Diplomatic Connections January-February 2013 Issue

A Business, Diplomacy & Foreign Policy Publication

January - February 2013 • $7.95

BUSINESS • POLITICS • SPORTS • ENTERTAINMENT • MILITARY & DEFENSE • CONGRESS

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It’s all part of a World Course, brought to life by a team of educators with diverse backgrounds — a truly relevant education for our children’s future.

Every Avenues student will graduate with fluency in a second language.

As our network of campuses soon expands to other cities — including Beijing and São Paulo — students will have the opportunity to expand their experience by studying abroad.

If you’d like to learn more about Avenues admissions, you’re invited to attend a parent information event. Register at avenues.org or call Avenues admissions at 646.664.0800.

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EDUCATION • EDUCATION • EDUCATION

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More than half a million families each year choose independent private schools. The schools that belong to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) share a commitment to providing safe environments in which young people can learn academic skills plus the importance of hard work, leadership, and good citizenship.

Independent schools provide challenging academics and opportunities to participate in a variety of extracurricular activities, which prepares students for success at the next level. A study from the U.S. Department of Education found that 99 percent of students at NAIS schools graduated from

WIS challenges students in Grades Pre-Kindergarten through 12 to become responsible and engaged global citizens.

Our inquiry-based, learner-centered education encourages creative and critical thinking in all disciplines and is inspired by academic innovators around the world. WIS is multicultural and multilingual, and offers our students the following: • An education which culminates in the rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, a college preparatory program recognized around the world.

• A community of teachers which represents more than 30 nations.

• French and Spanish language immersion programs in Pre-Kinder Pre-Kinder-garten and Kindergarten, instruction by native speakers in all grades and a commitment to learning in more than one language.

• Beginning language options in many grades.

Tours by Appointment: call 202.243.1815 or email admissions@wis.edu Primary School Open House (reservations required): December 6 www.wis.edu

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EDUCATION • EDUCATION • EDUCATION

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EDUCATION • EDUCATION • EDUCATION

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high school and 90 percent of graduates attended four-year colleges.

The Freshman Survey Trends Report, an annual study conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute, found that NAIS school graduates felt more prepared for the academic demands of college than their public school counterparts. As college freshman, NAIS graduates reported that they were more likely to ask questions in class and explore topics on their own, even though it was not required for a class. The Higher Education Research Institute also found that graduates from NAIS schools were more likely than public school graduates to have had an internship and to have accepted an offer of employment before graduating from college.

hood too. The National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), administered by the U.S. Department of Education,

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Through this globally based, experiential curriculum, students develop cross-cultural competency and communication skills. This program is an online program that is free of charge and open to all schools.

Since 2005, Challenge 20/20 has connected thousands of schools. Each year, we receive more than 500 applications from schools in nearly 60 countries.

Independent education benefited graduates in adult-

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EDUCATION • EDUCATION • EDUCATION

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EDUCATION • EDUCATION • EDUCATION

independent schools found that NAIS graduates were more likely to exercise regularly, volunteer in their communities, and read newspapers and magazines daily as adults than graduates of other types of schools.

One program overseen by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), Challenge 20/20, helps nurture community engagement while building cross-cultural connections and awareness of global issues.

Challenge 20/20 is an Internet-based program that pairs classes at any grade level (elementary and secondary) from public and private schools in the U.S. with similar-age classes in schools in other countries. Together, the teams (of two, three, or four schools) tackle real global problems over the course of a semester to find solutions that can be implemented at the local level and in their own communities.

The projects relate to water deficits, global infectious diseases, the fight against poverty, biotechnology rules, education for all, and biodiversity and ecosystem losses, among other topics. Schools are paired up by NAIS, based on their interests and age range. First, they share their perspectives on the issue and define the impact of the issue globally and in their own communities. They work together to generate project ideas and to develop plans.

Finally, they share implementation strategies.

The interaction with students from other countries and

Developing cross-cultural communication skills is among the top assets listed by teachers too. A handful of schools request to be partnered with schools in specific regions to help practice language skills. Many groups continue communicating with their partners after the completion of the program, forging bonds both personal and institutional.

Some schools have found that the program builds enthusiasm among parents and can drive volunteerism among community members too. Doctors or development workers may want to help students study global infectious diseases, for instance, and lawyers may be able to share their expertise on intellectual property concerns. Many schools also partner with local community organizations, such as food banks or conservation groups as part of their local implementation strategies.

Programs like Challenge 20/20 help students connect with their communities and the world around them, hallmarks of a high-quality education.

For more information about independent schools, please visit www.nais.org/go/parents.

For information about Challenge 20/20, please see www.nais.org/go/challenge2020.

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March12, 2013

S AV E T H E D AT E Diplomatic Connections is Hosting Another

eception D iplomatA ppreciation R On March 12, 2013

at the Hay Adams Across the Street from the White House in Washington, D.C.

SDate-half-Hay13.indd 1

11/5/12 8:08 PM

April 11, 2013

S AV E T H E D AT E Diplomatic Connections is Hosting Another

eception D iplomatA ppreciation R On April 11, 2013

at the Madison Hotel Just Blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C.

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11/5/12 7:56 PM

October17, 2013

S AV E T H E D AT E Diplomatic Connections is Hosting Another

D iplomatA ppreciation Reception On October 17, 2013

at the Fairmont Washington, D.C. Georgetown Washington’s fashionable West End and adjacent to historic Georgetown

SDate-half-Fair13.indd 1

12/19/12 8:48 PM

November 5, 2013 S AV E T H E D AT E

Diplomatic Connections is Hosting Another

eception D iplomatA ppreciation R On November 5, 2013

at the The Peninsula Beverly Hills 9882 S. Santa Monica Blvd.

Beverly Hills, California 90210 One of Southern California’s Best Addresses

D I P L O M A T I C C O N N E C T I O N S B U S I N E S S edition | J anua r y - F eb r ua r y 2 0 1 3 SDate-half-BHills13.indd 1

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11/5/12 8:17 PM

DIPLOMATIC CONNECTIONS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dawn Parker AssistantS to the Editor Kyle Byram, Chanel Cherry, Ashley Gatewood, Amy Nyhuis, Julie Pomeroy BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Executives Evan Strianese, Kendra Edmonds, Mongoose Atlantic, Inc. – Stephen Channon, Shelby Pierce, Amber Smith DESIGN & CREATIVE KDG Advertising, Design & Marketing msocha@kdgadvertising.com

Cleveland CLinic PAGE 30 Intercontinental Cleveland PAGE 30

DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENTS and CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Roland Flamini, James Winship, PhD, Monica Frim, Meghan Lawson, F. Lewis Bristol, Michael Litzelman Event Coordinator Assistants Kesha Lee; Claire McKenney; Charles Makings; Amanda Makulec; Amy Nyhuis; Katherine O’Leary; Elizabeth Posey; Thomas Saunders; Carter Wilson; Shin-Yee Yu

To contact an advertising executive CALL: 202.536.4810 FAX: 202.370.6882 EMAIL: info@diplomaticconnections.com DIPLOMATIC CONNECTIONS WEBSITE DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT IMS (Inquiry Management Systems) 304 Park Avenue South, 11th Floor New York, NY 10010 TOLL FREE: 877.467.8721 X701 Website: www.ims.com Marc Highbloom, Vice President marc@ims.ca Maria D’Urso, Project Manager Mariad@ims.ca CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHY Christophe Avril, Paula Morrison, Patrick G. Ryan, Canadian Embassy, IHG Cleveland and Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic Center for Medical Art & Photography, copyrighted 2012 To order photos from the events go to: www.diplomaticconnections.com Send any name or address changes in writing to: Diplomatic Connections 4410 Massachusetts Avenue / #200 Washington, DC 20016 Diplomatic Connections Business Edition is published bi-monthly.

Diplomatic Connections does not endorse any of the goods or services offered herein this publication.

Copyright 2013 by Diplomatic Connections All rights reserved.

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Cover photo credits: General Matern, Monica Frim; Sec. Clinton with Pres.

Aliyev, Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images; Azerbaijan, Russia, Armenia – Dmitry Astakhov/AFP/Getty Images; Jennifer Hudson, Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Mercedes-Benz; Nobel Peace Prize, Nigel Waldron/Getty Images For Nobel Peace Prize; IHG Cleveland and Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic Center for Medical Art & Photography, copyrighted 2012; Sarah Jessica Parker, Nigel Waldron/Getty Images for Nobel Peace Prize; H.E.Elin Suleymanov, Ambassador of Azerbaijan, Paula Morrison, Diplomatic Connections.

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Fashion and Accessories Fur Vault at Bloomingdale’s 83 FURNITURE Furniture - RocheBobois 14

COMMUNICATIONS InTouch USA Wireless Communications 14

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Diplomatic Connections Events

Diplomatic Connections Reception, March 12, 2013 at The Hay-Adams Washington, D.C.........................16 Diplomatic Connections Reception, April 11, 2013 at The Madison Washington, D.C...............................16 Diplomatic Connections Reception, October 17, 2013 at Fairmont Washington, D.C. Georgetown..........17 Diplomatic Connections Reception, November 5, 2013 at The Peninsula Beverly Hills, California. .............17 EDUCATION – INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS Archbishop Riordan High School 5 Avenues The World School 4 Florida Air Academy 8 Landmark School 9 Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles 7 Ojai Valley Schoo 9 Sandy Spring Friends School 6 The Kew-Forest School 6 Trinity – Pawling School 7 & 9 Washington International School 5

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TRAVEL, INSURANCE, PASSPORTS AND VISAS Insurance - Travel Insurance Center 10 VFS Global 11

ENTERTAINMENT [The] Embassy Series 95

PAGE 93

Featured Articles Azerbaijan – Ambassador Elin Suleymanov 44 Canada – Department of Defense – Major General Nicolas Matern 20 European Union – Nobel Peace Prize 84 Fashion for Charities 74 InterContinental Cleveland and Cleveland Clinic 30 North Carolina’s Outer Banks 62

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by M onica F rim

W

hen fitness Guru and P90X creator Tony Horton came to Washington in September to whip the public as well as staffers of the Pentagon and the Embassy of Canada into shape, Major General Nicolas Matern, the Canadian Embassy’s new Defence Attaché, was right there in the courtyard of the Embassy huffing and puffing along with the best of them. More to the point, he was, arguably, the best of them. For, when it comes to promoting healthy living, General Matern puts his money where his quadriceps are. He rides his bicycle to work every day, even in a downpour, 1½ hours re-

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turn, which probably means at a very decent clip. His toned physique attests to a disciplined fitness routine, but then discipline is hardly a new concept for a military man.

The question that begs asking is if he fired his driver or if the driver has a cushy job. His answer comes with a toothy grin and a hint of laid back humor: “He has a cushy job.” Then almost as an afterthought, he adds, “… which he really appreciates.” Indeed.

General Matern is Canada’s 26th Defence Attaché, following on the heels of Rear Admiral Richard Greenwood in July 2012. But even before

Military AttachĂŠ Major General Nicolas Matern

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taking up the position of Commander of the Canadian Defence Liaison Staff in Washington, General Matern had established close links with Canada’s closest military ally, the United States. He commanded at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the largest army installation in the world, by population, and, in 2011, completed the PINNACLE (Capstone) course in Suffolk, Virginia.

In a 35-year military career, during which he studied or commanded in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the fact that he was familiar with life in the United States that really eased him into his diplomatic appointment. He is responsible not only for the military attachés and support staff at the Embassy of Canada, but also some 400 members of the Canadian Forces in the United States consisting of students on advanced military courses, exchange officers and liaison staff.

In a recent interview, Diplomatic Connections spoke with General Matern about his experiences as a Commanding Officer in various international theaters as well as the nature of his appointment as Canada’s Defence Attaché to the United States.

Diplomatic Connections: Your appointment at the Embassy of Canada follows a long military career, in which you commanded in many volatile areas of the world. A diplomatic posting might seem rather subdued by comparison. What are your responsibilities at the Embassy and how do they fit in with your background as a Commanding Officer in the field?

General Matern: My responsibilities are pretty straightforward. First, I’m really here to represent the Department of Defence to the United States, and from that perspective I am the interface between Ottawa and Washington on defense and military matters. My second responsibility is as advisor

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to the Head of Mission on all matters of defense and military.

And my third responsibility is to report back to Ottawa on issues of interest for Ottawa with regards to what I’ve been able to garner here. Although my responsibilities are quite different from what I did as a Commanding Officer they come back to the same thing — communicating with people.

Of course it’s a different type of communication from what I would do with troops but it still remains fundamentally one of communicating back to the headquarters, communicating and engaging with our partners over here, and communicating and engaging with our Embassy staff and the Head of Mission.

Diplomatic Connections: Your predecessor, Rear Admiral Richard Greenwood was a Commander with the Canadian Navy. You were a Commander with the Army. How is the appointment of Commander of the Canadian Defence Liaison Staff in Washington decided? Is the position rotated among Canada’s three military components: Army, Navy and Air Force?

General Matern: That’s a good question. The choice of the CDLS individual is really decided by what we call Command Council: the Chief of the Defence Staff and three-star generals. They decide together on appointments — who’s going to go where. I just happen to be part of the two-star plot assignment and they choose a two-star to be in this position.

In terms of rotation of the position, it’s not an absolute as such. You’re looking for a person with certain skill sets, one that all the service chiefs want to see there and one that the CDS will feel comfortable with. But traditionally, and by virtue of pattern, it has usually been Air Force, Army and Navy.

Diplomatic Connections: You’ve worked with military

forces in many countries but your closest collaboration has been with the United States. What, in your opinion, is the main difference between the Canadian and the American Forces?

General Matern: The main difference is quite simple. It’s all about capability and capacity. For example, we are a small army, but very capable at producing good tactical battalions, ships that go out. The U.S. Forces are very good operational and strategic forces, so they are used to deploying big formations out. When I had the opportunity to serve with the U.S. as a senior officer, it was at a very strategic level. For instance, in Iraq I got exposed to the whole theater of Iraq, whereas Canadians are generally limited to specific regions. In Afghanistan, for example, we were very much consumed by the Kandahar region. The U.S. has much more capacity than we have, more ability to project and more reach. What we can expose our senior officers to in terms of strategic movement and strategic affairs is just easier in the U.S. configuration because it’s at a higher level of operations. But while Canada has a tactical army, a smaller army, the operations it engages in on a regional level are top notch.

Diplomatic Connections: You came to Washington via Ottawa, but from 2007 until 2010, you had the honor of being the first Canadian Deputy Commanding General at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Your mission at Fort Bragg took you to Iraq. Can you tell us about your contributions to the mission in Iraq, both for Canada and the United States? What did you, and by extension, Canada, gain from your time in Iraq?

General Matern: In terms of the Deputy Commanding General position, you are right, I was the first to open the position in Fort Bragg and that followed a position that both General Hillier and General Natynczyk occupied in Fort Hood when they were Deputy Commanding Generals for III Armored Corps. We were expanding and we wanted to find other places where we could expose our senior officers to the American way of doing things. So that choice was the XVIII Airborne Corps in Fort Bragg. Subsequently, there was also another Deputy Commanding General installed in Fort Lewis, Washington, with I Corps, so we really had all three of those corps covered. We’ve since given up one of the positions in III Corps to the Brits so that they could benefit from the exposure that we had. But to get to the specifics of your question, I think it’s very much a quid pro quo type of exchange. Personally, I gained a lot of experience from the deployment to Iraq because it exposed me to higher-level operations. The fact that I was participating in a conflict where

most other Canadians were not gave me insight as well as an ability to let Ottawa know what was going on within that theater, which otherwise they would not have had. And for the Americans, it was really about exposing them to someone who may have different ideas and who might approach a problem from a different perspective. I think they recognized that I could resolve issues in a different way or propose things that they might not have thought of.

Diplomatic Connections: Can you give an example?

General Matern: Well, I was in charge of two things over there: coalition operations and infrastructure. My being a member of the coalition, and not a U.S. army officer, enabled me to see coalition experiences from a different way than the Americans and I could share that information. I was also much better positioned to make a case to my boss so that he could understand the issue from a coalition perspective.

I was also working with U.S. personnel to resolve infrastructure security issues. That, I must admit, was completely new to me at that time. So, not being an engineer, and not having been trained in infrastructure security, I could come at that aspect from a very operational perspective and just question why we were doing things a certain way.

Diplomatic Connections: I think that even in nonmilitary situations it can be important to look at things from different angles and to get outside opinions. A matter of thinking outside the box, perhaps?

General Matern: Well, maybe it wasn’t thinking outside the box so much as forcing people back to first principles.

Because when you’re dealing with professionals who know what they’re doing, they come at a problem from a very specific perspective and sometimes they’ll hit a wall because they can’t resolve an issue. When you don’t necessarily have that training you come at the problem from another perspective. That was more the strength that I could bring. It was all about exchanging information and finding out what’s important, what’s not important.

Diplomatic Connections: After Iraq, you changed venues and deployed to Haiti as head of the U.S. Joint Task Force Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center after the earthquake of January 2010. Working with NGOs would have been very different from commanding in a war zone.

What sort of adjustments did you have to make in your approach to the situation in Haiti? And how relevant were your previous experiences to your role in Haiti?

General Matern: Well, I could build on all those experiences. Two completely different theaters of operation: Iraq,

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a very kinetic conflict zone… a very deadly environment… people shooting at each other; Haiti, also a deadly environment but for completely different reasons. This was a humanitarian support mission so the good thing was that you could operate in an environment where you were not being shot at. You didn’t have that constant stress of wondering if you were going to get blown up by a mine. However, the size and the magnitude of the problem on the humanitarian side far outweighed anything that I had seen in Iraq. And so the stress came from wondering how you would deal with the magnitude and the immediacy of this situation. Fundamentally both situations were about people. You just had to apply your people skills to a different set of circumstances. In Haiti, the NGOs were struggling with the effects of the earthquake, just as the Haitians were… but they didn’t have the organization to do what needed to be done. So it was crucial for the Armed Forces to flood the zone with troops that could give immediate help and, once the people started getting back on their feet, the Forces could back off and give them more autonomy. It all came down to working with people, talking with people, engaging with people and working through issues. Even in combat missions, there was always a humanitarian aspect of aid or help. But it was actually harder outside the military lane because there you didn’t know who was really in charge. I couldn’t rely on a military command control structure at the head of the humanitarian aid control center, so I spent a lot of time coaching and mentoring the heads of agencies on resolving problems of this magnitude.

I wasn’t an expert, but because I had a sound understanding of planning and of resolving problems, I could help find a way to collaboratively solve their issues.

Diplomatic Connections: Can you talk a bit about your experiences in other places such as Bosnia and Afghanistan? What were some of your more memorable experiences over there?

General Matern: Bosnia was in the initial days after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Those were interesting times because we were thrown into a breach with very little training, and very little experience apart from our warfighting training. But in Iraq and in Haiti, I could rely on what I had learned over 15 years in Bosnia and Afghanistan. In those earlier operations we were making it up as we went

along. As an example, in our later operations we had these things called Rules of Engagement, which indicate when you can use certain elements of force. When we started off in Bosnia in 1992, we didn’t even know what Rules of Engagement were. So we went from building the aircraft in flight to learning from our mistakes, and then trying to apply what we learned to more complex problems.

Diplomatic Connections: And would you say the same about your experiences in Afghanistan?

General Matern: Afghanistan was different in the sense that I was part of a Special Operations Task Force over there.

So that was before the International Security Assistance Force even came in to being. Therefore, my set of responsibilities was completely different.

Diplomatic Connections: Can you comment on your experiences as a Special Forces Officer and former Commander of Canada’s elite counter-terrorism unit?

General Matern: Highlight of my career. Loved it. Enjoyed it. And worked with some of the best people, no, the best people that the Armed Forces have to offer — people that are selected for what they do and who did it very, very professionally. Obviously, I can’t talk about the operations for reasons of sensitivity and security, but in terms of experience it helped shape my thinking as to what we are capable of as an organization with small numbers and very pointed capabilities. It’s amazing.

Diplomatic Connections: In a previous interview you remarked that you feel more Canadian when you’re outside your own borders. Can you elaborate on that statement and relate it to your present position here in Washington?

General Matern: Well, back home, you tend to get caught up in the daily activities and the daily politics, so you forget at times that you’re Canadian. But as soon as I’m outside of the country I’m reminded very quickly… I take a lot of pride in representing my country. It’s a different kind of pride from when I am back home with other Canadians.

When I was in Fort Bragg, there were two or three Canadians there and we were always known as the Canadians even though we were well integrated into the team. And we were proud of that fact. When you’re outside the country it’s just easier to wave that flag a little more and it’s a good feeling.

Diplomatic Connections: Washington seems to be a bit of a middle ground because you are surrounded by Canadians at the Embassy, yet you are also in a foreign country.

General Matern: Absolutely. That’s why this position is the ultimate. The biggest difficulty sometimes in Fort Bragg

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Military Attaché Major General Nicolas Matern

was in looking for a bit of home where there was none. I’m not talking about the family, but about my experiences as a Canadian, which I couldn’t really share. Here you can do that at the Embassy, yet the minute you cross the gate or go onto the sidewalk, you are in U.S. territory and therefore a representative of Canada. That’s why this is the best of both worlds.

Diplomatic Connections: Does this Embassy have a role in international defense collaborations with the militaries of other nations that have a presence in Washington?

General Matern: Yes. One that specifically comes to mind is the Inter-American Defense Board, which is a forum for 34 countries to deal with security and defense issues at the hemispheric level. The Embassy plays a very active role there.

Ambassador Culham, who is responsible to the Organization of American States, works hand-in-hand with General Thibault, whom you’ve also interviewed, and who is chair of the IADB. I am the delegate representative of Canada.

Diplomatic Connections: What do you envision as your greatest challenges during your time here and how do you foresee meeting those challenges?

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and vice versa. So I’m a bit of a sounding board for both sides. Another challenge is to make sure that the Ambassador understands what we bring to the table — and he really does — and to ensure that the defense interest remains as important as other elements that the Ambassador deals with.

Diplomatic Connections: Thinking back over your long military career and where it has taken you, what in your opinion has been your greatest asset and how important is it to your present appointment here in Washington?

General Matern: I’m a people person. I like people, I like to engage with people and that’s the biggest asset that I have down here. This job is about engagement and about people.

If you’ve got those aptitudes, you’ll be successful in this job regardless of which service you are from. I think I can make a difference through that aspect of engagement not just with the US, but also with all our other partners. I’m extremely happy and satisfied to be down here.

Diplomatic Connections: Thank you, General Matern, for sharing your views and your enthusiasm with us. You’ve seen a lot of the world and engaged with many people. It’s been a delight and an education for us to be let in on some of your past experiences as well as your present duties as Canada’s Defence Attaché to the United States. n

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INTERCONTINENTAL CLEVELAND. WORLD-CLASS HOSPITALITY ON CLEVELAND CLINIC’S MAIN CAMPUS.

World-class hospitality meets world-class care. We are connected to Cleveland Clinic via skywalk and just minutes from museums, sports, shopping, theater, galleries and unique dining destinations. When you stay with us, you’ll experience exceptional accommodations and guest services that are unparalleled in the area. We welcome guests from across the country, and around the world, every day.

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There are 193 countries on earth.

Patients from 125 have come to us for care.

Cleveland Clinic is an international leader in medicine and patient care.

We treat thousands of patients from around the world. They come to us from every nation for advanced medical treatments, innovative technology and attentive service. Our Global Patient Services representatives are standing by to link patients and physicians to our worldwide network of resources.

Contact us now, and enter the world of Cleveland Clinic caring.

Same-day appointments available.

Contact our Embassy and Executive Services Office at 216.445.7009. clevelandclinic.org

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F. L e w i s B r i s t ol

H

ospitals must maintain sterile conditions in generally antiseptic surroundings. They are models of medical efficiency, driven by the latest diagnostic techniques, and staffed by medical professionals whose primary concern is to understand the functions and malfunctions of the human body in order to take corrective action and restore health. Comfort, as any experienced patient who has shivered through a cold, anxious night in a hospital bed finally falling into a fitful sleep, only to be awakened by nurses or technicians checking vital signs or taking blood samples will tell you, is secondary to medical procedures.

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Hotels, on the other hand, are havens of out-of-the-ordinary comfort characterized by amenities that are designed to separate the niceties of hotel life from the mundane routines and frustrations of home life. Guests and their happiness are the be-all and end-all of the hotelier’s trade. Staff members are trained to provide exceptional service and to anticipate guests’ needs. Linens are characterized by ever higher thread-counts. Choices of pillows are provided. SPA-quality products are made available for the guests’ pleasure and Wi-Fi access facilitates the intrusion of work requirements into a very un-office like environment.

Reprinted with permission, Cleveland Clinic Center for Medical Art & Photography Š 2012. All Rights Reserved.

Jacqueline Spence, Managing Director for Global Patient Services at the Cleveland Clinic

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InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Lobby Seating Area

Seemingly the two — hospital and hotel — could not be more different. One is sterile and institutional, expecting patients to conform to its routines; the other is luxuriously comfortable, warm and inviting, seeking to accommodate its guests’ every need. Yet the Latin root of the two words — hospital and hospitality — is identical, meaning to protect, shelter and care for. But the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s leading hospital facilities, has taken note of this classical meaning and found a way to blend the facilities of a great clinical medical center with the accommodations of a worldclass hotel chain, the InterContinental Hotel Group.

Unusual though it may be, the Cleveland Clinic actually owns three hotels on the Clinic campus and has a management agreement with the InterContinental Hotels Group to manage and operate these facilities. Craig Campbell, Director of Sales and Marketing for the InterContinental Hotels at the Cleveland Clinic, notes that, “The Clinic’s objective with the hotels is to provide outstanding service to guests from around the world that enables the Clinic to do what they do best — deliver world-class Care.”

Jackie Spence, Managing Director for Global Patient Services at the Cleveland Clinic, underscores the unique opportunities afforded by having the hotels on the Clinic 32

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InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Lobby Lounge

campus, “Many of our patients come to us acutely ill and their supportive family members are often under considerable stress. The hotel enhances the healing environment by providing a situation where patients and their families can be together in the comfort of a hotel, yet have immediate access to the hospital facilities. They’re able to eat the foods they like. They’re not disturbed by hospital procedures through the night. The result is a more home-like situation where family care can be provided.”

Craig Campbell also observes that the association between the Cleveland Clinic and the InterContinental Hotel Group, “allows the hospital to have the degree of global reach that it would like to have in order to meet the medical needs of patients around the world.

And, it gives the hospital a level of influence over hotel policies such as pricing, availability, and services and amenities provided. Because of our relationship with the Cleveland Clinic,” Campbell adds, “we try to factor patient needs very heavily in our decisions, not only in the way we operate the hotels, but also in the way we choose to staff the facilities, as well as in the amenities we provide.

We even hire people with certain foreign language abilities because we know the nature of our customers.”

The three hotels on the Cleveland Clinic campus provide a range of price points and a variety of daily living arrangements designed to fit patient and family needs. The flagship hotel, connected directly to the Cleveland Clinic by skyway, is the InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center, which features 23 suites, extensive conference facilities and one of Cleveland’s leading restaurant experiences.

The mid-level product is the InterContinental Suites Hotel, one of the only all-suites properties in the InterContinental portfolio. Ninety percent of the rooms in this facility are two-bedroom suites that offer a separate living area and a separate bedroom area. Designed around a “wellness focus,” the Suites

Hotel offers a wide range of health-related amenities ranging from special menus, enhanced health club facilities and full access to hospital-provided massage and therapy programs to soothing color palettes and specially maintained hypoallergenic rooms.

The Cleveland Clinic Guesthouse is the most economically priced of the three hotels intended for more extended stay guests who may be patients at the Cleveland Clinic for weeks and months at a time. It provides everything from kitchenette rooms that will allow families to create a “home away from home” to RV parking spaces and electrical hook-

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ups for families who choose to travel to the Clinic in a recreational vehicle.

To learn more about this extraordinary collaboration between the Cleveland Clinic and the InterContinental Hotel Group, Diplomatic Connections spoke with Craig Campbell, Director of Sales and Marketing for the InterContinental Hotel Group at the Cleveland Clinic; Jackie Spence, Managing Director for Global Patient Services at the Cleveland Clinic; and Michelle Hammett, Department Administrator for Global Patient Services.

Diplomatic Connections: Why is the Cleveland Clinic particularly appealing to international patients seeking medical treatment?

Jackie Spence: People travel great distances to come to the Cleveland Clinic not only because of our excellent clinical outcomes but also because of our patient experience outcomes.

We receive many patients, especially for heart and circulatory conditions, because we have been #1 in the specialty for 18 years in a row. Patients and families are willing to come from anywhere around the world to be treated here. We have

InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Lobby Lounge

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a laser-like focus on the patient experience and making sure that while patients are here, we are doing everything we can to provide needed services. We work hard to go over and above expectations. The presence of the hotels right on the Clinic campus speaks volumes about our concern for patients’ comfort and welfare and about our ability to anticipate and respond to patient and family needs. The presence of InterContinental here sets us apart from the rest.

Diplomatic Connections: Please explain what you mean by “patient experience” outcomes. How do you measure that?

Jackie Spence: Our patient experience outcomes are measured by our HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores. This is a government-sponsored confidential survey that patients receive after discharge. This is the standard in the hospital care industry.

If I go to a major university hospital or a smaller regional hospital, they all use this survey as a measure of the quality of the patient experience they are providing.

Some of the things that we are rated on are hospital environment, nurse communication, doctor communica-

tion, noise at night, etc. This survey is how we evaluate our patient experience outcomes.

Craig Campbell: When we renovated our Intercontinental Suites Hotel in 2011, we specifically factored in some of the things that Jackie just mentioned. In the majority of our rooms, we have recliner loungers because sometimes people can’t recover in a prone position. They need to be upright.

We have mini refrigerators but we added freezer compartments because patients often had medications that had to be kept frozen. What we’re trying to do is to recognize that we may have guests and patients staying with us, either preprocedure or post-procedure, who have certain requirements that a typical hotel may not think of or be able to meet.

Diplomatic Connections: What services does the Global Patient Services Department offer to international patients and their families?

Jackie Spence: We have a one-stop shop in Global Patient Services. We are physically located in the InterContinental Hotel. International patients are admitted through our office.

Their financial clearance is done here. They are escorted from here to their appointments. There are also interpreters for any patient that is an international patient. The escorts/ interpreters stay with the patient and help them navigate our system. Our office even helps with other arrangements post-hospital. If a patient needs to go shopping or needs a haircut, then we help with that. We have a driver who will transport patients and families to different locations.

Michelle Hammett: We also can say that our patients receive one-on-one service. When they first contact Cleveland Clinic for an appointment, they are tied to a coordinator who will stay with them through their whole pre-admission process — until all of their appointments are scheduled, the hotel is booked and transportation from the airport to the hotel is arranged. From the very beginning they have contact with an individual person, which avoids having patients talk with many different people and having to

InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Presidential Suite

InterContinental Suites Hotel Presidential Suite

C2 Restaurant, Bar and Lounge at the InterContinental Suites Hotel

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retell their story multiple times.

Diplomatic Connections: How do international patients make contact with the Cleveland Clinic? How do they start the process if they are somewhere on the African continent or somewhere in Southeast Asia?

Michelle Hammett: There are several avenues that patients take to reach the Cleveland Clinic. Many people are on-line, so they will find us on search engines as they search various hospitals or search specific health concerns. Word of mouth is huge for us. Patients come here, are treated, and they go back to tell family and friends about the Cleveland Clinic and the excellent quality of service they received. We do publications that are sent out globally. We attend various conferences in different countries and distribute information about our services.

Diplomatic Connections: Patients really have a person, an identifiable personality, who is their point of contact with the Cleveland Clinic and the hotel throughout.

Michelle Hammett: Yes. Then, after they arrive, they have a post-coordinator who will facilitate any additional appointments. They have an interpreter or an escort assigned to them who will support them in other ways as needed.

Patients have very immediate personal contact, and they can always call our office if they have any issue.

Craig Campbell: You can also imagine that some of our patients and families, especially if they’re traveling internationally, they may have a visa that allows them to be in the United States for only a limited time. The Clinic has the ability to try to schedule all of their medical appointments in sequence as they need to be done in a short period of time. This would be virtually impossible without one of the Global Patient Services staff members navigating the waters for them. Global Patient Services really does a remarkable job of orchestrating everything that needs to happen within a limited amount of time.

Diplomatic Connections: What about services to families? Patients come to you generally not alone. They are accompanied by family members, and in some cases they may even be accompanied by a retinue, an entourage of assistants who come with them. How do you deal with the issues of the family members who are there in support of the patient but aren’t the patients themselves?

Jackie Spence: We almost treat the family members as though they were patients as well. We provide interpreters not only for the patient but also for the family. Perhaps not surprisingly, many times the family members become patients after their arrival. They are here to care for their family member, but once they know the reputation of the Cleve36

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land Clinic they say: “As long as I’m here I’m going to have my condition looked at.” At that point, we escort the family member through the whole patient in-take process.

Depending on the needs of family members, we provide food that is to their liking. We provide a prayer room/meditation area where family members can have silent moments that are appropriate for various religious backgrounds.

Craig Campbell: Oftentimes the family members need a break away from the hospital environment, and the Clinic will also provide hospitality shuttles to area attractions like the art museum or the botanical gardens or other area attractions. This gives families a chance to get off our campus and clear their minds and be prepared to come back and give the support that the patient’s family member needs.

Diplomatic Connections: How do you handle the

patient discharge process between the Clinic and the hotel?

Patients are generally discharged with on-going care instructions and yet in many cases your patients are going to be discharged not to the immediate Cleveland area but to locales literally thousands of miles away. What is done to facilitate that post-discharge care process?

Jackie Spence: We absolutely try to keep a close connection with the patient. Luckily, our patients are very Internet savvy. We do send patients’ medical records to their physicians back home. We try to assure a high degree of collaboration and communication between doctors at the Clinic and the patient’s primary care physician at home. Often our patients will email us months later asking for recommendations and physician referrals.

Many of our patients will return to the Cleveland Clinic

for follow-up care, but they don’t have to do that. Depending on the procedure, they certainly can follow-up with their physician back home. Then they can link back to us in Ohio to provide updates on their condition. Many times the relationship that we have with our international patients is on-going. We have a 45 percent return rate on our patients.

With that in mind, we work hard to build relationships that will keep patients and families coming back for their specialized medical care.

Craig Campbell: Another aspect that can become very important is that often the patient may or may not know where and when they’re being discharged. Or, they might plan to leave on one day only to find out that due to various issues it may not be advisable to leave for three or four days following discharge. A typical hotel may not have the ability

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InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Lobby Lounge

InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center Bank of America Amphitheater

InterContinental Suites Hotel Lobby

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to just extend, and extend, and extend where — being a partner to the hospital — we actually anticipate stayovers and extensions every day. We plan for that and factor it in. We know that meeting the needs of our patients is critical to our success.

Diplomatic Connections: Can the hotel meet the special needs of international guests ranging from translation services to dietary requirements? How do you try to respond to special requests when you have a world full of differing cuisines and familiar and unfamiliar foods?

Craig Campbell: Table 45 Restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel and Conference Center offers our guests “world cuisine.” We don’t necessarily try to recreate specific foods from various parts of the world, but we do incorporate spices and cooking techniques that people might find familiar. As we plan our menu, we do try to take a wide range of dietary requirements into consideration. The Cleveland Clinic has created a concept called “GO Foods.”

These are foods that meet certain dietary and nutritional requirements. All of our menus — both in our restaurants and in banquets at both of our hotels — include “GO food” menu items for people to consider. Whether they are on a low-sodium diet or low-fat content or just must be more health conscious in their choices, we try to be certain to offer a range of healthy and flavorful options.

In some instances Global Patient Services will make us aware of certain dietary restrictions, and we’ll do our very best to accommodate those needs.

Diplomatic Connections: Does that mean that the hotel kitchens provided some of the same options that would be provide to patients under care in the hospital?

Craig Campbell: Perhaps better to say that we try to support the healthy changes in eating habits and lifestyle that the Clinic doctors might recommend to patients.

Diplomatic Connections: Tell us a bit about the hotel’s events and catering service. Are you equipped to handle events in different settings according to international traditions and cultural expectations? Can you do a Hindu wedding and a bar mitzvah and other events within cultural expectations?

Craig Campbell: Absolutely. In some cases we have the skill and talent on staff. In other cases we may have to outsource certain items to meet the clients’ requests.

For example, we don’t operate a completely kosher kitchen. For a traditional kosher meal we would rely on an outside caterer to assist us with that meal. We do have the ability to do a wide range of weddings according to

Table 45 Restaurant and Bar at the InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center

cultural expectations.

Diplomatic Connections: What is it that makes the InterContinental experience, the Cleveland Clinic experience so exceptional?

Craig Campbell: This sounds simple, but it has proven to be very important to us. We tell people when we hire them that you need to understand the circumstances that you’re working in. We realize that we may actually be the shoulder that somebody needs to cry on. Those may be tears of joy because they received good news, or they may be tears of sadness because they’ve had bad news. We have to be that calming factor for our guests.

We see our role as making people comfortable, in every sense of that term. If we can help our guests to be as stress free and as relaxed and as comfortable as we can make the situation for them that allows them — either the patient or the family member or both — to focus on what is really important. We don’t want our guests to have to worry about the things that we should be doing, about the services that we provide. We don’t want our services to be a distraction; we want to eliminate distractions so that patients and families can focus on the healing process. We want to add tools and resources, to make services available to our guests that will

allow them to have the optimal outcome from their hospital experience.

Michelle Hammett: There is also the convenience of our patient being right here in the hospital complex. If there’s a time when a doctor needs to see a patient, we don’t have to hunt them down somewhere else in the city and then try to figure out how we’ll get them from downtown to the Clinic campus in a short time frame. When a patient is here in the hotel, we can easily call them and say, “The doctor wants to see you in 30 minutes,” and they are conveniently able to meet that time frame. It is a huge convenience to have these hotel facilities right here on the Clinic campus.

Jackie Spence: I recently came from the clinical setting in the Heart & Vascular Institute where I was a nurse-manager for two cardiovascular step-down units. There were countless times where a patient was deteriorating, and for the family members to see what the patient is going through is draining physically and emotionally. For these folks to be able to know that they have a comfortable bed to sleep in just yards away from the hospital and to know that their family member is in good, trusted hands allows the families to rest and regenerate without feeling that they are neglecting their loved one. And they know that if staff has to call with

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difficult news they can be at the patient’s bedside in minutes, or that the staff can come get them from the hotel. I experienced situations like this almost every day, and I don’t hesitate to say that having the hotels on the campus is not just a physical comfort to families; it is a spiritual comfort as well.

Diplomatic Connections: The most unique aspect of the hotels is the relationship to the Cleveland Clinic, but Clinic patients are not your only potential audience. What makes the hotels standouts among other hotels in Cleveland? Why might a visitor to Cleveland choose a hotel on the Cleveland Clinic campus as opposed to somewhere else in the city?

Craig Campbell: First of all, if it’s your intent to seek the finest hotel experience that you can have in traveling to Cleveland, we are one of only two hotels in the city that are four diamond rated by AAA. We’ve actually been rated that way from the moment the hotel opened. That speaks to the caliber of the product, the services and amenities that are provided, and the attention to detail we offer. So, if that’s what you’re seeking, we are the place that you want to be regardless of location.

Second, the location is important. We are centrally located between downtown Cleveland, which is about four miles to the West of us, and about a mile and a half east of us is the cultural district of Cleveland known as University Circle. The major anchor tenants of that area are Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the world-renowned Cleveland Symphony Orchestra that plays there at Severance Hall and we now have the newly opened home of the Museum of Contemporary Art. There are a number of major cultural venues concentrated in University Circle. We feel that our location is ideal to access downtown and the cultural life of the city.

In addition, the Conference Center Hotel provides 35,000 square feet of meeting and convention space making us one of the larger facilities in the city. Another key attribute unique to this hotel is that we have an exceptionally well-appointed 500-seat amphitheater that was intentionally designed for high-level conferences, both medical and nonmedical. Every place has a beautiful Corinthian leather chair with an individual Internet connection, and for Cleveland Clinic events they can connect into their own Intranet system. You have an audience response system at each place as well as production caliber, high-definition projection systems within that amphitheater. It is really a technological state-ofthe-art facility for conferences. That attracts many groups to us that are looking for more than just having a meeting but are really truly looking for an event.

Diplomatic Connections: What other event and conference services do you provide?

Craig Campbell: In addition to hosting large conferences — both medical and non-medical related conferences — the hotel hosts the vast majority of the fundraising gala events and high-end weddings in the Cleveland market. The caliber of the facility, the flexibility of the facility, and extraordinary creative culinary staff that we have, and the banquet service levels that we have provided since the hotel opened its doors have attracted a wide audience. People know that, if you’re looking to have one of the finest events in Cleveland, the InterContinental Hotel and Conference Center is where you want to be. You’d be amazed. Probably 80 percent of our wedding business comes from word of mouth endorsements of our superb service. Oftentimes we find ourselves doing multiple weddings over the years from the same family.

Diplomatic Connections: Rephrasing an earlier question, what is it that makes the Intercontinental hotels at the Cleveland Clinic unique?

Craig Campbell: Often people within the diplomatic community are not coming here specifically for medical treatment. They are coming here for more political and diplomatic reasons. We want to emphasize that because of our international experience directly related to our role with the Cleveland Clinic we have the exceptional skills, capabilities, protocols and systems in place that are necessary to support high-level diplomatic, governmental and business meetings — large or small. Bottom line is: “We get it.”

We operate this hotel differently from a traditional hotel.

That’s because we understand our mission as it relates to providing affordable accommodations to patients of the Clinic.

We have to manage in a different environment than many other hotels. But, that makes us uniquely qualified to be the hotel of choice when you want to visit the Cleveland Clinic or the Cleveland area.

We don’t want to disappoint expectations. We want to exceed them. We are a world-class hotel connected to a world-class medical facility. n

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OLD SILK ROAD MEETS THE NEW SILK ROAD:

AZERBAIJAN’S ENVOY TO WASHINGTON BRINGS THE STRATEGIC POSITION AND THE REGIONAL POLITICS OF THE CAUCASUS INTO GLOBAL FOCUS James A. Winship, Ph.D.

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mbassador Elin Suleymanov has devoted his diplomatic career to representing the interests of his young nation in the United States. Azerbaijan’s location in the Caucasus, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, has put it astride the boundaries — physical and emotional — between Europe and Asia. The embassy website describes Azerbaijan as, “a diverse nation and a reliable ally at the heart of the Silk Road,” and Ambassador Suleymanov is quick to point out that in present global circumstances, Azerbaijan is the only country to border both Russia and Iran.

Speaking at Georgetown University, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, William J. Burns noted that, “The U.S. views Azerbaijan as a strategic partner sitting at the crossroads of the Middle East, Europe, and Asia — regions whose future will shape American interests and foreign policy for years to come.”

“A more stable and prosperous Azerbaijan,” he continued, “promises a more stable and prosperous Caucasus. It promises more opportunities for peace in a complex region.

And it promises a more reliable partner for fighting global threats — from terrorism to financial crises — which no single nation can overcome alone.” Burns concluded by declaring that, “We want Azerbaijan to succeed in becoming a market-based economy and a democratic state.”

Ambassador Suleymanov has echoed these ideas in a statement on U.S.-Azerbaijani relations. He notes that as, “Both a member of the Council of Europe and the Organization of Islamic Conference, the Republic of Azerbaijan is in

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a unique position to bridge divides and to promote greater understanding. Azerbaijan and the United States,” the Ambassador reiterates, “enjoy a strong partnership founded on shared interests in global and regional security, energy and economic development, democratic reforms and respect for human rights. Azerbaijan is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and is firmly committed to building a self-sufficient, democratic and prosperous society.”

Azerbaijan has also been a critical link in the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a vital logistics network facilitating supply routes from the United States and NATO into Afghanistan and offering a critical alternative to frequently disrupted or politically closed supply routes through Pakistan. Early Persian and Arab writers all mention oil in connection with the Caspian region and Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku, and the records of Marco Polo’s journeys mention oil in this place. From the very earliest commercial discoveries of oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea in the last quarter of the 19th century, Azerbaijan has been a supplier of energy, first to Imperial

H.E. Elin Suleymanov Ambassador of Azerbaijan to the United States

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Russia and the Soviet Union and now in the 21st century to Turkey and Europe via a “Southern Energy Corridor” with pipelines by-passing Russian territory.

A nation of 9.5 million people with a majority Turkic and a majority Shi’a population, Azerbaijan was briefly independent from 1918 to 1920, and that interlude of independence is still remembered as a birthplace of the Azerbaijani nation — a fact reflected in the country’s flag. Prior to that early independence, Azerbaijan had been incorporated in the Imperial Russian Empire and subsequently in the Soviet Union. The country’s experience with the cultural mélange of Silk Road travelers, coupled with its experience of being a Muslim nation ruled by Russian Orthodoxy and by Marxist ideology, has yielded a secular state committed to the principles of cultural and religious tolerance and diversity.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary of independence in 2011, Azerbaijan received significant validation of its progress toward building a democratic state, a sustainable and transparent economy, and its commitments to independent decision making and cultural diversity when it was elected to become a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for 2012 – 2013.

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in his person. He was born and grew up on the Caspian Sea and educated in Azerbaijan, the Soviet Union, and the United States. He is a graduate of Azerbaijan State University with a degree in geography and received a graduate degree in political geography from Moscow State University. Subsequently, he received a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Toledo (Ohio) and a further graduate degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (Massachusetts), where he specialized in international security issues and public international law.

He is a career diplomat who did not begin professional life with a diplomatic position but instead began his career working for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Azerbaijan as well as with the Open Media Research Institute in Prague.

Ambassador Suleymanov’s initial diplomatic appointment was as First Secretary and Press Attaché at the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Washington, D.C. He then returned to Azerbaijan and served as Senior Counselor in the Foreign Relations Department of the Presidential Administration of the Azerbaijan Republic. Subsequently, he was named Azerbaijan’s first Consul General to Los Angeles, California and established his country’s consulate there serving 13 states.

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Azeri President Ilham Aliyev (2nd L) and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) have lunch following meetings at the presidential Zagulba residence in Baku on June 6, 2012.

He was named his country’s Ambassador to the United States on October 26, 2011.

Ambassador Suleymanov was kind enough to sit down with Diplomatic Connections for a frank and far-reaching discussion of his career and Azerbaijan’s foreign policy.

An Exclusive Interview with H.E. Elin Suleymanov, Ambassador of Azerbaijan to the United States Diplomatic Connections: Ambassador Suleymanov,

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please tell us a bit about your own career stream. How did you decide to become a diplomat?

Ambassador Suleymanov: It was not really a matter of choice. I always dreamed about Azerbaijan becoming an independent country. I think many of us have done that. So, when Azerbaijan became an independent nation, there was a great

shortage of professionals who could become diplomats, who could represent the country, who could be a part of this new — or renewed — national identity. The diplomats you see today are the people who decided to join the foreign service, to enter public service as part of their contribution to building a new independent nation. It is true for our president. It is true for our foreign minister. It is true for many of our officials.

Diplomatic Connections: Is there a sizable Azerbaijani community here in the United States?

Ambassador Suleymanov: There is. It is partly in California, but there are also communities here in the Washington, D.C. area, in New York City, in the Chicago area and some in Houston. We recently inaugurated an Azerbaijan Cultural Center in Houston. So, our community here in the United States is growing and gaining recognition.

It’s interesting because what you have in Houston is a group of people who are young professionals. They do not represent immigration that came here to the United States during the Soviet years, but many of them are new, younger Azerbaijanis who are professionals working in the energy sphere

Azeri President Ilham Aliyev (R) chats with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the presidential Zagulba residence in Baku on June 6, 2012.

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and energy-related businesses whose work brought them to the United States. Many of them are Western educated, and many of them are fluent English speakers. So, it’s a very interesting and diverse group of Azerbaijanis living in the United States.

The Azerbaijani-American community is becoming more organized. If you have noticed recently on the congressional side, there was much greater recognition of the Azerbaijani community. They are reaching out more to the elected officials. That’s a good thing. We’re very happy to see that.

Diplomatic Connections: Diplomatically, this is a young relationship between the United States and Azerbaijan. It is also a relationship that had a turning point in it on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon here in Washington were attacked. There was a more rapid development of a strategic relationship between the United States and Azerbaijan after that event.

Ambassador Suleymanov: Yes and no. Let me explain what I mean. I was here at the embassy when 9-11 happened. It was a very tragic day for all of us. It is notable that 50

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Azerbaijan was one of the first countries to offer unconditional support to the United States. The former President, Heydar Aliyev, convened the Security Council and made the decision to offer all we can to support the United States.

There are some acts that are simply outrageous, and terrorism is a universal evil. It is not an issue where you hesitate. It is not an issue where you ask: what do I get in exchange? It is an issue where you do the right thing because it is the right thing. That’s what I liked about that decision.

What happened on 9-11 is more a sudden realization or a more acute understanding of the importance of AzerbaijaniU.S. relations. Azerbaijan’s location immediately meant that it was of great strategic importance. Our partnership began prior to that. It’s been developing quite well since 1999 when Azerbaijan attended the NATO summit and became part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace. Energy cooperation was always going well. But, after 9-11 there was a realization that Azerbaijan matters. It was then that Azerbaijan emerged as a key partner for the United States in terms of security and

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Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov (R) and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton give a joint press conference at Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku on June 6, 2012. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks with Azerbaijan on energy, security and civil rights in this oil-rich state, and voiced concern about a flare-up of violence on its border with Armenia.

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defense and in fighting against terrorism.

Diplomatic Connections: What has it been like for Azerbaijan to come out from Soviet dominance to re-establish an independent state and a civil society? What have been the growing pains of a very young independent nation in modern terms?

Ambassador Suleymanov: I think what you are asking is a key question, which we all ask ourselves. If you look at me today, I am twice as old as my country. It has been only 20 years since the independence of Azerbaijan was restored. We have to treasure our nation because it is still fragile.

President Heydar Aliyev and President Ilham Aliyev have been able to build a very pragmatic approach to foreign policy and to regional affairs. Our greatest priority is to build a sustainable, viable nation, which makes its decisions independently. That’s an absolute priority for us. For a long time Azerbaijan decision making was dependent on bigger powers — some of them in the neighborhood. So, what we would like to do is to make sure that whatever decisions are made are made by us in the capital of Azerbaijan — Baku.

The other thing is that we understand that we live in a larger region. That means that stability in the region is crucial to us. We can’t survive if the region doesn’t survive.

Diplomatic Connections: Despite the collapse of the

Soviet Union, Russia is still a major presence in the region and is one of the Caspian littoral states. What is the impact of having both a history with Russia and the geographic proximity at this point?

Ambassador Suleymanov: This question goes straight to the issue of identity and nation-building. Azerbaijan’s geographic location is unique. People often ask whether Azerbaijan is in Asia or in Europe. I always answer that Azerbaijan is in the Caucasus. Of course, Azerbaijan is a part of Europe — we are part of the OSCE and part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace. But, we are also an active member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and we cooperate closely with the Asian Development Bank. Our unusual geographic location actually offers us an opportunity to be much more open and much more involved with all sides. That’s important. That’s a good thing for Azerbaijan.

We are the only country in the world — the only one — that borders both Russia and Iran. Other countries border Russia and others border Iran, but no other country borders both. Both Russia and Iran have had a very strong influence on Azerbaijan both culturally and economically. Sometimes that influence is very positive and sometimes it could get a bit overwhelming. But many of us would say that these influences have been more of an opportunity than a liability.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (L) stands with Afghan President Hamid Karzai (C) and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (R) for the official photo following the meeting on Afghanistan in Chicago during the NATO 2012 Summit on May 21, 2012.

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View of the Bibi Heybat Mosque near oil derricks on the shore of the Caspian Sea just outside the capital Baku.

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or toward the West, but because this is what serves the interests of the Republic of Azerbaijan the best.

Diplomatic Connections: What is the impact of Iran’s

presence and the traditions of Persian and Shi’a Muslim culture in Azerbaijan? Azerbaijan is predominantly Muslim, and that Muslim community is predominantly Shi’a rooted in the same Muslim traditions as Iran. Given Iran’s concerns in the world and the world’s concerns about Iran, once again we find Azerbaijan right on the same playing field.

Ambassador Suleymanov: You gave a perfect description — the world’s concerns about Iran and Iran’s concerns about the world . . . and here’s Azerbaijan right in the middle. First, Iran is a very interesting cultural space. It’s not purely Persian.

Iran is a rather diverse society, and a significant portion of the Iranian population is of Azeri heritage. We have lived next to the people of Iran for centuries. We have developed mutual respect. The Iranian people have a very rich culture.

The majority of Azerbaijanis share the same religious traditions with the Iranians in terms of being Shi’a Muslims. But the difference is that in Azerbaijan your religion is between you and God. The government does not take an official position on religion. There is no statesponsored religion. Azerbaijan is a secular state. We believe that faith is a choice for every individual to make independently.

It’s a big difference between Azerbaijan and Iran.

Because of the particular choices made by the Iranian authorities, that influence of Iranian Shi’a practice is not the same as it used to be. There have always been cultural distinctions between us, but the practices of the Islamic Republic in Iran have moved us farther apart. Iran has been a factor; it will remain a factor, in Azerbaijani life. We do hope to see that, whatever the disagreements are between Iran and the Western world, The Government House of Baku, also known as House of Government, is a government building housing they will be resolved peacefully. various state ministries of Azerbaijan.

Diplomatic Connections: We have been building up to the question of Natant. First, we must be pragmatic as we discussed before. gorno-Karabakh and the relationship, the tensions and the Second, we must be confident. The choice of working with bloodshed between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Can you help the West — in Euro-Atlantic integration, through the NATO our readers and our country understand the nature of that partnership, through energy security issues, and now we’re dispute and the fact that, though it is scaled down in terms working on building a southern natural gas corridor — those of violence, it is still very present in terms of tension between are pragmatic choices for the future of Azerbaijan. We made the two countries? those choices not because we want to move toward the East Ambassador Suleymanov: It is perhaps the most impor-

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Since emerging as an independent nation, owing to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and the political turmoil that followed, trying to position yourself as an independent nation has not been easy. We have sought to build our relationship on the basis of cooperation, mutual respect, and the understanding that we are independent partners and partners which stand on equal footing with each other.

Azerbaijan has always been very open and welcoming to a Russian cultural presence. Provided, of course, that there is a strong respect for our independence and, most important, for our independent decision-making authority.

Diplomatic Connections: You were so long a part of the Soviet Union, and then at the collapse of the Soviet Union you were pulled westward rather than eastward, looking at the Western European economies, looking at NATO. Azerbaijan is walking a bit of a tightrope between identities, trying to maintain Azerbaijan’s unique identity, recognizing that you have historic Russian roots, and yet being pulled toward Europe in new and attractive ways. How do you orchestrate this — being pulled westward and being rooted eastward?

Ambassador Suleymanov: Two things are very impor-

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An Azerbaijani family walks in the capital Baku. Locals prefer to see the Eurovision competition as a chance to put their city — which already boasts fine fin-de-siecle architecture and an enchanting old town — firmly on the European map.

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tant and the most difficult question for Azerbaijanis. When you look at the early 1990s, not considering the war in the Balkans, this was the most violent conflict in Europe.

The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan did not end.

A ceasefire was negotiated in 1994. That ceasefire has been violated on occasion, but mostly it has held. The ArmenianAzerbaijani conflict actually precedes the independence of Azerbaijan. It began in 1988, three years before our independence. In many ways, it is very simple. What we are talking about is an occupation or an annexation of a territory by a neighboring state. Armenia, with the help of some other countries, used military force to expel the Azerbaijani population from Nagorno-Karabakh. Imagine that: there were only about 7.5 million people in Azerbaijan and of them about 1 million became refugees and IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). This was a program of ethnic cleansing designed to create an ethnically dominated enclave which basically was done by using military force to push people out and take over foreign territory.

Armenia’s occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh is not recognized and does not have any prospects for recognition.

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Azerbaijan’s position regarding sovereignty over NagornoKarabakh, with the exception of Armenia. Our position is based on the principles of international law, including territorial integrity. There are now four Security Council resolutions that call for the withdrawal of Armenian troops.

Nobody, even Armenia, recognizes the so-called regime in Nagorno-Karabakh.

There is the Minsk Group under the sponsorship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and co-chaired by France, Russia and the United States.

They have mediated a peace process which goes on and on and on. It’s been going on for nearly two decades.

Diplomatic Connections: From Azerbaijan’s point of view is there a solution? Must the territory that has been occupied

by Armenia be returned? Is there a possible compromise?

Stepping into the role of Armenia for a moment, the Armenian position would be that: we are a people who suffered attempted genocide, and if we do not protect ourselves and our fellow cultural countrymen, then no one will protect us.

Ambassador Suleymanov: Yes, but we need to look at the reality. Whatever happened in Armenia historically, and I would not agree with the term of genocide, Azerbaijan does

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Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev (L), Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev (C), and their Armenian counterpart Serge Sarkisian (R) speak during their meeting in Krasnaya Polyana near the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. Aliyev met his Armenian and Russian counterparts to discuss the unresolved conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

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not occupy a single inch of Armenian territory. We have not used force to take over someone’s territory. Nearly nine out of 10 of those displaced by this conflict are on the Azerbaijani side. The Armenians did not undertake this action by themselves. They were helped. At this point there are several bases of the Russian Federation in Armenia. In fact, the Armenian borders are guarded by foreign troops. So for them to say that, “We are the victims. Nobody is going to protect us,” is not extremely sincere even if that might be their perception.

Diplomatic Connections: It is that issue of perception and emotional content of the conflict that we were trying to get at.

Ambassador Suleymanov: You make a very important point. And that offers a logic that leads toward a solution for the conflict. If you look at the history of the region and at past grievances regarding boundaries, these might be real but they are in the past. These attitudes are not the basis of pragmatic decision making. The leaders of Armenia have to sit down and say: what is the best for the economy of our people? What is the best for the future of my people? And, whatever may have happened to Armenia in the past, how do

we avoid that from happening again?

We spoke earlier about the Russian culture in Azerbaijan.

The Russian presence in our country had mixed consequences. It was positive, but there was also a substantial history of Russian invasions. We can lament all our lives about the consequences of the Russian presence in Azerbaijan. Or, we can look at what has happened and say what we have is our common history — common successes, common tragedies, common failures, common aspirations.

Let us use that experience to build a new partnership in the region. Armenia today can be driven ethnically and look at the region through their ethnic lens, or it can sit down and say: “Let us work with the neighboring states.” We’re ready to do that. We’re ready to build a region which would be integrated and which includes Armenia. We want that to happen, but Armenians have to make the decision. Do they want to be a part of the region, or do they want to be a republic defined primarily by ethnicity and not participate in regional development?

Diplomatic Connections: May we talk a bit about the U.S.-Azerbaijan strategic relationship? Could you explain to

(L-R) President of Azerbaijan Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev; EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger; Michael Diekmann, chairman of the board of management of Allianz SE; Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace; Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and Carl Bildt, Swedish minister of foreign affairs, participate in a panel discussion during the opening day of Munich Security Conference in Munich, southern Germany. The Security Conference was a three-day event bringing together top defence and diplomacy officials from around the world discussing the winding down of the NATO engagement in Afghanistan and other looming challenges.

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caption WikiMedia Foundation

Former Building of Carpet Museum (new one is under construction) in front of National Park of Baku Boulevard. Baku Boulevard is a promenade established in the early 1900s which runs parallel to Baku’s seafront. Its history goes back more than 100 years, to a time when Baku oil barons built their mansions along the Caspian seashore and when the seafront was artificially built up gradually.*

us a bit of the role that Azerbaijan has played in supporting the U.S. and the ISAF presence in Afghanistan? You also had “boots on the ground” in Iraq. You have had boots on the ground in Kosovo. Why would Azerbaijan involve itself in those operations?

Ambassador Suleymanov: Certainly since 9-11 the awareness of Azerbaijani’s potential role and the possible areas of cooperation with the United States in international security have been much more acute. Azerbaijan also wants to be a responsible member of the international community. Some things we do because we have commitments to our partners. Some things we do because we believe in them as absolutely right.

This partnership between Azerbaijan and the United States is abiding and strong. Azerbaijan does this because we believe in our strategic partnership with the United States.

We’re saying that we share values. We believe that the United States stands for something, and we believe that our partnership is good for the region.

In terms of Afghanistan, part of the reason we chose to participate is because we want to see regional development.

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country to slide into chaos once again and become a center of instability. We understand that the best hope for stability and controlling radicalism in the region would be a secure and stable and prosperous Afghanistan. That’s our commitment to them as well. Therefore, Azerbaijan has already committed € 2,000,000 to the Afghan Army Trust Fund in Afghanistan. Our assistance to ISAF is not limited to overflights, being part of the supply line and having troops on the ground. We have collaborated in training the Afghan security forces and training Afghan officials. We’re now talking about enhancing Afghanistan’s links with Central Asia in trade and communications. Our hope is that we’ll also be a part of the solution for the people of Afghanistan.

Diplomatic Connections: The question of naming and maintaining an American ambassador in Azerbaijan has been almost comical if it weren’t so serious. Why has this issue of an American ambassador in Baku been such a saga, so problematic?

Ambassador Suleymanov: You now have an outstanding ambassador. Ambassador Morningstar is a distinguished ambassador and a veteran ambassador. He served as Ambassa-

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dor to the European Union and as special advisor on Caspian Basin Energy Supply.

Ambassador Bryza was a recess appointment necessitated by the politics of the United States Senate and the objections of Armenian-American organizations. Some members of the Senate were convinced by Armenian lobbies to put a hold on his nomination effectively blocking any vote on his confirmation. That recess appointment was for one year only and could not be renewed.

Of course, that whole process wasn’t pleasant for Azerbaijan, but I think it was very damaging for the United States — for its image and for the values for which the U.S. claims to stand. It was not a proud moment for American foreign policy.

Diplomatic Connections: As long as we’re talking about image, we must raise the question that there have been persistent concerns about human rights violations in Azerbaijan, not so much on grounds of religion, or gender or ethnicity but more on the issue of stifling political opposition or political criticism of the government. How does your government respond to those concerns?

Ambassador Suleymanov: I will speak both as Ambassador but also as a citizen of Azerbaijan. We want to have

a democratic country. We want to have a sustainable and prosperous Azerbaijan. We have spent our lives building the country. Please understand that nobody in Azerbaijan, especially not the President nor anybody in the leadership, wants to see an Azerbaijan that is not democratic. That is natural for us as we work on building a new independent country after years of Soviet domination.

Nobody is perfect. People have questions and consistent criticisms of democracies that are much more mature than Azerbaijan’s. Azerbaijan has an opposition and a very vibrant opposition. Many of our Azerbaijani publications are opposition publications.

Just like anywhere else, there are certainly shortcomings that we need to overcome. These shortcomings are often recognized by the government. Sometimes we need advice in recognizing them. But that should be constructive criticism. If it is only something just designed to undermine the development of Azerbaijan, I don’t think that’s fair. On the other hand, if the critical advice is friendly, sincere and offers potential solutions, then it’s a good thing.

Diplomatic Connections: Let us wrap-up the interview by asking you a question that we try to ask as the final ques-

The Nizami Literature Museum in Baku, Azerbaijan.

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tion in each of our interviews. That is: What are your deepinternational community. How many of us have had a chance to est concerns for the future of your country? What are your participate in building your own nation from the ground up? fondest hopes for the future of your country?

Diplomatic Connections: You have been present at the Ambassador Suleymanov: I think our biggest concerns creation, or the recreation of your nation. That is a striking — my biggest concerns — are threefold. First, is to see that and a humbling place to be. Mr. Ambassador, thank you for Azerbaijan succeeds as an independent nation. It should be giving so generously of your time. It has been a fascinating integrated into a region and become successful as a country conversation. n in every way. Second, is to see that the Azerbaijani population remains committed to its secular order and its diverse For the full video record of the and tolerant society. I want to see it grow as an educated interview with Ambassador Suleymanov, citizenry and continue toward building a nation that is much please go to our website: more diversified in terms of its economy, moving toward a non-energy economy. Third, my big fear, and not necessarily unjustified, is that instead of finding a solution to the conflict with Armenia we may end up in a situation Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev (R) poses beside first lady Mehriban Aliyeva after she was awarded with the Legion d’Honneur medal from the hands of French President Nicolas Sarkozy where hostilities resume. in Baku, Azerbaijan.

My greatest aspiration I talked about earlier. It is to build a country that becomes a rightful member of the international community. My goal is to sit in the Republic of Azerbaijan at the end of my days and say that we were part of history, part of becoming a truly independent nation that plays a key role in the

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The Nizami Literature Museum in Baku, Azerbaijan.

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Article and Photographs by Monica Frim

Wildlife spotting is a favorite activity along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

From a viewing platform in the marshes at Bodie Island, a bird-watcher looks for heron, egret, ibis and other wading birds.

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Diplomatic Connections is now dedicating a section of each It’s a sheltered life here in Washington — sheltered, that is, in terms of geological upheavals. While snowstorms, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes have been known to pound and shake the Potomac environs, their touch is but a debonair tap compared to the weightier pummelings of places farther-flung. For Washington lies within a buffer zone that is cushioned from the violence of the Atlantic Ocean by a comma of land that dips between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. You can cross it in 2½ hours by car, travelling through the states of Maryland and Delaware to Lewes, gateway to a tether of weather-whipped spits and islands with sand dunes and salt marshes that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean all the way to Florida.

Go farther south and the Outer Banks of North Carolina reveal an even wilder side. Here, there’s beauty in nature’s fury, and rapturous escape in history’s ingenuous events. You can sap up storm-defiant treasures, either alone on an empty beach

publication to national and international destinations. We are continuously asked for more information about different places to travel to. For this installment, join Monica Frim on her travels to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, including Hatteras, Roanoke Island, Corolla, Duck, Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Ocracoke Island — a journey of history, sun, sand, and great beauty.

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or in a crowded resort town where boardwalks, piers, go-kart tracks and seaside restaurants lure the young and the young at heart with action-packed options. Kite boarding, kayaking, hiking, hang gliding, surfing, lighthouse climbing, bird watching, fishing, crabbing, diving, cruising, shelling, jetskiing, parasailing, swimming… the smorgasbord of activities is as endless as the grains of sand.

But as the song says, silence is golden and so are deserted beaches where feral horses roam and desert dunes shift along narrow strips of sand that constantly change shape and profile according to the whims of wind and water. Stand back and you can almost see geography in the making as the sand swivels from one pile to another dismantling old dunes and creating new ones. Sit back, do nothing and savor your inertia. An idle respite can do an antsy spirit good.

The paradox of America’s Eastern Shore lies in its balance of crowded resorts and near-empty spaces. They are so close to each other that you can shift between frenzy and near comatose repose several times in a single day or savor an entire week in the environment of your choosing.

History, too, can be as close as you let it. Museums tell of shoals and shipwrecks (this is, after all, the watery playground of Blackbeard and other pirates), wars and

watchtowers, first flights and feral horses known as “bankers.” These short and hardy creatures still roam the buffer strands, albeit in managed herds, their arrival on the islands as mysterious as the fate of the first English settlers who disappeared without a trace from the island of Roanoke well before Plymouth and the colonial triumvirate of Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg took root as America’s founding cities. In that sense, the first European settlers were not English adventurers, but four-footed grazers, likely of Spanish descent. Conjecture says the horses either swam to shore from shipwrecked Spanish galleons or were brought there as early as 1526 by the Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón when he tried to establish a colony in South Carolina.

Others have suggested that the horses were the only survivors of Sir Richard Grenville’s failed attempt at a naval base in 1585 at the behest of Sir Walter Raleigh.

With 600 soldiers and would-be colonists, Grenville washed ashore at Roanoke Island and left Ralph Lane in charge while he (Grenville) returned to England for additional supplies. The natives and Europeans bonded in trade, then bickered and parted under most unfriendly terms after Lane killed the Secotan Indian Chief Wingina over a stolen cup. Lane skedaddled back to England on board Sir Francis

Many people begin their explorations of the Outer Banks at Kitty Hawk, about 50 miles south of the Virginia border. Here the beach is available to local residents and visitors alike.

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The Roanoke Marshes Light house on the waterfront of the town of Manteo is a replica of the lighthouse that once stood at the southern entrance to Croatan Sound.

The Elizabeth II is a composite reproduction of a 16th century sailing vessel. Visitors to Roanoke Island Festival Park can board the vessel and listen to sailors and soldiers in period costumes interpret life at the Roanoke settlement and aboard ship.

Drake’s ship with most of the settlers in tow mere days before Grenville’s return with the promised supplies. The defection marked the end of Governor Lane’s colonial career, though not the end of Sir Walter Raleigh’s dream of colonization. In 1587, Raleigh tried again. He mustered 117 men, women and children under the governance of John White and sent them off to establish a permanent colony on the Chesapeake Bay. They made it as far as Roanoke Island and within three years disappeared without a trace leaving only the word “CROATOAN” carved into a pole and the letters “CRO” carved into a tree. Their fate has been the subject of much conjecture. Did they flee hunger and/or hostile Indians for the nearby Island of Croatoan (now Hatteras)? Nothing has been found. Were they massacred by Indians bent on revenge for the killing of their chief years earlier? There is no evidence. Did they starve to death? Intermarry with native peoples? Get taken as slaves

by Indian traders? Succumb to Spanish raids? Historians remain baffled to this day.

Today, on the northern tip of Roanoke Island, clues to the Lost Colony unfold within the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site like a murder mystery without a resolution. While you never get to the “who dunnit” part, you can tease out the background on a stroll past a recreated earthen fort and from

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The Bodie Island Lighthouse near the northern entrance to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore was built in 1872 to warn ships of the dangerous Diamond Shoals to the south. The keepers’ private quarters are now a visitor center.

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An ice cream parlor in Avon replicas of John White’s water paints the town pink. Avon is the color sketches in the Elizabegateway town to Canadian Hole, the most popular windsurfing than room of the visitor center. spot on Hatteras Island.

Pictures of Indians in soft pastel-colored robes or loincloths and mat-roofed domes of village homes surrounded by a circular fortification of poles testify to the mores of Indian tribes such as the Secotans, a people who disappeared within 200 years of meeting their first European foils.

Canoeists stand punting with long paddles through shallows while fishermen spear fish with poles longer than the men are tall. Eastern box turtles, with orange and green carapaces and crabs in muted pinks and blues serve as reminders of the agelessness of flora and fauna from a pre-Kodak time when trip mementoes took the form of brush strokes not cameras. For John White was not only the leader of the failed colony of the “Cittie of Ralegh” but a talented artist and mapmaker. Much of what we know about the colony comes from his paintings and writings. He sailed back to England in 1587 to seek fresh supplies but could not return to Virginia, as the area was then called, until three years later. In the meantime the colonists vanished, including White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in the New World. Ironically, the tiny infant of unknown fate achieved lasting fame as a tool for imaginative branding as clever scribes and marketing types labeled their liquors, sodas and vanilla extracts “Virginia Dare.” She has been the subject of books, films, animations and songs, and honored on postage stamps and in the names of many places in the southern United States. A sculptor’s vision in Carrara marble of Virginia Dare as an adult, had she survived whatever trauma befell the early settlement on Roanoke Island, stands in the Elizabethan Gardens next to the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

But the greatest homage to the short-lived colony and its intrepid settlers comes in the form of the longest-running outdoor historical drama in the United States. In an amphitheater overlooking Albemarle Sound, playwright Paul Green’s symphonic play, The Lost Colony, has been cutting through the soft summer surge of the Sound since 1937 in a rousing pageant of music and action that sweeps from Queen

Elizabeth’s sophisticated court to a sylvan baptism to a fiery Indian raid.

Elsewhere on the island, Civil War memorials attract devotees of military memorabilia. Several forts look over Croatan Sound on the northwestern part of the island while Freedom Trail winds through woods to a memorial marker that commemorates the freed and runaway slaves who found a safe haven on the island.

A short hop east, the Washington Baum Bridge connects Roanoke Island to the 120-mile stretch of surf and sand that stretches from Corolla just south of the VirginiaNorth Carolina border to Ocracoke, an island of dunes and marshes accessible only by ferry. Houses on stilts in towns with whimsical place names like Duck, Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head and Whalebone Junction are strung along a coastline that is somehow wide enough and stable enough to support an array of shops, restaurants and oiled bodies. At Nag’s Head there’s even a hospital. The towns’ names are couched in obscurity with various stories to explain their origins. In one version Nag’s Head, refers to the practice of “wreckers” hanging lights on mules heads’ to lead ships onto the shoals for looting. Many ships transported barrels of rum, known as “Kill Devil” in the parlance of the day, giving rise to the name Kill Devil Hills. Apparently the “wreckers” would hide their pilfered rum in the sand dunes of the area where Orville and Wilbur Wright tested their gliders then took wing over flat ground in the first powered aircraft for an unprecedented 12-second-flight. By their fourth try they managed to stay aloft for 59 seconds and a distance of 852 feet. Sixty-five

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The Wright Brothers Monument at Kill Devil Hills marks the spot from which Orville and Wilbur Wright performed hundreds of glider flights before their first powered flight.

A stainless steel sculpture of the Wright Brothers’ airplane at the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

years later Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Today a 60-foot granite monument in homage to the Wright brothers crowns Kill Devil Hill, but it’s the flimsy “Flyer” housed in the rotunda of the visitor center below that’s most likely to catch your eye, possibly because the mannequin resembling a supine Orville steering the plane from atop the lower wing sports dapper plaid pants with matching hat, a vest and a tie.

Today’s hang gliders dress less formally and their preferred roaming skies are above the East’s highest sand dunes at Jockey Ridge. Here are also the operational grounds of the world’s largest hang gliding school. But you don’t need to soar through the air to enjoy the solitude of the pale blue skies or the quiet whisper of the wind. You can watch hang gliders from below or meander through the 400-acre grounds of Jockey Ridge State Park on self-guided nature trails that penetrate a variety of environments from wetlands to grassy

dunes. Daylight affords the best views of the colorful human birds that, as one bystander commented, “run like the devil, then soar like angels” into what surely must be freedom, serenity and solitude. But early morning is the best time to catch the prints of foxes, deer, rabbits and lizards in the sand.

Look closely at the sand grains, amber as the sunrise, and you’ll see a scrollwork of tiny depressions, evidence of wingtips of birds and insects having taken flight from the sand. By evening, the day’s traffic of hikers scrambling up and down the soft dunes will have ground the delicate reliefs of animal prints and the wavy patterns of shifting sands into a giant playground of overlapping pits and pockets.

Heading south, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore is a refuge of dunes, marshes and woodlands with no clear demarcation point between land and sea. Dubbed, “The Graveyard of the Atlantic,” more than 600 shipwrecks have

A model of Orville Wright at the controls inside the rotunda at the Visitor Center.

A hang glider coming in for a landing at Jockey’s Ridge.

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Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean at Nag’s Head.

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At Mirlo Beach at the north end of Rodanthe on Hatteras Island, houses are built perilously close to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

Many underwent extensive repairs after being damaged during Hurricane Irene in 2011.

found watery resting places as victims of shoals, storms, subterfuge and war. In this setting, lighthouses once played an important role in guiding sailors to safety. Today, most serve as museums or photo-worthy foregrounds in picturesque settings. Some, such as the black and white barber pole-striped Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, are open to climbers. It is the tallest brick lighthouse in America, sturdily built in 1870 at a respectable 1500 feet from shore, but without pilings. For who of that era could have imagined that, at that distance from the shore, the lighthouse would someday be lapped by water and at risk of falling into the ocean? But the power of the Atlantic is such that it can roll up the seashore and deposit it elsewhere. Like Sisyphus pushing the rock, the Atlantic pounded the shore and gnawed at the lighthouse base — to the tune of $3 million in repairs until the government decided it might be better to shell out an additional $10 million and move the lighthouse out of harm’s way once and for all. Since 1999, the lighthouse proudly stands 2,900 feet farther inland, its doors and stairs open to visitors. The foundation stones of the original site were left at the edge of the sea when the lighthouse 70

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was moved. They are engraved with the keepers’ names.

Ocracoke Island is wild and thin and empty — a country bumpkin at the southern tip of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. A free car ferry provides access from Hatteras Island. There are no restaurants, amusement parks or tourist amenities until you reach the end of the 15-mile road that bisects the island like a straight strand of black licorice. On one side, marshy greens full of bonsai-like oaks and shimmering salt grasses dissolve into the flat blue waters of Pamlico Sound. On the other, a dark blue ocean rolls with white-fringed gusto over sandy shores shifting, changing, kneading the land into strips of doughy dunes that rise and fall with the moods of the weather. It’s the best place for Outer Bank souvenirs if your idea of good souvenirs means seashells and flotsam scavenged from beaches where you can walk for miles without meeting a single soul.

Historically, Ocracoke’s most famous residents were Blackbeard and “bankers,” monikers for, respectively, the pirate Edward Teach, and the feral horses, sometimes called ponies for their short stature. For a while the townspeople

tolerated them both. Although Blackbeard terrorized merchants in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, raiding their ships and killing those who protested, the townspeople enjoyed the benefits of his labors, which Blackbeard sold to them at a fraction of the cost of legitimate imports. By contrast the “wild” horses were as gentle as the breezes off Pamlico Sound. Their worst traits involved an occasional intrusion into a vegetable garden or a rare stampede through town. In the mid-twentieth century they even joined the Okracoke Boy Scout troop, which was the only troop on horseback at that time.

Nevertheless, the ponies ended up in the care of the National Park Service, which now owns the entire island. They are corralled halfway along the island’s only road in Wild Pony Pens, their free-roaming days over. Proponents of corralling point out that bankers have been brought back from the verge of extinction and receive excellent, if regimented, care with controlled breeding programs and safeguards from the traffic of Highway 12. Opponents argue that there has never been a need to isolate them.

Blackbeard was finally murdered at Ocracoke Inlet in 1718, his head cut off and suspended from a Royal Navy sloop as a warning to other pirates. According to legend, his headless body, thrown overboard, swam around the ship several times before sinking. Today superstitious villagers swear

that on a clear day they can still see his body rising out of the depths looking for its severed head.

With no roads joining Ocracoke Island to the mainland, and undeveloped beaches stretching from one end of the island to the other, Ocracoke’s commerce is centered in a single sound-side village that is as quirky as it is quaint. Unique and interesting specialty shops coexist in riotous colors with inns that follow the curve of a horseshoe harbor known as Silver Lake. Ironically, it’s this quiet, sound side that’s the focal point of the village, not the raucous Atlantic. Unlike the beach towns farther north, where Top-40s drown out the sound of the surf and coconut oil overwhelms the nasal passages, life on Ocracoke is a subdued affair sheltered from the rage of the ocean and its parade of crazy characters. Leafy lanes with ancient graveyards and simple wooden cottages that face the sound indicate a respect for nature’s forces born of years of experience and common sense. Even the lighthouse keeps a guarded distance. It is set on a treed lawn halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and Silver Lake Harbor.

Ocracoke Island remains basically wild. Isolation has woven a magical thread around history’s maddest moments and kept this lost colony free of the busy beach pageantry so characteristic of the spits and islands to the north. The island is still its own best beach find and emptiness its most enchanting quality. n

Cape Hatteras Island viewed from the Hatteras-Ocracoke car ferry.

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Fashion Soiree Reception hosted by the Embassy of Canada’s Deputy Head of Mission Deborah Lyons with guests and embassy staff.

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by Monica Frim

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ever let it be said that the diplomats in Washington don’t know how to party. In November, the Embassy of Canada hosted a fashion extravaganza where even staid government types morphed into high fashion models. In fact, the fashion show began on the floor well before it spread to the catwalk as 75

guests in five-inch heels, sequined cocktail dresses, animal print sports jackets and patterned leggings vied with tailored business suits and sensible flats. The fashion soirée included a cocktail party, silent auction and rousing dance party where Washington’s diplomatic and business communities proved that they could certainly let down their hair — all in the name of a good cause, of course.

Three hundred and twenty-five guests attended the Fashion Soirée and raised $7,798 for charities that benefitted not only the Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign (GCWCC), an umbrella organization that raises funds for a variety of charitable organizations in Canada, but also the United Way of the National Capital Area. The latter supports 358 member nonprofit organizations in the Washington, D.C. area.

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Aptly, many Washington businesses joined Canadian enterprises in contributing prizes and services. The models donated their time; the Fairmont Washington, an overnight stay; and a Canadian Airline offered two tickets to any destination it served. Fashion houses gave freely of time and fashion — with many of the runway designs offered for the silent auction. Even the handbags in the show were donated for the silent auction courtesy of Matt & Nat, a vegan line designed by Inder Bedi of Montréal and Nella Bella, another vegan fashion house founded in 2007 in Toronto.

It was an evening of glamor and glitz, thanks in large part to the creations of Michael Kaye, the Canadian fashion icon who dressed the event organizers and emcee Kelly Collis of 94.7 Fresh FM fame in stunning sequined cocktail dresses that, in a fitting ode to the season, bedazzled and enchanted.

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Michael Kaye is known for his visionary tartan gowns (the “Bonnie Prince of Tartan” is putting his creative stamp on Canadian history with 15 evening gowns in the tartans of each Canadian province and three territories to be toured across Canada), but this evening his focus was all sparkle and shine with a runway emphasis on sexy, body-hugging red and white evening gowns. His de rigueur tartan trademark surfaced mainly as a male fashion accessory for event host and Embassy spokesman Chris Plunkett, dapper in a red tartan bowtie with matching pocket square. New York-based for more than 20 years, Michael Kaye’s high-end evening gowns have graced the likes of Katie Couric, Tipper Gore and Martha Stewart.

The evening’s fashion fare combined internationally acclaimed Canadian brands that are already familiar household names in Washington — names like Lululemon and Pajar — along with many rising independent designers such as Christopher Bates and Sim Khan, who are proving that men’s fashions

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can indeed be as smart and bold as women’s. Christopher Bates combines classic Italian tailoring with modern Scandinavian design to produce a style that he calls minimalistic and futuristic. He established his eponymous company in 2008 and immediately made his mark with edgy, tailored menswear that combines luxury and casualness. Guests at the Embassy of Canada got an eye-catching introduction to his adventuresome use of color in his pink shorts and matching pink suspenders, which he paired with a crisp, two-toned long-sleeved shirt featuring white cuffs, collar and front panel insert. Attention established, more wearable fashions, at least for style-attuned government types, followed: a classic black suit and, for off hours, various combinations of white and powder blue pants and jackets.

A rapidly-rising fashion star with an acute mind for business, Christopher Bates was his own best model. Wearing his trademark lipstick kiss dress shirt and a white tuxedo, the charismatic designer mingled with ease among guests, politely engaging in conversation with all who approached him. With winning personality, generous spirit, and smart, innovative designs, this man is definitely stepping out on the road of international renown. Keep watch.

Another newcomer worth watching is Washington-based Sim Khan, a 30-year-old lawyer turned fashion designer for men. His red satin-lined tuxedo and yellow blazer show a penchant for bold design and daring.

His brand, B & C Potomac established in 2011, is still finding its fashion feet but with a running start from celebrities who have already jumped on the B & C (Brimble and Clark) bandwagon. Actor Daniel Cosgrove of daytime drama, teen heart throbs of the Twilight Saga series (Booboo Stewart, Kiowa Gordon and native Canadian Bronson Pelletier) are early ambassadors of the B & C brand.

But if bold was the hallmark of revolutionary design, conservative chic were the standards of craftsmanship that epitomized all the labels.

Greta Constantine, the brand name

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of partners Kirk Pickersgill and Stephen Wong, was a hit with a flouncey teal jersey dress that highlighted the paradox of casual sophistication — careful attention to detail and structure that results in a look that appears effortless and unstructured. Also known as the “jersey boys of Toronto” for their luxury jersey dresses, the name Greta Constantine is actually a combination of Stephen’s mother’s name and that of Kirk’s grandfather. Launched in Toronto in 2006, the company has a long list of celebrity clients such as Nellie Furtado, Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Hudson, Angelina Jolie, Naomi Campbell, Iman and Canada’s most iconic fashion reporter, Jeanne Beker.

Also giving homage to a look that translates easily from daytime wear to evening sophistication were the designs of Kimberly NewportMimran. Her label, Pink Tartan, is the female equivalent of husband Joe Mimran’s Joe Fresh line for men. For the embassy’s Fashion Soirée, Kimberley, who is both president and head designer of Pink Tartan, worked in a palette of chiefly black and white reconstituted op art designs that showcased a penchant for retro chic. Her runway dresses were silent auction items but those who lost out on the bidding can take heart. Two years after launching in Toronto in 2002, Pink Tartan opened a New York showroom with designs also available at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Holt Renfrew, The Bay and specialty stores across North America, and in 80

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Dubai and Seoul.

In another tribute to vintage, Montréal designer MarieEve Emond paired a simple brown skirt with button detailing and a simple black top with two thin horizontal bands of brown that matched the skirt. Marie-Eve is the face behind Betina Lou, a classic design company that entered the Canadian fashion scene in 2009 with subtlety and a focus on neutral colors. Her adherence to classic, traditional wardrobe staples with timeless elegance also resonated in a blue and red quasi plaid dress with a circular skirt that emphasized a penchant for precise cuts and attention to detail. Suitable for all occasions, Betina Lou designs are practical designs that adapt easily to a variety of occasions.

Perfect for Washington events.

Proving that anyone could wear these easy-on-theeyes and enhancingto-the body designs, the embassy’s own staffers joined professional models, who, themselves, gave freely of their time and talents on the runway. But the loudest cheers went to embassy models who, for the most part, strutted with confidence and ear-to-ear grins as they relished their precious moments of vogue and vanity in Canadian trendsetting designs. Alas, their extroversions did not extend to modeling (at least not in public) the silky lingerie, courtesy of Christine Morton’s eponymous label, but the professional models who showcased the beautiful red silk peignoir sets and pajamas drew satisfying smiles and nods from an appreciative audi-

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ence. Christine and Company was the first company to launch a line of silk lingerie in Canada in 1973. Since then, Christine has achieved international recognition for her high-end lingerie. All her contributions to the fashion show were auctioned off at the end of the evening. As one auction contender proclaimed, if the peignoir she bid on was good enough for Oprah, it was good enough for her. Other owners of a ‘Christine’ are Catherine Zeta-Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow and Katie Holmes.

Of course, no Canadian fashion show could be complete without some homage paid to Canadian winters, and Pajar, the top name in Canadian winter wear, did not disappoint.

And neither did the most applauded Pajar model: the embassy’s own in-house fashionista and Deputy Head of Mission, Deborah Lyons. Stunning in a lipstick red down-filled parka with fur trim, Ms Lyons proved that work, charity and play

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could be a formidable and fun combination as she hammed it up for the guests and the cameras. Since 1963, when Paul Golbert combined the letters of the first names of his family members to form the company name, Pajar has ruled over winter fashions, beginning with performance footwear, then expanding to include high-end parkas.

The Fashion Soirée was a showcase not only for the creative designs and talents of Canadian designers but also their generosity. As Deborah Lyons said, “All are here to help the United Way meet its objectives.” And all seemed there for a good party as well. For between the fashion show and the silent auction/raffle winner announcements, the embassy turned itself into a reveling party room where guests hopped, bopped, danced and cavorted until closing time. One could be fooled into thinking it a hipster bar.

Only at the Embassy of Canada, eh! n

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The President of the European Commission JosÊ Manuel Barroso (L) and the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz attend a ceremony to celebrate this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the European Union (EU), at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on December 12, 2012.

Nobel Peace Prize in hand, European leaders meet for a final 2012 summit on December 13, 2012, still facing the uncertainties of the debt crisis.

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Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Oliver Dowell Lloyd

Daniel Sannum-Lauten-Pool/Getty Images

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he flag of the European Union shows a circle of twelve gold stars against a deep blue backdrop. A similar panoply of stars gathered to celebrate the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. Hosted

by Sarah Jessica Parker and Gerard Butler, the Nobel Peace Prize Concert was staged in Oslo, Norway, and included a long list of international stars. Parker, star of the awardwinning comedy series “Sex and the City,” fashion icon and a UNICEF Ambassador, called hosting the Peace Prize Concert a privilege and said, “I am honored to be sharing the stage with such amazing performers to promote the power of peace around the world.” Her co-host, Scottish actor Gerard Butler, called the concert, “a remarkable celebration of humanity.

The European Union has shown the world what is possible when forces unite in peace. It’s a joy to stand alongside these magnificent artists and celebrate the EU and its contribution to world peace.”

The concert performance list was as diverse and as multicultural as the 27-member European Union itself. Featured performers included Australian pop-singer Kylie Minogue, Grammy and Academy Award-wining R&B songstress Jennifer Hudson, singer-songwriter Ne Yo, and British R&B star Seal as well as the young Italian trio — Il Volo. Also among the constellation of musical stars were Belgium’s Milow, Swedish singer-instrumentalist Laleh, the Norwegian hip-hop duo Karpe Diem, the Portuguese “Tasca beat” band OqueStrada, Norwegian artist Susanne Sundfør, and the fast and funky Romanian brass ensemble Fanfare Ciocarla.

Why follow the pomp and ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony with a pop-music concert? It’s an effort to make the award real and relevant to new generations, not an artifact of the last will and testament of a turn-of-the-twentiethcentury businessman, inventor and humanist. Why allow the beat of contemporary sounds and recording artists from across Europe, Australia and the United States to accompany the seriousness of the Nobel Peace Prize citation and the accompany-

(1st row L-R) German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Romanian President Traian Basescu, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, French President François Hollande (2nd row L-R) Portugal’s Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, Danish Prime minister Mark Rutte, Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Smith (3rd row L-R) Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, Deputy Minister to the President for European Affairs of Cyprus Andreas Mavroyiannis pose for a picture prior to a working luncheon at the Gamle Logen hosted by Norway’s Prime Minister for the EU leaders while they attend the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at Oslo City Hall on December 10, 2012, in Oslo, Norway. The European Union is collecting this year’s prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for uniting the continent after two World Wars, especially while during economic crisis.

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John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

(L-R) Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande are applauded at the Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremony at the City Hall.

Solum, Stian Lysberg/AFP/Getty Images

(L-R) Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, Chair of The Norwegian Nobel Committee Torbjørn Jagland, Maria Barroso, President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, Queen Sonja and King Harald of Norway, European Union President Herman Van Rompuy, Geertui Van Rompuy, European Parliament President Martin Schulz and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Geir Lundestad gathered prior to the Nobel Peace Prize gala banquet in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2012.

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Nigel Waldron/Getty Images for Nobel Peace Prize

(L-R) Marta Mrianda of OqueStrada, Seal, Sarah Jessica Parker, Gerard Butler, Jennifer Hudson and Ne-Yo at the press conference ahead of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway.

ing lecture by the prize recipient? It’s an attempt to place the honor and prestige of the award and the importance of peacemaking efforts in the here and now . . . to pass the hope and the responsibility of reconciling disputes to an emerging cohort of young leaders who live in a world very different from the one inhabited by Alfred Nobel.

The naming of a winner for the Nobel Peace Prize is almost never without controversy, and 2012 is no exception. Critical voices suggested that in the midst of Europe’s gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression, this was no time to be lauding the work of the European Union. Still, this Nobel Peace Prize was awarded more for what did not happen than for any programmatic accomplishment of the European Union and its predecessor organizations. In many ways, this Peace Prize was given to underscore the maintenance of the peace in Europe throughout the second half of the twentieth century, no small accomplishment after the first half of the twentieth century had been marred by two wars on the European continent that spread to the rest of the world.

Recalling that several awards had been given to

persons seeking reconciliation between France and Germany during the Interwar Period (1918 – 1938), the Peace Prize committee announcing the award to the European Union (EU) noted that, “Since 1945 that reconciliation has become a reality. The dreadful suffering in World War II demonstrated the need for a new Europe. Today, war between France and Germany is unthinkable. This shows how, through wellaimed efforts and by building up mutual confidence, historical enemies can become close partners.”

And the work of the European experiment did not end with the emergence of a European Economic Community in the West. “The fall of the Berlin Wall,” the announcement continued, “made EU membership possible for several Central and Eastern European countries, thereby opening a new era in European history. The division between East and West has, to a large extent, been brought to an end; democracy has been strengthened; many ethnically-based national conflicts have been settled.”

Alfred Nobel’s will specified that what has become known as the “Peace Prize” should be dedicated to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for

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Left: Jennifer Hudson performs at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway.

Right: Actress Sarah Jessica Parker (L) and Scottish actor Gerard Butler host the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway, on December 11, 2012.

Artists from all over the world gathered at the Oslo Spektrum to help spread the message of peace and

European Union (EU) President Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso and the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz.

fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Over the years, since the initiation of the Peace Prize in 1901, the words of Nobel’s will have been interpreted broadly and often with an eye to the political impact that the announcement of the award might have.

Though they had waged war against each other for more than a decade, the foreign ministers of North Vietnam and the United States 88

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Ragnar Singsaas/Getty Images

celebrate this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureates,

Daniel Sannum Lauten/AFP/Getty Images

received the prize in 1973 for finally reaching an agreement that would bring the serial Vietnam War(s) to a close. In this case, war-makers became peacemakers and the Norwegian Nobel Committee took note. In 1989, in the aftermath of the Chinese suppression of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Peace Prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, seemingly not only because of his global efforts to promote peace and end the oppression of the Tibetan people, but also to send a message of disapproval to the Chinese government in Beijing.

So, too, the Peace Prize committee may have chosen to recognize the notable accomplishments of the European

Union at this time precisely because of the economic pressures threatening to unravel the accomplishments of European integration and stymie the path toward still deeper collaboration, especially in the economic arena. Thorbjorn Jagland, former prime minister of Norway and chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee, seemed to acknowledge this motive when he explained in a press interview that, “There is a real danger that Europe will start disintegrating. Therefore, we should focus again on the fundamental aims of this organization [the EU].�

In his award ceremony presentation, Jagland called the

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Nigel Waldron/Getty Images for Nobel Peace Prize

Australian singer Kylie Minogue performs on stage at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway. She paid tribute by singing to this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner the European Union.

Ragnar Singsaas/Getty Images

Daniel Sannum Lauten/AFP/Getty Images

Recording artist Ne-Yo performs on stage during the Nobel Peace Prize concert. Artists from all over the world gathered at the Oslo Spektrum to help spread the message of peace and celebrate this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureates, European Union (EU).

being assessed [in Europe] today is ‘whether that Union or any Union so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.’” He concluded his portion of the Peace Prize lecture by noting that, “Where there was war, there is now peace. But another historic task lies ahead of us: keeping peace where there is peace. Our continent, risen from the ashes after 1945 and united in 1989, has a great capacity to reinvent itself. It is to the next generations to take this common adventure further. I hope they will seize the opportunity with pride.”

It was precisely that theme of focusing on the next generation that was picked up in the evening’s Peace Prize Concert. Headliner Kylie Minogue opened the show reprising her

award of the Peace Prize to the EU “both deserved and necessary.

We are gathered here,” he observed, “not in the belief that the EU, is perfect. We are gathered in the belief that here in Europe we must solve our problems together. For that purpose, we need institutions that can enter into the necessary compromises. We need institutions to ensure Laleh performs at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway. that both nation-states and individuals exercise self-control and moderation.”

The Nobel award was accepted by the three leaders of hits “On a Night Like This” and “Can’t Get You Out of My the European Union: Herman Von Rompuy, President of Head” and had the audience on their feet before the evening’s the European Council; José Manuel Barroso, President of co-hosts ever appeared on stage. As Sarah Jessica Parker and the European Commission; and Martin Schulz, President Gerard Butler thanked Minogue for her audience warm-up, of the European Parliament. Borrowing his words from the Butler set the serious but playful tone for the evening. “We’re American President Abraham Lincoln, who faced a civil war here tonight to pay tribute to the European Union,” he began that threatened to tear the American national union apart, and quickly shifted to a deadpan continuation of the thought: Von Rompuy paraphrased the Gettysburg Address, “What is “This evening, we’re going to go beyond the Euro crisis and the D I P L O M A T I C C O N N E C T I O N S B U S I N E S S edition | J anua r y - F eb r ua r y 2 0 1 3

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Nigel Waldron/Getty Images for Nobel Peace Prize

Brussels bureaucracy — and even the EU regulations on the curve of a banana. (The latter is a reference to a long-running trade dispute wherein, somewhat mythically, the curvature of bananas had become part of a regulatory regime).”

The evening concert, in other words, was not about the fine points of EU institutional procedures. Instead, it was about bringing people together and energizing a new generation to internalize and operationalize the European vision. In the words of Kylie Minogue’s opening song, “Don’t say it’s like a fantasy, when you know that’s how it should be.” It may not be Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, the European hymn, but those words speak to a new generation of Europeans faced with maintaining the peace and building a community. Jennifer Hudson closed the show and brought down the house with a tribute to Whitney Houston that had the audience dancing in the aisles and touched the “soul” of European youth: “I wanna dance with somebody who loves me!”

Purists might think that Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, the fathers of the European Union would be turning over in their graves at the thought of rock music displacing high political theory. But it was Schuman who, in the founding document of the European Union, declared that: “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it.” Far from disapproving, I suspect that the founders might just join this new generation of dancers! n

Norwegian singer/songwriter Susanne Sundfør attends the Nobel Peace Prize Concert 2012 at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway.

Ragnar Singsaas/Getty Images

Photo Credit

Chirag and Magdi of Karpe Diem perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway.

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Italian Trio of Il Volo, Piero Barone, Gianluca Ginoble and Ignazio Boschetto, perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert.

Robert Schuman (3rd-L, 1886 – 1963), former French Prime Minister (1947 – 8) and Foreign Minister (1948 – 52) signs 27 May 1952 in Paris the European Defense Community Treaty.

First from left, Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967), the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949 – 63). Robert Schuman proposed in 1950 the Schuman Plan for pooling the coal and steel resources of Western Europe. He later became president of EEC Assembly (1958 – 60).

AFP/Getty Images

Inset Photo: Ragnar Singsaas/Getty Images

Ragnar Singsaas/Getty Images

Seal performs at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2012, in Oslo, Norway.

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dazzle Events that dazzle.

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Classical Concerts Held in the Intimate Settings of Embassies and Ambassadors’ Residences Since 1994, the Embassy Series has worked with over 100 ambassadors, hosted 300 plus concerts in 62 embassies involving more than 500 artists from the Washington area.

By extending public access to the embassies in the Nation’s Capital, the Series offers its audience the opportunity to participate in a cultural exchange - to watch and listen to a musical performance that highlights the contributions of a particular country. Such a backdrop allows the audience to “get a feel” for the nation being represented, which is key to promoting and celebrating the diversity of both a host embassy and Series patrons.

These wonderful experiences are accentuated by a reception at the host embassy or residence immediately following the concert, where guests are encouraged to interact with the featured artists and the diplomatic community .

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Let us provide a peaceful retreat alongside the power of the Pentagon.

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