Under Secretary of State Beers Salutes Visitors Council

Praises work of 80,000 volunteers in international exchanges

Charlotte Beers, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, paid tribute to the network of volunteer organizations who conduct the International Visitor's Program, one of the nation's most enduring and successful cultural exchange initiatives.

Under Secretary Beers, speaking at the annual meeting of the National Council for International Visitors (NCIV) in Washington on March 14, said: "I am now your greatest advocate. I talk about this amazing sum, which is larger than the parts."

The NCIV comprises more than 80,000 volunteers working through 97 separate councils in 44 states.

In addition to many distinguished heads of state and government who traveled to the United States as International Visitors (IVs), Beers pointed out that 1,500 cabinet-level officials around the world are former International Visitors.

Among these distinguished IV alumni: Hamid Karzai, head of the Interim Afghan Authority, and Simar Sanar, Vice Chairman and Minister of Women's Affairs, who traveled to the United States under the International Visitor program in 1989.

With the war against terrorism, Beers said, the U.S. exchange community must now build on these successes to meet new challenges in communicating to key Arab and Muslim audiences.

"Basically, what happens in these IV exchanges is what we need to build a real dialogue with the Middle East," said Beers. "We must find common ground, and if we could invite a majority over here I really do believe we could deflect the myths, the biases, the outright lies."

Beers also cited other examples, such as the publication "Network of Terrorism" and the photo exhibition "After September 11," which provide the context, emotional, and human dimension that are essential to successful communication with other peoples and cultures.

Following is the State Department transcript of the keynote address by Under Secretary Beers to the annual meeting of the National Council of International Visitors on March 14, 2002:

Charlotte Beers, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Keynote Address at the National Council for International Visitors Annual Meeting -- Luncheon Plenary

Washington Marriott Hotel
March 14, 2002

It is a real pleasure to be here today with such a distinguished group of diplomats - both volunteer and professional.

It's always a little frustrating to be "the speaker" when I am in such elegant and informed company. It's clear I have much to gain from listening to you. We have in the room a number of guests who are ambassadors and diplomats to the United States from countries as diverse as Algeria to Zambia - literally A to Z.

It's a tribute to our International Visitors Council that you would take the time out of your crowded schedules to be here. Thank you.

Our Foreign Service National employees are here as well. The government, as I have quickly learned, is a blizzard of initials and acronyms - and the exchange community is no exception.

But I have also learned that some sets of initials are more equal and important than others. One of those is FSN, for Foreign Service National. And having now "been to the field," I know firsthand how vital our FSNs are. I have to admit that, when things go exceptionally well, there's usually an FSN team making it happen.

And, of course, here today are our esteemed partners in your role as the National Council for International Visitors (NCIV). You will be glad to know that in my earliest briefing days I tried to invent - or reinvent you. Coming from the private sector, I was very aware of the power that rests in private individuals, when harnessed, to effect positive change.

"We need to activate private partnerships," I stated firmly. I was gently told . . . this idea is 40 years old and consists of 80,000 volunteers working through 97 councils in 44 states. Exactly what I had in mind.

I may have had a slow start, but I am now your greatest advocate. To Congress, I talk about this amazing sum, which is larger than the parts - the International Visitors Program - making clear how you multiply the investment they make in exchanges. It's the best buy they'll ever see.

When I take the show on the road, I talk about you. I mentioned you at the Fortune event for the "50 Most Powerful Women in Business," and to other audiences as unaware as I was of your like - like ANA and the Business Roundtable. It is important to get the word out.

I'll confess to another kind of naivet��

These visits are such complex transactions - tailoring subjects and interests to participants, elaborate travel, packed agendas, and harnessing the towns the people the events.

So naturally I asked, "What do you do when something goes wrong?" My experts looked blank. Nothing goes wrong. It's an amazingly efficient machine.

Now if you happen to know of a small thing or two that has gone wrong, kindly do not enlighten me. I need to stay right where I am. But I also asked, "How do you quantify results?"

Well, we do have a really blockbuster answer to that one. Before 9/11 we weren't planning to organize a worldwide coalition to defeat an enemy hidden and terrible, fragmented and fanatic.

But, in fact, we needed to move quickly, to reach accord on who this enemy, these terrorists, were and how they should be answered.

Can you imagine how much faster and more productive these crucial conversations were because fully 50 percent of the coalition members had been in U.S. exchanges at some point in their development?

Even in Afghanistan, hardly a country with a functioning U.S. exchange program before last September, Hamid Karzai, Chairman of the Interim Afghan Administration, is a former International Visitor. I know Secretary Powell referred to Chairman Karzai in his remarks this morning.

And the most prominent woman in the Afghan Government, Simar Sanar, Vice Chairman and Minister of Women's Affairs, traveled to the United States under the International Visitor program in 1989.

I met Simar when we started inviting Muslim Americans to counsel with us in October. The first thing she said to me was how important her visit and work here as an IV some thirteen years ago was to her.

More than 1,500 exchange visitors have become cabinet-level ministers.

So you can't quarrel with those results, but are we doing as good a job as we might in telling our story? How can we defend budgets and excite support if our results are usually long term, and it is not simple to prove the causal relationship?

That's a big word, but the only fair summary: Lives change, attitudes evolve, biases fall away. Clearly, real American people in real American towns are simply our best storytellers. But how to track the fruits of one person's transformation? Well, sometimes, often, we can't even track that person after two or three years.

We don't have what any decent local car dealer would have - a data bank of all their alumni. Why? So we can locate them and engage in further dialogue and create a kind of active membership.

You'll be glad to know that the alumni data bank is in our recent budget request.

We want to stay in touch, to continue the relationship, if possible, to help support their interest in being emissaries for the values of freedom and opportunity that we share. We'll cross-pollinate our ideas with those from other countries, share successes and proposals with web sites and newsletters. After all, your programs gave them a whole new way of seeing, or working. Let's reinforce that. Just this kind of scrutiny led us to adopt a standard I call "magnification."

We will ask each of our three bureaus: Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), Public Affairs (PA), and International Information Programs (IIP): What happens beyond the visit, the speech, and the article on the web? How do we magnify this event or product or exchange for an audience larger than the initial one?

I'll give an example that really inspires me.

We're missing Pat Harrison today, the Assistant Secretary of Educational and Cultural Affairs -- she's just where she should be -- in the field: Britain, Turkey, Morocco. But, she's the heroine of this story. We wanted, needed to show the pictures, illustrate the feelings, of our devastation and our resolve to rebuild the World Trade Center.

Beyond magnification, illustration is another one of our communication standards.

As time has passed since last September, we found that we needed to give people a visceral reminder of the devastation and death in New York. We needed to depict - not in words, but in pictures -- the loss, the pain, but also the strength and resolve of New York, of Americans, of the world community to recover and rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center.

And that brings me to another standard of effective communication, that of context.

By context, I mean communication that includes rational and logical discourse but also evokes our deepest emotions. A message that -- without words - documents that the World Trade Center was not a collection of buildings or a set of businesses - but a community, a way of life, a symbol, a place of the living and, now also, the dead.

How do you do that? How do you tell such a sad, grim, shocking, and ultimately uplifting story?

You do that in pictures.

We discovered that a photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, was documenting the story of Ground Zero for an exhibition called "After September 11." His archive, done for the Museum of the City of New York, will eventually hold 5,000 images.

Well, this was just what we needed - except that the answer to our request for using the photos internationally was, "no and no."

So Pat went to New York and came back with 27-plus photos in a 30"x40" format -- and with Joel himself to make presentations in many markets. So now, we have this extraordinary treasure trove of images from Ground Zero. How do we magnify it?

• In Britain, we add pictures of the London Blitz in World War II. We also conduct 23 interviews for TV, newspaper and radio.
• In the Philippines, we invite relatives of two Filipinos who died in the attacks. The result: a 10- minute TV feature, whole newspaper pages, and other follow up stories.
• In Brazil, we opened the exhibit in nine cities at once with important U.S. and local officials, such as U.S. Trade Representative Zoellick.
• In Chile, the presence of New York firefighter tripled media coverage.

Basically, what happens in these IV exchanges is what we need to build a real dialogue with the Middle East. We must find common ground, and if we could invite a majority over here I really do believe we could deflect the myths, the biases, the outright lies.

If people can spend some time with us, and experience the full face of the United States, warts and all, they may not love us, but they won't need to kill us to get our attention. That's putting the U.S. in whole context, which became an issue very early on in the month following 9/11.

We were attacked. Who did it, and why? By the time I was sworn in on October 2, Secretary Powell and President Bush had named bin Laden, working with the al Qaeda network, and supported by the Taliban. In the absolute crush of condolences from every world leader and hundreds of vigils mourning our loss from Germany to Indonesia, there were also confirmed stories of celebrations and glee over the fact that the U.S. (Uncle Sam) finally got "his." That was our first recognition that this hate, so strong it called for the murder of innocents, was more than the domain of only a few mad men.

We gathered extensive information about the al Qaeda network, which turned out to be more widespread than we estimated and so even more alarming. As a result, it was highly classified.

But the messages in headlines, on TV, and through embassy cables from the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula States, made it clear there was much denial or doubt, that it could be bin Laden.

"Arabs don't have the skill to do such complex planning," said other Arabs. Or they would not or could not do it. There was even the belief that "the U.S. did it," to justify a war against Islam.

In my suite of offices there is a vault where I read classified documents. The contrast was stark between these painstakingly detailed reports of bin Laden's network and international press stories from Muslim countries. How could we answer such misinformation traveling so swiftly?

Well, we have another hugely talented bureau in the Department called International Information Programs, whose people send key information and speeches, scholarly references, and stories to every embassy. They maintain a terrific web site in six languages, including Arabic.

However, this is also a unit whose resources were cut by some 40 percent over the last ten years. As a result, we did not have a full dialogue with many of these Middle Eastern countries.

By November we had taken all that was not classified and knit it together in a book of truth titled "Network of Terrorism" with color photographs and translated into 30 languages.

"Network of Terrorism" told the story in context - both the emotional and rational dimensions. It depicted the scope of worldwide support for the coalition against terrorism, and provided third-party credibility through statements by leading imams and other religious and political leaders.

We also arranged for the Arabic edition of Newsweek to reprint the entire Arabic text of Network of Terrorism as a full insert. This was a first in the State Department. Adapted by our embassies, it has become one of our most widely read government document - from airport guards in Beirut to the whole Japanese Diet, to many boarding schools in Jakarta.

To return to the exchanges for a moment, they strike me as the ideal. They are experiential. We don't have to tell -- we can show or let them discover.

They allow and encourage third-party credibility. Participants meet real people, not just policymakers or those with axes to grind.

Still, everyone can't come here, and in the Muslim majority countries, we have a long-term communication problem. The brand "USA" is depicted as dangerous to a faithful Muslim. We are seen as decadent, selfish, without our own faith. There is no concept of how we are bound by our elected officials and to the rule of law.

In trips to the Middle East where I came with resources -- books, exchanges to US, grants -- and to listen, I was bombarded with these half-baked and entrenched views -- not if Muslims were mistreated in the U.S., but how often.

Although these ideas are not held by government officials or the elites, even they were very willing to let us hear what "the people" think.

President Bush was right. It's going to be a long war.

The war against terrorism is about extremists attached like parasites to a religion followed by more than one billion people. We have to take this on, but carefully.

Perhaps our greatest building block among many American values is freedom of religion and religious tolerance.

So how about a picture of one of those faiths up close and personal: Muslim Life in America? A story of success and faith, 1,200 mosques, 20 percent conversion rate.

The stories start with documentaries on such subjects as Muslim firefighters, Nobel Prize Winner Ahmed Zuweil, and athletes like Shareef Abdul Rahim, the Atlanta Hawks basketball player.

Such stories will illustrate the acceptance and esteem of Muslims in the U.S., and a shared love of family and faith.

This work is co-partnered with Muslim leaders all over America. They will lead the selection of other subjects. We also seek partners in those countries for seminars, forums, and other activities. In short, we will give moderate Muslims a voice and a forum.

Hollywood is working on celebrity stories, and this will help greatly. We bought a TV series from the Arab New Network to offer eight half-hour segments on how Muslims live in America. PBS has a series we hope to offer - "The Islamic Empire." We will try to get distribution of Middle East films.

In other words, we will organize a total communication effort. We are in the field now, researching messages and will monitor results.

Understanding doesn't prevent debate or disagreement but it can change irrational rage to constructive anger.

We have other kinds of exchanges in the works. We have brought the head of the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia - and the world - to the United States; funded a Rule of Law conference for more than 200 Egyptian judges; brought young political leaders from the Palestinian Authority here - as well as teachers from Turkey, Uzbekistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

We are arranging for Middle Eastern journalists and TV producers to attend training sessions here - to explore this country with their cameras. And we will track carefully the articles, TV shows, and op-ed pieces that follow.

We hope to catch a little of the magic of exchanges by installing an "American Room" in universities, schools, and libraries - especially in the Middle East and Gulf States.

Of course, your ECA partners are working daily to maintain and improve the understanding and support of our exchanges. To magnify their results and to petition for more varied exchanges in more geographic regions.

We must tell our exchange stories in better, tangible ways to wider audiences.

On a final note, did you see President Bush's announcement of the USA Freedom Corps in his State of the Union address?

He said: "My call is for every American to commit at least two years - 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime - to the service of your neighbors and your nation." Included in the list of needs he cited is one you'll find familiar: "extending American compassion throughout the world."

That's what all of us in this room accept as our assignment - and the volunteers of the International Visitors Program know more about the satisfaction, the productivity, the generosity that's part of serving our country than any of the rest of us.

Here we go - inventing you all over again.

And thank goodness, after 40 years, you're still here bigger and better than ever.

Thank you.