society which doesn't result in any change, and that is the biggest problem. >> on monday mitt romney gave a major foreign policy address, and i thought one to have interesting ideas he had in this was the united states should convert or its aid to egypt, a, that it mains its peace relationship with israel, and, b, that -- [inaudible] how would that go over in the egypt? >> horribly, and that's a horrible idea. you're now going to stipulate the reasons for aid? you're going to humiliate the egyptians, spur feelings that the americans want to keep you under their foot? egypt was our greatest ally ever since the aftermath of the 1973 war when henry kissinger went to see saw dad, and sadat rolled the map on the table and said

the israelis will move our forces here, and we will be able to move our forces here. that was the beginning of an american/egyptian relationship. >> in a sense, the aid was a quid pro quo for that defense treaty -- >> yeah, it was a quid pro quo for camp david, and you can't start stipulating democratic conditions for that. do we really want to alienate our, when this is such instability in the region and we have so many problems, do we really want to alienate the country that had been a pillar of american stability and support in the region? we need to work with the new leadership in a country like egypt and find common goals and move toward them together hand in hand. >> morsi seems to have said, it seems the muslim brotherhood position that the peace trity with israel will start of stand for the moment. what is their basic position? >> oh, there's going to be no movement on the treaty. what they might want is some type of amending modification

which would allow the military to me more forces in. and can that's what you hear on the streets. but the funny thing with that is every time the israelis have allowed them to move more forces in, they didn't do that. i think the israeli -- i forgot the statistic, allowed them to move seven battalions in -- >> into the sinai? >> into zone c, excuse me, which borders israel. they allowed, and i think 20 tanks. but the egyptians never did that. historically, historically since the egyptians took over the firing, they've only stationed about 75% of the forces they were allowed to under the camp david accords. >> so in your view, there's almost, it's extremely unlikely that that the peace treaty between israel and egypt would in any way be significantly changed, amended? >> no. changed or amended, they may want to get more forces in there now because of the situation, but they're working on, they're

bilateral working on it. now, if we talk about if there's going to be a problem between israel and egypt, my greatest fear is they're both moving forces into these regions, israel because it has to shore up against jihadist incursions, and the egyptians because they have this jihadist problem. what happened in august 2011 when there's a jihadist incursion into israel, israelis respond in hot pursuit, and they killed the egyptian guards. it created a real big con flag ration in egypt which led to the storming of the israeli embassy. tensions are very, very high. both sides need to work to reduce that so there's not this type of isolated incident or event that could lead to a real, real big problem. >> to the lady here and then the two gentlemen there. thanks. >> hi. -- [inaudible]

with public international law and policy group, what role and prospects do you see for, um, u.s. influence in the region, um, especially given the security problems in the recent embassy attacks and the challenges of weak governance and weak institutions in. >> i think a great book to read on that is the not too much promised land by aaron david miller. he has a great section in there on how strong we think we are in the region and what we can get done and what the people on the ground think we can get done. we cannot get much done. we need to work with our allies. we need to talk to local intelligence services, and that's been the big problem i now, we've lost the contacts in these intelligence services that really provided us information about the bad guys. >> well, but at a huge cost to, i mean, you know, it's not like there's any great notaly for the libyan knew cab rat or the egyptian, right?

>> we had a great relationship with mussa cushion saw. he was giving us all, and, you know, at the end of his life, gadhafi was really a tolerated nuisance. when condoleezza rice visited in 2006-2007, it was the highest ranking american to visit libya since, i think, vice president nixon's visit in 1957 or '58. there was really a big about face, and that was the big middle east foreign policy of the bush administration put forward, that they had, um, that they brought libya back in from the cold. and that was what we had there. yes, there were a lot of human, there were human rights violations and, yes, there were a lot of problems, but that didn't change the fact that our intelligence services really benefited from the coordination that they had. >> well, but, i mean, in a sense the whole jihadi/al-qaeda problem was really in some ways a fruit of these intelligence services as much as anything else. i mean, it's not an accident

that saeed wrote his -- >> they played a very large role in that. >> and it's not an accident that zawahiri became more radicalized. there's many other examples, sa caw by became radicalized. >> i'm familiar with all those, and is you're 100%. >> really the big question for all those is, you know, if you accept the idea -- i think it's uncontroversial -- that, you know, al-qaeda and groups like it really came as a result of these authoritarian regimes, um, many of these regimes are going which suggests more political space for islamists which may, we hope, might not turn violent. that's a hope. but i think it's a reasonable one. would it have been better to have none of these democratic openings and these regimes still in place who also brutally repressed these groups, but also in a way created them, or is

there some other sort of -- >> sure. like i said earlier, depends where you're looking at and at what time frame you're looking at. we're looking at it the right, short-term and immediate right after these elections, and we see the september 11th attack, and you say we see this as the problem. this is what happened, this is why these things were not good. in 10, 20 years, in the next generation these societies will transition to more strong democratic states with strong state institutions with more security, stability, and then everybody's going to be happy with the powers -- >> or happy enough. >> -- that bloomed. but going back to one of your questions about the political islamists, a lot of people are going to be disgruntled with what it will accomplish. you know, the real hard-core people that are pioused, and they'll say they're just as bad. they didn't get for us what we

wanted. so they become dis enchanted with the solution, and then the al-qaeda ideas, the salafist ideas that says democracy is an idol -- [speaking in native tongue] i think it was a 2009 speech, democracy the contemporary or the modern idol. or you have, you know, people like abu -- [inaudible] these guys all talked about democracy and being a new form of idol worship. >> yeah. >> they'll be able to say, you see? we told you about this decades ago. >> in iraq there's been a sort of experiment about a lot of these same issues. where do you see the jihadists in iraq right now? >> the problem with the jihadists in iraq was zarqawi overplayed his happened. >> right. do they come back? do they have any validity now? have they changed their ways? >> it's toon soon for -- too

soon for society to forgive them for what they did. >> and i think that lesson's also, i think if you look at one of the turning points in the al-qaeda's fortunes was the attack on the three american-owned hotels in aman, jordan, which killed almost entirely jordanians attending a wedding. that got widespread coverage in the arab world. it's not just in iraq where people were sold what an al-qaeda-like regime would impose on the civilization. i think around the muslim world there was quite a lot of understanding of this. >> true. i was in aman i think about a month after that, and people were very upset. zarqawi's tribe disowned them, they took out page ads in the papers, full-page ads if the papers denouncing the attacks. there was a real backlash against that. you see a lot of that in a country where an attack is carried out, people usually support attacks outside the countries.

>> well, they talk about benghazi, what happened in benghazi after the attack on the consulate. >> well, benghazi's very different, libya's very different because they're very supportive of the west for what they did in overthrowing gadhafi as opposed to other countries where no one asked for american aid, and no one got it, military support. but my point is, i was in, i used to live in yemen, and in yemen people were very supportive of attacks against the american military in iraq, of attacks against american civilians. they were supportive of the 9/11 attacks. but the day that there was an attack in yemen, aqa al-qaeda sponsored, oh, we can't have that. >> name sing happened in saudi arabia in 2003. -- same thing happened in available in 2003. let's have another question over here. >> this on? >> i'm ray mcgovern, ray

mcgovern, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. i'd like to broaden the discussion to russia. i used to know a lot about russia, and i think i remember they were very interested in syria. how serious do you think the russians consider what's happening there in syria, what's the word on the street or in the diplomatic circles as to how far the russians will go to keep propping up al assad? >> i can't really talk about russian foreign policy, that's not my specialty. i have a friend who's very good at it, but that's not something -- i'm sorry. >> okay. did you have a question, sir? >> yeah. >> i'm mike period, i wonder what is -- beard, i mean what is the role that iran is playing in the area? >> excellent. iran is playing a big role in supporting the syrians. we know that they're training them, they're offering all types

of aid. they really need, they can't allow syria to fall because syria's a conduit to send weapons to hezbollah which is iran's really big ally in the region that it uses to exert influence and power against the threat, to threaten the israelis. so it's not, it doesn't -- it will do everything in the its power to, um, to sustain the syrian regime. however, it doesn't have the money that it would want to have because of the sanctions regime against it. its economy is really being pummeled, the rial is falling by the day, it has instability problems. so it can't extend all the aid that it wants to, but it will give them the logistical support and the military training to help them, and we've heard rumors that the training should be the paramilitary units that

go around and indiscriminately kill people. so there's a lot of evidence of that, a lot of talk about that at this point in time. >> by the way, how are thal whites --al weitz regarded by mainstream shia this. >> they're not very happy with them either. >> it seems funny that an idealogically-shia regime would be, basically, supporting a group that they really regard as heretics. >> see, it wasn't really just, it was more borne of pragmatism and necessity when they started the relationship. um, the iraqi -- the iranians needed an ally when, um, iraq started the war with them. so they were able to reach out to them because all, the whole region was against them, the gulf countries, saudi arabia, kuwait and what not. they were very scared, and they used iraq as the shield, the

protecter of their interests against the iranians, and that's why the americans were brought in after the gulf war. but the, when we look at the shia/alawite relationship, what happened is beginning at the end of the ottoman era, the ottomans tried to bring in thal weez under the islamic fold because they were scared the french would claim ha they were lost christians -- that they were lost christians. french, a french priest, henri lamont claimed they were lost christians, so they were afraid of the french who claimed them. then what happened is the whole issue became politicized when certain islamist scholars gave fatwas or issued legal opinions saying that the alawese were muslims, the must mufti husseini issued a fatwa in the 1940s, i

think, saying that. and then assad was able to get al-sadr to issue a fatwa in the mid 1970s saying that the alawese were shia. so, and we also saw this, i think, in the '20s and -- maybe in the '30s and '40s, they started sending their youngsters to study in the seminary. so there was, there was an integration of the alawese into the shia fold. they came back with books and what not. but the alawese have never been considered shias. there's two groups called twelvers which is the main treatment that predominants in bahrain, iran, iraq and lebanon, then you have southerners who were extremists based on seven imams. these were extremists, and they are found right now in some

areas in lebanon and yemen and syria and india is a sevenner. they are an offshoot of these people, and they deify allah. so they are really outside the islamic fold. they don't land within any time of normative islam. the shia are -- [inaudible] but these people are just heretics. [laughter] >> any other questions? gentleman here. >> adam -- [inaudible] heritage foundation. i was just wondering your thoughts on, a, to libya and if we're giving enough, or should we give more and what kind of aid. >> it's a great question. -in ya doesn't need any aid because it has all that oil wealth. it needs help in building institutions, it needs experts and trains to build -- trainers

to build a good judiciary system, bring in judges. you need to bring in people to move, build up technical capacity that's nonexistent, and egypt -- libya's oil money, it can support all that. anything the libyans need they can get on their own, they just don't have the experience necessary, the government experience. >> barak, you have libyan islamic fighting group which was sort of once aligned with al-qaeda is really a first affiliate or al-qaeda which is they've already done a peace deal with the regime, and that was, of course, gadhafi. to what extent has that peace deal sort of held the islamic fighting group? are they involved in jihadist activity? what is happening with that group? >> oh, sure. they pretty much, they've accepted, um, to play by democratic rules. you know, everyone talks about baa hajj, he's part of a political party. you have a member of another

party, i think the idealogue is also playing the political game. everyone at the beginning of the rev fusion talked about knew saadi in darna. there have been some extremists such as libyan lifg, they said he was an al-qaeda driver, he was detained at guantanamo bay. he's clung to some elements of his extremism. we're not sure if he was involved in what happens september 11th or not. i don't think so. but by and large lifg has really just like the jihadst in egypt, they've renounced violence, and they've moved into the mainstream society. >> there's somebody in back over here. with a question. any other questions? sir.

>> if i could get a second question, you look at the various transitions that have gone on in libya and syria, the leadership, to me, doesn't have any exit. they're going to get shot, their followers are going to get shot, run out of town wherein tunisia and yemen, certainly also somewhat in egypt there was an exit strategy for them. could you talk about the supporters of assad, and they see their backs to the wall, and do they have to fight to the death or they're going to be killed in other ways? is there any way out of it? >> yeah, it's a big problem. basically, the regime is just feeding the alawites, these

people really feel like their back is against the wall, and they're going to be slaughtered. and it's just a doomsday scenario for them. the alawites. the other minorities, you know, you're talking about christians, many christian groups -- >> what's the percentage of the christian population? >> i can't -- i think we're talking about between 10 and 12%. >> so it's significant. >> no, it's not a small population. it's pretty big. and you're talking -- it's not cohesive because, you know, you're talking about greek orthodox, you're talking about syrian christians, you're talking about small numbers of protestant and what not. so these groups and also the drews, they've supported the regime. their members are, their members are part of the security services. so they are also scared at the same time. >> barak, this has been a really

deep, well-reported and also you took a lot of risks to gather this information. so we're very grateful that you came and spoke to us about it. >> the original person who took the risk was peter when he traveled to afghanistan. [laughter] >> that was a long time ago. >> yeah. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> a live picture this afternoon from the hofstra university campus in hempstead, new york. this is the site of the next presidential debate tomorrow. pram pa and mitt romney will -- president obama and mitt romney will meet here for their second debate. looking at the setup of the room, you see the chairs for

about 100 audience members. these are undecided voters from long island who will be posing questions to the candidates. it'll be in a town hall which was done for the first time about 20 years ago making tomorrow's the sixth town hall presidential debate. both candidates today spending the day getting ready for tomorrow. president obama is practicing, we understand, at a golf resort in williamsburg, virginia. mitt romney is back near his boston-area home spending much of the day practicing there. >> this isn't about governor bush, it's not about me. it is about you. and i want to come back to something i said before. if you want somebody who believes that we were better off eight years ago than we are now and that we ought to go back to the kind of policies that we had back then emphasizing tax cuts mainly for the wealthy, here is your man. if you want somebody who will fight for you and who will fight to have middle class tax cuts, then i am your man.

i want to be. now, i doubt anybody here makes more than $330,000 a year. i won't ask you, but if you do, you're in the -- >> it would be a violation of the rules. [laughter] >> i'm not gonna ask, i'm not gonna ask. but if everyone here in this audience was dead on in the middle of the middle class, then the tax cuts for every single one of you all added up would be less than the tax cut his plan would give to just one member of that top wealthiest 1%. now, you judge for yourselves whether or not that's fair. >> quick, and then we're moving on. >> good. 50 million americans get no tax relief under his plan. >> that's not right. >> you're just not one of the right people. secondly, we've had enough fighting. it's time to unite. in eight years they haven't gotten anything done on medicare, on social security, a patient's bill of rights. >> all right.

>> it's time to get something done. >> presidential town hall debates began in 1992 with then-president george bush, governor bill clinton and businessman ross perot, and every election since presidential hopefuls have taken questions from undecided voters in the same town hall style. tuesday night watch president obama and mitt romney in their town hall debate. c-span's live coverage starlets at 7 eastern. starts at 7 eastern. >> you're watching c-span2 with politics and public affairs, weekdays featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate. on weeknights watch key public policy events and every weekend the latest nonfiction authors and books on booktv. you can see past programs and get our schedule at our web site, and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. >> and we are live in the nation's capital, we are hear there retired supreme court justice john paul stevens this afternoon delivering a speech regarding the second amendment and gun laws. the brady center to prevent gun

violence is hosting the event today. during his time on the court, justice stevens authored dissents in the 2006 and 2008 decisions on the second amendment. he served from 1975 to 2010. that makes him the third longest-serving supreme court justice. we expect this to start any moment. this is live coverage on c-span c-span3. c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> we to want to let everybody know there was a mass shooting at -- [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] a gunman acting --

>> that's when i realized that this is not part -- gunmen are shooting everywhere. >> we go out, and the first thing we see is a 13, 14-year-old with bullets in her leg and her stomach and probably her -- [inaudible conversations] ♪ >> we do want to let everybody know at home there's been a mass shooting at a movie theater just outside denver, colorado, in aurora. a gunman acting alone opening fire -- >> that's when i realized that this is not, like, part of the movie. there's a gunman, and he's shooting everybody. >> we go out, and the first thing we see a 13, 14-year-old with bullet wounds in her leg and her stomach and probably her chest, and i think she was right there about to die.

>> just two weeks after the shooting in aurora, colorado, a gunman opened fire in a sikh temple in wisconsin killing six. >> 911. >> we've got shots fired -- multiple gunshots. >> multiple gunshots. >> >> yes. >> do you know where? >> over by the gym. >> the unarmed teenager was walking by the subdivision where his relatives lived. zimmerman shot him once in the chest. >> what is your -- [inaudible] >> a lot of people can relate to our situation, and it breaks their heart just like it breaks mine. >> late wednesday morning the bearded man seen here entered a popular seattle café. minutes later, four people were

fatally shot, another wounded as the gunman stands alone amid overturned stools, he's holding what appears to be a gun. we're going to take you now to chicago where this past weekend at least 52 people were shot, eight of them killed. >> the victims included 7-year-old kevin sutton, shot to death selling candy outside her home. >> most of the shootings took place in poor neighborhoods, far from downtown and tourest attractions -- tourist attractions. gunned down in this a weekend of violence so typical it didn't even make the front page. >> gather on this corner of the block comforting each other, trying to make sense of the violence. >> a 2-year-old was shot and killed outside of church -- >> attended schools -- >> the 20th of february, and already detroit this year has 43 murders -- >> work-related shooting. >> this is being blamed on -- >> minneapolis reports, the funman killed four people -- gun frank killed four people

including the owner. >> although police have not been -- [inaudible conversations] [background sounds] ♪ muck ♪ >> good afternoon. my name is dan gross, and it is my privilege to serve as the president of the brady center to prevent gun violence. i very briefly want to welcome everybody here and thank our sponsors and especially thank

you, justice stevens, for the extraordinary honor of your participation in this event. [applause] like too many people, i come to this issue through a personal experience. in february of 1997, my younger brother matthew gross was shot in a shooting that happened on the observation deck of the empire state building, and our dear friend chris was killed in that tragedy. my brother survived, um, despite being shot in his head, much like a lot of our heroes in this room, jim brady, and considering what happened to him, he's doing remarkably well, but needless to say it has changed his life and the lives of all of us who love him and care about him forever. in my case, when my brother was shot i was a partner at a big advertising agency called j. walter thompson, and i just

found that i couldn't go back to work knowing that this problem was out there, and that there was an opportunity to do something about it. so i quit that job and have devoted my life to trying to prevent other families from going through what ours has been through. and that's led me to this extraordinary privilege to assume the presidency of this organization the february. um, and since then our focus has been not on changing this organization, but rather getting back to the essence of what made it great in the first place. and to put be it most simply, brady at its core has always been the voice of the american people on the gun violence issue. the voice of a public that doesn't want to live in a nation with 32 more gun murders every day, the voice of the overwhelming majority of americans who support sensible measures to make in the safer nation that we all want and we all deserve. and brady's laser focus is to

make that voice as bold and powerful as it needs to be to create the change that is too long overdue in our country. our unwavering mission is to bring together the american public into one voice for a safer nation, a voice to demand real action to confront the tragedy that is gun violence in our country like you saw in that video. one voice, blue state and red, republican and democrat, gun owner or not, mothers, fathers, kids, cops, clergy and, yes, lawyers, all of us dedicated to the vision of an america with safe neighborhoods, streets and schools. because we as a nation, we all know we are better than this. we are better than mass shootings in movie theaters and places of worship, we are better than 32 more gun murders in our country every day, a tragedy every day that happens in our country on the scale of the

virginia tech massacre. and make no mistake, change is starting to happen. this past summer will, of course, appropriately be remembered for the terrible mass shootings like the ones at the movie theater in aurora, colorado, and the sikh temple in milwaukee, wisconsin. but i'm confident that this summer will also be remembered for something else; for the beginning of a real, broad-based movement in our nation to finally do something about gun violence once and for all. for the beginning of a sustained, solution-oriented, national conversation, a consideration that brady is helping to convene. it's a conversation that includes americans from from across the country and across the political spectrum coming together in a common cause, to make in the safer nation that we all want. a conversation that is respectful of those who might like to hunt or target shoot but don't want 19 people getting gunned down on the streets of

chicago overnight. none of us want that. we've seen people like rupert murdoch, bill o'reilly and michael diverse sin, george w. bush's speech writer, all advocating for sensible policies that would save lives. frank hundreds showed us that 74% of nra members support criminal background checks for all gun sales. hundreds of thousands of americans have signed petitions like the ones on we are better than this.org to demand action. that's we are better than this.org. it is clear, one voice is forming, and a very important of that voice is the legal community. to use its expertise and resources, to protect the good gun laws that are under constant assault by the gun lobby and to hold the gun industry accountable when it places profits over people. in fact, i would go so far as to say that no profession right now

has a greater opportunity to prevent gun deaths and injuries than the one that's so well represented in this room today. so how's that for saddling you with some serious responsibility on your shoulders? [laughter] but i do want to emphasize that this isn't just about all of you here today or any one profession. not conversely, to let you lawyers off the hook. in the end, this is all about all of us, making our voices heard based on the fundamental belief that we as a nation are better than this. and that is brady's ladies and o all of you, to the entire american public, that together we will fake voice of the american people heard -- make the voice of the american people heard. that it will be heard, it will resonate, and it will be felt. and it will only continue to build until each and every one of us has the freedom to live in the better, safer nation that we all deserve. thank you again for being here and for all of your support. [applause]

and now it's also my privilege and pleasure to introduce to you truly one of the brady center's superstars, john lowy, the director of brady's legal action project. [applause] >> thank you, dan can. and thank you -- dan. and thank you all for coming here. i also would like to thank the sponsors of this event, alan bennett, bill harwood and tom col, mark hobson, chris -- [inaudible] carter phillips and in particular a great supporter of ours who's here today, tom green. tom. and please recognize a key member of our board, bob bates. if bob could stand up. and a valuable member of our legal team, dan vice.

and special thanks, of course, to justice stevens for honoring us with his presence. i have the suspicion that most of you are not here to listen to me. [laughter] so i will proceed quickly. but before i do i have a few words to say about our work and an exciting new program we are launching. the brady center's legal action project was founded 23 years ago to take the fight for safer america to a level playing field where americans who demand real solutions to gun violence can get a fair hearing. we remain the only public law group in america dedicated to fighting in the courts to reduce gun deaths and injuries. if you need a reminder of why our work is so vital, recall ten years ago almost to the day. on the evening of october 14th, 2002, a 47-year-old woman was loading her car outside home depot in falls church, virginia, when gunfire came out of no where. and she was shot dead in front

of her husband. linda franklin was an fbi analyst and a mother of two. she was one of 13 random shootings by the d.c.-area snipers that terrorized this region as many of you will recall. one man was shot and killed while mowing grass, a woman was read ago book on a bench, a man was pumping gas, a mom was vacuuming cheerios off the floor of her mini van. we all lived in fear that we could be next. and we can be. you see, those three weeks in october were fairly typical in terms of gun violence in america. in some parts of this city, people live every day with fear, the real fear that gunfire can claim them or their children. the sniper shootings simply brought meet si to the gun violence -- immediacy to the gun violence that is around us every day. in the ten years since, about one million people have been shot in america, about 300,000 lost their lives.

imagine the governmental response if those guns were fired by terrorists or some enemy force. well, the legal action project doesn't wait for politicians to respond to this epidemic. we take direct action to reduce gun violence. we bring high impact liability actions to reform gun sales practices that arm concerns. in fact, we won a landmark case on behalf of linda franklin and other victims that forced gun companies to sell guns more responsibly. you can read about another important victory we just won in your packets. we also challenge guns that limit gun right prevention. we recently stop a florida law that infringed on first amendment rights by preventing doctors from simply advising patients of the racings of guns -- risks of guns. and we've worked to establish a body of second amendment law that allows americans to protect their communities by keeping guns off the streets and out of the hands of dangerous people.

this work has become urgent since the 2008 heller decision in which the supreme court had the audacity to hold over the dissent of justice stevens and three of his colleagues that the second amendment recognizes a right to have handguns in the home, separate from the well regulated militia of reference therein. heller has inspired over 500 challenges to gun laws and more being filed all the time. these cases are part of a far-reaching, well-funded campaign to force guns into every sector of our society and to vastly expand the narrow right recognized by the court. they claim, for example, that criminals, domestic violence offenders, drug users and teens have a right to guns. that military-style assault weapons are constitutionally protected. and that law enforcement cannot take reasonable actions to keep guns off the streets. if these challenges prevail, not only will current gun laws be

struck down, but americans will be foreclosed from enacting much-needed gun policies in the future. if heller is properly read, these challenges would be rejected, and most have been so far. but already some courts have struck down important public safety laws. some cases are heading to appeals courts. as i said, more are being filed all the time. that is why the legal action project is launching a new effort unlike anything we have done in our 23 years. it's called lawyers for a safer america. lawyers and law firms who join will become part of an alliance who will assist and in some cases represent governments, victims of gun violence and other organizations in high impact litigation to reduce gun injuries and deaths. this is a rare opportunity to help develop an emerging body of constitutional law and even more rare to use your talents to defeat one of the great threats to americans' health and safety. we cannot win this battle without your help.

but with you we can create new law that recognizes our most basic rights to life and self-government, and we can save lives. please fill out the cards at your tables to express interest in joining this effort. and can hand them to our staff on your way out today. this work is challenging, but it is fulfilling and crucial to making america a better and safer place. which brings us to our main event, a man who has undoubtedly made america a better, more just, more free and safer place. there is, regrettably, only one john paul stevens. he may, in fact, be the only person who's ever shared a stage with two of my other personal heroes, thurgood marshall and bob dylan. [laughter] he was not playing in the band, he was being awarded the presidential medal of freedom. justice stevens has valiantly served our nation for over 70 years earning a bronze star in

world war ii. president nixon nominated him to the u.s. court of appeals for the seventh circuit, and after he was nominated by president ford to the united states supreme court, he served over 34 years, the third longest tenure in american history. upon his retirement in 2010, one commentator argued convincingly that justice stevens was the greatest associate supreme court justice in the american history. in light of the numerous and diverse areas of law in which he's left such a profound mark. and in addition to the wisdom expressed in the his opinions, his writing is a model of clarity, elegance and wit. justice stevens by word or and deed inspires us to strive for a more perfect nation and to do so with a civility, decency and good humor that reflects the best of our profession and our humanity. i hope in some modest way our work at the brady center and the

work we will do together with lawyers for a safer america is worthy of justice stevens' example and furthers his ideals and vision of a just american society. it is my honor to introduce a national treasure, the honorable justice john paul stevens. [applause] >> thank you very much. [applause] >> i thank you for those kind remarks. this morning i was saddened to read about senator specter's passing. and i just think i need to say

one brief word about him. he was a, an independent and iley intelligent public -- highly intelligent public servant who really served the country with great distinction. i had a number of conversations over the years with the senator and two that i -- one was his argument in the one case that i can recall that he argued before the supreme court. he was a victim of the very strict enforcement of bill lund qis' rule of when the red light goes on, and he never really was happy with the fact that the chairman of the senate judiciary committee was treated just like any other litigant. [laughter] but i also remember the case that he particularly, in my memory of conversations with him, that he particularly was unhappy about was bill rehnquist's minnesota in the violence -- opinion in the violence against women act in

which the court held the statute unconstitutional and wrote an opinion which senator specter thought was not adequately deferential or respect offul of congressional -- respectful of congressional findings. and he on more than one occasion he thought the court should have shown more deference to congress. well, i just wanted to mention the senator before i began with what i've written to present to you. before answering questions that may occur to you, i shall make three brief comments; two relating to the supreme court's 2008 decision in district of columbia against heller and the third to the court's 1997 decision in prince against the united states. as i'm sure you all remember, the central issue in heller concerned the scope of the second amendment's protection of the right to keep and bear arms.

over the years guns have been used for military purposes, for hunting, for self-defense, for criminal activities and occasionally to fight duels. in united states against miller, decided in 1939, the court held that congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia. when i joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the second amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. four years ago, however, in heller the court concluded that the amendment also protects the right to keep a handgun in one's home for purposes of self-defense. while the postdecision

commentary by historians and other scholars has reinforced my conviction that the court's decision to expand the coverage of the second amendment was incorrect, two good things about the court's opinion merit special comment. first, the court did not overrule miller. instead, it, quote: read miller to say only that the second amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes such as short-barreled shotguns, unquote. on the preceding page of its opinion, the court had made it clear that even though machine guns were useful in warfare in 1939, he were not among the types of weapons protected by the second amendment because the protected class of weapons was limited to those in common use for lawful purposes like self-defense.

even though a sawed-off shotgun or a machine gun might well be kept at home and be useful for self-defense, neither machine guns nor sawed-off shotguns satisfied the, quote, common use, unquote, requirement. thus, even as generously construed in heller, the second amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the other thanship of the use of the sorts of automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in virginia, colorado and arizona in recent years. the failure of congress to take any action to minimize the risk of similar tragedies in the future cannot be blamed on the court's decision in heller. a second virtue of the opinion in heller is that justice scalia went out of his way to limit the

court's holding not only to a subset of weapons that might be used for self-defense, but also a to a subset of conduct that is protected. the specific holding of the case only covers the possession of handguns in the home for purposes of self-defense. part three of the opinion adds emphasis to the narrowness of that holding by describing uses that were not protected by the common law or state practice. prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons, on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill and laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings or imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms are specifically identified as permissible regulations.

part three of the opinion is admittedly pure dicta, and it is embarrassingly inconsistent with the earlier argument in the opinion that the word, "people," as used in the second amendment has the same meeting as when used in other provisions of the constitution. on page 581 of the opinion, on page 581 the opinion confidently asserts that the term "unambiguously" refers to all members of the political community not an unspecified subset, unquote. that assertion accurately describes the category of persons protected by the first amendment because felons and the mentally ill have the same right to worship as they please as do law-abiding citizens. and no citizen need obtain a license to express his views publicly.

nevertheless, i believe justice scalia deserves praise for including his advisory opinion in part three. my comment on the printz case will be brief. the case was the subject of a talk i gave to the chicago bar association a few days ago that i should have reserved for this audience because it involved the constitutionality of the provision of the brady act that required law enforcement officers to make background checks of prospective gun purchases during the period that the federal government was developing its own enforcement program. relying on a judge-made "anti-commandeering rule," totally unsupported by constitutional text, the five-justice majority held the statute unconstitutional. in my talk i described scholarly

criticism of the rule and its potential impact on the federal government's ability to respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters as well as the efficient administration of federal programs. and i recommended a forward amendment to article vi of the constitution to nullify the rule. i shall not repeat what i said in chicago, but i do want to call your attention to one provision of the constitution that is significant for reasons that had not previously occurred to me. all of you, i am sure, are familiar with the great compromise made by the framers who created a bicameral legislature including a senate in which both large and small states have equal representation. i am not sure, however, that you're also aware of the fact that article v of the

constitution which describes the procedures for amending that document contains a proviso prohibiting any amendment that would deprive my state without its consent of its equal suffrage in the senate. that provision constitutes powerful evidence that the framers regarded the senate as the branch of the federal government having the most significant responsibility for protecting the sovereignty of the several states both large and small. as i said in my chicago talk, quote: the notion that a they expected federal judges to fashion additional rules for the protection of the sovereignty of the several states is really quite absurd. thank you very much. [applause]

>> thank you very much, justice stevens. justice stevens is gracious enough to answer question of us all, so if you have questions, there are two ways you can communicate them. one is line up by this microphone here, ask them directly. also there are index cards on your tables. you can write questions down, raise your hand when you do, and there are staff who will collect them and feed them back to me. but to get the ball rolling, um, while people line up, justice stevens, there are a number of issues that have come up since the heller and mcdonald decisions that we mentioned where there are attempts to expand those holdings.

one of the major issues is an argument that the second amendment includes a right to carry guns in public places and that governments are prohibited in some cases from enacting and enforcing restrictions on public gun carrying. what are your thoughts on whether heller and mcdonald sports that extension -- supports that extension? >> my prediction on what courts will do or what they should do? [laughter] >> whatever you're free to say. >> well, actually, i think that what i said in my brief talk does have that particular problem not squarely covered, but i think it's quite clear that the holding only relates to guns in -- at home, for private.

and he specifically lists the use, possession of guns in certain sensitive public places as beyond the coverage of the amendment. and it seems to me that the reasoning which justifies that limitation was equally applied to a right to have guns available outside of the home in public places if the law making body in that particular community thinks otherwise. now, any one of the principal problems was the whole holding in heller and what's developed since is the fact that, ironically, in the name of federalism and the like the court holding was held applicable to the city of chicago which by an interpretation of the substantive use of the word

"liberty" in the due process clause which ends up with the ironic result that even though the preamble to the second amendment makes it quite clear that the amendment was designed to protect the ability of states in their own militias and states to regulate the use of guns in their own militias, the irony of the holding is that federal judges now have the authority to disagree with state legislatures, state lawmaking bodies which seems to me to be really an ironic and perverse interpretation of the basic document. but i also, i also do think that the court had been deliberately narrow in both stating the holding if you read the holding in the heller case itself and mcdonald's description of the holding as relating just to guns

within the home, i think that there's a very powerful argument for saying it does not extend to disagreeing with local community decisions about where, which public places they should not be permitted to be carried. >> okay, thank you. i'm not certain if you'll feel comfortable answering this question, but we will try it anyway because it goes into how the supreme court reaches decisions. i've heard the view expressed that at least at the margins in some cases the court is affected by popular opinion and views. and i've heard it stated by some that the fact that many americans believed, according to polls, that they had a constitutional right to bear arms, um, even when the history and precedent did not necessarily support that view, that that may have had some

effect in some way on the court's ultimate decision on herl. what are your thoughts -- heller. what are your thoughts on that general theory of how the supreme court arrives at decisions and how it relates to the heller case. >> well, i can't really speak for anyone else who was then on the court, but in my own thinking about when you, first of all, you limit the issue in the chicago case to the due process clause, the 14th amendment, rather than the privilege and immunities clause which was the primary argument paid by the litigants in the case. the court disregarded or rejected that argument, all except clarence thomas who wrote a very interesting and strong opinion on that particular issue. but if you're just looking at the word "liberty" in the 14th amendment itself, in the due process clause, i do think the

attitude if they're deeply-held views of the people in general about a particular issue, that there is some force to an argument that if people generally felt that they've grown up with the understanding they could have a pistol at home for self-defense purposes and the like, i think that does lend support to the argument that the majority adopted in that case. i think it's trumped by other considerations, but i do think, i do think it's not totally unfair for a member of the court to in trying to appraise the depth of the feeling of the community as a whole, to give some attention to the views of individuals about the right to have a gun at home. ..

>> of course i said that in the descent too. [laughter] >> the supreme court held that the second amendment assures that right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense as you say. the question is asked if that protects gunowners what about those who don't have guns, surely they have a right to self-defense instead of relying on the second amendment dealings on gun laws when it be more rational to go i -- relied on the right we all have for

self-defense? >> i am not sure i actually captured the entire question but it does occur to me that one thing that i thought about from time to time is that maybe you have some kind of a constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 9/11 number at your bedside and that might provide you a little better protection than a gun, just to use it. [applause] >> speaking to us as lawyers who are often in court or writing briefs arguing that the second amendment right should not be extended beyond that which was recognized in heller mcdonald, what arguments, evidence or principles would you think the courts would find most persuasive? >> well, i suppose one of the --

one of the arguments is actually not a direct legal argument but some of the statistics that you assemble from time to time about the damage that is done by unregulated use of firearms and, but it is strange, i have to acknowledge and i find it almost difficult to accept the fact that notwithstanding the recent tragedies that i have mentioned and you mentioned, a little activity that has been in lawmaking bodies to address this issue and of course one of the arguments that i made in both opinions i think is that it's particularly ironic because it's an issue which both sides are well represented and there is no hesitation in getting your views out into the public domain. and when an issue is the subject

of such importance and widespread discussion, the fact that congress doesn't address it i find mind-boggling to tell you the truth. >> you will get much agreement on that thought, justice, and i have to brag that you mentioned the importance of statistics and evidence about the effect of gun violence. it's a great honor to us to site in the mcdonald case which was written largely by the team of hail so thank you for that. >> it had to been a good brief or i wouldn't have said it. [laughter] >> i have a non-gun related question. we litigators like to think that we actually make a difference and we appear before the supreme court or other courts and that we persuade judges at oral arguments especially but also in

our briefs. could you tell us, has there ever been an argument where the oral argument actually switched your vote and generally the effect that briefs and arguments have had on you? >> yes, i am sure there are. i can't put my finger on any right now but i think everybody, any member of the court and maybe someone who has only been there for a year or two like justice sotomayor and just as kagan may not be able to say this yet but over the years, it is absolutely true that both oral arguments and briefs will actually change votes from time to time and sometimes the impact of the argument really doesn't come home until you discuss it in conference and sometimes the argument will change your result. i know a good many occasions when i have come out differently

after on the briefs and certainly before i read my original opinion before reading the briefs. the arguments make a great deal of difference and don't ever think that the court has already made up its mind on most of the issues to come before it. they wouldn't go through the routine and the trouble of having oral arguments and all the rest of it if they didn't think it made a difference themselves in the very fact that they have such reports is i think a demonstration of the fact that they do have an impact on the actual process. of course there are some cases in which the issue is so clear that there is nothing you can do with it but in most cases up there, they are not all that easy or they wouldn't be there. most of those cases, the work of the lawyers makes a huge difference. >> what do you think is the

likelihood the court will take another second amendment case in the next few years and if so, what issues, open issues, do you think it's likely to address? >> i really don't know. i just haven't been privy to any discussions of course since those cases were decided and i know they have left issues open, but i would not expect them to decide a rash of cases. >> i know there hotly disputed issue after heller mcdonald is what standard of review should be applied in second amendment cases and some lawyers seeking to expand quote gun rights have argued that courts should look to the first first amendment and apply that jurisprudence to the second amendment. can you address whether you believe that is appropriate and what standard might be applied

in these challenges? >> well you are maybe asking the wrong person because i have never believed in a righty of different standards for different kinds of cases. i really think that there is basically one standard that is sort of the generous use of the term rational basis. not rational dissent of and i will think of some hypothetical case that would match the standard but is there a reasonable justification for a law that is based on neutral considerations that actually should justify whatever the discriminatory treatment is? so i would assume there might be different standards applied to different issues that arise. i don't think it's necessarily a one-size-fits-all for the second amendment in every case. just as i really think you can't say this same to the first

amendment. i think there is a wide range of issues in which different standards have in fact been applied, even though in the recent case of the statute that makes it a crime to brag about military decorations that you never really received, that in that particular case i think justice kennedy wrote an opinion in which he listed nine or 10 exceptions to the strong presumption that the viewpoint regulation is always impermissible. there are just exceptions to every standard even in the first amendment, so i don't know really how to answer that. but i would have to wait for the case and the particular issue that came up. i don't think i'll second amendment issues will be any more fungible than all first amendment issues are. >> the this is another non-gun question but in your excellent

look, i chiefs, which you don't need me to show for your book, but i would recommend it to everyone. it's an extraordinary book. you discuss some of the conventions that foster civility among the justices and do you have any suggestions on conventions that could -- he within the private bar or on capitol hill? i mean that is a serious question because you have a way of cutting across a lot of the sharp divides in the courts. >> that is an interesting question. you are right, the same approach should apply both within a multi-judge court or within a legislative body or its adversaries in a trial, and i really think it's a very important part of your law practice to treat your adversary with civility and courtesy and i

think you will find you are more persuasive with the court if you do. those who get into bickering over minor discovery matters and the like, they are much more armed for themselves than they realize. i would think it is the same basic professional obligation of integrity and fairness and applies in all three arenas. >> the what do you think is the biggest change that you saw in the court since 1975 and 2010? see if you read my book, you would know the answer to that. [laughter] but i will say the rest in the book. it was the change from thurgood marshall to lawrence thomas. [applause] and i say that with all do respect for clarence. he is a very fine gentleman and a very good scholar but his approach to the legal issues is

so different from thurgood's and is probably the most significant change that occurred airing my tenure. >> someone writes, i will summarize, that they draft and i'm reading from the question, that the draft in the second amendment was motivated by fears of federal tyranny in standing army and how this has informed your reading of the second amendment? >> i think that is a legitimate and correct interpretation of history. they were concerned about having the federal government make malicious unavailable to the states and that concern does not involve in the slightest the right to hunt for example which

was protected and other state constitutional provisions or even the right of self-defense and it was especially protected in-state provisions and in drafts such as madison considered but they ended up drafting a provision that did not mention those other uses, but did have a preamble which identified a particular purpose behind it. so i do think that's very significant. >> this is another question from the audience, which might guess you can't answer that i but i will ask it anyway. are you responsible in part for getting justice scalia to include the advisory portion of the part three of heller? >> one of my responses -- >> part three of the heller, justice scalia's decision and

heller? >> no, i can answer that no. i take no responsible for anything in that opinion. [laughter] [applause] >> another non-gun related question. your feelings on citizens united. [laughter] >> has anybody read the whole dissent? it is a long dissent to read but they are all set forth here. i really think it was an incorrect decision. i do think though that and in justice kennedy's by half, that this seats for that opinion for in the bug laid v. puleo case.

there is language in buckley that does render support to the interpretation that the court took in citizens united and i really think to get that whole area straightened out the way it should, i can't remember the exact language but in substance it says you cannot restrict somebody speech in order to enhance the speech of others, but that isn't what is involved. the question is whether you can oppose equal rules on both participants in a debate, and i think that particular sentence should be disavowed and rewritten, and then the whole -- you could then omit state regulations of spending and contributions designed to equalize the opportunity of rival candidates to express their views, so long as -- in

his writing in buckley, so long as there is an adequate opportunity for both to have -- to make their case effectively to the public. >> this may be a leading question, but it appears from your comment that you would agree that the battles over carrier restrictions and laws that restrict carrying in public and laws that would restrict assault weapons or would require background checks for all gun sales, is it your view that those would be constitutional even under heller mcdonald? >> i really think that is correct and as they say, i do think justice scalia is entitled for the credit for his own

decision or whoever else may have discussed it with him to include part three in the opinion because it doesn't really have to be included at all. >> in your book, you talk about the importance of dissent, of how some great dissents in history have ended up in a position of the court years later and in addition to some of your great majority opinions you have authored some great dissents. are there any in particular that you would like to see or predict you may well see being made into effectively majority opinion in the years to come? >> well, i would like to see them all. [laughter] [applause] but i really think that printz is one of their worst. i really do.

and that would be the first one that i would change. >> another question from the audience. since the context of the second amendment is the outdated problem of citizens having to provisions state subtwelve doesn't that limit the scope of the second amendment? >> i think it would make sense to have the amendment but quite obviously the court decided otherwise. >> i think we have god on reserve some time to give you some tokens of a purge -- appreciation but i have some last minute questions you can ask them. i will ask one for me personally. like you i'm a tennis player and you talk about tennis players in your book. which justice is the best on

those courts and include yourself. don't be bashful. who is the best tennis player on the court? >> on the supreme court. >> you may remember, thought it was pretty good when i played with justice -- when i was a law clerk and i beat him pretty easily in the first set but we had a long second set and he ended up the winner in that. and so, i then began to expect the abilities of aging senators and in that respect carried down to aging judges. >> john, we have a question here. >> hello, sir justice. i have a question and i insisted on asking you personally because i wanted to tell you what an amazing honor it is to really just being your presence. i'm only 18 years old and i'm very interested in law, specifically gun laws. i am and in turn of the

coalition to stop gun violence and my question is as you mention in your description of the heller case, the court consider the fact that many people grew up with the idea that there was a constitutional right to have the gun on your person or in the home and i was wondering while this might not necessarily have been directly constitutionally represented, where do you think this idea came from or this understanding that you could have a gun in your home or on your person? >> where did the understanding come from? >> yeah, if it wasn't directly in the constitution, where do you think he came from? >> i suppose a lot of it came from charlton heston. [laughter] and i think there are very large numbers of private homes in which a gun was kept. notwithstanding knowledge that there might have been unlawful to do so, so i do think it's one

of those beliefs that was encouraged over the years from time to time. >> thank you. >> i have what is called a serious question on the card. and if you can avoid the lawyer witness problem. did babe ruth call his home run in the world series, which i hear you were a witness to. >> it let me give you a little story about that. [laughter] i was asked that question at a judicial conference of the sixth circuit about two years ago, maybe three or four years ago now. and i said at the time, i remembered vividly that responding to the razzing from the guy and pointing to the centerfield bleachers and then hitting the ball over the centerfield into the bleachers

and that satisfy the audience but after the session was over, the question was, a young man, think may have been a bankruptcy judge, i'm not sure, came up to me and said he didn't want to embarrass me in the proceeding before the whole group but his grandfather had been at the game, sitting in the bleachers and one of his treasured possessions was the ball that babe ruth hit into the bleachers, and therefore when i recalled the ball going over the centerfield, my memory, it as is true of people who become older male well have become unreliable. after that experience i went back to the office and asked my law clerk to do some research. [laughter] and she came up with the correct answer. babe ruth hit two home runs on that day. so we were both right.

his grandfather had gotten the ball in the bleachers. [applause] >> if there are no other questions, we have some small tokens of our appreciation. first, jim and sarah brady. they were sorry that they could not make it here today, but jim brady wrote a letter to you which i will give you the original. dear justice stevens, how thrilled i was to hear you would be speaking to the brady legal action project luncheon and i want to thank you for the great honor. i so wish there and i could be there but i know it will be the wisest and most inspirational borders. we are not traveling much these days but look forward to the transcript. as a fellow illinois and, you must know how much pride we have for all you have done for our country. i'm also personally proud to

share with you membership in the quote prestigious society which i reluctantly submit is his aptly named for beloved company. i do know however is you do that they will make it to the playoffs next year. again, my thanks for honoring us on monday. regards, james brady. and, our first gift for you. i was told that there is a movement in your family to convert you from a cubs fan to a nationals fan and i should get -- [applause] a ryan zimmerman autographed baseball might help with that. i was unable to procure that however i was able to get an autographed jane and -- james and sarah autographed baseball. [applause]

also we were hoping that you would be able to wear this to the nationals games in the coming weeks but sadly you are going to have to wait until april. your personalized nationals jacket. [applause] >> thank you. thank you everyone. [applause] >> i really want to thank you for everything you had to say today and even though as you know i'm a cubs fan, i did stay up until past midnight the other night. it was a very sad evening. [applause]

>> thank you all for coming. thank you for supporting us. if you could fill out the cards that are at your tables, whether you are interested in joining us, lawyers for a safer america or not, handed in to staff members who will be making themselves known around the audience and again you very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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>> this isn't about governor bush. it's not about him. it is about you and i want to come back to something i have said before. if you want somebody who believes that we were better off eight years ago than we are now and that we have to go back to the kind of policies that we had back then, emphasizing tax cuts mainly for the wealthy, here is your man. man. if you want somebody who will fight for you and who will fight to have the middle-class tax cuts, then i am your man. now, i doubt anybody here makes more than $330,000 a year. i won't ask you but if you do you're in the top 1%. >> it would be a violation of the rules. >> i'm not going to ask, but if everyone here in this audience

was dead on in the middle of the middle-class, then the tax cuts for every single one of you all added up would be less than the tax cut his plan would give to just one member of that top wealthiest 1%. now you judge for yourself whether or not -- >> the question and we are moving on. 50 million americans -- you may not be one of them and secondly we have had enough fighting. it's time to unite. you talk about eight years come in eight years they haven't gotten anything done on medicare, social security, patients bill of rights. it's time to get something done.

the center for strategic and international studies hosted a discussion on tunisia, morocco algeria and libya. north african countries that are part of what is known as the maghreb. experts talk about the political, economic and security dynamics since the start of the arab spring uprising in late 2010. this portion is about an hour and 20 minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. i am john alterman on global security and geo-strategy and director of the middle east program and it's a real pleasure to welcome you here to this

conference. we for started planning the conference about nine months ago and we drew up our list, are sort of dream team of speakers. every single one of the speakers who is going to be with us today, if there were an all-star game for north africa experts, he would be seeing them play today and i think we are all delighted we are able to pull that together. for several years we have csis have tried to push forward the ideas that the maghreb is an important region or u.s. national and just and for u.s. strategic thinking. for several years we hurt held a roundtable and this is the fourth all-day conference on the north african region in the last five years. for years as well north africans remained on the margins of the u.s. strategic thinking but today's conference and the crowd we expect to be here suggest this is beginning to change. it's hard to look seriously at the middle east for the last 18 months and not conclude that

north africa is indeed important and we need to understand it better. we approached these issues with mixed emotions. ambassador chris stevens was a friend and colleague and his tragic death in libya a month ago is a reminder not only of the dangers posed by hatred but also of the threat that comes in the wake of police forces in disarray, inadequate security and factionalism. and yet we see the same green shoots of hope that gave chris such optimism. historic elections in country after country were conducted with more order and less intimidation than any one had project did and new parliaments are struggling to exercise their new roles. militaries are giving way to politicians and politicians are yielding to the demands of their public or go on the governmental government to level the united states is strengthening partnerships with new allies in deepening long-standing friendship such as the recent

launch of the u.s. morocco strategic dialogue. we have a heightened stake in the process of reform working. this conference is part of csis's ongoing study of maghreb in the understanding of social and political dynamics will affect her decisions and stability in the months and years that. we are going to look at individual countries in maghreb and also the region as a whole as we carry forward this work or go our first panel will look at at the changing politics in maghreb countries in particular how governments will manage shifting expectations analysis thing governments manage more complex political environments and how new governments use their powers. the second panel on economic challenges and opportunities will examine government strategies to manage the the socioeconomic problems that they face and how outside economic factors will impact their ability to create positive change in economic -- the third panel will look at the issues of security and stability across the region especially how governments will manage security

threats and in and one and plans u.s. policies on the region might have been what the u.s. will face in its relations with the maghreb government. to conclude we are honored to host a secretary of state who will deliver a keynote address on transitions underway in the maghreb. secretary secretary clinton's participation today speaks to the importance of the maghreb to u.s. interest. before before a turned over to the moderator for the first panel i want to thank the group for its generous support of this conference and much of the work we do in the months to come. now i'd like to churn it over to my old friend, dan brumberg from georgetown university who will moderate the first panel. dana somebody who i have known i think since i came back to washington about 15 years ago. i was describing dan to somebody just last week as somebody who has said that most things i remember from conferences months and years later and we all go to a lot of conferences and a lot of people say a lot of things

but he has a way of framing issues and boiling things down that even i remember them. so it's a pleasure to have them host. it's a pleasure to have them host this. no pressure at all. he is the codirector of the democracy studies program and the senior adviser to the center for conflict analysis and prevention at the u.s. institute of peace. previously he was a senior associate in the democracy rule of law project and the carnegie endowment for international peace and also previously talked at the university of chicago for which he received his ph.d.. >> thanks john for those kind words and voter confidence. we are the older generation now and we have lots of new generations colors in this room as well. and, i want to say that d.c., the good friend who says

washington is a place where we are constantly involved and in confidence-building measures and i'm glad to hear some of the things i've said and conferences have lingered. i hope i can say a couple of things quick weight and not much because we need to get going. the title of today's conference is maghreb in transition. when i was a student at cairo university more than 20 years ago now, i used to have a professor. some of you must know ali. loosely translated it means we are in a transitional stage and that was in 1986 and everyone was insisting egypt was in a transitional stage. leaders of all governments in the maghreb in north africa would have made a similar argument for the last 20 years and one where another these countries have been in transition and of course what is remarkable is the way in which the government has persisted and in some sense they were in some sense they want. there were only to change and continuity but they evolved into

tunisia which began the arab spring and here hear his little tunisia suddenly on a map in a and a very significant way redefining what it meant to be in transition and suddenly the rules of so-called transition were now challenged. and the questions of course tunisia in that sense is that most forward moving country. in terms of an actual transition. nevertheless all of the countries in north africa and the wider arab world are now on notice to figure out whether they can or cannot or should or should not go beyond the kinds of old rules and mechanisms that persisted in the sort of endless transition, this endless transition and whether they are going to move beyond it and the fact of the matter is in tunisia, algeria and morocco the answer is different to some extent in the ways in which the challenge of the transition to democracy have been placed on the map literally by tunisia and now on the agenda of all these countries. i think what we want to hear

this morning in part is how and in what ways all these countries have responded to that challenge of whether we are into the old transition or something really new so let's think about it in that sense. we have a traffic panel to discuss these and other related issues. to my leftist professor malika zeghal, professor of -- she is going to talk about tunisia and professor of north africa and middle east studies at tufts university will talk about algeria and anwr and assistant professor of political science and international studies at mcdonald college will be talking about morocco. i've been told very clearly that every speaker has a maximum of five minutes and i'm supposed to be -- sorry, 15 minutes and i wanted to see if they were awake. 15 minutes and i'm going to be the supreme leader. i do a lot of work on iran as well so i'm going to be the supreme leader this morning and

enforce that rule rigorously. so, wearebetterthanthis.org you have the floor and of course if you have one of these you are supposed to turn them off. i should've mentioned that as well. >> thank you very much for the introduction and thank you to csis for having me. i'm going to talk about tunisia. a year ago, a year ago, when elections for an assembly were taking place in tunisia, in october 2011, tunisia looked very promising and probably the most promising country who had been part of the arab spring. the elections were free and fair for the first time in tunisia's history and there was an extraordinary freedom of expression and we had seen that tunisia was still protected from the turmoils of geopolitical conflicts in the region.

one year later, in october of 2012 however, the situation seemed uncertain, with a very difficult economic situation. social conflicts, government that was not able to provide public services and attacks on the american embassy months ago which has also led some elites to ask, are we becoming an afghanistan? suddenly, it seems that things have changed, have become much more in certain. there is no institution building taking place today so i would like to argue that even if the situation seems promising, if we are -- indeed, maybe the elections were organized a little bit too early. in order to make this argument, i am going to contract two periods in the tunisian transition.

the first one to place after that the parts are on -- and the second one took place after the elections so the pre-electoral moment in the post electoral moments of the pre-electoral moment was what some people call the magical moment. this period where the transition seems to go very well in spite of all the conflicts that were taking place. why did it work so well? civil society was very strong in fact and the parties seem to have disappeared for a while. when i met with members of the civil society during the year 2011 their dream was to do politics but without political parties so the idea was to invent politics with out the old

parties. for politicals the rcd by the way or the old traditional parties. there was a polarization from the beginning between the secularists or the liberals, but since states were going on them are quite healthy because that is was what was taking place in a context where nobody had any -- the realization of the object of the of the revolution and political transition was in fact not elected and therefore it had no legitimacy but that was very important in the sense that because its members did not feel that they had legitimacy they were extremely cautious and therefore they have always compromised. and i think this period works very well because of the absence

of legitimacy. because there hadn't been elections yet and therefore everyone within the high committee for the end of the revolution felt that they had to compromise. that is what in fact was an important part and actually the high president has called the mystery. therefore, they hide committee was able to do institutional building and one of the amp and -- examples of the achievement is the electoral. this institution building was a problem of course because now the question is how do we build new institutions after the election of october 23, 12,011. so polarization and conflict, yes, but an absence of legitimacy that made everyone cautious during the first period

and forced everyone to compromise. now the second period of the transition starts of course after the election, when tunisians discovered that their society is in fact extremely conservative society. at least this is what the polls suggest. and what the polls have shown also is that the traditional political society had been rejected by tunisia in general so the old parties of opposition have been rejected by tunisians and those who have one are -- as everybody knows but also the parties who did not use the divide between secularism and islam isn't. what is even more interesting is

that the election shows and electoral an electoral map that is completely different from the protest map. the people who present it are not the people who who voted if you will. so the difference here is quite telling and it's going to produce also more conflict after the election. and now we have after the election the electoral legitimacy so it has large margins of maneuverability to do what it wanted to do. there for the polarization becomes more important and there is less need for the opposition to compromise on institution building which has created a very difficult situation in particular the context of social problems and social conflicts become important day after day. civil society remains -- political parties parties have come back and civil society feels marginalized by political

societies by the new force of the political parties especially a to hold transitional process has renewed the -- because they are now governing and have also been marginalized by the election. so the polarization changes in its nature after the election. also because the salafis have emerged after the election, pushing towards the right and making it extremely difficult to be at the center, something they wanted from the beginning. they really wanted to be in the center and to move towards the center so this has created difficulty. also there are threats from civil society. the ug bt/-- divide has become

very important so this has also created more difficulty for the troika to govern. the third element in this new polarization, the changing nature of the polarization is of course the question of islam and its relationship to -- and we have seen more and more trials and we see the courts with new actors in the transition dealing with questions of legitimate freedoms and freedom of expression and that is also polarizing the debate. so, there is no more need to compromise for all parties and today, the political landscape is more and more polarized into big parts. on the one hand that tunisia

call that represents the liberal as well as the old party that is coming back to the political arena. now, what does that do? it creates a new type of polarization within political society and it seems that in fact these two parties were very much in parallel and that they are the mirror of each other. so what you have is the political landscape in which accusations are thrown against the other party constantly so another accuses infected channel to come back and accuses another to impose its hegemony on the

political arena. now, what is interesting is that when you listen to another narrative as well as the tunis narrative, they both see themselves as mass parties, big mass national party that has as a mission not necessarily to participate in the democratic game, but to shape the preferences of tunisians and civilized tunisian society and this has been the narrative but it is also the narrative of -- another push to islamize tunisian society from the bottom up but that represents the modernist nationalistic ethos. now we are not talking about the

reference has gone back -- [inaudible] those two parties look at the other one is having a democratic intention. it is very, in fact, when you look at both parties, it is very difficult to evaluate those and that is true i think for both of them. so i would like to rebalance the way those two parties have been presented in particular by the media and while they are in fact fact -- on the political scene there is no institution building that is made, that is shaped, and so in a few days on october 23, we are supposed to have the first draft of the constitution. we don't know what is going to happen after october 23. we will -- what we see is too

big polls that want to shape society in the way they see fit and two big parties that shoes, and that i think is important, the institutions of the old states to shape society. this is why i think they did not need to ask for sharia to being integrated in the constitutional narrative. he doesn't need sharia and the constitution. he has everything he needs in the law of the state's. i see them being in grade continuity and for instance the press loved 1975 to implement any anti-blasphemy laws for

instance. you don't need to implement sharia laws against blasphemy or even to constrain expression, freedom of expression. so in a way, i am optimistic of course about tunisia but cautiously optimistic as i think what you see there is the continuity of the old state. it doesn't seem that there are any intentions to change the institutions of that whole state, which in fact are very useful for oth tunis to reshape society for tunis in a modernist direction rather than an islamic one. so i will stop here and i look forward to our discussion. >> thank you very much and it

was a model of superb analysis and remedy at the same time. i also have a sinus as sinuses please continue. i'm not exact he sure why i needed that sign. i'm trying to figure that out. it is rather intimidating. the thing i would, tunisia was supposed to be a good happy case and al stepan in our other colleagues writing about tunisia have talked about how the model has been established by a constitution between islamists and secularists early in the process and now we are reminded that if you have your focus on today's event you will see the bigger picture and certainly what is striking about what you said among other things is that the regime is able to go back to 1975 law and use it to respond and to address it so that critics do not have to institutionalize mechanisms to to do so and that gets to the question of what kind of the transition we are looking at here so i think that was really

an interesting way of framing the issues. you are next. >> thank you. well, good morning ladies and gentlemen. when asked to discuss algeria, under the rubric of changing politics in a new era, my heart sank. because of course it is begging the question that things are significantly changing and all jerry. is it changing a lot really or if not, i'm going to tell you it is not changing very much. i am going to address the question, what is holding this up? algeria is the bad pupil and the one that is not sending in its essays on time. it is the exception to the arab spring and of course i expect most of you to be familiar with

the -- and the question is why the exemption and i want to spend time on that. i want to address the different set of issues to deal with the obstacles to change and the omissions in the algerian body politic that are in my view responsible for the absence of the kind of change that is desirable. but i want to do something else first which is to go through a checklist of questions to do with for instance government strategy and the presidential succession so-and-so i'm going to deal with that first. one of the facts about algeria that is to be borne in mind is of course that it's an oligarchy which means that it's sort of a problem of algeria. ..

january 2011. it's quite spectacular pay rises so virtually everybody demanding them and everybody did demanded them. it allocated a lot of money to fund the provision of credits and other ways to invest in small businesses for unemployed youth. for example, the second element is a strategy and the algerians are masters.

they are geniuses in the art. they develop skills in this field during the revolution that never deserted them, and they're very good at coopting new instance to the political stage as a way of stymying the veterans figures of the opposition and the e elections that were held this summer were an occasion precisely for introducing under the egis of the sponsorship and a new element of political personnel authorized to find new parties as a way of being coopted into the political dispensation. at the same time it's a regime that doesn't hesitate with opposition figures when it decides that that is the smart thing to do. a third element is of course the

stick, the carrot and the stick and it doesn't hesitate to use that either. it's been striking that while generally seeking to coopt discontent or buy it off, the regime has been taking a very hard line against elements of a certain source of unrest, particularly those unemployed who instead of going out to get credit have been actually demonstrating demanding jobs. it actually matters on that nuance whether you get a handout or if your head broke. the regime is not interested in really undertaking the new change in economic policy that leads to significant job creation therefore it's been quite harsh with those elements of the algerian youth demanding that and campaigning for it. it's also of course being engaged in a more or less standard progress of human rights organizations and making life in particular difficult for what is in many respects in my

view the most helpful aligned on the algerian seemingly the development of independent trade unions outside of the corporatist state control of the workers, the regime. they ban such independent unions but it can make life for them and does so. finally another element you might call the stick is the fact they don't hesitate to destabilize those opposition figures who it considers to pose a serious threat to it as jake could tell you some along those lines as has been seen by the regime a perfect constitutionalist peaceful political figure he's someone the regime has destabilized repeatedly. and of course it knows how to destabilize by organizing internal opposition with an opposition parties to bring down the leader of the party.

so, there is a whole range of things it's been doing and i've gone halfway through the the repertoire and it's still rigging the elections. the algerians have now got to the point where they are rigging the elections legally. think about. and that is actually what part of the battery of so-called reforms that would put forth a year ago the electoral law enables the algerians operating strictly within the terms of the law to rig the elections of that it produces the right result. i will go into that if people want me to explain how this is done but take it for me this is what they've done. the rating is really sophisticated and can't really any longer be described as criminal. some, there is a problem there. and finally, of course tightening up a lot of the laws passed a year ago endorsed its

reforms by a spokesman for the western government. i am afraid that they involved substantial tightening up. this is particularly clear in bill law and the associations that tightened up in various respects. one of them being that concerning the funding of the association's by the outside sources. another one being that political parties may not have links with the associations or associations with political parties. that's something that is already present but is being reaffirmed. that is one aspect of the position in algeria. second aspect is of course in a sense the algerian political class are waiting for the succession to be resolved. and it is due in 2014. and i am not going to speculate much about this. it's something that occupies a

good deal of the political elite. but i think it's important to flag there may be a serious problem on the horizon in so far as we may be looking at a complicated complex double or triple succession. it's not just the presidency. the chief of staff is very elderly as the general, and the head is just a couple years younger and has been rumored to be on well. the point is the presidential succession won't be a problem, won't be too big of a problem if the forces that normally arbitrate such matters are in the saddle but if in fact we are seeing a multiple succession crisis and the question arises who concentrates any of it and a part of the context of the terrible descent into violence 20 years ago was the fact that

you had a complex, not a simple but a multiple succession problem in the algerian elite and that is a context where you get a massive aggravation of the fighting within the regime. so i am a little worried about that possibility of a complex not a simple succession a year or two from now. don't want to be alarmist, just flagging it as a possible difficulty. how much longer do i have? >> [inaudible] >> really? that's good. i was asked to say something about the military. an important fact about the military with scarcely any exceptions, the entire now consists of officers who did not take part in the war of liberation. in other words, the military -- individual generals do not have the historic revolutionary legitimacy of the early generations of the high command.

what is at issue is the extent to which the army collectively has legitimacy beyond its specific military defense security functions. to what extent does the army retain political legitimacy? over the last eight years, the regular army has been in the wings by getting rid of the previous chief of staff who overplayed his hand but he has persuaded the regular army to stay out of the political limelight. and that provides the problem, but it meant that she wasn't the only game. the other was the head of the military intelligence. so the drs, the department which covers the whole of the intelligence services has become

more powerful over the last eight years than it was previously, and there's been this polarization if you like within the regime between the presidency and the drs as the two crucial power centers in the executive of the state. what that means is one thing we have to ask ourselves is what extent the algerian army can make a political comeback. in the event that there is a succession problem in the drs. i think that a second aspect is the extent to which the drs has grown over the years to a size and weight performing a range of functions that are dually is unprecedented and there's a question whether it can actually sustain that or whether there has to be some process of training in and of a redistribution of power away

from the drs as presently constituted. that is something that can also be put on the medium to long term agenda as a possible issue. what about the opposition? the crucial aspect of what has been happening is the failure of algeria to go with the trend that has seen the islamists become the key players elsewhere, in tunisia, egypt and so on and this actually is not a matter of rigging. i think people do need to understand that the moment and algeria has come and gone and they're still of course allowed to play. the alliance as it was called told them 149 seats in the election in the summer gooding 10.5% of the seats. but i think that the things that have given them purchase on the popular reflex in the past are

gone. they mobilized the utopian element in the algerian populist tradition. that's broken. it can't be repaired. people are no longer utopian in algeria. the illusions crashed a long time ago but that utopianism was a premise of the islamic salvation front ability and the problem is that since the utopian formula went, the islamists have not been able to develop a convincing reformist formula. the only one who really had the intellect and the vision to do so is the regime and they've noticed that and headed them off with a pass every time he looked as if he's getting somewhere. okay. i've got two minutes and 40 seconds left. right? 42 seconds. i just want to hammer the point that no one else is making

because virtually all of the western discourse on the problem of political change in this part of the world defines the problem as the authoritarian not the dictatorial for chemical regime. i want to insist that a big problem, a big part of the problem of the absence of interesting change in algeria are the weaknesses of the opposition, weaknesses but simply not in the effect of the behavior of the regime. the regime is not a very oppressive. there are hardly any political prisoners in algeria. there is a lot of scope for debate in the press. algeria is not a very humphrey place. but it is run by an oligarchy and it isn't well governed and there is a lot of discontent and justifiable discontent. but the problem is the so-called opposition. they are not really in opposition. what the regime has done since the introduction of pluralism in 1989 is organize a kind of periphery around the core of the

oligarchy to a number of dissidents. you have a lot of different bands of dissidents. the dissidents in a sense neutralize each other. a lot of the complex composition is between the dissidents, jockeying for the position limelight and that extra little marginal increase in the seats and the patch that that gives the leaders of the dissident parties. leaders that often turn out to be immovable and in position decade after decade. think of who's been leading the socialist friend since 1963. and the point is these opposition parties have no propositions for real reform. they are not saying anything. they are demanding exchange, never defining it. reform, never explaining. a government bound by the law. never defining how one gets there and what it really means. i can remember in the 1999 so-called presidential elections altogether candidates were

saying they were in favor. not one of them explained what he meant by that or how we get there. so i really want to raise this as an issue that we have a kind of opposition that is part of the problem. the regime has in essence create a problem for itself by being a little bit too smart. it's organized this nonthreatening environment of pluralism. pluralism that is manipulable, patronized, and in a sense controlled, but it's ultimately useless. and the result, the fundamental reason why algeria isn't producing the change, of course the reasons you know about, the scars of the violence in the nineties and had its arab spring 20 years ago the algerians have a point when they say we were way ahead of everybody. that is all perfectly true. but the fundamental reason i want to suggest it is people do not know what to do. both the regime and the

opposition have reached the limits of their repertoire and the west and its discourse on change in this region are not suggesting anything useful to them at all. let me leave it there. thank you. >> fantastic. hugh has always been one of the most astute analysts. he's done a marvelous job of describing the emergence of algeria's own version of lubber allies to autocracy, and of course i think he described what i consider liberalized autocracy and how you get out in part depends on whether but regimes about decisions can envision something beyond the kinds of roles and the dynamics that he was describing. i say this because i think it's an interesting question to ask about morocco is in the game or they might move beyond that. having said that i will ask

anwar to come up for his presentation. >> thank you for inviting me. so, moroccan men to leave to politicians in putting in power like to explain political reforms in quite simple terms. the less you change, the easier it is to achieve change. so, the great year of the consensus concerning the perception of the balance of power between the major actors in morocco the more likely a new set of rules can be accepted by all. this is what happened when the uprising in the arab world began in 2011. so, the only important problem after the arab spring reached morocco as defined in the balance and power. there were clearly on the defensive and it was forced to look for new allies to expend its support base. in the end, it found the

moderate islamists of the pgd the best partner to weather the storm. so the challenge was solved quite easily. the strongest factor smartly crafted an explicit set of rules and codified them in a constitution that looks good on paper. the distribution between actors changed, though slightly, and the balance of power was recognized by all significant actors. so the constitution provides a margin of political maneuverability that did not previously exist. this is at the pgd islamist like to call for a third way. so, but despite its democratic overtones, despite its space leanings, the constitution suffers from some ambiguities.

the text can be interpreted differently, depending on the balance of power in a moment. so, for now the third way remains an unbalanced power between the palace and the islamist, the bgd. the islamist bgd believe the balance what eventually shift slowly their way as the party gains experience. as it puts its mark on social and economic policy. and as it chooses its battles, political battles judiciously and prudently. i must also say the palace cannot afford for the bgd to fail. or backpedal incremental reforms. so there are three stages to the process according to the leadership of the pgd as the put it in private. the current transition itself which is reflected by the lower

levels of dhaka see. this is, they say, the best that the pgd could hope for given the lopsided balance of power between the regime. el sereno in the incumbent led transitions, those in power are expected to design the reform and rules in a way that favors them. so that's the transition, the current transition. number two, transitional growth which is reflected by increasing levels of transparency, accountability as the pgd tried to build stronger institutions of government and a robust civil society emerges. at the last step, which is space consultation. such policies would work, again, according to the leadership of the pgd in a protracted, slowly and deliberately as everything else in morocco functions. slow, protected but delivered.

these would proceed gradually and incrementally. social transformations, political transformations, economic transformations would proceed or are likely to be accomplished only if they are spaced out over a good deal of time. if they are approved sequentially, and if they build up an existing order rather than try to dismantle its. so, slow transitions that are conservative or more durable than the radical transformations so, right now we have is a political gamesmanship over the interpretation and over the implementation of the provisions of the constitution to read over the government appointments, over the reforms of the media, the reforms of the judiciary, and over fighting corruption. many of the constitution's as you know still inquire organic

law. the head of the government genuinely believe that the pgd must avoid confrontation will decline. he believes democracy and progress will not emerge out of a confrontation with the balance. only cooperation, he said in morocco. so the small changes the pgd introduced so far are framed as a positive game in which the party may not all retain its preferred outcome but settled for the second best outcome that nonetheless represent an improvement over the old status quo. pgd points to a set of accomplishments. the party has discarded his predecessors and for example connects better with the people. the first time members of ministry declared their assets

to pgd now has the right to appoint over 1,000 senior government officials. they can only select 40, though the most strategic ones that's for the pgd a huge improvement. in the economic and social realm, the government has set up a social solidarity fund half of which is contributed by the private sector. it will be primarily aimed at funding medical care for those experiencing financial hardship and promoting education for children from poor families. another fund that the speech will help create is a family support fund which was set up for divorced women whose former husbands cannot pay their food allowances. so, the pgd can claim credit for a new national health service program which has benefited

8.5 million markets and financed by private companies earnings. pgd has begun to reform public assisted governance, to support the undertaking of the microeconomic reforms and the his doubles and of a strong corporate sector to do so again, this sequence starts with reforms of public governments, improved accountability at the ministerial level than of the public level and they say would alleviate poverty and would have a positive effect on the economic government and would await investment. the pgd is aware of the challenges it faces, and it faces many. is also aware of the resistance through its efforts to promote accountability and transparency. so far though pgd has i believe demonstrated its sincere trying to promote accountability and transparency.

we don't know whether it will succeed. i think it is too early to tell. we cannot judge the experiment based on nine months. it's too early to tell. so, the government's battlefield as we move forward will be on the effort to enact the organic law that i talked about earlier including the implementation of the region, the judiciary and the law that introduces the languages. the government's ability to implement significant reforms, however, also to a large degree depend on its cooperation with the palace. the pgd has proposed several reforms but some of them have collided with interest of senior civil servants, military businesses that have access to the supreme court power. all these reforms would require the strong backing of the palace

unless you are a confrontation and would also require strong backing by the parties in the collision government as well as of course substantial change in the mentality of the government's bureaucracy. so, we have seen how the pgd's efforts to tackle corruption is allowing some representatives within its own, and the pgd was accused of being a populist. the minister of justice hard liner ran into trouble when he tried opening the investigations against the figures close to the regime, the foreign minister and the current treasurer. this move, according to an observer, clearly upset the relations between the pgd and the palace. many in private conversations it complains that it doesn't have

control over several employees in his ministry for example who owe their positions to the control over the ambassador, he says. they are not a party in power. it's an illusion. we exercise power with other parties, the minister in charge of relations, and the youngest minister of communications grumbles but there are efforts to undermine the government whenever it launches the reform initiative. in the judicial sector, he said it's the judges who are mobilized by the forces to foster change. in the social grommets the unions but co-op but syndicates. in the media it's the coopted process. we all remember what happened last march when the reform torpedoed. the pgd promised voters that

once in government it would exercise oversight over finances and programming of television and radio, this resulted in clashes with officials close to the regime. obviously neither of who these hidden forces or but i think we have i guess. the skirmishes between the pgd -- the pgd is trying to choose its battle and choose carefully. the skirmishes came to a head a couple months ago in august when a young pgd leaders criticized the can for not adhering to the constitution. the palace allegedly reacted to this complete by banning the pgd event where the secretary-general and head of

the government was to deliver a speech. as one scholar put it in the head of state and head of government was speaking using the local authority of the interior to do so. and the minister of the interior is supposed to be an out -- outlier. they are better equipped to resist pressure because there are endowed the comparisons between this experiment and the experiment of the 1998 socialist. the pgd leadership this number and the body ensures the youth plays an important role and its more transparent and the islamist party when it comes to the election and it's also more ambitious and very calculated. but the biggest challenge for the pgd is the economy i think. how to reconcile the desire to advance morocco's standing in

international rankings and the competitiveness when the calls for social justice. the mark is complicated by several factors. as i said, the coalition. the pgd only holds 107 seats out of 395 seats in the lower house of parliament. it only has 11 of 31 ministers, cabinet. the upper house is also indirectly elected by notables the first and dominated by the regime supporters. when the coalition government was formed, the pgd expected growth to be 7%. the was revised to 5% and now 3.5%. this would have obviously repercussions on the pgd. so just to conclude, and then can open up for questions, the

king is still in charge. his personal legitimacy remains intact. he's very popular obviously. most want change but insist on a peaceful transition that adverts the country down, taking the country down the risk of destabilization protests which would necessarily meet with violent state repression having talked about the opposition and we can discuss that in the discussion. thank you very much. >> terrific. thank you very much. i was really superb. as i was listening to this presentation by anouar and then thinking about hugh's presentation thinking about algeria it is very difficult to see an opposition that can find a way to push the regime in any substantial way given the kind of political culture of the opposition that you've described in the case of morocco of course this is an extremely sophisticated opposition of the

finest way to both engage and occasionally of confrontations in the regime and one can see the possibility for some sort of a gradual cooperation that might further push the political system down towards some sort of transition. so it's a hopeful case of course but nevertheless i think anouar's presentation illustrated the limits that exist right now in morocco we have right now about 20 minutes for questions. please ask brief questions. no speeches, please. identify yourself and let us know specifically to whom the question is addressed. yes, sir. >> my name is charles -- my name is charles, the world of vice president of moroccan jews.

you didn't mention at all, you know, you didn't explain the altar and position on the western sahara and the expanding al qaeda and the monrad in the style. i would like you to address that. my second question is quickly you mentioned the position of morocco today explaining the political situation. it seems like morocco or monrad has been the only country that has provided stability right now and has been a model for the rest of the arab spring countries. i think the democracy in morocco will be forthcoming but it's

better to come through negotiations and political moves than the radical change as we have seen in tunisia and libya and egypt. thank you. >> know about the position on the western so i left that out. the algerians of course have been sustaining their position over the years despite everything that is being done to try to pressure them out of it. i think that the questioner of al qaeda and islamic speed 11 debate to -- maghreb this is the leader panel was going to be dealing with. with the major aggravation of the problem in part of the

predictable fallout of the destruction of the state in libya is unquestionably beginning of the strategic position. so the question may be of how long it can sustain its defensive principled position on the western sahara. that may be at issue now simply because the extent to which algeria is beginning to fall into circles strategically and on the defensive. >> anouar and the path forward for morocco? >> for now i think so. because there is still no appetite in the streets for radical change. moroccans are still giving time to this experiment that cautiously optimistic as i said it's only nine months. but things cannot easily change. the pgd still believes that it

can effect change in partnership they have been frustrated. they believe that there is a struggle to delineate the contour of power that season each other up. the marquee puts limits and the pgd obviously cannot cross and it concedes in some other areas. so the pgd believes that the first thing they need to do is to operate from within the system, know how the system operates. know who the actors are and then start to change it from within. we have seen at the pgd there were elections and a couple of weeks ago and the several actors believe the pgd was set to lose popular support. in fact the pgd crushed the opposition and it showed that

they hadn't lost yet its appeal. the turnout was low but nonetheless the pgd is still with it because the challenge is to address the concerns of the base and at the same time address the concerns of the palace so far now incremental changes the way to go. they see this happening in egypt and syria and for now that is not the path they want to travel if it backtracks on the reforms and the economy suffers coming you know, if this model fails then i don't know what is next.

>> good morning. - carlton from the u.s. embassy. a couple of my colleagues and i came to town with a counterterrorism partnership conference. my question is a cross cutting one for all of the members of the panel. are there factors internal or external that might motivate the countries of this region to cooperate more together to break down some of the barriers for example between algeria and morocco and if so do the include security? could we see more cooperation perhaps on counterterrorism or to resolve the complex for example >> what might bring the country of the region for the regional

basis. >> schoomaker it is a major change in the french policy. >> i don't see it ceasing to do so. >> aaron with the institute for near east policy. i have a question. on tunisia i was just wondering what do you think is the future

for the party when you see the sort of polarization between tunis and he's just out there and i have a question regarding whether you think there's any pressure within tunisia from the opposition. a lot is that he's essentially wielding power for the group even though he is an unelected leader. i have a question whether you think there is any pressure from the opposition regarding the fact that he is essentially wielding power for even though he is actually not an elected official so i was wondering if you could talk about that. thank you. >> it's a great question except for the second one because what you can see is that he acts as a defector president in a way, as the diplomacy when people visit from the middle east they come

to him so he has become a national figure even if he is not elected and he probably feels he has a legitimacy to do so and of course the opposition is strongly against about so i don't want to give the picture that the landscape is not vibrant and lively, it is extremely vibrant and lively, and the new freedoms that have emerged make that political arena and extremely interesting and shoddy enough not to criticize and i think that he has his share of enemies and critics and i don't think that's a problem. i think a lot of tunisian politics have seen those critiques and the very tense political arena as being undemocratic but this is what

democracy is. so this is not anti-democratic. it's part of a healthy game and i think the person who understands that is malzuki. it's the congress. it's not a party and i think he knows this and this is why the party is not existent anymore. it's finished but i don't think that it's in the creative party and he himself in a book that has been republished in 2011 is the book of interviews with a french political scientist he explains that very well and says in the the the local party's i'm not what they are looking for. it's something that they are not really attracted by said he has understood the conflict has to continue and i'm not talking

about the violent fear but the flip side is that marzuki has a difficult time to play the role of the president. so he hasn't been able to be this model guardian of the republic. he has had a very difficult time to be the figure unifying of tunisia because he has made the choice to ally with another because of the polarization of the political landscape has also weakened him very much. so it is interesting to see that the power of the presidency is not what it used to be but maybe that is for the best. on the affair and it has weakened marzuki's figure so the question is what role will he play after the next election? >> in egypt president morsi is from the framework but they have their own project and its

economic and political and social and the relationship between that project and the political project of reform that morsi is trying to head up is an interesting one to think about and i hear echoes of a little bit of this in the case. yes, sir on the right to disconnect for any or all of the panelists. has there been any discussion about what's going on in other countries -- jon, the center. there hasn't been discussion what is going on among the countries. they are in transition and have hundreds of years of relationships. lots of affinity particularly of this between algeria and morocco but there's been many visits between senior government officials from all the countries, private sector, they are participating. what is your sense if not on the government level on the civil society level of the activities among the society in algeria,

tunisia and morocco? >> we will go into this on the panel but in terms of the gentleman's questions if anyone wants to tackle that on the political level. >> that's a good question. >> which do you mean? >> [inaudible] >> increased interactions since whatever, the arab uprising among officials with their neighbors in tunisia have there been more interactions in tunisia which has taken a leadership role in resurrecting the amu? where is that going or anywhere? with regard to morocco, does it have a broader regional role now in a had two years ago in terms of new government? the seals self in that role? it is a fairly logical question

and the vision of the region. it doesn't see itself as a region any more than it did two years ago. >> this is a question that probably could have received for answers later today but i would simply say one little aspect. i don't think that personally i am not convinced any measurable increase in the velocity of the meetings between officials is particularly significant. but i can say something about public attitudes and algeria to what's been going on around algeria and i would say this, i'm talking about the public opinion, popular opinion, ordinary algerians were to vary the use in this the last -- enthusiastic and impressed by what happened in egypt and they were initially inclined to see what happened in libya through the same lens until the intervention when that was -- that have a major impact on algeria popular attitudes.

and the development of a government discourse that is a negative critique of the arab spring gained from that moment so that's one aspect of it and the development subsequently has led to a kind of reassertion of what you could call the mentality of the feeling of being surrounded and on the defensive. >> when i listened to the three americas there was something that strikes me. it essentially says it's a major

issue in the transition going back to your issue is the polarization between the secular stand dimond secular -- non-secular and this doesn't appear, so my question is to mr. roberts. it does this belong in where it's going in terms of the opposition the to the secular and religious and he knows what algeria has done beyond that and i don't think it has done away the issue of deutsch of religion and secular and so on and there is a statement when they talk about the pjd it's like

something else and the government as part of the regime and my sense. so what is the story? it's like something out side of the regime and then the monarchies what i see is the secular a stand dimond secular it's like the malarkey and then -- pg. >> why don't we start with anouar and then have a few minutes to wrap up. >> sure. the new constitution is ambiguous, so the head of the government has power but there's still the interpretation of what that power means, so in that there are differences between

the pgd as a party in power it does not control the government its one among many so it doesn't have a majority. but there have been skirmishes between the two. because right now as i said the challenge is how to interpret the constitution in a more space way. as far as polarization, yes, there is position and there has always been polarization between the secularists and islamists. we have seen that in the movement in february 20th for example how it broke up and the withdrawal from the movement. so the ideological polarization has emerged again and obviously that is inimical to the political progress. we have seen battles between the pgd over the median of forms and the of their parts. some of them are based on ideology and some of them are

opportunistic because this is where the attack if you see the media reform it's true he wand to introduce more ar oversight but really the platform with the media reform is that it is wanted and more oversight over the finances and the program so there is polarization and that is contributing to some. >> did you want to dd something very quickly? i'm getting signals from the true supreme leaders to wrap up soon. >> i think it's an interesting question. just to follow up on the question i think tunisia doesn't have a military that is part of the oligarchy so that makes the polymerization visible and shape thpotil fielin different ways that i woul syisted and might be more hidden in

algeria and morocco because the presence of the king and the military is lucky enough to have but it makes the transition more risky. >> just very quickly the polarization between the islamists and secularists work years ago was the polarization the trend of forms of identity politics neither of which were capable of developing a possible government which is what suited to the regime very well. it's become less bitter because in the course of the 90's the islamists stopped believing in the idea and the secularist backed off the idea of producing the algeria. both sides dropped to their utopianism and they both basically subscribe to the compromise constitution established through the

revisions in 1996. all of the debate coveys accept the constitution. there's no longer associated with either of these identity positions therefore it is becoming gradually be politicized. the problem is that is reflected a lot of interest in the whole question of constitutional change which is part of the reason for the impasse, the so-called opposition has absolutely no idea what to do about promoting of a constitutional change. once it is given of utopia, it can't address reform. but that's the reason for the softening if you like of the polarization. >> okay. i'm afraid we are going to have to wrap this up. i am clearly hearing that we need to move on to the other panel and there isn't much time between this one and the next one so thank you very much for a fantastic introduction to the day. [applause]

we continue now with the center for strategic and international studies discussion on north africa, in particular tunisia, morocco, algeria and libya. two of the countries, tunisia and libya overthrew long ruling dictators while the government in algeria and morocco have remained mostly intact. this one out or and 15 minute panel will fit the economics of the region. >> it's my pleasure to open the second panel today on an issue which i think all the people who

follow this closely think is probably the key to success. it's easy to talk about the politics. it's easy to imagine political agreements. but the hardest thing is getting the economy to work. the economy is the underning nutrient that makes it possible to have political compromise. and of course the economy and north africa have a series of columns, they are a short-term crisis but also long-term vulnerabilities that previous governments from the enormously difficult to address and the current government's even more fragile than their predecessors at the current time often find even more difficult to address. at the same time we look at the region we see the untapped potential. we see the region not only as a source for global energy supplies but also the markets

and investment in the regional trade and what we have assembled a here is what i think is a rather remarkable list to people to help block us through where we are and where we might go. speaking first, dr. speed is the chief economist to the middle east and north africa at the world bank she previously worked at the international monetary fund and the federal reserve where she focused on growth international trade and international finance in the developing world and transition countries. after her, dr. mustapha nabli as of the bank of to tunisia at the world bank middle east and north africa division and senior adviser to the world bank chief economist it he also served concurrently as the minister of economic development in a tunisian and the planning of regional development as well as the chairman of the tunisia

stock exchange. dr. mostafa terrab is the director-general and chairman of the board of trustees of ocp. i will not in flight my friends on anybody. that stands for something. you can imagine what would be. trust me, it's much better that way. [laughter] arabic is easy for me, french is beyond me. prior to joining to is the lead regulatory specialist in the global inflation of communications department at the world bank. we also had the information for development program. he also served as a director-general for the national telecommunications regulatory authority in morocco and as an adviser in the world can read and robot and it said analysts and the transformations it comes to the assistance for bechtel and minerals incorporated. what we are trying to understand in this panel, and i think it's a quite remarkable array of talent to address is what are the strategies to address the

issues of unemployment, education and social spending? what's the near-term strategy and the longer term strategy? what kind of approaches can the government take to provide a social safety net? obviously the transition to adopting the social safety net to different kinds of structures and different kinds of restraints is very important. we look to see the european economy in the european economy that is much more integrated with north africa. what does the european recovery mean for the things the the political and economic changes were concerned about in north africa and then of course the questions of the u.s. role and of the role of the islamist parties that are rising and what is their attitude towards change and we have a host of expertise and by alaska dr. fruend to begin. thank you.

>> first let me start by thanking the organizers for inviting me and i'm honored to join this esteemed panel. also recognize i'm less of an expert on the region than the other panelists, succumbing from the world bank, i am going to talk in part about the economic challenges in the framework of other regions which is the comparative the advantage of the world bank. i'm going to discuss three issues in my remarks today. first some experiences from other space transitions because the arab spring was remarkable and it was unprecedented but there were also previous episodes are somewhat similar. so in fact, we can identify 90 other transitions in the last 50 years that we might be able to learn something from.

.. >> we simply pulled together all the transitions that have taken place over the last 50 years and looked at this data to see are there obvious o patterns that emerge -- obvious patterns that emerge. so we used this polity4 database, i'm sure of the pretty

sal scientists here are familiar with it. and what you can do is look at what happens if you have a regime that's an autocracy, and it suddenly jumps to democracy and is able to sustain it. so we create this kind of filter where we can define successful democracy transitions, successful democratic transitions as a sustained and substantial increase in this index. and we can define failed ones as a situation where it improved, but then goes back or improved only slightly. and then finally, gradual ones where this index slowly changes over time. and just to give you some statistics, there were 90 transitions in the last 50 years. this is eastern europe, this is latin america, this is africa,s, this is asia. all over, a few in men that as well, in menna it includes

lebanon,30% were failed. in menna it includes algeria in our sample, iran andy booty, and 15% were gradual, so they were the slow type of transition. what happened during these transitions? well, very similar to what we saw happen in tunisia. growth plummeted in one year by about five percentage points on average, exactly what we saw in tunisia where we had 3% growth in 2010, and it dropped to negative two last year. but it recovered really quickly in most transitions. this is also what we're seeing in tunisia. it's back up to predicted at 2% this year, and this is kind of what happened in most transitions, and then a few years out it goes back to normal. and one thing that's especially interesting in these rapid

transitions is the long run growth after transition tends to be somewhat higher than the pretransition growth by about a percentage point. so that regime change did stimulate some sort of economic changes that improved growth prospects. but of special interest, it didn't matter if the democratic transition was successful or failed. we so that effect in both types. in contrast, the gradual transitions, these slow transitions, tend to actually have the worst outcomes. they have growth dips that are about double what we see in the rapid transitions and are much more protracted, taking five years before growth improves. but within the gradual there's two kinds of groups. there's the group that's gradual because the democracy doesn't take hold, so it's, so there's constant struggle and uncertainty.

and there's a group that does it really well in a predictable way. ghana's such a country that had very strong growth during a gradual transition because they did it in a predictable way with a very popular leader in power who was actually the one who turned it to a democracy and managed to stay in power and get elected in a free and fair election. so it is possible to do the gradual transition well. but the reason the growth is worse on average during gradual transitions is because of uncertainty. and this is what we're seeing now in this region where uncertainty is so high. a recent survey we did of investors, the world bank did jointly with the economic intelligence unit, showed that 60% of investors are on the sidelines or withdrawing investment in developing menna. so uncertainty is the first thing. countries really need a plan to

resolve this uncertainty in order to bring investment and growth back. one other thing we saw from this study is that there are spillover effects in the form of regional spillover effects. whole regions are more likely to see successful transitions if you look at a map of these transitions, you see that regions tend to move together if one country moves first. so this puts some pressure on tunisia really to get it right. it sparked the revolution, if it can get it right, it can have a huge demonstration effect for the rest of the region. so just to sum up on this first point, what i want to emphasize is that in these rapid transitions irrespective of whether they go back to

autocracy or succeed, growth tends to resume and just replacing the regime tends to improve that, the outcome because leaders realize they'll get ousted if they don't improve things, perhaps. but predictability in setting a road map for transition are so important. this uncertainty during what happens in these gradual transitions that are gradual not by design, but by default, that's a real problem. the second point i want to talk about is some of the main economic challenges and really focusing on the long run/short run trade-off. because if we don't get the short run right, there's a danger that the long run is going to be compromised as a result. so if we think about the structural issues, one thing that sums it up to me is if we look at china.

china's been growing at 10% with unemployment below 5%. if we look at countries like algeria, morocco, tunisia, we see precisely the reverse. we see growth under 5%, around 5 %, and unemployment well above 10%. why is in the case? why has growth been so slow? and that's overall growth. if you look at per capita growth, the statistics are even worse. well, there's a few reasons. i mean, a bulk of it is this absence of a vibrant private sector, but why hasn't the private sector been able to take off? there's the bloated government sector where we see higher wages and more workers in that sector than in other similar economies. there's in this so-called skills mismatch where businesses say they can't find qualified

workers, but workers at the same time are saying they can't find good jobs. and that's because the education system has developed in a way where people are getting educated for a certain type of job which is a public sector job, not for a private sector job. the incentives are in the wrong place. high fuel subsidies that have sort of characterized the region's type of social safety net is also a big problem. it's not just a big problem because it's costly to defisk, it's also a big problem because they're regressive. they don't even target the population you want to target because rich people have bigger houses, more cars, more appliances, etc. and they tend to go to industry. but by going to industry, there's a double burden there because you're actually subsidizing one input, which is fuel, while taxing labor, yet your main opportunity is a big

labor force. you want to take advantage of the human capital, yet policy is pushing industry to take advantage of fuel instead. there's also the poor business climate which has been recognized in a number of reports. we have one that came out before the arab spring privilege to competition where the private sector's characterized by a lot of rules and regulations that aren't uniformly enforced, so it's very difficult for businesses to compete. and new businesses to start. and finally in some cases, there's an, there's evidence of overvaluation of the real exchange rate. and this is a big problem in a day and age when a lot of countries around the world are peating not -- competing not with competitive exchange rates, but actually with undervalued exchange rates. and we see this in the forms of high trade deficits and

decreasing as opposed to increasing diversification of the export structure. so why has this been so hard to change? many of the things i've talked about are recognized going back years and years. um, reform is very costly. so there's this kind of j curve of reform where when you try to remove subsidies, the industry you have is going to get hurt, and it's going to be a few years before the new industry develops. and these people are organized to want to keep those subsidies in place. so reform is very costly in the short run. so the biggest challenge is how can governments respond to get the long run growth without hurting the short run? so there are some short run things that can be done in order to make the longer run reforms that are necessary more

palatable. and one of these is we need to see more avoidance of backsliding. so the first response, and i think this was mentioned in the previous panel, after the arab spring had begun was to increase public sector wages and to raise subsidies when these are precisely the things that are preventing you from having long run growth. and more recently, at least in morocco, we've seen an increase in fuel prices which is an encouraging sign. but there are also ways to try for some quick wins and confidence-building measures, and these can include things on the political side like improved access to information. tunisia's made steps in that direction, morocco is as well. improved service delivery, better inclusion such as the national initiative for human development program in morocco. um, smes.

while these are not going to be a cure for jobs, they can help to build confidence, and, of course, there's labor-intensive public works simply using fiscal policy to bump up employment. there's also little things countries can do, um, and is just to give one example here is from a country that transitioned and did make a dent on corruption -- something most countries don't do -- is georgia. georgia had a policy of georgia without corruption. they jumped from 83rd, well worse than all the north african countries, on the corruption perception index in 2002 to the 35th percentile, leapfrogging all the north africans in 2011. they fired the entire police force. accidents actually decreased. [laughter] this is how bad their police force was.

they trained a new one. they used external assistance to pay the salaries of the workers. they housed their police in glass police stations. that was taking transparency to a new level. [laughter] so there are things that can be done. they put billboards everywhere. if you go to georgia, saying numbers you can call if you're asked for a bribe. so there are things that can be done that build field trust and confidence. so finally, i know i have to wrap up. the last point i would like to make is on challenges facing external actors. there's the usual challenges we face operating under uncertainty with changing counterparts, changing circumstances, um, unclear bent whether it's going to go populist or free market, asymmetric information. there's also the this long run and short run trade-off i've been talking about that as

development specialists it's tempting for us to go toward the long run, but we also have to think about the short run. but the more unique challenge in this region is distrust because of our own a past real and perceived failures. and gallup poll evidence shows that, for example, in countries like egypt and libya you see a worsening of a demand for assistance from world bank and imf. they'd prefer to get assistance from within the region. though in algeria, no -- morocco and tunisia, the polls aren't going in that direction. it's still rather favorable. so we're trying to be humble and recognize this. we're also trying to do things differently, focusing more on governance, especially accountability and inclusion. that because income inequality did not actually look o bad in this region before -- so bad in

this region before, there was a sense that that budget the main problem. but clearly, there's something about equality of opportunity that we had missed. and build trust meeting with a broader range of people. part of this is using social media. we have developed a facebook page for the menna region at the world bank, and we have a very active blog. and then finally, the last point i'll make is that this is just a really bad time for transition. we have the global economy in the doldrums. so while the world should be focused on the arab spring, instead every time you pick up the paper it's focused on greece and the eurozone. and so that's just pulling people towards a different topic which is unfortunate, and it also just means there's really limited scope for serious initiatives either through trade and migration or through funds.

the money's just not there. that said, of course, this is a great deal of regional wealth, um, but so far it has failed to materialize. in a sizable and predictable way. so i'm already out of time, so let me conclude there. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much. dr. nabli. >> first, let me thank the csis for this opportunity to be here. to be invited to be here with you today. we are asked to talk about the challenges, the economic challenges and opportunities, and let me start by saying two things. talking about economic challenges cannot be discussed

independent of the political process and political transition. and let me illustrate that by two points or by illustrating by saying there are two rules or two styles about transition which are really important to keep in mind when we discuss economic strategies. the first is the -- it's related little bit to what caroline was saying. any successful political transition requires a strong economic recovery and vice very v.a. -- vice versa. there is a strong interaction between the political and economic transitions. if one works well and the other one works well, you are successful. but if one works bad and the other, and then the other one is not going to work, and you are likely to fail this. this means one thing that is extremely important up front. if your political transition as we discussed in the first session is not going so smoothly and then it's lots of uncertainty and lots of problems, then your economic transition is going to be

suffering as well. and you are unlikely to have a good strategy and, or a clear strategy for economic transition. and, actually built in the program of this discussion today that it's like one can deal with economic challenge -- [inaudible] of what's happening in the political arena. that's not possible, that doesn't work that way. and my talk will illustrate this in some more detail in a few minutes. the second, the second rule of transitions that i would like to highlight is what i like to call the iron law of transitions. the iron law of transition will say something like this, things would get worse, much worse before they get any better. and this is something that is happening across the board. almost everything except one thing. whether you talk about security,

security gets worse because -- before it gets better. corruption gets worse before it eventually gets better, if it ever does. quality of public services gets® before it eventually gets better and growth collapses before it improves and employment increases before it eventually decreases, everything. investment collapses -- so everything, almost everything in the economic life and even on economic life, you know, behaves that way. and the whole problem is how do you get things better eventually as soon as possible? the, in brent access, the -- parenthesis, the exception i would like to mention just in passion is the freedom of expression. it tends not to follow the iron law. freedom of expression whether you look in tunisia, libya, it has improved better throughout, and that's the only exception i can think of, actually, in this.

now, what does this tell us? this tells us that really the biggest challenge in the economic area is how to navigate this economic democratization and minimize the costs of this collapse, initial collapse and engineer eventually a recovery that is fast enough and that pursue a new, a new path, a new path that is eventually better. to me, the challenges of growth, employment and inclusiveness. that's really the big -- now, i would like to say that from what i see there are really two major challenges. the first top challenge, there are many others, but two main ones i would like to emphasize in this transition and in building a strategy for recovery and for eventually high growth. one is the macroeconomics, and the second is the role of private sector.

because it's critical for employment and pro-growth. now, to illustrate what i mean, i would like to discuss when i discuss the macroeconomics challenges, say a few words about what the situation was before the revolution, what happens during transition and what's likely to happen, you know, in the medium term and the long term. so when we look at the macroeconomics, on the macroeconomics, we see -- i'm talking about tunisia to a large extent, but i think what i say applies broadly speaking to egypt and even to libya in many ways and morocco and so on with different nuances. but broadly the same. we know that the north african countries' macroeconomics was not pretty, was not bad before the, before the revolutions. countries had macroeconomic

stability, relatively low inflation typically, you know, reasonable fiscal policies, no major fiscal imbalances, debt was brought back to control after some digressions, no financial crisis. so things on the macro side were, you know, real exchange rates were, you know, maybe violated a little bit here and there, but no major -- really something you can really talking about as major. so we have the initial conditions, if you like, of the revolution were fine. i mean, no -- you are not facing major challenge. so what happens to the -- [inaudible] on the macroeconomic side? essentially, it has become very difficult to maintain macroeconomic balances, and pressures were for imbalances to build during the transition for many reasons. the first one is on fiscal side. clearly, there was very much

pressure to increase expenditures to meet what the so-called social needs which were the origin of the revolution whether it was employment or whether it was regional imbalances and so on. there was a lot of pressure toward these expenditures including through employment, including through increasing wages, subsidies and all kinds of things. so public expenditures, you know, shut up whether it's in egypt or tunisia, you have huge, increasing public expenditures, fiscal deficits increased, debts started to increase and so on. and eventually this had an impact on inflation, inflation started to go up, current account testify sits start -- deficits start to increase in 2011 and expect in 2012, pressures on exchange rates. so you have serious deterioration in the macro

situation. and the problem is that many, and i will come back to this, many of these pressures are not reversible. they're built-in pressures that are likely to continue in the medium term. which means going back to the medium term and the prospect in the medium and long term a lot of macro uncertainty is built into the system. lots of macro uncertainty, fiscal balances are really at high risk because many of the public expenditures are recurrent, are not going to be reversed whether it is wages or employment, higher wages, higher employment, public employment including subsidies. so public debt is likely to continue to increase. many sources of new source of old and new source of continuous liabilities are building up in the social security areas, in

the banking sectors and so on. therefore, there's in the medium term significant risks on the macroeconomic side and so on. these risks also putting pressures on competitiveness if exchange rates don't adjust quickly enough and so on. so what you have is that in this macro frameworks are really you under pressure, and they're likely to remain so in the medium term. and this is going to be a big challenge for building, facing the new challenges and building an investment climate which is conducive to higher and so on. so this is some problem that we should keep in mind. the second major challenge, i think that should be -- is related to the private sector. i think caroline was talking a little bit earlier about why the

private sector was not strong and growth was not high enough before the, before the revolution and so on. i think there has been a lot of discussion of this and lot of debate. my own view is that, i have come to this conclusion, that before the revolution one of the basic weaknesses of the private sector despite the reforms that were undertaken in the '80s, '90s and so son, the private sector did not grow as had been expected. and the basic reason for me was the credibility of the political systems. i think corruption was going up, the private sector was never, you know, the credibility of property rights was always a question mark, and, therefore, the private sector was never really sure that it can grow and

thrive. and this has meant that this credibility issue and property rights issue was a central one that explains it's much more than business climate and much more than, you know, labor markets, policies and so on. now, what happens during the transition? in principle, in principle the revolution was supposed to resolve that problem. because if you are going towards a democratic government, you are supposed to be going to a system where there is rule of law, where you have credibility, property rights, therefore, better governance and, therefore, the political system should be conducive to higher investment and high growth. but the problem is that in the interim the iron law of transition applies. actually, credibility, you know, gets worse. because you still do not have a

new political system in place, you don't know who is going to be designing economic policies, you don't know whether the new political regime is really going to be protecting property rights as expected or not and, therefore, what you have in the interim period is a decline in private investment, a decline in the activity of the private sector and wait and see, i think, the 60% that caroline was mentioning is symptomatic of that. so in a transition things get worse and, therefore, the private sector is not going to pay attention to that. and there are some specific. there is this position that develops that the private sector is corrupt anyway. it was linked to the previous regimes. it was rich because of corruption, and therefore, it has to be brought to account, and this brings all this issue of transitional, so-called transitional justice and what do you do with that. all of this, you know, means

that the private sector is not going to be playing that role during the transition, and you are going to be facing major challenge. that's what expands the collapsing growth, that's what collapse of employment, increased unemployment and so on which is exactly the opposite of where we want to go. it's going the other way. so this is a major challenge. so in terms of prospects, the big challenge is to reverse that trajectory. and that is why it's so important, it's so important that the political transition gets, you know, moving in a predictable way with, you know, good road map and predictability in terms of what's happening and of the rules that eventually will be prevailing in the economic area and so on. so that brings me to the first rule i was talking about. so the successful transition is

contingent on political recovery, economic recovery is con contingent on a successful political transition, and, therefore, this political and economic transition can go hand in hand and resolve the issues. now, economic strategy and challenges, clearly, there are lots of them, other issues besides this macro and private sector, you know, we can talk about business environment, we can talk about education, skills mismatch, there are tons of them. and the world bank has, you know, potential to work on tons of things. but we have to keep in the perspective the relative importance of things. i don't think, you know, playing around with business environment rules here and business is really the most important thing on this stage. it's really focus on the major things which as i said are really the macro and the

credibility of the political transition is really the most important thing. now, i don't know -- how long do i have? two seconds? yeah. what i wan to, what i was planning to say is that where do we stand in terms of the positions of the political parties and the political players in terms of this economic challenge and so on. i would say two or three very quick things. first, political parties don't have views on macroeconomics. political parties don't have clear views on the medium term strategies. there are no political party which says i would like to have, you know, a bad macro. or i want to have, you know,

increasing expenditures, i don't care what happens to the exchange rate or what happens to inflation. everybody would like to have more expenditures but stable exchange rate. no debt. they always -- but their views are inconsistent typically. it's not that they have a strategy to make things bad, but they lack the good things that they don't like to have to see there is -- [inaudible] so political parties don't know constraints. that's the problem with political parties. which means that when they get into trouble as i was saying in terms of risks on the macroeconomics, it's not because they want to run the risks because they are, you know, dealing with the short-term issues, and they are trying to postpone the constraints for the future. and that's what, and that's what gets you into trouble typically. so there is no debate on those issues in any explicit way.

so on the other hand, if we want really to deal with the macro issues and the economic challenge, you have got to deal with the subsidy issues. subsidies are becoming the major issues. you have to deal with the public sector employment issue. you have to deal with the wages. you have to deal with some of the contingent liabilities, major issues building up in algeria, in egypt, in tunisia on social security. major issues building in tunisia, major issue in the banking sector and the portfolios of the banking -- capitalization needs and o so on. in terms of the other areas in terms of the private sector and growth, all of the parties, almost all of them, would tell you that private sector is really critical except some of the leftists. there are some leftist parties

who say, okay, we like private sector, but the private sector is bad anyway, so we try to deal with the -- but how to do it and what is required to do is really remains. how do you achieve really an improvement in the credibility of government and preserving property rights so that governance and political parties do not act as they did before as, you know, grabbing hand, if you like, grabbing hand of the private sector. but what we are seeing, we are seeing a continuation of the same now. during the transition, actually, we are seeing some of the party behaving with the private sector as the old regime used to behave with the private sector. so it means that the improvement in credibility of the private sector is not really happening. so this is likely to undermine recovery of growth, any recovery of investment and any, you know, dealing with the employment

challenge. so to sum up, my bottom line is that it is tough, the transition is difficult, it's likely to continue to be difficult. and there is no way to meet the economic challenge of employment, growth and so on if the political transition does not go successfully and quickly and does not drag on. because if it drags on, i think it's really a recipe for major failure and, therefore, both the political transition and the economic transition would be in jeopardy. i will stop here. thank you. [applause]

>> give you any insights on current account deficit orifice call deficit, although i agree with something, many things you said in particular that the exchange rate has been overvalued, although very easy to see from an exporting company. but, indeed, there are some, some of these challenges there. what i want to do is share with you an experience from a very different perspective which is that of a state-owned enterprise, very anecdotal

ideas. but i hope that, and i'm sure they'll reinforce some of the things that were said before. first, i think that we are definily embarking on a new era from an economic point of view in countries in the maghreb. i also have to say that my knowledge is really more on morocco, although i think that countries like tunisia share the same challenges, so take what i'm going to say, the statements on morocco. but what i think in terms of these transitions, and we talked about political transitions before, in terms of the economic transition i think as much as the political transition there's a unique characteristic we should keep in mind is there's going to be forced transition as opposed to a chosen transition. i think it's very important to realize that a lot of the things

we're discussing today in terms of reforms -- and you eloquently outlined -- were discussions we had with economic partners and the international finance institutions and development agencies in the early '90s. we talked about the importance of private sector development, and, mustafa, you were very instrumental at that time. we talked about the importance of some reforms including the subsidy scheme, you know? in the '90s many missions from the world bank and imf came to morocco with big programs on private sector development, etc. well, i think we chose at that stage, these countries, motto implement these -- not to implement these reforms, let's be honest. thiess -- at least not to fully implement them. but i think what is different today is those reforms are going

to be forced on these countries. and i think there are two key areas here in terms of reform. one is competitiveness, export competitiveness. again, after a structural adjustment in the '80s, many of these countries -- morocco and, indeed, tunisia -- passed free trade agreements first with europe in the case of morocco, also with the u.s., but competitiveness was supposed to be a key, a key ingredient to foster precisely to shorten the negative part of the j curve that you mentioned and move quickly to growth. it didn't happen to a large extent. and the other key area, which also was discussed, we had a lot of programs on education, etc., is more inclusive growth. i think this is also what explains -- and if we have to be

honest with ourselves, this is all over the literature on development in this region -- that explains the paradox tunisia and morocco to a certain extent, of course, algeria, considered these paradoxes. they went through all the structural adjustment, they did, you know, the basic reforms that needed to be done, and yet growth remained on the average between 4, 5%, not the 6, 7% that would create any social benefit as was expected. so this is why the paradox was there. fairly decent growth. not enough to resolve the social problems, but unemployment becoming more and more of a problem. and i have to say, also, let's be honest, unemployment amongst graduates, amongst people who were educated in a very

expensive education system. what i'm going to try to do is, first, agree that political transition has to be fast to really get down to the, to allow and enable the reforms that need to be done. and they go hand in hand. but i'm afraid that, one, i wish i could be as optimistic as you are. i think we are in long, protracted transitions in our countries. but i think that there are no macro solutions either in terms of economy. i agree that the fundamentals have to be there. but, look, we have a paradox. we're talking about -- i read yesterday some report from a rating agency saying, look, there's a problem. of we may downgrade one of the countries because potential, you

know, unrest looking forward, at the same time recommending that the sub subsidies system shouldo be done with very quickly. well, you know, i wish we could do both at the same time. i don't think it is the case. let me go down to what we expect because i think it has some relevance with the, with all modesty. it has some relevance because we are an export-oriented company, we employ 20,000 people, and we represent about a third of morocco's exports. and we lived what i would consider a microcosm of what happened on the arab spring because we deal with three mining cities where the only jobs that exist are ocp jobs, and we, you know, some of the toughest unrest -- not unlike what happened in georgia -- some

of the toughest unrest was in the mining cities. and these youth demanded jobs. demanded jobs with ocp, okay? our response was, first, to analyze the situation. why did these people need jobs at the same time as our growth path was very good. ocp's investing tremendously in terms of growth, we're creating jobs. our subcontractors are creating jobs in these areas, yet the youth from these areas are not the ones employed in these jobs worse. we import labor in morocco. industrial and construction, and this is not unlike other countries, also in menna or at least in north africa, we import labor. so, obviously, what you mentioned, caroline and mustapha, the mismatch between what the education system

produces and what our needs are. well, we said we can knock on door and say, please, speed up the reform process of system. we took questions in our own hands, we created a program called ocp skills where, not our job, but we're currently training 15,000 youth from the regions. we'll open up at least 95,000 youth registered for the program, and from the outset we told them these are not jobs within ocp. we're going to train you, enhance your ploy about for jobs -- employability with jobs for our subcontractors and some of our partners, okay? we know very well with our development program what kind of skills are going to be needed, and we're looking five years, ten years ahead. and we train them according to those skills. we also talk very nicely to our subcontractors and invite them to look closely at these

opportunities in terms of jobs. the point here, what i'm trying to make, the point i'm trying to make is part of the answer is not going to come from government or the administration or the private sector, but also from state-owned enterprise. and the large private sector companies, let's face it, depend on government procurement for many of their activities. so i think, i know that the present government -- which is part of the regime, by the way -- but the present government is looking very closely at what we're doing and trying to, you know, to entice private and state-owned companies to try to tailor some of what they can do to these kind of experience. so, look, what i'm saying saw that there are solution -- is that there are solutions on the ground. innovation happens on the

ground, it doesn't happen from, you know, from washington or from paris. in fact, the other ingredient we need is not only partners that listen to us, try to tailor the program to the experience on the ground, but i think i'll finish with this, i think there are two key perception issues, problems that we have to deal with. if first one, and i think we saw some of this today s we view too much north africa and, indeed, the whole of africa including sub-saharan africa as an area of problem. well, look, talking today this is a big area of stability comparatively. it is an area that has grown 4 or 5% even during the worst times of the crisis, 2008, '9 and '10. this is an area where youth are, you know, is available and wants

to be trained. these are areas of opportunities, not areas of problems. too many public policies from the north and consequently too many business strategies consider this not as an area of opportunity. food security is a case in point. i'm talking to it because we are in that -- we produce fertilizers. you know, if we consider that between now and 2050 we'll get at least two billion more people on this earth and can that the only -- and that the only really available arable land to speak of is in africa, and if you look at the interral agenda, and you put two columns, problems/solutions, africa is consistently put in the problem column where it is, and it's going to be a big part of the solution. so we have a perception problem. the euro med, the partnership with europe, i have to say --

and i can be less politically correct than others -- has viewed north africa as a problem to be contained, not as an opportunity for increased competitiveness of european countries. that was completely missed. well, to a certain extent, okay? the second problem, and i would say the perception problem -- and here i'm even going to be less politically correct than i probably should -- is the menna syndrome. is viewing exclusively maghreb as part of the middle east or as the southern part of europe and missing its main nature, its main identity which is africa. we are part of africa. you know, the world bank has a menna department, has an african department, doesn't consider that north africa is part of africa. many diplomacies have north african partners -- you know, policies that are part of a broader middle east policy. so i beg, you know, i beg you to

consider that north africa is also part of africa. i'll stop there. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much. so there you have it, the economic issues seen from the broad comparative perspective down to the regional perspective down to the firm perspective. thank you very much to our panelists for helping lead us down that progression. we have about 15 minutes for questions. i would ask if you could, please, identify yourself, if you could only ask one question, and then my pet peeve, if you could ask your question in the form of a question which is to ask a genuine question of our distinguished panelists and not to make a statement and say what do you think of my statement. i see a hand right over there. the lady right there. >> hi. um, i'm ann pence, i'm formerly an economist with the state department, but now i actually

work with dr. terrab, so i wanted to get that out, out front. you guys have presented a rather challenging perspective on how economic opportunity, as most taffe that put it, can be realized in the region. so, mustafa, you are giving us some very concrete examples from your experience, but i would like the panel to tell us what sorts of things can actually contribute to this competitiveness and how does the outside world, if you will, the usg, the rest of us help you with that. and is it foreign direct investment and opening up more to that? what are the changes that together we can make in the near term to help surmount this transition period and take advantage of these opportunities which most of us think are very real? >> thank you very much. who would like to start? is -- caroline, did you want

to -- >> say something. um, i think i'll actually agree with dr. terrab on the importance of large firms. so another work that we've done and what's popular in trade now is a tremendous skew of exports we see around the world. so the top single firm in most countries accounts for 15%, the top 1% more than 50% of exports. so it's really the large firms that are going to create the exports, the growth and the jobs. so there needs to be an environment that fosters firms to be able to grow into these large firms and to export. and to me, a big part of that especially for small countries that aren't going to have negative effects on the rest of the world and when we see a

world that countries are competing with undervalued exchange rates, is the exchange rate's a huge tool that can be used. so look at switzerland. under 6% unemployment, undervalued exchange rate. look at germany. record employment, undervalued exchange rate. look at china. it's just, the exchange rate is such an immediate tool to create jobs. and growth. especially after a crisis. that's how indonesia got out of its crisis, that's how argentina got out of its crisis. i mean, there was of a balance of payments issue there, obviously, but the exchange rate's an important tool. then, as i mentioned in my discussion, there's also political and confidence-building measures and labor-intensive public works, etc. >> thank you. >> um, i think this is, this is the question that we face every

day can, what can be done in the near term to create jobs and to meet some of the pressures that you have in the labor market. and x the options -- and the options, the immediate options, these easy options are not really so much available. and as i was saying, because the engine of growth, of creating jobs with the private sector is really -- [inaudible] has the blues. it's not, it's not easy to create jobs, it's not ready to take risks. so you can talk about all of the things that you want them to do, but they are waiting. and the big firms, international firms are waiting. they are not ready to move. so the big things that you can do, and that was what i wanted to do, is really make sure that

you get back to some reasonably predictable and stable environment politically, socially and macroeconomically. that's really the point i was trying to make. now, i would add something else on, since i'm speaking in washington and things. the other thing that can be done is fix europe, help fix europe. [laughter] help fix europe. and the u.s. should be doing something. and we're not seeing the u.s. doing much about europe. and by fixing europe, you are helping us. because europe, because we have been losing jobs because of the crisis in europe. actually, we have huge loss of jobs for the last six months. i mean, the beginning, since the beginning of 2012. i think after 2011 things were okay. starting in 2012, you know, probably -- i don't know, caroline can -- february or

march, really things started to become bad. and we start asking how can we create, how can i preserve what i have. and europe is really destroying jobs and things. so try to help europe, i think that will help us. and this will help the democratic transition. and by helping the democratic transition as well and stabilizing the political environment and so on, this we can create jobs. after that, i mean, there are lots of other things that can be done in terms of fixing all kinds of incentives and things, i mean, you name it. i mean, reforms, there are thousands of things that you need to do every day. not to get your priorities right, you have to focus on the important things first. >> do you agree the focus on large firms rather than small ones? >> uh, i'm not sure i agree fully because when you look at

the export -- [inaudible] the export is only part of the story because you have domestic market as well. so the domestic market has also the smes and the small firms which are important. so what caroline in terms of the exports, competitiveness and so on, the large firms are really, you know -- but then she knows, also, that a lot of exports come from the smes that eventually create, innovate and create and grow eventually. so, yes, when you take, you know a cross-section, it looks like this. but for domestic markets a lot of the business is in the sme sector. >> [inaudible] >> maybe just to say that, you know, i agree that europe -- but i don't think it's going to be fixed very soon, unfortunately. i think there's something emerging that is, that we're overlooking which is the global south. you know?

we've just run a conference on the global atlantic trying to look at opportunities that are now emerging in the southern, you know, in the southern atlantic with the countries like, you know, brazil and the whole of africa. so there is a dynamic, and we've seen moroccan businesses, of course, wishing that europe will be fixed, but also looking very strongly at africa as an area of, you know, of growth and opportunity. so i think that, by the way, mustafa, part of fixing europe is also europe looking at africa in a different, themselves looking at africa in a different prism. but never the less, in terms of the sme issue, of course it's not a silver bullet, but

consider a company like ocp, i'm sure this is the case in -- [inaudible] for example employers use as subcontractors about 500 industrial companies in morocco. so, indeed, our competitiveness depends on their competitiveness, but there's a lot we can do to help them become more competitive and become, by the way, export-oriented. >> thank you. there's a question here at this front table and then one at the back table, so -- >> thank you. i am ted moran, a professor of international busiss at georgetown university. do morocco and tunisia have private sectors that are alert, energetic, imaginative, risk takers or more tranquil, risk-averse, only wanting to engage in familiar and comfortable activities?

and from a comparative perspective, do we know anything about how to get more of the former and less of the latter? >> thank you. >> yes, i think, what, a couple of years ago i think it was at brookings, what's his -- nolan and, who a book on the arab economies, i do not know what the title is exactly. ..

is a supportive. it's incredible how much enterprising businesses will appear where, and we know some of them have been able even in difficult environments to become very alert when the and there are a number of multinationals

now in these conditions, egyptian and what have you. there are ones to be living off the connections they have and the corruption and the relationships and so on, and about was my point. my colleague is how we did as you can create the environment where the private sector feels it is safe in terms of what it can do and cannot do and in terms of what it can own and cannot so that it can thrive and enterprise. the previous regime was essentially trying to capture with the private sector could give. they are trying to control all of the private sector. if you have a business and they

come and ask to share, so it's the businesses geared towards the price. so we have a cronyism. this is part of the revolution naturally. we don't forget one of the reasons of the revolution of tunisia and i have talked about this, i do not like to talk about it now would, when the youths revolted really about jobs but also about corruption because in the mick about the culture, but the private sector because the hit line rules becoming what the son-in-law of a brother-in-law or the sister-in-law has captured in

terms of business and so on and it's part of the story. we forget about. so there is that private sector if you like but there is another one that has a lot of potential. >> let me see if we can just slip in one more question the gentleman had from the very beginning and then we will move to the next panel. >> from what i've been hearing, we've been hearing about the revolution and the change in the private sector. but since 2005 with the arab development and a series of reports coming on that, we have been aware of something called the arab paradox where they closed the gap, the educational gap and gender that if you look economically, a large percentage of the female population across the arab world is from the

economy, not productive members of the economy. you think that there is any prospect for an economic revolution to bring that half of the population into the economy and to contribute to the prosperity and stability in the economy? thank you. >> well, it's very true the region's have the lowest rate of labour force participation among women compared with other and then despite the small rate of participation it's the highest rate of unemployment of the women in the labour force, so it's a very small fraction across the country is that are

in place so there's a tremendous resource that isn't being utilized. there are studies that if it were to be utilized from the entire growth and income would be. unfortunately i would say that at least in the short run i'm not very optimistic about a change in this beaufort's happening -- both for what's happening because of shifting in government, but then also even if growth were to do better it is not always the case that women come in. we have seen in turkey actually a worsening situation of women in the labour force so it is on economic growth and it's on integration but if you look at the women's participation it's really not to read this has been a tremendously important issue and one that we have the world bank focus on a lot.

but it has to be homegrown and a born in the region to change things both through legislation and court cases how changes come about in the u.s. there are more opportunities in child care and just a general change in mentality. >> based on my experience in an optimistic answer and actually pretty optimistic about the capacity of the women and the region based on the women that i know but also after we get through this or that trajectory will go. i want to speak for the panelists for a very thought-provoking panel. [applause]

>> i can get the original script from a person and come to my own conclusions which i think is better than having someone else tell me what i should think. c-span, c-span2 and c-span3 in book tv which i loved. c-span3 is a history channel and i sometimes want to visit the senate and see what the house is doing.

this isn't about governor bush, it's not about, it is about you and i want to come back to something i said before. if you want somebody who believes that we were better off eight years ago than we are now and that we ought to go back to the kind of policies we had back then emphasizing tax cuts mainly for the wealthy here is your man. if you want somebody that will fight for you and will fight to

have middle class tax cuts, then i am your man. i want to be. i doubt anybody who makes more than $330,000 a year. but if you do you are in the top 1%. i'm not going to ask. but if everyone here in this audience was dead on in the middle of the middle class, than the tax cut for every single one of you added up would be less than the tax cut his plan would give to just one member of the top wealthiest 1%. now, you judge for yourself whether that is fair. >> 50 million americans get no tax relief under his plan. you may not be one of them. it's time to unite. you talk about eight years. in eight years they haven't

gotten anything done on medicare, social security, the bill of rights. it's time to get something done. >> presidential town hall debates began in 1992 with president george bush, governor clinton and businessman ross perot and ever since presidential hopefuls have taken questions from undecided voters in the same style. tuesday night with president obama and mitt romney in their town hall debate. live coverage starts at seven eastern. now domestic security and stability in north africa. while the arab spring is really the middle east, a number of

countries impact of our northern africa. the center for strategic and international studies discussion posted this one hour and 25 minute panel on the situation and tunisia, morocco and algeria >> i would like to welcome you to the third panel of the day. we started out -- my name is haim malka i'm phill and deputy director of the program here csis. we had a great morning with a lot of substance. we started out talking up the political trend, the internal political dynamics in each of the countries in the maghreb, and we moved on to talk about the economic and social economic challenges that many of the countries in the region face and now we are going to bring those trends together and look at how the political and socio-economic trends in the region intersect and affect the stability moving forward in the region in the

transition and the country's in transitions in those countries that have navigated the uprising of the last year-and-a-half relatively smoothly. to make sense of these complicated trends we have the team of north africa analyst with us today a group we have been trying to bring together for a long time and i am happy they've joined us today. first is dr. yahia zoubir, professor of internal shul relations and international management at the director of research and geopolitics management at the school of management. he was recently published an article called tipping the balance to words maghreb unity towards the 13 cities great focus not only on algeria and tunisia but the implications of what we have seen transpire over the last year-and-a-half. after will be geoff porter. glad you could make it.

and finally batting the cleanup is dr. lawrence the director of the north africa project at the international crisis group. we are delighted that you are all here for this excellent panel and i will turn the floor over to dr. zoubir. thank you. >> good morning. thank you for the kind invitation from jon and haim. haim was very tough. he gave me a huge list of questions to address before coming here, particularly on algeria. so i will divide my presentation into. one is prepared and the other would be sort of i will try to bring it because of the questions that came from the audience earlier today particularly from the young diplomats from the diplomats who asked about what's going on with the maghreb union and the region in general, and also a little bit about what's going on, you

know, in the periphery of the maghreb because from my perspective we cannot now distinguish the two regions and the maghreb in terms of security issues. but the first 1i would like to address is the one about algeria. i wouldn't repeat what was said this morning but it might be similar. it was very interesting that in january, 2011, if you watch the media and i remember he contacted me and most people that work on the region and said what is trying to happen in algeria? when is it going to happen in algeria? so the question that we raised was why is it that altria wasn't next? and we try to give it some explanation and because of the limitation of time, i would give only a few points.

by the way they've tried everything. the arab spring started in 1988 and even then self immolation it was not, you know, it wasn't algeria in 2007. so they repeated this and there were 10,000 riots in 2010 alone. these were identified algeria so why didn't it happen? well, one of them is you can think whatever you want but it's not a state if you compare it to tunisia. i remember algerians going to tunisia and saying algeria is much better. it's free. it's a democracy compared to what was going on and tunisia.

if you look at the cartoons in the newspapers, the media and so on and so forth. so there wasn't that stress that you could see in tunisia for instance or even in egypt. but at the same time, the liberalization and i will tell you why we talked about 88 and bring it back because, you know, one of the things that is being repeated is the fact that how the authorities reacted to the arab spring their reaction that they had in the 1980's after 1988 is being repeated. but at the same time there are some similarities that you can draw so that's one of them. the regime after the 1988i don't

have to repeat the events but there was a hope of democratization, liberalization between 1989 and 1991 but that came to a standstill. you know the story. and even after the end of the civil strike of the 1990's, the hope after 1999 they were in the sense that we fell into the same procedures as others, electoral authoritarians or hybrid system. it's not a democracy but it's not real dictatorship or what have you so this is one of the things that explains why they

see if i make a revolution what is going to happen? it's going to have another civil war or what is it that is we do have been, what is it going to bring about? the second one is that one of the most important things, and i think that this morning you are right in emphasizing is that there is no coordination between the socio-economic and political grievances or there is no opposition that is capable of channeling the social economic grievances and turning them into political demand. if you will recall in 2011, you had more or less to movements was making the socio-economic to band and the other is nicknamed a hit of the rcd had some demand and was ridiculed by the population because there is no

anchorage. the opposition. i think that it's one of the few countries in the world where the opposition never aspires to come to power. i am very serious. the only one that was capable of coming to power the regime was extremely astute so this is why you have the fragmentation of the political part. from 1990 until 1999 there was only one party that was allowed. after 2011 we have the modification of the parties the dissidents online and the other parties and so on and so forth and they represent themselves and the population doesn't know

them, which i think is from the regime perspective it's always fearful of one thing in algeria. it's hysterically because of age and legitimacy and participation by multiplying there is hope that there would be more but at the same time it is also to weaken the national sandlin in which it is just a rubber stamping institution in algeria. the history of it about violence

1964, 1963, roel war. the 1990's is also a brutal so that is a mark on the segments of society as of this explains why why there is no report in any large scale. the other one is what has happened at the borders of algeria. i repeated i'm not sure that the extent to which the image of nato is among the population at large, nato supported plans in the war. it's on so forth so they are

very patriotic and when it comes to the country itself it is a different story. i talked about the weak and divided opposition. there's the financial resources as you know if you read today there is the larger billion dollars in the special rights, so algeria has brought about the latest figure is about 200 billion so it is doing quite well. you have a raise and so on and it is creating and by the way, not everything. there have been huge investments in the infrastructure. another reason that i identify is the efficiency of the

security now that the police do not shoot at people or do anything crazy so they know how to manage and how to control and so they would not do what they did in '88. another one is believe it is not unpopular among the masses. they'd defend been -- ben ali. they see him as the one that has restored peace and so on and so forth. now, how does the regime react to the uprising in the neighborhood states? that's quite possible. he felt he wasn't under any pressure. he would take his time and basically whatever reforms more

under the paper before. so the laws or the reforms, but it's the institution. now, i think -- five - one fun. i talked about the maghreb and the q&a. we have the -- you asked about the role in algeria haim asked me please, can you tell us whether what is going on in egypt, tunisia and so one might affect algeria? it still exists in algeria. they do exist but they are around, they are in the mosques and jerry present in a lot of democracies in the country, the big cities mainly.

there's a lot of business and electronics and so on all of the mobile control so they are there and we don't know how powerful they are, but again, so far they have not shown any interest. we also ask about the succession. if you try to find -- anybody who says we might know who comes to power in algeria has a special crystal ball that unfortunately i don't have, but if you want to see i think it is responsible to look at what is going on and you have to observe the development. again, not the problem is the fl

end of both leaders to have them on the one hand, and on the other debose are facing -- they both are facing trouble in things that don't. i think if you look probably it's been free no matter how thin, but again i could be interesting to look. now since i promised in the audience, i wrote the piece on -- i wanted to look at how the region at the maghreb itself might react to what's going on and again, i like history and history is very interesting and revealing. look at how the arab maghreb union came out. it came out at the time of difficulty for all of the regimes of the people.

they were faced and the same thing happens now. again there's always these alliances made and so on and so forth but what has happened? initially the situation creates a headache for them. there's the treaty were there would come to the rescue and so on and so forth. in the media there were rumors that there were so afraid of the way that is supported gadhafi. i'm sure that they were happy to see him go because they cost more headaches than anything

else. okay. but there were real fears which today prove them right one of the u.s. high diplomats and the algerians were right at the situation in libya. so the situation in libya created a problem for all of the maghreb countries. for tunisia they are in many ways the trade with libya was the highest. it was the e.u. first. there were 1.5 million from libya to tunisia. not only tourists but also the health seekers' used to come to tunisia and so on. and i know there are people from the world bank and i don't dare say more about that but i the end of the figures from the african development bank where

the situation in libya affected the economy. from the security perspective they were not infected because especially the national security official with regional peace to you but you can put two and two together but the algerians are extremely fearful of having another words you get tunisia and weapons are going out. [inaudible] so it is the worst case and the biggest nightmare. morocco has the power but there's a shadow government if

anybody thinks the kgb is willing it is a little bit divisional. i would say starting september, october, 2011 and you see this huge movement calling for the revival of the arab maghreb union and the of the security conference of all of them and they send us back to the family of gadhafi and so forth. they are signing agreements with tunisia on the border issues and libya and algeria are working together in the security issues and trying to help reconstruct

and so on and so forth. i'm afraid that when once the storm has withered away it's all in a traditional way. [inaudible] influence and so on but i think that i have them on the side -- [inaudible] if there is one country that has shown the greatest interest is tunisia and tunisia is primarily i believe for economic reasons

it has a relatively neutral white flag, leave us alone. i don't need to get into this. but i asked about it and we are for this and that, etc.. but it's more something coming from a personal state, but i honestly believe that if there is one important aspect for the future of the maghreb it is the region and the world with of the least, the lowest interest of regional trade less than 3%, and i think that the revival on the ground from now tunisia has what i may call the space legitimacy trying to push for the reopening

but i am not so certain so we are in a situation that i am really afraid the situation in northern mali can be of concern for the countries in the region. thank you very much. sorry about that. >> i would have loved to hear you continue speaking but geoff wouldn't have forgiven me. the floor is yours. >> welcome. good morning everybody. i want to thank haim for inviting me down and csis for hosting this event. i think the timing is opportune. there's a lot of stuff going on in north africa and it's a great

day -- to flee and in that discussion about it. i also want to speak for my fellow panelists, dr. zoubir and florence. jon this morning said that we are the all-star team of north africa experts. and i appreciate the sentiment. i really do. but it's kind of like being an all-star ping-pong player. there is just not that many of us. i also appreciate haim's comments. we are the a-team. so i think i'm going to do something a little bit unusual for a conference. what i would like to do is put out a couple of scenarios for where north africa might be heading. i don't intend these to be exhaustive or definitive. instead i hope they are

speculative and provocative and serve as fuel for the discussion. before we do that though, it is an important case where do we take these countries and then from there we can protect where we think they might be doing. what are their trajectories. last i would like to propose an alternate trajectory of we have a likely scenario of the reasonable trajectory what would be some of the circumstances the would throw them off the trajectory and have an alternate scenario there is a positive one or - one. you know, i'm going to focus primarily on algeria and libya. we have coverage for today and i think i'm going to further contribute to that but i also going to talk about libya which hasn't been a threat this far in a lot of detail. i'm going to leave aside tunisia. there are many reasons for that. they've done a fantastic reorganization this week. but while we have seen the

tunisia bellweather for political change in north africa over the december, 2010 throughout 2011, and you know, it seems that it's no longer serving as a catalyst for change. there is a dynamic change with the countries that surround tunisia on the change to tunisia are now following their own course. they are no longer following the path that put them out. likewise i'm not going to talk about morocco. i think morocco is relatively insulated from the regional instability but there is instability in libya or in northern mali as anour said this morning it can add up in a political change in a relatively

controlled venture. so i'm going to leave it at that, morocco and tunisia and instead focus on algeria and libya. the reason i want to focus on algeria and libya is i know these countries better than i do the other of their to but also i think that there is an outside potential for the regional and stability if the different scenarios in neither algeria or libya come to fruition. these are big significant countries and their intertwined with regional dynamics in a way that morocco and turney tunisia aren't producing 1 million barrels a day that generates a billion of revenue a day. if everything is perceived in a very positive for optimistic scenario, libya could be phenomenally rich and successful democracy on the southern shores of the mediterranean. another alternative scenario is that it could be somalia a stone's throw from europe they

could end up as a failed state and i will get into more detail about that. likewise algeria has a huge potential and i notice there are younger faces in the crowd or i am getting younger. but i think it is important to emphasize how big algeria is. it isn't something we think about on a daily basis but to give life throw away figures the distance to the southern border its greater than the distance from alger to london. it's an enormous country. the border that algeria shares with moly is greater than the distance from new york to chicago its 800 miles. it's a huge territory that has to be covered. not only is algeria big but it's also phenomenally wealthy and upwards of two entered billion dollars. hugh mentioned this morning it has a professional military, and it has like libya and capital

potential, so for the moment from my perspective is the key but also the key stone for north africa. so, where libya and algeria go. during the scenarios are that there are some and a local problems. in the case of libya when the events of 2011 started and when the rebellion started in february of 2011, we found analysts here in d.c. rapidly trying to catch up and make up for lost time on libya. their reference they were drawing upon to understand political dynamics in libya or bookstore written 20 years ago and based on research that had been conducting 30 years ago and they've been scrambling to build up their knowledge base ever since. but in the same gap about algeria and the same

misunderstanding to read a lot of the analysts that cover don't travel through the country. and they generate a certain perspective on what's taking place in the country from outside of it into that this is rarely produces problems and misunderstandings. i think a good example of that in the face of algeria is the understanding of why they didn't have an air arab spring. i'm not going to be labor that. dr. roberts covered it but there was this state that algeria didn't have a arab spring because they had a twofold method of carrots and sticks of repression and maintaining subsidies or increasing subsidies on certain stables and increasing salaries whenever there was a protest and this interpretation to be nine algerians of any agency whatsoever and the interpretation seemed voluble from outside of elyria but once you traveled to the algerian you get a sense that they didn't have a arab spring because they didn't want the arab spring.

there is a difference between protesting for the increased salaries and protesting for the revolution and many protested because they wanted to improve their standard of living and they wanted more money from the state owned enterprise but they didn't want a revolution. i think for many algerians especially not their position has been vindicated and we see what is happening in libya. to begin on where i think algeria and libya are now and where we think they might be going in the future in of libya 2012 was a good year. every political milestone that the set out for itself in august of 2011 did out the vote campaign. the heady elections and swearing in ceremonies on the date they had anticipated to have them and they have the election of a congressional president and prime minister but all of a sudden they got derailed in a pretty significant rate and now

we are starting to see that despite the positive events of 2012 they are becoming clear. i'm not talking about the incident or militia. instead by talking about the new prime minister 25 days after he had been appointed by the same body that he appointed him to read on october 7th it was arguably the product of pensions that characterize the libyan political scene since the beginning of the revolution and the regional tensions. of those covered in the opposition and stayed within libya and there were tension among different ideologies. they had over 2012 made it seem as if the gmc and its

predecessor of the national transitional council had overcome the sanctions but we in the events of october 7th it's pretty clear the tensions were still the driving force of the political dynamics. one of the reasons they didn't take into account the regional was some of the sanctions. the favored islamist of the so-called secular spot. he was too harsh for those that worked in the administration those that were in exile the members under the gadhafi regime whereby to replace the same himself as elected and they try to figure out a situation to vote for the next cabinet to approve the wholesale or vote on individual cabinet members. and what we are seeing is libya coming down from as revolutionary high and it's

crashing really hard. and these are just the political problems. if you talk about the security problems that focus debate open up a whole new barrel of monkeys and the persistence of the militia some of them are being incorporated by the state or the interpretation is that the air infiltrating the state institutions. you have some militia that have developed independent sources of income that will allow them to remain independent entities for the foreseeable future without fear of intervention by the state. so it's a very dynamic picture. where is all of this having? in all likelihood they will speak doggedly to the political process. they will stick to the road that they laid out in august 2011 and drive forward to create political institutions that appear to have popular legitimacy that the same time the political process will become detached from the popular sentiment and everyday concern. i think they stand a strong

chance of muddling through the crisis going to appoint a cabinet and a constitution that will draft the constitutional committee that will draft the constitution and at some point they will move ahead with elections but the risk is in the preoccupation of the political process the government has been neglected. other aspects of governing. health care, infrastructure, education, these are going to fall by the wayside except when they serve the interest of the members of congress or the folks that get appointed as cabinet minister. beyond all this they are going to continue. oil companies demonstrated they had a tremendous risk threshold they're willing to put up with the amount of think about iraq. if libya continues to have the receipt this will give them the sense the of the revenue and the resources to address problems when they become and this is a

false comfort. i suspect the security situation will remain touch and go. then al-awja will select with impunity, but i think in a relatively predictable manner. regarding the threat in libya, and i think some of the attendees here of the conference have written extensively about this i think is a way to remain. its effect on the ground for now. but at the same time there's an increasing awareness of the threat they pose and the state is not going to be in the position to grapple with it so while the threat will remain it will diminish and i don't think we are going to see a repeat of the devastating attacks that we saw on september 11. it's not a horrible story or a great story. it's okay. i don't think the algeria story is about 1 meter.

after the close of elections in july, 2012, he faced a real political crisis. he had to choose a prime minister and he was dealing with difficult party public dynamics of the country but that the same time there was a sense among the political watchers that whoever shows that the minister was going to be the opening shot in the 2014 presidential campaign. whether that is true or not that is the popular perception. ultimately the show that he's a competent democrat and is also a staunch ally and falling now the point is pretty clear that algeria is on the cusp of change and this is going to prompt a series of questions in the question and answer session. so that has to mandates. revise the economy and prepare for the 2014 presidential election regarding the first

mandate the year beginning to move with the help of the minister of energy in mind and algeria reformed its hydrocarbon law and they are out there trying to attract and the hydrocarbon sector and also other industrial sectors. that is also looking back in the measures put in place. these are not going to disappear entirely and regarding the second mandate, the presidential election in 2014 this is a deeper challenge that we took to the popular legitimacy and it has to somehow create that and somehow make algeria interest in the politics again and that is a challenge. one of the resistor to do that is he started to introduce greater transparency measures and he's also started to promote younger technocrats in different administrations up through the ranks of government to inject dynamism into the bureaucracy. we've seen this in this sector

and foreign affairs. one of the persistent questions about algeria is what their political leaders are rise from within the system or come from without the system. the related question is it touches upon something roberts mentioned this morning how long do political parties matter? if we assume hypothetically they don't matter and they are largely for show in the cinema and theater and the key political decisions are taken by a group of eletes standing commerce, military and politics and we assume that the arias from outside of the system, then it's possible some of the

decision makers who backed the interest in the past could return after they've gone in 2014. in the past the makers in algeria have been shot in a profoundly ideological nationalist protectionist isolationist tendency and the leaders created for algerians but then was only a certain class, the oligarchs dr. roberts referred to. if they return whether it's in the future there is a possibility they will want to become a fiefdom and then algeria will fall back. there's not been to be a revolution that there will be a rebellion. they were focused on surviving somehow in the economy and they focused on trying to get out of

the country but algeria will drop off the map and return to the status quo. will be a big clearing absence and north africa. the largest country in africa disengage as from the community and the instability that is mentioned. this to devotees and moly have to be arrived without help. that is a scenario. what make this happening is it the worst fear about libya were to come to pass. as i mentioned before the libyan government is committed to the road map as a laid out their familiar to the political process but i would like to bring you back to the middle of 2011. at that time, the head of external defense he warned that would become like somalia. and at that time most frames of reference were to a black hawk down moment and we have had a

apply caulk down but i think he is a very new wants to die and he was referring to a range of reference would look like somalia and not just a black hawk down in the incident, but other dimensions as well and i think fed what he meant is there a way to translate into warlords and some parts of the country are in default islamist in somalia that other parts of the country will be relatively managed like visa -- somalia land. the oil revenue will be divvied up by those that produce it but there will be deprived of those parts of the country that don't produce it will be in its fiscal and financial resources. the u.s. will be over the integrity of the state but i think the u.s. finds itself the

interlocutors or unwilling to help the u.s. for july advanced. you could have a holding introverted, disinterested, disengaged algeria that story in this would be for africa but i am perpetually the optimist. i don't think there are a lot of chicken little. there are always chicken littles when the sky is falling. but if unhappy circumstance none of these come to pass? where does the u.s. the din in a more positive scenarios that we expect to happen? i think there's a potential for the u.s. to build new relationships with algeria. it's going to have to be one that is predicated on algeria being in the driver's seat. a jury will never be any the peace proxy. algeria has a capacity of an enormous potential i think the u.s. could help but realize but domestically and economically to.

the transition in 2014 they have their time in the sun. the one they are looking for is 1962. in libya the u.s. has to remain engaged. there is no question. all of the problems there are logistical and a pragmatic ones and they need support. they don't have the administrative band with to deal with of the changes they are facing on a day-to-day basis and don't have the technical capacity to address the shortcomings throughout the country. with the same u.s. support without sustained u.s. support, the negative scenario is somalia on the that might become a possibility. thanks for a much. [applause] >> thanks. bill? >> good morning. in an all-star lineup hitting

behind the right fielder. there is a verb for this i learned in cairo years ago but there is a verb in arabic that means to arrive without your luggage. i've done that so i've had to walk down the street for clothes. but i'm here and i've survived and i'm going to try to wrap up the discussion further. i think given what's been said this morning we heard a lot more about continuity and change, and i'm going to talk about what is a change in the context of the arab spring and i agree to talk about libya because that is one of the missing pieces this morning and the most time focus on. the two biggest changes relate to each other and of the arab

spring this is in terms of the actual movement by the arab spring. what i call old order and new order dynamic. there are new ideologies of change coming from those that are radical and are having a profound impact every aspect of life in this part of the world. unlike some of the continuities we have been looking at, they are antitrial, they are antipatriarchy and in the case of morocco kuhl anti-corruption, pro transparency, inspired by things like wikileaks phill lot said about but we can't deny that has a huge impact on the region. and then the of a sort of major change in terms of the movement of the arab spring is the nature

of these contested movements and the major hybrid i think is the secular islamist who provided. there is a show that at least in the country's there's a certain level of society and an of rejection of that at the society. we saw in the february alliance and we have seen it in all of the countries. we saw it in algeria during the reconciliation of the work again with a strong desire among young people not to have a islamist the date and most social constance contestation these days everything we see in tunisia in the news 90% of the contestation is of economic and social related in probably 10 percent is islam and to read the national press you'd think it was the exact opposite.

now just briefly since i'm from the national crisis group, a quick recap. 18 countries were shaken by the arab spring that in any other year or two would be front-page news but a lot of the stories were drummed up in the change. it's also been very, very bloody and i think that plays into the narrative that you heard this morning of why it was in algeria and morocco when we passed 60,000 dead and millions displaced and affected and in very dramatic ways. for those keeping score, you know, i heard a long time about how international intervention in syria had to be enrolled and the model was a disaster but for those keeping score if passed the terms in a figure over 28,000 now. and for me it took relief on the

nonintervention which i think is profound on intervention in the international community. and then the other sort of cross cutting i wanted to point out before i get to the specific countries is the whole cells and obliterate trend, which i think is pretty significant. hernando has done incredible work on this and interviewed all of the families across the 53 days after and the 170 across region. i think we have 37 in the first the region. more in algeria. almost all of the self emulators are in formal in the economic sector actors. underscoring what we heard about the importance of the social and economic issues to what is going on here. and i will get back to the informal economics here in imminent. now want to libya to the to -- now on to libya. contrary to the misperceio