get involved in someone’s religious war because you feel like you’re getting in the middle of something that’s never going to stop. And so I actually at the same time as I was in Vienna was asked if I would bring together the inter-religious leaders—the leaders of different religious groups: the cardinal in Sarajevo, the Orthodox Metropolitan, the head of the Jewish community center and the [inaudible] of the Muslims, and it was all guys and they each had an assistant and they created an inter-religious council, which was great. And they came back to Sarajevo and they announced it and that was really important; not because of the people in Sarajevo who already knew that this wasn’t a religious war, but to tell people from the outside that it wasn’t.

But the problem was they would come back in and they would get pulled by their constituencies—by the more die-hard among their group—and they kept not doing much. And I, for several years, would go down and we would meet together in a restaurant in Sarajevo and say, ”Hey, come on guys, what are you doing?“ And they were [not] doing much. So we said, ”Well, let’s try something different. Let’s find women who are actually the lay leaders—just like we have in our country, the lay leaders in these various religious bodies—and let’s bring them over to Harvard.“ That was really interesting. We brought about 16 women and they spent a week at Harvard, and the way you do this is you have [inaudible] go around and speak together, like you take them to Brandeis [University] and you take them to Tufts [University], you take them to the State Department, and you have various places and they keep having to do this dog-and-pony show about how united they are and, you know, they start feeling quite united. [Laughter]

And so then they—and this is the kind of formula that we’ve done—we’ve just repeated it many times. So then they went back to Sarajevo and put on a conference of 70 women leaders and out of that came three initiatives that were ongoing for many years. So the women tend to—another one of your questions—women are so highly invested in making this work.

I had a Kenyan women; Mary [inaudible]. She said—you know, her experience was—she said, ”What men want is very different from what women want.“ And she’s talking about the men war leaders and the women activists. The men want a whole state, they want to make sure that the boundaries are where they think the boundaries should be, and they want control over the oilfields or over the mines or over the rubber companies or whatever. She said, ”What women want is a safe place for their children to be able to [go to] school and to be able to get back without being shot by snipers.“ So they want whatever conditions are going to make that happen. It’s a very different kind of motivation.

And when I asked the folks at the U.N. several years ago, ”Why aren’t there any women on these negotiation teams in Africa,“ the U.N. official said, ”Oh, well, the warlords won’t have women.“ And I said, ”Well, why?“ He said, ”Because they’re afraid the women will compromise.“ I thought, bingo. [Laughter] You know? Yeah, that’s right.

POWER: All right. Yes?

QUESTIONER: Bettye Musham from Gear Holdings. In Iraq, there are a large number of educated women but they’ve never had the ability to have any impact on their government, but now that you’ve been training these women, how are they going to have the ability to organize and what structure will support them to have an impact on the new renaissance?

HUNT: Well, there are a number of civil society mechanisms that are pulling together the women and getting them that kind of support. Zainab Salbi, who started Women for Women International and who was very active in Bosnia, it turns out she’s an Iraqi and, lo and behold, she’s doing great work there. And Nesreen Berwari, who is the minister for reconstruction, is a Kennedy School graduate and she was organizing other women who were in the ministries and the like.

If you’d like to find more on this, we have a web site, womenwagingpeace.net, and we have some reports about how women are organizing in Iraq and so feel free. You’ll also find some profiles of about 400 women. We don’t go around looking for more examples, because we really have examples coming out the kazoo. You know, we have members of parliament, investigative journalists, military officers, grassroots street protesters, et cetera. But our key role has been to link these 400 women with 4,000 policy-makers, so we get the three women from the governing council in to meet with President Bush or a group of Colombian women leaders to meet with [World Bank President] Jim Wolfensohn and et cetera. Just multiply that, because that’s where we think the real leverage is.

POWER: Over there. Ah yes, Chloe?

QUESTIONER: Chloe Bryce, St. Mary’s, Manhattanville [College]. Thank you so much. I just wanted to pursue again the question of the relationship with the U.S. government and I was wondering if you could address the seeming sort of disconnect where on the one hand the Bush State Department and—you know, may be very supportive in terms of women’s participation, but on the flip side of that, this real sort of hard line when it comes to reproductive rights and the funding of, you know, UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund]—the united published—

HUNT: Right.

QUESTIONER: Right, all that. And, you know, the difficulty that was reflected in the recent conference on the status of women with them not endorsing a 10-year-old platform because they drummed up some nonexistent abortion language that wasn’t in there. How do you confront the issue of reproductive rights, which is probably among the most important for, you know, women’s coming into being in any country in the world?

HUNT: Well, I personally was the co-chair of [Democratic Representative] Dick Gephardt’s campaign. I worked on [General] Wes Clark’s campaign, and I worked on [Massachusetts Senator] John Kerry’s campaign. And I made no bones about the fact that I was looking for regime change. That was in November—October/November. And in December, I was invited by [former Deputy Secretary of State] Dick Armitage to be seated at the head table with [former interim] President [Sheikh Ghazi] Al-Yawar from Iraq sitting next to [Senator] Dick Lugar [R-Ind.]. So that’s what I’m saying. Both are true. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an administration that is able to be consistent on all levels. I’ll tell you what, I was quite opposed to the Clinton policies on Bosnia for the first year and a half I was there. I was advocating for intervention—military intervention long before we did so. And so we can talk about that as a great failure as well.

I still am—I still have my own political views, but I don’t want to say that, because so much of what this current administration is doing, I can’t support that—I won’t work with them as I’m able to.

POWER: Can I just ask a sort of tricky little tactical follow-up to Chloe’s question? So when you’re in the room and—I mean, there’s so many vectors in the Republican Party from where—

HUNT: Right. Right.

POWER:—from whence and from where these policies are being generated, but—so when you’re in the room, do you basically say half a loaf is better than a full loaf, and the best way to maintain these relationships and to get the funding that we need for these women—these extraordinary women around the world—is to sort of bracket this issue, or now that you’re in the room and have a seat at the table, are you taking advantage of it, or do you feel like there’s a space to have dialogue about this other set of issues that are being neglected at great—

HUNT: Yeah. I write a syndicated column for Scripps Howard [News Service]. They call me their liberal voice. And it’s in a lot of papers around—you know, every two weeks around the country. I don’t hold punches on these very subjects about what we ought to be doing on reproductive rights and on others. If I were to have a half-hour meeting with President Bush, which I haven’t, would I spend it talking about reproductive rights? Probably not. I would spend it talking about how we need to be working in the countries that I think are most on his agenda by bringing women in, because then he’ll get to his goals of freedom and toward democracy. So I try to pick my avenues.

POWER: Yes, ma’am?

QUESTIONER: Indira Kajosevic. I work with Reconciliation and Culture Cooperative Network, which is just across the bridge in Queens working with survivors from the former Yugoslavia and trying to create a space where they can safely meet.

And actually, I want to talk a little bit—and actually would like to ask you about the positive imagery that you have set as an example to be an ambassador at that time to hold meetings with women who would come from all parts of the former Yugoslavia at that time. To—in June—I remember quite vividly in June in 1994, which is about 10 years ago, there was a woman from Belgrade who said, ”If there were not that woman in Vienna, we wouldn’t have a chance to have all of these voices heard.“ And then again, you are—and she was somebody who was attacked by an American feminist who said, ”If you were really doing the thing that you are saying, that you were working, you would have been probably been dead.“ But she wasn’t that, nor were there a lot of other women organizers who were opposing Milosevic’s regime. They were probably perceived as non-threatening. They’re very often portrayed as these crazy women who want to do something.

So there is a little bit of that, but we only have to convince everyone around that, oh, OK, we are women and we are doing things differently. And then we have to say how different, and then we have data, and then we got into this eclectic conversations and discussions, which are really great. But I really wanted to ask you something else. You—at the beginning, you said when women are together they are talking differently. And not only even one of them is pulled out and represents those women’s organization or what has happened. And working on that issues—and I call it trust-building among women organizers. This has happened throughout that region, but also in other parts of the world. But how did you at that particular point feel and how did you know that this is really indeed something different? Because as you mentioned, those first two years you wanted to show that you are actually doing your job. You are not a woman advertising women—what women were doing. How were you convinced? Thank you.

HUNT: Well, I have to tell you that when you quoted—it brought tears to my eyes when you said that this woman was saying, ”Yeah, there’s that woman in—over in Vienna.“ You never know. None of us in this room knows the impact that we have and the hope that we’re giving to other people. You know, we just all sort of chug along. We all get up in the morning, brush our teeth, and figure out what we’re going to do today, and you don’t have any way to calculate the effect you’re going to have. And so thank you for saying that.

I remember there was a group called Zena 21, which stood for women of the 21st Century, and this was a group that was cranking out a newsletter all throughout the war, you know, by candlelight. And the stories—some of those stories are in this book. And they would—have become—Charles, my husband, is the principal guest conductor of the Sarajevo Philharmonic and he’s the one who pulled together the orchestra right after the peace was signed for that New Year’s Eve concert, Beethoven’s Fifth, that was seen around the world. And so while he was doing that—a week of rehearsing—I was meeting with these women’s groups. And Ejup Ganic, who at that time was the vice-president of the federation, he wanted to have a lunch to honor me that I was there. And so I said, great, and I want to have this woman who is the head of Zena 21 to come to this lunch, and it was a very formal lunch.

Now, the night before at Zena 21 she had stood up and she said, ”Here’s what we must do. We must come together. We must stay together because we want security for our children.“ She was saying all the things I’ve been saying to you and she was so forceful. ”And if we don’t seize this moment, shame on us.“ So we’re sitting there at this fancy table, and I’m sitting opposite Vice President Ganic and I said—he’s asking me some—and he’s just doing small-talk stuff, and I said, ”Oh, Ejup, I want you to hear what Fatima said last night,“ and I looked at her. And she kind of sat back and I said, ”Fatima, tell Vice President Ganic about our meeting last night at the Zena 21 clubhouse.“ She said, ”Oh. We had a meeting.“ She was—she completely lost her words, she lost her voice, she lost her power. It was all gone. And that was a—one of those clarifying moments for me, because I didn’t mind saying it to him, for whatever reasons—maybe I didn’t have to worry about people who were members of my family or in some other ways there being repercussions so I could be her voice. And if I came in and could try to be her voice, that could strengthen her voice.

And I have found that I don’t go to countries where I don’t ask to meet with the head of state or whoever. I always go to the highest people I can—and I can get to and I say, ”Oh, have I been meeting with some spectacular women. Wow, are you lucky to have these women. Wow. If I were you, I would put them front and center.“ I’ll make it personal.

I was asked to come to Kigali and—it was in 2000, and I was asked to come and speak. The good old U.S. Embassy had a woman there who was organizing women from the Horn of Africa area, and they were calling it Women of Partners for Peace. They wanted me to come over and keynote, which I did. And Paul Kagame was there speaking. And so I said, well, OK, I should on my way to the airport stop and meet him, and so I did. And he said, “Ambassador Hunt”—that wasn’t a—you know, I was an ex-excellency at the time, Peter Galbraith said. But he said, ”Can you help me get some money for roads?“ And I said, ”I don’t think so.“ And he said, ”Well, why not?“ I said, ”Well, your per-capita income just went from $243 annually to $176. I mean, why would anyone see this as a great investment? You know, frankly from a distance, you all—I mean, it just looks like, you know, ’me warrior.’ It really looks like The Heart of Darkness here, and I don’t see why anyone would want to give you money for roads.“ And he said, ”Oh. Well, what do you think I should do?“ I said, ”You need to change the face of Rwanda, and you need to get the women that you met at that conference, and that I met, and you need to put them front and center.“ Got on the plane, flew back home, said, “Ho-hum, another conversation.” By the time the plane landed, he had appointed women to the negotiating team with Uganda. The Ugandans had to appoint women to talk to those women, they said.

He asked me to come back a year later to meet with the women he had appointed to ministries and embassies. There were 70. We did an all-day training session, and you all saw the New York Times on a Saturday a few—about a couple of months ago, a lead story above the fold, ”Rwanda reinvents itself with women,“ and they quoted this research that we had been doing tracking this. We’re now sending a staff person there for three years to document the kinds of bills that these women in the senate are—and the house are introducing now to change the face of Rwanda, so it can happen. You know, I only need a success like that once every 10 years to keep me going.

POWER: Well, I think we only need a tale of success like that once a week in order to keep going, so if you could just continue to generate these success stories, you’ll make life easier for the rest of us.

I think we’re out of time, but there’s an amazing—there’s a mantra in writing, which is that you should show and not tell; you know, that especially on issues like these when it’s sort of about morality or the human condition, that it’s really important that you don’t let your own voice sort of get in the way of the material. And you’re so extraordinary because you both show in terms of everything that you are as a woman and that you are then an inspiration to women and to men, but you tell by speaking truth to power in the way that you did to Paul Kagami, and knowing Paul Kagami, there is some power there. So the fact that you were able to convince him is an amazing testament to your powers of persuasion. And so we’re all as part of this community just incredibly lucky to have you and to have had you here today and congrats on the book.

HUNT: Thank you.

POWER: Which is available for purchase outside.

HUNT: Thank you. Thank you for coming. [Applause]

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