to be reverting to the policy of past presidents — tighter sanctions and diplomatic pressure — to end north korea's nuclear and missile programmes. it wants china to agree to do the same. a bbc investigation has revealed the scale of organ trafficking in egypt, with thousands of illegal operations each year. venezuela has announced it will withdraw from the organisation of american states, accusing the regional group of interfering in its internal affairs. there've been more demonstrations for early elections — at least 20 people have died in protests since march. tributes have been flowing for the oscar—winning film—maker jonathan demme, who's died aged 73. he was probably best known for directing the silence of the lambs, but also made the ground—breaking aids drama, philadelphia. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk i am sarah

montague. the refugee crisis is one of the world's most enormous problems. 60 million people have fled their homes and countries. my guest today says the problem is fixable, and we can do it easily. he is the economist, professor sir paul collier. the solution, he argues, is to give refugees jobs. in doing so he suggests everyone will benefit. but if the answer is so simple, why has it not been done before? professor sir paul collier, welcome

to hardtalk. thank you for having me. you have said, of the syrian refugee crisis, that it is entirely manageable, we can do it easily. yet we are talking about millions of desperate people on the move. why do you say it is so fixable? because it is. the reason we have a mess is because of two reasons. one is that we have in international system which is hopelessly broken. we have a system built in 1950 that is com pletely a system built in 1950 that is completely unfit for the 21st century problems. we never changed it. we've got a broken system which was then confronted by a potentially perfectly manageable crisis, the syrian refugee crisis. what the responses were were then a bunch of political headless chickens. they

went through three phases, one was hea rtlessness, went through three phases, one was heartlessness, where they ignored the problem. refugees fled to jordan, turkey and 11 on, and those three countries were left to bear the burden. that was the phase of hea rtlessness the burden. that was the phase of heartlessness —— lebanon on. then, briefly, for about five months, we went to the phase of headless mess. —— headlessness. and a small proportion of those refugees moved to europe, a small proportion. we're still talking millions. we're not, we're talking less than a million syrian refugees moved to europe.

there are 10 million displaced refugees. most refugees, a large majority stayed put in the regional havens. they are not natural migrants. of course, there were other migrants, though, who joined the wave of syrians. of course, of course, migrants and refugees are very different categories of people. but i interrupted you — that was the headless phase. and then, very rapidly, that door got slammed, and now we're back in the heartless phase — ship them back to turkey, right? and you have said that if there had been — your words — "a timely application of the heart and the head," we could have achieved a very different scenario. and you went on to say, "there needs have been no deaths through drowning, no exodus of the skilled to germany, and perhaps even no brexit." yes — i'm afraid all those are true. let's start with the drownings, right? the drownings were entirely avoidable. if europe had wanted to open its doors to syrian refugees, if, then the sensible thing to do was to provide a safe means of transport from the haven countries, right? the message "swim to europe" was not an intelligent message. it made it inevitable that

what we would get would be the south american people smugglers coming in, the big criminal businesses, who then sold places on little boats. people drowned. not only did people drown, but because those places were so expensive, the average syrian — a year's income was not enough to buy a place on a boat. so that tells you who moved. ok, but to take on your point about, if we had applied the head and the heart, how are you saying that we should have done that? yeah, so let's start with... go back to 2011, when the syrian refugee crisis started. people are displaced. as i said, the refugees

are not migrants. they are people who have had to... they're actually people who have chosen to stay in their country. they flee out of fear — fear of disorder, in some other scenarios fear of famine. and so you get across—the—board... we've got to write this book, refuge, because alex and i, my co—author, were brought intojordan by the government... this is alexander betts. yeah, yeah, we were brought into jordan because the jordanian government said, "help, we've got a million refugees, it's a small country, pretty poor, what on earth do we do?" we were then taken to the main refugee camp. alex, my co—author, director of the refugee studies centre, he knew about refugees. i'm an economist who works

on poor countries. i'm not really familiar with refugees. what i saw in zaatari really deeply shocked me. these were people who were being warehoused, their lives were on hold. they've got free food and free shelter, that's the model of the camp, so that's the model we've run for over 60 years — feed them for free, clothe them for free, house them for free. and that's it — schooling, no, work, no. these people have been infantilised. there was a light—bulb moment for you. there really was. we went to this camp, as i say, alex was familiar, i wasn't, i was shocked, i was deeply moved. i was talking to refugees in their homes, i'm talking to a 16—year—old kid, "are you at school?" "no, no school." "what do you do?" "housework." what's the house? it's a portakabin, you know, a container. brothers and sisters, "oh, yeah, i've got an 18—year—old brother."

"what does he do?" "0h, he's gone back to syria." 18—year—old brother back in syria, what's he doing in syria? you guess, you know? so that was the camp. and then our somewhat bored jordanian government hosts said, "you know, actually, once we are here, we've got time to show you something that is really cool, we are pretty proud of, and nothing to do with refugees." "it's the king hussein industrial zone that we've just equipped, £100 million spent on it, 15 minutes away." great big industrial zone connected to the grid and everything — empty, empty. because jordanians didn't want to go there to work. so forfour years, a big empty industrial zone which could have employed everybody in that camp was sitting empty, and nearly 100,000 syrian refugees were sitting idly in a camp, and nobody had connected it. now, there is a reason why. ok, but before you come onto it, we should explain that thejordanian

government had approached you because you had a record, you are an oxford academic, but you had worked for the world bank, you had advised david cameron, you had advised, recently advised — still advising, i think — chancellor angela merkel, so you had a history of giving advice and being listened to by governments. i try and give practical under—the—radar—screen advice that governments can use. i'm an economist, and so i work on poorer countries, usually much poorer than jordan. but i try to come up with practical things that governments can do. so you are behind policies that david cameron has come up with — as a result of your book the bottom billion and plundering... the plundered planet, yeah, so... so you say to thejordanians, they take you to this £100 million

virtually empty enterprise zone. and so we say, "can we put two and two together?" "can we create some jobs in the camps?" whatjordan was really anxious about, the reason they haven't let refugees work was pretty obvious, that they couldn't provide enough jobs for their own citizens, let alone for refugees. so they saw letting refugees work as a threat. so what we suggested was, actually, you've got a big empty industrial zone, why is it empty? because jordanians don't want to work there and firms don't want to come. why don't you use the fact that you've got all these refugees as an opportunity to get you on the map, to getjordan noticed as a place where industry can come and bring jobs? we put that to the jordanian government, and it was like a light bulb, was their light—bulb moment. refugees could be an opportunity for our own economic development.

and so they've developed what's called thejordanian model now. and that involved, first, we went to brussels, and we persuaded the european commission to change its trade policy towards jordan. the european community had got trade barriers againstjordan. well, nobody is going to produce goods to sell in europe if there's trade barriers. so the european commission agreed, 0k, we'll give you ten years' open, free—market access. that was a big change. then i used my previous connections with the world bank and said, "where are you?" "you are missing in action." and they said, "of course we are missing in action, jordan is an upper middle income country, we're not allowed to work injordan, the board won't let us." so what did you ask them to do? i said, "ask the board, take a project on refugees to the board." they said refugees are nothing to do

with the world bank — if it's refugee, it's unhcr. unhcr has a monopoly, has had a monopoly on refugees for the last 60 years, but it is a purely humanitarian agency. but if you're going to get peoplejobs, where are those jobs coming from? who are the companies in whose interest it is to go to what arguably is a temporary setup, somewhere in another country? we've been doing that for decades, it's called globalisation. germany has created thousands upon thousands, probably millions ofjobs in turkey. but we are talking about conversations that you first had two years ago, and it was launched a year ago — what companies are now offering jobs in jordan? we've now got 39,000 jobs already created, right? this is realjobs. you've got 39,000 refugees working in jordan who wouldn't have otherwise... that wouldn't have otherwise been working. and this is because of international companies saying... we can do it, yes. the whole thing only got launched last year, and already there's stuff happening.

last september, the king ofjordan, king abdullah, said on cbs that jordan has always been a place that opens its arms to refugees, but now, and he made the point, "a 20% increase in our population, such is the scale of the refugee crisis, the huge burden on our country, we are in dire straits," and he talked about what refugees were doing. most were in towns looking for work, driving up rents, 160,000 syrian kids injordan's schools, unemployment skyrocketing, "0ur health sector saturated, our schools going through difficult times." and he made the point about how difficult it is. this doesn't solve that. in a way, this goes against that, doesn't it, if you're employing more syrians? not at all, because part of the deal is that the jobs come for both syrians and jordanians. so the ratio that we are working to is for every 70 jobs for refugees, 30 forjordanians, and so it's a win—win.

so the companies come in, they create new employment opportunities, new firms in the zones, and those jobs are shared. that model, thejordanian model, has already been copied in africa. the government of ethiopia is doing it now in their industrial zones. so your argument that there have been 30,000 plus newjobs created, there have been, what, 15,000 jobs forjordanians? yes, yes, yes, these are doable things, right? and don't forget, this is starting cold from a new idea, where no institution is used to doing it. if we'd had this system in place, if the global refugee system had been changed years ago, as it needed to be changed, if we'd had a system that was fit for purpose, this would have been easy! because what we need... but you've still got a problem,

though, because you've got a neighbouring country, and your argument is, "let's keep refugees local, because they ultimately want to go back." but they have children, they need health services. the pressure on services, and the scale of this, whether it isjordan or lebanon or turkey, we are talking about a massive influx of people that is really overwhelming the local population. that's why we've got aid programmes. the world bank, in october, did go to the board, it did approve $300 million loan tojordan on soft terms to provide jobs in the industrial zones for refugees and jordanians, the first loan it had ever done on refugees in 60 years, and at the same time approved soft money for lebanon to provide schooling for children, for refugee children. so we can use international aid money both forjobs and for the social services that are being stretched to breaking point. ok, so your argument is extend

the rights of the refugees in a way, not just shelter and food, keep those, but put alongside it a right to work. of course, and a right to decent social services, to education and suchlike. but the moment you do that, you have effectively incentivised them to stay, because the argument that they should remain local is that they will go home. but if you effectively create a new parallel life, where it is still going to be years, and they have invested perhaps in a business, why would they then go home? well, most people, actually, want to go home. don't forget, these people, that is mostly what they dream of, going home. conflicts do end, and you can think of this as actually incubating the jobs that can move back to the post—conflict society. when syria gets back to peace, which it will, the firms that are operating in jordan, if there were workforce, a lot of their workforce wants

to go back to syria, they can set up an operation in syria. one of the miracles of capitalism is that it's not a zero—sum game. if it's profitable injordan, it can stay injordan. if a chunk of your workforce is already skilled and trained and wants to go home to syria, you can set up an operation in syria. so give us an example of a company that is employing people now in jordan that wasn't before. one of the things that happening is who needs refuge coming out of syria? notjust syrian people — syrian businesses. and so now syrian businesses are moving to the zones, weren't allowed to do before — there was no protection for syrian businesses. and they moved tojordan... so businesses that were operating in syria are moving tojordan because of the enterprise zones.

if you were being bombed to bits in aleppo, you might think it's a good idea to move. but is that injordan's interests? of course it is! they're getting jobs for their own people as well. as i say, capitalism is not zero—sum. if you set up a succesful firm injordan, why would you ever close it? even if you can then restart the operation back in syria. earlier this month, we had the mayor of a town in lebanon, the mayor of naameh, called charbel matar, saying, "we have to stand with our own people first before we stand with the syrians," and he was saying that as he was issuing a decree to order businesses owned or operated by syrians to close, which was in keeping with the law. yeah, i mean, that's tragic, isn't it? so it's no good lecturing the government ofjordan, saying, "you mustn't do that."

it's no good preaching — we've got to make it in the government of lebanon's interests to do things that are helpful to refugees, as well as to their own population. but their population is 11.5 million, they've got more than 1 million syrian refugees. i mean those are just numbers that are unsustainable, even with your model, surely. i think that's probably right, i think lebanon is kind of off the map, right? when you get to that stage, you need... actually, before you get to that stage, you need some sort of threshold which says, now other countries have got to bear some of the burden. what about something like what you called the headless policy of chancellor angela merkel, allowing in many refugees in a strong economy? why has that, in your terms, not worked? why would that not be successful? well, i think, first of all, it was a noble gesture, so i'm still working with the chancellor — this was a noble thing to do, but it wasn't a thought—through thing. it was done very quick decision, wasn't thought through.

you're working very closely with her at the moment, you speak to her, you tell her it was a mistake and she says what? she's reversed the policy — i don't need to tell her it was a mistake, she's reversed the policy. has she acknowledged to you that it was a mistake? of course not — politicians don't use words like mistakes, do they? but she changed the policy, right? 180 degrees. something like less than 5% of the syrian population is in europe, but something between a third and a half of all syrians with university educations are now in europe. and your argument that it's a tragedy is because, ultimately, they're needed back in syria. they're the very people who will be needed to rebuild the country. i do a lot of work on post—conflict countries. the real bottleneck is skilled people. but so german policy, you advise, should be to encourage them to stop them staying. it depends how long it is before they can go back.

at some stage, it's obviously sensible to think that people are there for life. but at the moment, yes, it's too soon to settle people for life. they should be basically prepared with the skills that they can go back. germany is the ultimate successful model of high—skill, high—training, high—credentials, high—minimum—wage job market. so syrians, even those with a university education, are utterly unsuited for the jobs that germany has, unfortunately. it would be far easier for germany to create jobs for refugees injordan than it is in germany. so those refugees, syrian refugees in germany, would be better off injordan? they'd have a job. they'd be the elite — they'd have a job, yeah. even now, you'd send them back? i'm not in the business of sending people back. the german government... but that is the logic

of your position. the german government, i would remind you, is actually sending people back, that's the model now. i believe it's sensible for europe to take some. one of our principles is solidarity, everybody, every country has a duty of rescue, and that duty of rescue is partly to provide haven. you talk about politicians acting as headless chickens, you also talked about an international system that was broken — in part, because it's dependent on the unhcr, which you say is effectively working to laws that were devised just after 1950. we have a situation now where the president, the new american president, is talking about cutting funding, a 28% budget cut to diplomacy and foreign aid, and that would include the money that goes to the unhcr, and america funds more than a quarter of the unhcr. given how critical you are of it, do you see that, actually, as perhaps not such a bad thing? i think unhcr needs to change.

we talk a lot with unhcr, and one of their responses to our argument is, "we are not a job agency." well, that is true, unhcr isn't a job agency, but unfortunately what refugees most need is a job agency. so either unhcr changes staffing, skills up, and actually becomes capable of operating in the economic space, getting business to createjobs... 0r? or we bring in other agencies that are already doing that — the world bank, undp. the tragedy of the last 60 years is unhcr has had a monopoly, and it's a humanitarian—only mandate. and so it's what, contributed to the problem? yes, it's perpetuated a problem that shouldn't have been a problem by now. you know, world numbers of displaced and refugees are at a post—1950 peak. but richard gowan, who's a un expert

at the european council on foreign relations, talked about the cuts, saying they would cause chaos and leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill. it's the wrong hole to fill. the camps, the free food, the free shelter — that is the wrong hole to fill. the whole we need to fill, which is at the moment a glaringly empty hole, is jobs. tragically, at the moment, most politicians are reacting in really dysfunctional ways. the narrative has become, "we've got to keep refugees out, they are a danger." when you talk to people about refugees now, instead of their instinct being compassion, the instinct is fear. the big asset that refugees should have is automatically triggering the compassion of the vast bulk of humanity. paul collier, thank you for coming on hardtalk.

thank you. hello again. 0ur weather's set to turn a little bit milder over the next couple of days, quieting down in many respects. but before we get there, yesterday we had some really big thunderstorms around, this one brought some hail to west hamstead. thanks to our weather watcher dg perry for sending us that picture in. you can see the extent of the showers as they've worked in. the showers have tended to die away overnight, just one or two left over, working towards parts of central and southern england. but by and large today we're looking at quite a cloudy weather picture for many of us, and there will be some showers knocking around as well.

ok, let's take a look at how the weather starts off in the morning. quite a lot of cloud around, some showers really from the word go across north—western areas. towards southern parts of england and wales, this is where the clearest weather will be. certainly a cold start to the day. we're looking at some patches of frost around. probably the lowest temperature about —3 or so. so a cold and locally frosty start to the morning but it should be reasonably bright. the brightness won't last, though, because quite quickly we're going to see an area of cloud come down from the north and that will tend to trap all cold air at the surface. so it's one of those days i think when temperatures will be very slow to rise. across more northern areas, northern england, northern ireland, scotland, quite a cloudy start to the day, occasional brighter spells, but already a few

showers from the word go. quite breezy for northern scotland as well and through the rest of the day, the showers that are really associated with these weak weather fronts will continue to slide southwards, it will tend to turn cloudier and cloudier as the day goes by and eventually we'll start to see those showers working in across east anglia and south—east england as well. while the weather brightens up for scotland, northern ireland and late in the day the far north of england. temperatures generally about 11 degrees for many of us. now, looking at the weather picture through the night time and those showers will continue to push southwards. so quite a bit of cloud initially but then the showers fade away and the skies clear during the second half of the night. again that will allow things to get quite chilly. there'll be some pockets of frost developing by the time we get to friday morning across parts of scotland and the far north of england in the countryside.

here's friday's weather picture and generally quite a quiet weather day. again we're looking at a few showers, most of these will be across eastern parts of scotland, eastern england, but for many of us it's a dry and a bright kind of day, amounts of cloud coming and going through the day and temperatures will be rising a little bit. that's your weather. this is bbc news. i'm james menendez. the headlines. war games and calm words, the us says tighter sanctions and more diplomacy are the best way to pressure north korea. turkey says it's arrested or suspended 9,000 police officers, accusing them of supporting last yea r‘s abortive coup. and a special report from egypt, the centre of the multi—billion dollar illegal trade in human organs. and i'm aaron heslehurst. well, he called it the worst trade deal ever,

but trump is backtracking on nafta. the white house tells mexico and canada it won't cancel the north american free trade agreement — but will renegotiate it. the peso and canadian dollar soar. plus — is it terminalfor alitalia?