Round Up of My Writings about the Conflict Minerals Campaign

8/9/11
The New York Times oped:
How Congress Devastated Congo
IT’S a long way from the marble halls of Congress to the ailing mining towns of eastern Congo, but the residents of Nyabibwe and Nzibira know exactly what’s to blame for their economic woes.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/08/new-york-times-op-ed.html

8/10/11
A Response to Enough
The Huffington Post has published Enough's response to my New York Times op-ed. I think it's unconvincing, for several reasons
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/08/response-to-enough.html

8/28/11
What Should We Have Known? (First of several)
None of the people responding critically to my op-ed in the NYT letters section or the blogosphere denies its principal claim: that the law has immiserated a million or so highly vulnerable people. None of them, however, suggests this information has spurred them to reconsider their support for the law, slow their efforts to see it implemented, or make any effort to help the miners whose livelihood the law has all but eliminated. In fact, with one exception, none of them discuss the plight of the miners and their families at all: it's as if they don't exist
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/08/what-should-we-have-known-first-of.html

8/29/11
The Spurious Claims (Second of several)
Defenders of Dodd-Frank make several arguments on its behalf: that it has done a great deal of good and has the potential to do much more good; that it cuts the Gordian knot tying mineral profits to conflict (and therefore rape); that, contrary to my assertion, it does in fact enjoy the broad support of local communities and Congolese civil society organizations; and that miners have not been substantively harmed by the virtual elimination of the trade in minerals. I want to consider each of these arguments in turn, but before I do I want to deal with a few of the less serious objections to my op-ed.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/08/spurious-claims.html

9/16/11
27,000 Americans Call on Congolese to Boycott Money
With apologies to The Onion.
A swelling chorus of Americans is calling on Congolese to help bring an end to the painful cognitive dissonance they feel whenever they play Angry Birds on their iPhone. Led by lovable celebra-dog Houser, best known for rescuing refugees in the former Zaire, the Americans are asking Congolese miners to boycott all forms and specie of money until they sort out their feelings.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/09/27000-americans-call-on-congolese-to.html

9/18/11
Were Congolese Excluded? (Third of Several)
In my NYT op-ed I reported that knowledgeable Congolese felt excluded from the conflict minerals debate. It was, they told me, a dialog in which their voices went unheeded, dominated by Western advocacy groups confronting Western electronics companies. As a result, immensely important decisions about the lives of millions of Congolese were made without any input from them.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/09/were-congolese-excluded-from-conflict.html

10/18/11
Eighty-eight Less than Luther
I spoke last month at the New York City Bar Association* on the predictable but unintended consequences of DF 1502 on armed conflict and economic development in eastern DRC.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/10/eighty-eight-less-than-luther.html

10/18/11
Are Enough and Global Witness Violating the Very Guidelines They Promote?
A penpal sends me the following observation: Activist groups like Enough appear to be in violation of the OECD Guidelines they promote as part of the solution to the problem of "conflict minerals."
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/10/are-enough-and-global-witness-violating.html

11/18/11
My Comments at the World Bank
I spoke at a World Bank event last week (November 9) on the various initiatives underway to develop conflict-free mineral sourcing from the DRC.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/11/my-comments-at-world-bank.html

11/18/11
Yay Us! The Private Public Alliance for Conflict Minerals
There's nothing like watching diplomats at work to make me feel like Holden Caulfield. Last week's launch of the Private Public Alliance at the US Institute of Peace is a case in point.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/11/yay-us.html

12/13/11
RePublishing: Why We Need a Social Impact Assessment on Conflict Minerals
How many Congolese children are going to bed hungry tonight because of Dodd-Frank 1502?
This is not a rhetorical question. In fact, we have no meaningful data regarding the extent of the harm caused by DF-1502.
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/12/republishing-why-we-need-social-impact.html

12/25/11
Have Global Witness and Enough Brought Kwashiorkor to Central Africa?
Imagine that your stated goal is to advocate for patients suffering from a terrible, debilitating disease, and that a new drug comes along that promises to alleviate many of the worst symptoms of this disease.

Now imagine that reports start filtering in from clinics where patients are being treated experimentally with the drug. The reports, at best, are mixed. At worst, they suggest that the drug may be truly harmful.

What do you do?
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/12/are-global-witness-and-enough-causing.html


12/28/11
Bisie: A Reality Check
One of the most repeated criticisms of my NY Times piece about conflict minerals is that in my zeal to make the case against Dodd Frank I ignored the many positive developments that were happening on the ground as a result of it. Principal among those developments was said to be the de-militarization of Bisie, the largest tin mine in the Kivus
http://www.congoresources.org/2011/12/bisie-reality-check.html

2/9/12
Questions Enough and Global Witness Refuse to Answer
Global Witness and The Enough Project pride themselves on their hard-hitting, pull-no-punches research into malefactors around the world, from African warlords to corrupt Western bankers. Central to their ethos is a belief in openness and transparency--in the idea, as the cliche goes, that sunshine is the best disinfectant.
http://www.congoresources.org/2012/02/transparency-for-thee-but-not-for-me.html

3/26/12
Where Now with DF-1502 and the Conflict Minerals Campaign?
A conference on conflict minerals at the Center for Global Development last week revealed that the gulf between advocates and critics of DF-1502 remains as wide as ever. The speakers were Corinna Gilfillan of Global Witness, Mvemba Dizolele of Stanford, Laura Seay of Morehouse, and Enough's Sasha Lezhnev. To my mind, the most revealing statement of the day came from Corinna, who at one point plaintively asked the room, "Can anyone honestly say that having people with guns running around in mining communities is a good thing?"
http://www.congoresources.org/2012/03/where-now-with-df-1502-and.html#more

3/5/13
Why Companies Will Avoid DRC
Given just how incredibly complex and ever-shifting supply chains are, at both upstream (from the mine to the smelter) and downstream (from the smelter to the finished product) ends, it is all but impossible to envision companies ever buying minerals from eastern DRC until rigorous, stable, closed loop supply chains are established. And it is hard to imagine how those closed loop chains could ever incorporate more than a handful of mines, given current conditions.


3/15/13
Rosenblum's Cant and Stearns' Guild
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to Peter Rosenblum’s latest broadside, a letter he addressed to the SEC excoriating my New York Times’ op-ed. The note she attached to the link said, “What did you do, run over his dog?!”
http://www.congoresources.org/2013/03/rosenblums-cant-and-stearns-guild.html

5/22/13
My Testimony before the House Monetary and Trade Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee
Unfortunately, in their quest to fashion a narrative that would resonate with and therefore galvanize their largely Western audience, activists ignored the complexities of the local context and brushed aside Congolese experts who repeatedly warned them of the dangers the conflict minerals campaign posed to their people.In doing so, they developed policy prescriptions that damaged an already tenuous economy, entrenched the position of the warlords, and accomplished little by way of resolving the conflicts.
http://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-113-ba19-wstate-daronson-20130521.pdf

http://securingrights.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/lessons-learned-the-case-for-a-human-rights-impact-assessment/

Round Up of Congolese Voices on Conflict Minerals

Serge Mulumba, president of the mining cooperative CDMC, in a letter to the SEC:
"We can not give you exactly the number of lives that are lost each day following the cessation of artisanal mining in the DRC and yet even if a child died or who is hungry or do not go to school because his father digger lacked money, this is a tragedy, it is a sad news that should challenge our humanity."

Pastor Raymond, in an open letter posted on Fair Jewelry Auction:
"Please listen attentively to our cries of weeping and anguish. Our families and us will be doomed to death if you do not hear these cries of alarm. Do not wait to rescue us when we will be already in the grave. Act in time to avoid the humanitarian catastrophe that would arise from the consequences of your suspension to purchase our minerals."

Heads of three South Kivu mining associations, in a letter to the SEC, begging them to reconsider DF-1502
"What is the refuge of all the Congolese jobless, around 85 % of the population. Is it to make peace or to trouble the peace, when the life is stopped for a population? No job, no life. Please imagine the consequences…"

Pere Didier de Failly s.j., in a letter to the SEC:
"Now if the Dodd-Frank regulations are applied from April this year it will ruin all these efforts and condemn hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern DRC to keep under the terror of these maffiosi barons, instead of improving the whole situation. Even in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, thousands of people will be badly affected."

Open letter to President Barack Obama and SEC Chair Mary Schapiro from 50 religious, civil society and business leaders in South Kivu Province, DRC, July 5, 2011:

In this environment, artisanal mining has emerged as one of our only economic lifelines, and has directly and indirectly provided milions of jobs. The abrupt cessation of this trade has had devastating impacts on our people:

1. Millions of our artisanal miners have suddenly h.d their livelihood cut from under them. (Many of them continue to mine, finding small-scale buyers who are either buying on speculation or smuggling abroad, but at less than a half of what they making before.) They find it increasingly difficult to pay school, health, or maternity fees; some even report having diffculty providing food for their families.

2. Mining enclaves have emerged over the past decade in places so remote that only planes can access them. The world's sudden refusal to buy these minerals means the planes no longer service these communities; with nothing to trade, they are unable to provide themselves with such basic necessities as salt, sugar, oil, cloths, soap and so on.
3. Because artisinal mining was one of our only engines of economic growth, secondary econòmic impacts are being felt throughout the province. Even in our large tòwns, economic activity has diminished; construction slowed; trade in everyhing fallen. People with very little to begin with are now doing with less.

Dominic Johnson, Senior Analyst
NO KIVU, NO CONFLICT? The misguided struggle against “conflict minerals” in the DRC 
The Pole Institute, April 2013

Thus, a pattern is emerging in which Kivu's mining sector is being asphyxiated in the name of reform. Before 2010, Kivu's mineral traders had willingly participated in moves to strengthen formal and legal channels and to safeguard Kivu livelihoods by creating “conflict-free” production and trading chains within Eastern Congo. The mining ban killed this off, and today the focus has moved to Katanga and Maniema, increasingly apparently favouring a nexus of mining firms closely linked to the power-holders in Kinshasa. Because they do not finance armed groups, these firms are seen as “conflict‐free,” but no criteria exists to judge the wider political ramifications of their activities, their benefits for local development and the possible exacerbation of local conflict caused by favouring certain firms in collusion with international partners to the detriment of others. 

9/11/15
Kivu Times interview with Soraya Aziz Souleymane, human rights activist, and deputy director of the Carter Center in the DRC:

What do you think that the appearance of theories of ore blood and certification process brought more into local economies in the mining areas? Do you think for example that the Dodd-Frank Act has led to the restoration of the social climate in the mining areas of the DRC?That's a good question since many communities depend on natural resources. Some international initiatives have decried the problem of conflict minerals. This led the US government to adopt the Dodd-Frank Act which requires all US companies trace their minerals. The Congolese Government has also conducted the suspension of mining activities in some squares. However this has had the effect of further impoverish communities that depend mainly from the exploitation of these resources and has resulted in the creation of major clandestine networks that have propelled him to the rank of Rwanda leading producer of Coltan. For me it must apply the solutions I mentioned earlier, namely the creation of alternative economic activities for communities to survive without these mining revenues. Hail why the recent regulation of the European Union that took this aspect of the local economy into consideration.  [Google translated from French] 

11/17/15
Testimony of Evode Imena, Minister of State in charge of Mining, Ministry of Natural Resources, Government of the Republic of Rwanda
Before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, Monetary Policy and
Trade Subcommittee
“Dodd-Frank Five Years Later: What Have We Learned from Conflict
Minerals Reporting?”

Despite all these efforts and the costly investments in due diligence, we have noted since 2013 a negative international market bias against Rwandan minerals, and in particular against tungsten, as Dodd-Frank has been fully implemented. This situation worsened in 2014, when companies that process tungsten ore stopped buying from all Central African countries – despite the fact that Rwanda was fully implementing both OECD due diligence recommendations related to conflict minerals and the ITRI minerals traceability mechanism.
The region is now suffering from an “Africa-free” and not a “conflict-free” minerals situation. Section 1502 has caused a de-facto boycott by companies in the US and much of Europe on our most valuable resources. The result is a very limited customer base, which further drives down mineral prices because these customers know they have no competition for our resources.
The situation has largely impacted the livelihood of thousands of miners and their families, as the costs for due diligence are passed down from mineral exporters to mining companies, and then on to mine workers. Based on our calculation, the revenues for mining companies and wages for mine workers have decreased by 3 to 6 percent in the last year. Coupled with price fluctuation,
the situation has become very difficult to miners and to an industry with tight profit margins. 

Past Failures in Congo May yet Haunt Susan Rice

Rice in southern Sudan (Boris Grdanoski/AP Photo)

Criticisms of Susan Rice's dismal record on Africa continue to pour in, as the human rights and Africanist communities react to the prospect of her being named the next secretary of state. I doubt that the criticism will make much difference, but I must say it's mildly gratifying. Some of us were more or less radicalized by 1996-97. Perhaps if she is nominated some enterprising senator will grill her at the confirmation hearing about what the US knew and did during the first Congo war.

Here are a few of the more mainstream articles condemning her record:

Jason Stearns at Foreign Policy:
Earlier in 1996, Rwandan troops had carried out vicious revenge massacres against civilian Hutu refugees who fled into the Congolese jungles, killing thousands, according to a detailed U.N. investigation andreports in the U.S. press at the time. But the United States, along with other governments, focused its opprobrium on Kabila, withholding aid to Congo and demanding an investigation. There was no official sanction of Rwanda. During this period, Susan Rice was first senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council and then assistant secretary of state for Africa. When a U.N. investigation into these massacres was concluded in 2010, Susan Rice tried to block its publication. According to a senior official involved in the report, "she didn't see how opening up old wounds would help."

Howard French at The Atlantic:
Rice's public response to the genocide was to issue a number of powerfully worded statements with the air of mea culpa about them. They have amounted to a paraphrasing and elaboration on the famous post-Holocaust oath of "Never again."
Put to the hard test of African realities, however, this pledge quickly shrunk and withered into something far more narrow and selective. Indeed, it failed its first test, in Congo, right next door to Rwanda. Since Rice's famous expressions of contrition began, more than five times as many people have died in a series of wars in Congo than were killed in the Rwandan genocide....
What this leaves us with, in effect, is a policy stripped of any real moral force. Never again, in effect, has come to mean never let down Rwanda's post-genocide regime and its leader, Paul Kagame.

Michael Hirsh at the National Journal:
But there are other issues with Rice’s record, both as U.N. ambassador and earlier as a senior Clinton administration official, that are all but certain to come out at any confirmation hearing, many of them concerning her performance in Africa. Critics say that since her failure to advocate an intervention in the terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994 — Bill Clinton later said his administration's unwillingness to act was the worst mistake of his presidency — she has conducted a dubious and naïve policy of looking the other way at allies who commit atrocities, reflecting to some degree the stark and emotionless realpolitik sometimes associated with Obama, who is traveling this week to another formerly isolated dictatorship: Burma.

Militarization of US Africa Policy Continues Apace

Around election time, several knowledgeable Africanists wrote pieces lamenting Obama's disappointingly thin first-term record on Africa. (This article by the Center for Global Development's Todd Moss is an excellent representative of the genre. For more, follow the links here.)  Unlike a lot of observers, I myself wasn't terribly surprised that Obama hadn't done more for the continent. I never expected him to. If there's one thing he couldn't have afforded, politically, it was expending resources and political capital on what would have been billed, inevitably, as a Kenyan, Muslim, anti-colonial, America-neglecting agenda.

But it's not quite correct to say that Obama hasn't pursued any major new initiatives toward Africa. He has--just not on the trade, diplomatic, or humanitarian fronts. On the military front, Obama's  administration has gone gangbusters. Indeed, the faster the US declines as a major political and commercial player in Africa, the more intent it seems on turning the place into a garrison continent, secured and patrolled by elements of America's national security apparatus.

Three news stories in the past couple of days reinforce this impression. Yesterday's New York Times reported on AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham's recent assessment of al Qaeda-affiliated extremist groups in Mali, which it termed "detailed and sobering"--national security speak for "something we need to spend lots of money on." The Washington Post  featured a long article about how the Pentagon is establishing a new spy network  to rival the CIA in size and scope, focused inter alia on the Middle east and Africa.  And today's Defense News, which also summarizes Ham's assessment, informs us that AFRICOM has at last acquired its own  Commander's in-extremis force, more commonly known as a special operations company. (For earlier reporting on US militarization of the continent, see here and here and here and here and here and here.)

During the Cold War, US foreign policymakers seemed unable to distinguish between genuine ideological opponents and groups that were merely nationalist, anti-colonial, or pro-social justice. Everything was seen through the lens of a globalized, Manichean struggle: A sparrow couldn't fall in Managua but that it was the sinister work of the Soviets.  Today's policymakers seems equally unable to understand how America's increasingly numerous and widespread interventions abroad fuel rather than diminish antagonism toward the US. (In my more cynical moments, I wonder if that isn't the point: after all, the more we treat others as potential enemies, the more real enemies we'll make, and more real enemies we have, the more money flows into the military's budget.) But how wise can it be, really, for the US to be expending vast new sums militarizing Africa when China, our geo-political rival in the region, is doing stuff like this or this? Not to get Maureen Dowd cute here, but do we want to be trying--and failing--to transform the continent into a military satellite, or do we want to be building it new communications satellites?

Quote of the Day

Speaking of North Africa and the Sahel region, Ham said there is a “growing linkage, a growing network and collaboration and synchronization among the various violent extremist organizations... which I think poses the greatest threat to regional stability, more broadly across Africa, certainly into Europe, and to the United States."
     --General Carter Ham, Commander, US AFRICOM, at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute on December 3, 2012.

Photogenic Goma

The war in eastern Congo may not be attracting the consideration it deserves from the media and the upper echelon of the international diplomatic community, but that doesn't mean no attention is being paid. In addition to the dozen or so journalists who are posting regularly from the Kivus, several photographers are documenting the conflicts there. Here are a few recently published photos that struck me.

1) This photo by Dominic Narh of Magnum of a young man mourning the death of his father seems to me to strike the right balance in depicting suffering without being overly intrusive. The man's face is largely hidden, protecting his dignity, even as his drawn-in body evokes the universal language of grief. Note the contrast between the bright red of his sweater and the dark shabby clothes of the people passing on the crumbling cement veranda behind him. The fact that some of the pedestrians are half-turned toward him, while others are simply walking past, provides a useful footnote to usual Auden/Breughel observation. But to me what gives this photo its precise measure of rightness is the caption, which provides the name and occasion for the man's grief, lifting it from the universal to the particular.

Mujinga Lokuli Grace (21) mourns after finding the body of his father who was a DRC
government military doctor who was killed the day before as rebels took the city of Goma.
 Dominic Narh. Magnum Photos. 11/18/12

2) The things they left behind. The Congolese army melted into the civilian population as Goma fell, abandoning their uniforms, weapons, and anything else that might give them away to the Rwandans. I'm wondering if these army boots ever had laces, or if the soldier who owned them took the laces for repurposing on civilian shoes. Yes, it's a little Van Gogh-y, but still.

Items left behind by soldiers who fled. Photos taken in the
neighborhoods of Volcans and Mabanga.
Alain Wandimoyi. France 24. 11/22/12

3) This photo by Phil Moore of AFP of Monusco blue helmets manning a protective barrier near Goma appears at first glance to show two soldiers doing their job under dangerous conditions. But something about their relaxed, almost casual demeanor provides a sardonic comment on Monusco's impotence in eastern Congo. By extension, it constitutes a sharp criticism of the international community's continuing indifference to the plight of eastern Congolese.

Uruguyan United Nations peacekeepers man a defensive position on the outskirts
of Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Phil Moore. AFP/Getty. 11/20/12

Lifted from the Archives

March 9, 2009

Somewhere The Onion (a satirical news magazine) has a headline that says something like, "Area Asshole Gets his own Blog."

And sometimes, I feel like I'm that asshole. If only I weren't so pessimistic about the latest developments in the Great Lakes! If only I weren't so skeptical of the region's leaders, and believed they actually had their own people's best interests at heart! If only I felt that the new administration was really going to make a difference! If only it weren't staffed by so many former Clintonites! If only I didn't feel the Clintonites had made such a hash of it the first time around! If only I believed in the power of Hollywood stars to change the calculus of nation states! If only I believed that a few, inexpensive measures would make all the difference! 

Instead, I'm always carping about this or that, worrying about the-other-thing, questioning motives, remembering some awkward bit of history, and generally sulking around like the skunk at the picnic. 

So it's nice, every once in a while, to remember I'm not alone.* Howard French, former NYT bureau chief in Africa, chronicled the rise of Kabila and the disastrous Clinton policy of those years. He has an editorial in the Huffington Post about what Obama may mean for Africa, and like me, he retains a bad taste in his mouth from the last Democratic administration:

There is a powerful argument to be made that this disaster [the wars in the Congo], along with the Rwandan genocide that preceded it, is Bill Clinton's most important foreign policy legacy, and an Obama policy toward Africa run by many of the same people and carrying forward Clinton era thinking would be a sign of disdain for the continent and its problems.
The Congo's apocalyptic dissolution began in earnest when Washington gave Rwanda the green light to invade the country, setting off a free for all that sucked in many of the Congo's neighbors.

*And of course, I'm not. While the policy debate in Washington is being led by cheerleaders, the real scholars of the region--and you know who you are--are much less doe-eyed, much more weighed down by the deep intractability of the problems, and much less hopeful about Obama's capacity or political will to bring change to the region.

An Eccentric Little History of Congo

Adam Curtis of the BBC has a strange, entertaining little history of the Congo's early years of independence. He touches on Che Guevara, Mobutu, Mike Hoare, the Sapeurs, and Diane Fossey, and includes several short video clips that I've never seen before. Did you know that Louis Leackey, Fossey's mentor, had an affair with her and tried desperately to convince her to abandon the gorillas to be with him?

My Two Cents

Hope and Change

I'm voting tomorrow for the same guy I voted for four years ago, but with little of the hope and yes--joy--I felt back then. Obama has been a crushing disappointment to me. On Africa, my single issue topic, he has not simply been absent, as several commentators have argued. He has been worse. He has inaugurated a host of militaristic policies in Africa driven by our millenarian wars on drugs and terror. He has welcomed the same tyrannical and bloody kleptocrats to the White House as his predecessors. And while he talked a good game early on about the importance of building civil society and good institutions, he has done nothing to follow up on those words. Nothing.

On the wider stage, he has enshrined a state of more or less constant war against Eastasia--I mean the Muslim world--that normalizes atrocities against the darker-skinned abroad and a permanent abridgment of their our civil liberties at home. He has barely uttered the words "global warming," though he must know that posterity is likely to judge him more harshly for that than any number of sins of commission. On the domestic front he has rescued capitalism for the capitalists (Roosevelt famously rescued it from the capitalists), but done nothing to reverse--or even slow--the entrenchment of our emerging financier-based plutocracy. Dodd-Frank's only real effect will be to enrich a new generation of Wall Street lawyers. He has imprisoned and deported more undocumented people than all previous presidents combined. He has taken every opportunity to invigorate rather than temper the war on drugs. He has pursued quasi-market educational policies based on the lamentably well-philanthrophized notion that testing well is dispositive for learning. He has ignored labor.

His one significant accomplishment is health care: it is impossible to gainsay that, if only because nearly every president since WW II has tried and failed to institute some sort of universal coverage. That it was the worst of the options, that it does little to bend the cost curve, that it came at the cost of bribing off virtually every stakeholder except the sick and those who may someday become sick: Well, perhaps this was the price that needed paying. Or perhaps not: the other options were never tried. In any case, that one achievement isn't nearly enough to make up for him having squandered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that his election represented. He came in facing the gravest set of problems any president has confronted since Roosevelt; in his biography and rhetoric Obama promised as soaring a set of responses. The achievements he has delivered have been at best Clintonian in their scale and imagination.

But the other guy's worse. And I live in Virginia, where votes count.

Quote of the Day

"The countries in the Great Lakes including Rwanda, Uganda, DRC, Kenya and others have shown a common interest in ending the crisis in the eastern parts of DRC...Although the situation involves complex issues like ethnic identity, transit and DRC's ability, it has been illustrated that no one is willing to support the negative forces operating in Congo and the country's sovereignty will be supported at all times."

                         --US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman