45. Dr Comfort Ero: Resolving deadly conflicts & reforming the UN

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1:29Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're very, very lucky to have with us today, Dr. Comfort Eero. And Dr. Eero is the head of the International Crisis Group. And we talk a lot in the podcast about the challenges of the liberal global order, the way in which from the 90s, we had an age of optimism to an age now where things seem to be disintegrating around the world. And Comfort's work and the work of Crisis Group is right at the very heart of this. This was an organization founded in the mid-1990s, founded because of the catastrophes in the Balkans and Yugoslavia, dedicated around the world to producing incredibly detailed, high-quality research in conflict zones.

2:13If you wanted to know a few years ago about exactly what was happening with tribal groups in the northeast of South Sudan, you would go to the crisis group. If you wanted to know exactly what was happening in East Timor in the late 90s, you would go to the crisis group. If you wanted to understand the Balkans, you'd go to the crisis group. And Comfort is the president, so she's the boss, but she's also been part of the creation of this organization. She was a relatively early employee. She led on their programs in West Africa out of Sierra Leone. She then worked for the United Nations Mission in Liberia.

2:45She's somebody with a deep academic training. So she was trained in the UK. She's British, but her parents were brought up in Nigeria. and she is somebody who combines, I think, a real dedication to influencing policy, shaping policy, making the world a safer place with a commitment to ground truth. So comfort, welcome. Let's start with where we are today, the day on which we're speaking and how you would describe the world today, literally today, compared to how it was when you left university and the world that you saw in the 90s. It hasn't panned out in the way that it was described to me. I left school when I was told that I was the generation of the future, the era after the end of the Cold War, where key institutions and one that I aspire to work at, the United Nations, the ideal of we the people and dealing with peacekeeping, peacemaking, that these institutions were ripe to respond to conflicts.

3:48that were ripe to respond to peace building. And also that these were institutions that were entrusted and there was trust at the centre of them. I think today I look at a world that is going in the wrong direction. I have struggled with the numbers that we're seeing since the end of the Cold War. We've never seen figures like this except for the Rwandan genocide. Last year, set aside Ukraine was the worst year in terms of human suffering and deaths. And we can name Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan, which you're familiar with. and this year I think it's gone further in the wrong direction because just astonishing figures around children for example the most innocent of people now being caught in the crossfires of great power politics and in revenge and in pain and the idea that this is what we're dealing with in the 21st century when my generation was told that we would be the generation that would turn things around.

4:57There's a sense of failure, to be frank, a sense of hopelessness, a sense where the horizon looks bleak and dark, and the sense in which you don't know where to go. But I cling on to hope as well, which is why I do what I do. Tell us a little bit about your own life and your own childhood, your life before you were, I guess, 20. A little bit about your parents' inferences on your life, where you lived, how that helped to form you? Look, my parents are in a sense your classical immigrant parent. They found themselves here. They came here from Nigeria to study. My father, electrical engineering.

5:39My mother, initially teaching and nursing and specialised in paediatric ophthalmology. One of the most famous high hospitals, Moorfield's Eye Hospital. I grew up on the children's ward of Moorfield's Eye hospital and I saw my very first eye so to speak at the age of about six or seven and you know our mother insteeped in us the value of our eyes and in fact my mother used to tell me off as every good Nigerian mother does with her eyes you know somebody would say but I never saw your mother talk I guess she did she used her eyes and I knew when she was calling me stupid I knew when she was telling me behave yourself I knew when she was saying you're doing okay she was minimal with her words but her eyes spoke volume as well they both believed um in education my my father was an educationalist he was very clear my mother used to say oh let's take the children on holiday my father would like i'm on holiday i'm in the uk i'm not at home in in nigeria but my myself my two siblings it was made very clear to us that there's one thing that can't be taken away from you with your education and for me particularly as the only girl middle child um my parents were pretty clear.

6:45And my father did chart the classical male father career that he thought I would take. I was going to do medicine. And then I took a turn and guess what made me take a turn? It was the 1989, sort of the beginnings of the end of Thatcherism. And I was asked if I wanted to come out and get involved in election campaigning and all those kind of things. So very quickly started doing all those things. You campaigned for labor? i'm not going to reveal mine i'm getting the vibe i'm getting the vibe but nonetheless i got caught up very few people say i got to 1989 the end of thatcherism decided to campaign and i was campaigning for thatcher my father had some key that my father had lots of books because my father was an educationist he always bought our school books and he would take our list of books to read and he'll just literally go and buy all the ones but there was one thing he consistently bought which is books of politically and or historically significant women so i grew up with one book in the living room apart from goldemir and and gandhi i grew up with thatcher's book that doesn't say anything about my father's political lenience but it said a lot about how he viewed women and he was very clear to me about about your independence as a woman your independence as a woman was bound by your education that you get educated nothing can be taken away from you because you chart your own course.

8:11And so I didn't do medicine. My dad didn't understand it. And he said, well, what else are you going to do? The only other profession he could possibly conceive of was the law. So in the midst of doing my first degree, he registered me and I still wasn't interested. He still didn't get it. And then he said, well, you do your master's. And I did it in international relations. And he still wasn't figuring it out. And I was still registered to do law. I deferred it several times. but my father seemed to have a way with the law society that maintained that and then well he said well you're going to be a lecturer then because what else could you be you know if you weren't going to do medicine if you weren't going to do law then you'd be a lecturer which was what my father was and then he said well and to be a lecturer you have to get a PhD and you know I grumbled and everything and I had a very good friend who said to me you're lucky because your parents are prepared to invest in you and invest in you getting educated take it grab it while they're still alive and get educated and do whatever you want after because it's not many children who are blessed with parents who care about their education now unfortunately my father wasn't alive to see me get the phd but my mother was and when i got a call a year after i was i got graduated somebody called the house and asked to speak to dr era and i said unfortunately he's passed away and they said oh we'd like to speak to his daughter and i was like oh yes that's me that's me i'm the daughter yeah listen tell me about tell me about your name oh comfort i don't think i don't i don't think i've i mean i've signed many many thousands of books in my life as has rory and i love it when i find something they say can you sign it to such and such because oh i've never heard that name before but i can honestly say to you i've never heard that name before and on that note expect a signed copy at my door of your book it'll be there tomorrow It's my maternal, my mother's mother's name, Comfort.

10:01And, you know, as all children from those colonial past, you know, they do land with an English name at one point. My English name is Comfort. And I have a host of other names that are non-English. What are your other names? Comfort, Ekwase, which is the Bini side, Edo state of my father. And Abusola, which is the Yoruba side of my mother. My full name is Ayaru, which is my father's name. And the same goes on with my brothers as well. I mean, the other tradition is that your grandparents and the most significant people in your family also name you as well. Am I right that you went back to Nigeria during your childhood?

10:44What was your sense coming from Britain to Nigeria? What struck you as a child about what you loved about Nigeria and what you missed about Britain? So I could only answer that on hindsight because I was a child. I mean, I was a baby when I went to Nigeria. I mean, my parents did what all good Nigerian parents did at that time, which is to take their children back, get them steeped in their heritage, the Nigerianness. And in fact, I was convinced that my mother was the one in Nigeria, which was her eldest sister. And I used to call her mummy all the time. And I had no idea that this wasn't my, you know, and then she had lots of sisters.

11:16Just to explain that, so your parents remained in Britain and you were sent back age two or something to be with their family, their extended family in Nigeria, until you were what age? I came back at the time of infants, the last year of infants. Do we still call it infants? Pre-primary school, I guess. My older brother came back in time to go to primary school and I was brought up on my mum's side by her sister and her siblings. And we lived in my uncle, my mum's elder sister's husband, was in University of Lagos. So I grew up on the campus, Lagos campus, and my aunt was working for the African American Institute.

11:52She was also a museum curator. And in fact, she influenced, I mean, it's hard to tell my story and the decisions I took without talking about my aunt in Nigeria because she influenced it. And so even though you came back to Britain when you were six, you stayed very close to your aunt? I stay close to all of them, particularly on my mother's side. So I call my aunt in Nigeria, Mommy Kampos. And we tend to call people by their location. So my cousins will call her Mama Keja because the Keja is one of the government areas, boroughs, if you like, in Lagos. So but because I grew up on campus, I grew up on the Lagos campus, I called her and her husband, mummy and daddy campus and then my mum's elder brother we would go and hang out and play with them and their children um in Ibadan's and but they came from Canada so I would call them mummy and daddy Canada because that's how I identified with them and then I arrived in London I was told we were coming back to London and I saw my parents as mummy and daddy London and I was told these are your parents I was like oh that's who are these people so I felt blessed I felt that I had several parents in my life.

13:04Comfort. Just tell our listeners a little bit about what the crisis group is. Rory gave some of the kind of key things that you look at. But for example, we talk a lot on the podcast about what's going on in the United States. Looking at the sort of scale of political polarization there, it's not impossible to imagine all sorts of conflict that we wouldn't see as a conflict maybe in that we think about some of the issues in the Balkans or South Sudan and so forth. But is that a potential crisis that you would look at and seek to try to prevent? Yes. And in fact, in our nearly 30 years of history, Alistair, a decision was taken in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident for crisis group to formally work on the United States as a conflict actor.

13:50Now, let me step back a bit. A decision was taken soon after Trump's coming in power that we needed to look at the United States in terms of do no harm, in terms of its use of force and within the context of the war and terror and never ending conflicts. And so the trustees sort of instructed us, so to speak, to start looking at the US overseas and its foreign policy. We took a tilt in 2020 to look at the United States' domestic politics and reverberations, because what did we see? We saw language that we would see in other conflict zones. So looking at sort of civilians who are protesting on the street, Trump was using language of battlefields, of enemies of the states.

14:40And while these were citizens protesting in the name of justice, inequality. And we have an indicator, Alistair, for example, when we're looking for countries that are going to go through election crisis, where we think that the elections will be usurped, will be challenged, where we think that various actors will seek to delegitimize the vote. we we use this kind of indicators to look at other countries and our boss my boss at the time rob marley asked curiously if you try to overlay this within the united states what would the scorecard look like and everything turned red and in fact the january the 6th incident alistair that everybody's familiar with was sadly a vindication of what we had forecasted that there would be a run on the country that there would be a challenge to the elections and that there would be some kind of attempt to delegitimize that as well.

15:36So that's why we are where we are. So coming back then to where we are today, what happened between the 90s and now? You're part of a crisis group which was set up by these sort of heroes of ending war, people like Richard Holbrook and Mark Mallett-Brown and all these figures who were very much part of a vision of a UN liberal global order. What happened to it? What happened to the idea that we still had in the early 2000s that the problem was the world wasn't intervening enough, that we turned our back on Rwanda, that we had a responsibility to protect, that was going to be this global order that was going to make the world ever more peaceful and prosperous?

16:13Where did it go wrong? This is a good question, Rory, and I've just come back from our board meeting in Oslo. And this was a central theme that today we are, what we are witnessing is a crisis in peacemaking. And also at the same time that we see a new generation of conflicts emerging. And basically, I think what we found is that particularly after the Arab Spring, I mean, let's backtrack a little bit. I mean, I think one thing is clear to me, the era of negotiated settlements, finding peace deals, that there are only two that we can cite in recent times, Colombia in 2016, the ending of the FARC, and then 2014 Mindanao in the Philippines.

16:53Those are the only two that we can mention. Can I, speaking to you from Dublin, can I put in a pitch for Northern Ireland? I was going to come to that because I'm walking backwards. And I think that the only other one in my time that I think holds credibly, and I think when you look at it within the guise of crisis group, and we never worked on Northern Ireland, which was interesting, Alistair, that for me was sort of a classic example of contemporary post-Cold War. And it gave people a great sense of optimism. It gave people a great sense of optimism. Many people made careers. They said, you know, I've brought peace in all nine and now I'm going to go around the world and create peace in 30 other places.

17:29Yeah, there was that. But soon after the Irish peace agreement, then things started to fall apart. And it was very first tested in Syria when suddenly you saw that the principles of peacemaking, peacekeeping were no longer holding truth. Leaders said that in the name of responsibility to protect all those key doctrines and suddenly they were fritted away. And I think the very first damage was in response to 9-11. And fast forward, you know, people are invoking 9-11 again in terms of Israel-Palestine. So I think that was the first death of that liberal democracy. Intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq?

18:01The way it went, it went wrong. Notions of state building, notions that you can't impose peace, that you can't use the military or strong arm the military to fix the problem. The notion that you can go in and bomb a country, even despite the atrocities of that country. The notions that the The United States and its notion of democracy could easily be transported, I think, died a death in Iraq and Afghanistan, which you know well, Rory. If everything I was saying is wrong, then we wouldn't be where we are today, which is 20 years wiped out and the return to Taliban. Also, the notion of democracy and human rights, the fallacy of that, particularly in Africa as well.

18:41and now suddenly we see that all those ideas suddenly looked very freeball come 2010 in the midst of the Arab Spring as well. I mean for our general listeners because we you know we have many many people in many different countries around the world with different levels of knowledge could you give us a sense of half a dozen conflicts that maybe people aren't focused on happening at the moment in the world that you think people should focus on more? You know when I became interim vice president in 2021, I was told, welcome to your new job, Myanmar, the coup. Myanmar was at the top of the headline in February 2021.

19:15It dominated the first three years of my transition and it slipped down the radar. That's the other one. Tell us what's happening in Myanmar now. I think you've got a situation where the coup leaders are entrenched, suppressing resistance, trying to push ahead with elections. But you've got leaders who are using the most brutal tactics to sideline, to curtail, to oppress people. And you're seeing heavy human trafficking in the region, first heavy refugee flows. And you remember, Rory Alistair, we had the Rohingya crisis as well, and you had flows of refugees going into the border regions of Bangladesh.

19:51And today you've got a country where it has been able systematically to ignore the international community. It's resistant to the pressure of sanctions, resistant to ideas of intervention. And it's been able to maintain its power, partly because the international community has decided that it has not, sees no options. It's not prepared to go into sort of loggerheads with China. And it's also largely because we are talking at a time of great power politics. I think one of the factors that has undermined the ability to deal with crises like Myanmar is because of the US-China tension. Let's just very quickly maybe give us examples of four or five other conflicts that continue and then maybe we'll get into this question.

20:36Haiti is another one. I think so you were talking about an era sort of post the Cold War. It's funny how certain crises come back onto the agenda. So Haiti sort of back on our agendas about three or four times in the span of 30 years. You've got Yemen also in the Middle East region. Sudan, I've heard you and I have to give credit to your podcast for continuously bringing in places like Sudan and the Sahel, which should be a strategic importance in a way to the West, onto the agenda. The DRC, one of the longest running intractable conflicts on the continent. And then, you know, I mentioned other unknown ones like the Central Africa Republic as well.

21:16And then, you know, we've got, well, it's not a small one. I think it's quite a big one. The South China Seas and Taiwan. I wouldn't put that as an off the radar conflict. I'd call it quite significant. Kamph, you said some things there about several of the governments you just mentioned and several of the regimes, for example, Myanmar. And you were very, very clear and very, very forthright and very critical. What are your relations like with governments where you're going in and you're trying to make an analysis? And do you work at having good relations or do you just think that your job is to speak truth to power and to help people prepare whatever the government is?

21:53It's both those things. And I think that is Crisis Group's sort of unique power. We're not a name and shame organisation, Alistair. We spend our time, as you suggest, providing sort of rigorous field-based analysis. So we don't parachute in. We're in those countries. Our analysts are either working in those countries, long historical presence in those countries. They also work in the regions as well. Our job is not to, as I said, name and shame, but to find a pathway to peace. It's about getting stuck in the politics, the grey area. So we don't see a black and white. We're trying to seek a compromise.

22:33We're trying to seek solutions that requires us to engage, to understand the dilemmas of the actors involved. My very first job is to build trust with even the most problematic actors, even actors who've got blood in their hands, even actors that have committed the most atrocious crime. My job is to find or to shape the politics of peace. And that requires me to engage with you. So I spend my time understanding, bringing your perspective into my analysis. In the end, I'm going to come up with policy options. And those are policy options that you may not like, but they're nonetheless how we understand a way out of the crisis.

23:12One of the things you said in talking about why we have been unable to address Myanmar is great power competition. Tell us about the way in which the world has changed and why great power competition matters as a way of explaining conflict today. I should say it's always been there. It eves and flows. It can exacerbate certain conflicts. And, you know, there's certain conflicts that become proxy to great power politics. I mean, it was great power politics that brought us into two world wars. So I don't want to make it sound as though it's new. I think what is new is we're no longer living in an era of unipower where there's one dominant power, the US.

23:46You know, we're no longer living in that bipolar US-Russia. It is the era also of Asian geopolitics, of US-China competition. And it coincides with a period where institutions that we would normally rely on, either the United Nations or the European Union or other regional bodies are brittle, lack in legitimacy, are often not seen as able to respond to those crises because they are caught up in that geopolitical crisis as well. Talk about the UN. You, I believe, began working for the UN when you were very young. It's one of your first jobs. Well, do you mean the association or do you mean the UN itself?

24:23The association. and I say it proudly that I was probably well self-declared longest intern I believe I was the longest intern I mean if there was a Guinness book of records on internship I probably would get it I think I don't I don't know but at least in my world. And your internship started in? 93 I was in between finishing my master's and then getting ready or trying to figure out whether I was going to do a PhD or go to law school. So there you are it's 1993 and you're starting to intern for the United Nations Association. What has happened to the UN during this period? I mean, 93 to 2023 is quite a neat period to look at, 30-year period.

25:01What's happened in 30 years? I mean, it's what we struggle with every single day. I think what we've watched is that in the theatres of wars, civil wars, interstate conflict, war and terror, in the midst of all that, and I would even say that the first salvo of the crisis that faced the UN was in Srebrenica, where you, Alistair, Rory would know, and Rwanda was the other beginning of the death knell. So even in that glorious era that everybody talks about, there were already problems with peacekeeping and question marks about the UN's own ability to peacekeep. But then suddenly in the 2000s, we saw a resurgence of the United Nations going into places where I first started, in Sierra Leone, in Liberia.

25:44And one of my former bosses, who also was president at Crisis Group, Jean-Marie Guéheno, came up with this innovation of partnerships where the regional bodies would rehat in the form, for example, of the West Africa body and work in partnership with the UN. And there was a moment in which the region and the international body would work in concert to help rebuild and bring peace back. So you would, for example, get peacekeeping troops from African countries, part of African regional groups working alongside the UN? Yeah, working and they called it rehatting. So, for example, despite, and I think, concerns about the heavy handedness, for example, of Nigerian military or other regional bodies, countries, Ivory Coast, despite the controversies of their intervention in Sierra Leone or Liberia, the UN saw them as useful tools because it was Africa in the lead.

26:33And this was also the era of African solutions for African problems. I leave aside what I think about that. All is to say is that there was a period of a sense in which the UN was on the right path. It started to go in the wrong direction in the midst of 9-11. And it further took a knockback because all the triumphalism of that period was started to sort of die within the context of the Arab Spring. And then we get to Libya, when doctrines, peacekeeping, responsibility to protect, all those things that we championed were seen, foreseen for what they were. They were misused. There was double standards.

27:09There was hypocrisy. We talk about those things today, but they're already there, Rory, in 2010. They're already there, exposed. A spotlight was shone on them in the midst of Libya, in the midst of Ivory Coast, and in the midst of the Democratic Republic. We already saw that the system was brittle, was fragile, and was being called into question then. I think lots of people sort of see the United Nations almost like a body that sits above global politics, when in fact all the United Nations is is a collection of all the countries of the world, with all the tensions and divisions that exist there.

27:40Do you think that the system, the basic foundation of the United Nations with this permanent five, which seems a bit odd given where real power lies around the world today, but you've got that permanent five fundamentally divided, US, UK, France most of the time, and then Russia and China in a very, very different place. Yeah, expose your nationality there. Sorry about that. But you know what I'm saying. And all with this power of veto. then all these other organizations that in groups so g you mentioned g7 there's the g20 there's the bricks rory and i talked on the podcast recently about the 10th anniversary of the belton road initiative which seemed to me was being used almost to form a different kind of global powerful alliance around china is the united nations as a kind of legitimate accepted form of global authority do you think it's gone no and it's not dead and in fact i and i made that very clear when I gave my sort of acceptance speech at the United Nations.

28:36If your entry point is the Security Council, then yes, you'll be forgiven for questioning its relevance going forward. But the UN is more than the Security Council. I think there are important agencies that are doing vital work as we speak today. They're at the front line, for example, in trying to get trucks into Gaza. Then you've got important agencies that are doing work on climate change, doing work on environmental issues. You know, you've got other bodies that are doing sort of important vital developmental work like UNDP as well. So I think you've got to look at the entirety of the UN. And when I worked in the UN in Liberia, Rory, I began to appreciate the rest of the UN family that does the sort of work behind the scenes that doesn't often get heard about and where the job is largely thankless.

29:23You know, our entry point, your entry point, all our entry points tends to be the Security Council. And so if I was to focus on that, then yes, it's inevitable. And there's certain things that are inevitable with an intergovernmental system, which is what it is. There's also something inevitable and dysfunctional about a body that in the end is controlled by five countries who, by the way, their only claim to be on the Security Council rested with the triumph in which they brought not to be undersold with the Second World War. The world is radically different from the end of the Second World War.

30:00There are other powers that are vying for claim. Just on that, I mean, we were sort of thinking about this in relation to what would happen if suddenly the Security Council booted off Britain and France, which seems pretty reasonable the way the world is changing. But brought in... He's not showing his nationality there. Brought in Britain, brought in Brazil, brought in India, brought in South Africa. And when we began talking about it, Brazil was being run by Bolsonaro. India is being run by Modi. South Africa has problems of its own. It didn't exactly feel to me as though the inclusion of those great regional powers was going to suddenly lead to a human rights respecting pro-democracy liberal global order.