June 2015

■ LUXURY LIVING SPECIAL SECTION INSIDE

A World of News and Perspective

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■ A Special Section of The Washington Diplomat

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■ VOLUME 22, NUMBER 6 MIDDLE EAST

Iran Drives Wedge Between Washington And Its Gulf Allies Iran has driven a wedge between the U.S. and its Gulf partners, who came to town last month hoping for ironclad security guarantees but walked away with vague assurances, while the U.S. got an equally vague sense of how the Sunni Saudi-Shiite Iranian rivalry will play out in the region. PAGE 6

GLOBAL CITY

EUROPE

■ June 2015

The 11th Street Bridge Park, Washington’s first elevated park, will span the Anacostia River and offer water features, play places, concert spaces and educational facilities.

■ JUNE 2015

by Stephanie Kanowitz

Architecture of Nation’s Capital Reflects International Influences

DEFENDING HUNGARY

“One of the goals that most viscerally connects with the public is that this is a physical bridge but also a metaphorical bridge, encouragin g the residents from both sides of the river to travel to the adjacent neighborho ods that have long been divided by the Anacostia River…. We also see this as a bridge between countries.” director of the 11th Street

— SCOTT KRATZ Bridge Park Project

T

he United States is often referred to as a melting pot because of the mix of cultures and languages coexist here. And in many ways, that the nation’s capital exemplifies that amalgam. Sure, there’s variety of races and religions, the obvious but the story of America, of Washington, D.C., is told in subtler ways,

too.

Like the faces of the people who inhabit the nation’s capital, the architecture of significant building sites that the buildings here reflects were to be occupied by a houses for Congress and history rooted in international the President, relations.

“In a way, it’s sort of the distillation But after clashes with government ” NPS added. of America and in commissioners, officials and city some ways it is very unlike L’Enfant was forced out and any much of his said G. Martin Moeller Jr., senior place else in America,” vision never materialized.

That curator at the National Building Museum. shaper of Washington stepped is, until another pivotal in.At the turn of the 20th century, Sen. James McMillan Foreign flair has touched D.C. orchestrated an effort, the Charles L’Enfant, a French-born from the start. Pierre McMillan Plan, to remove the train tracks crisscrossing architect, designed the city’s layout in 1791. He developed Washington and replace them with what we know as a Baroque plan with the ceremonial spaces and grand National Mall. radial the intersecting diagonal avenues avenues, resulting in The design team responsible superimposed over a for the transformation grid that we know today, according to the National had to do something first:“They convinced Sen. McMillan Park Service.“The avenues radiated from the two most Continued on next page

June 2015

LUXURY LIVING The Washington Diplomat

Page 21

UNITED STATES

U.S. Elevates Gay Rights as Pillar Of Foreign Policy The U.S. boasts a record number of openly gay ambassadors abroad (six), a sign of the administration’s decision to promote the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people as human rights — but the policy is not without its detractors around the world. PAGE 13

culture

Kooning Steps Out Of Husband’s Shadow Eclipsed by her husband Willem’s abstract expressionist fame, Elaine de Kooning emerges as a bright star in her own right at the National Portrait Gallery. PAGE 28

In recent years, Hungary’s ties with the United States and European Union have been in free fall, but the country’s new ambassador, Réka Szemerkényi, hopes to set the record straight about a center-right government that prides itself on having opposed Soviet communism — only to find itself accused of morphing into a Russian-style autocracy. PAGE 15 PEOPLE OF WORLD INFLUENCE

DIPLOMATIC SPOUSES

Ex-Envoy Untangles Mideast Turmoil

Jamaican Educator Learns Life Lessons

It’s head-spinning to keep track of all the turmoil in the Middle East, and the latest blowup between Saudi Arabia and Yemen is no exception. But Edward “Skip” Gnehm Jr. knows the region — and the convoluted dynamics that drive it — better than most. PAGE 4

A lecturer at the University of the West Indies and a mother of two, Jamaica’s Lisa Vasciannie talks openly about her passion for education and about the sacrifices of being an ambassador’s wife. PAGE 29

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The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

CONTENTS tHE WasHINGtON DIPLOmat

9 Drones

[ news ] 4

6

“Moving Forward, Looking Back”

18

29

WIDE GULF

20

[ luxury living ] 21

ELEVATING GAY RIGHTS 25

COVER PROFILE: HUNGARY

as the Women’s foreign Policy Group marks its 20th anniversary, female ambassadors talk about the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated field.

MEDICAL A promising new class of cholesterol drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors is likely to make some dramatic changes in how cardiovascular disease is treated.

TAKING DOWN DRONES

WOMEN AMBASSADORS

TWIPLOMACY WINNERS AND LOSERS the latest “twiplomacy” study gauges the effectiveness of world leaders on twitter and what it takes to have staying power on social media.

28

DIPLOMATIC SPOUSES a lecturer at the University of the West indies and the mother of two young boys, Jamaica’s lisa vasciannie talks openly about her passion for education and about the sacrifices of being an ambassador’s wife.

30

UNRAVELING ‘BLOOD QUILT’ Playwright Katori hall weaves together the powerful story of four sisters whose lives begin to unravel when their mother dies in “the blood Quilt,” now at arena Stage.

31

SPANISH-U.S. TREK “Moving forward, looking back” is an immersive look at the old Spanish trail and how it impacted the american Southwest, both past and present.

32

DINING Step into China Chilcano, José andrés’s trendy new Peruvian-Asian restaurant in Penn Quarter, and it immediately feels like a night on the town — and around the world.

INTERNATIONAL FOOTPRINT from the 11th Street bridge Park to the national Museum of african american history to the national Mall, foreign designers and architects have left their mark on D.C.

34

CINEMA LISTING

AMERICAN ICON

36

EVENTS LISTING

iconic american furniture maker tom Moser talks about the international influences that have inspired some of his creations.

38

DIPLOMATIC SPOTLIGHT

43

WORLD HOLIDAYS

46

CLASSIFIEDS

47

REAL ESTATE CLASSIFIEDS

[ culture ]

for years, hungary’s relationship with the U.S. and European Union has been in a free fall, but réka Szemerkényi hopes to put a stop to the bad blood.

17

AMERICA’S AMBASSADORS Dennis Jett’s richly detailed new book, “american ambassadors,” offers fascinating insights into the world of U.S. diplomacy — the good, bad and the ugly.

19

the U.S. has a record number of openly gay ambassadors abroad (six), a sign of the Obama administration’s decision to elevate lGbt rights as a tenet of foreign policy.

15

Thos. Moser furniture

the arab Spring and iranian nuclear talks have unleashed a torrent of tangled alliances and bitter battles, and few experts understand these dynamics than Edward “Skip” Gnehm Jr., a former U.S. envoy to Kuwait and Jordan.

targeted drone killings remain intensely popular with americans — not so much with other countries — but a lawsuit is hoping to pry open a policy that has been shrouded in secrecy.

13

31

25

PEOPLE OF WORLD INFLUENCE

lashing out at Washington’s perceived coziness with iran, Saudi arabia has begun flexing its military muscle, igniting a proxy war in yemen and distancing itself from its longtime partners in the U.S.

9

June 2015

HUSBAND’S SHADOW Elaine de Kooning’s career was often overshadowed by that of her famous abstract expressionist husband Willem, but an enlightening national Portrait Gallery retrospective shows that she was a bright star in her own right.

COVER: Ambassador’s photo taken at the Hungarian Residence by Lawrence Ruggeri.

P.O. Box 1345 • Silver Spring, MD 20915-1345 • phone: (301) 933-3552 • Fax: (301) 949-0065 • E-mail: news@washdiplomat.com • web: www.washdiplomat.com Publisher/Editor-in-Chief victor Shiblie Director of Operations fuad Shiblie Managing Editor anna Gawel News Editor larry luxner Contributing Writers Michael Coleman, Stephanie Kanowitz, Sean lyngaas, Molly McCluskey, Ky n. nguyen, Kate oczypok, Gail Scott, Dave Seminara, Gina Shaw, Gary tischler, lisa troshinsky, Karin zeitvogel Photographer lawrence ruggeri Account Managers rod Carrasco Graphic Designer Cari henderson The Washington Diplomat is published monthly by the Washington Diplomat, inc. the newspaper is distributed free of charge at several locations throughout the Washington, D.C. area. We do offer subscriptions for home delivery. Subscription rates are $29 for 12 issues and $49 for 24 issues. Call Fuad Shiblie for past issues. If your organization employs many people from the international community you may qualify for free bulk delivery. To see if you qualify you must contact Fuad Shiblie.

The Washington Diplomat assumes no responsibility for the safe keeping or return of unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, artwork or other material. the information contained in this publication is in no way to be construed as a recommendation by the Publisher of any kind or nature whatsoever, nor as a recommendation of any industry standard, nor as an endorsement of any product or service, nor as an opinion or certification regarding the accuracy of any such information.

June 2015

The Washington Diplomat Page 3

PEOPLE OF WORLD INFLUENCE

Edward “Skip” Gnehm Jr.

Ex-Envoy Sees Widening Gulf-U.S. Divide on Security

by Michael Coleman

I

t can be difficult to keep track of all the turmoil in the Middle East, and the latest blowup — a bloody battle between Saudi Arabia and Yemen — has generated fewer international headlines than conflicts in Syria and Iraq. But the war between Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shiite-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen threatens to drag the wider region into even greater turmoil.

“

A Saudi-led coalition wants to restore the ousted Yemeni government, stop the Houthis’ advances and, in the process, stanch Iran’s influence in the fractured country.

A tangled network of tribal and political loyalties undergirds much of the fighting in Yemen. But Riyadh’s bombing campaign threatens to turn what many experts say is a homegrown conflict into a sectarian proxy war between Shiitemajority Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, which are gunning for dominance in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the United States is keen to make sure Yemen doesn’t become another haven for extremists, but as it helps the Saudi aerial campaign on the one hand, it’s negotiating a nuclear accord with rival Iran on the other — and tacitly backing Shiite militias in their fight against the Islamic State in Iraq.

Caught in the middle of this geostrategic maneuvering are the long-suffering people of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, who face a looming humanitarian crisis.

Few people understand this convoluted dynamic better than Edward “Skip” Gnehm Jr.

of the Foreign Service and U.S. ambassador to Australia.

Today, Gnehm serves as the George Washington University’s Kuwait professor of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula affairs, a position he has held since 2006. An amiable and engaging southerner from Georgia, Gnehm maintains an extensive network of contacts in the Middle East and serves as director of the Middle East Policy Forum at GWU. In a Diplomat interview at his office, Gnehm said the United States has been supportive of a combined Gulf state effort to restore the Yemeni government and turn back the Houthi rebels, and has engaged militarily by providing refueling capacity for fighter planes. But as the Saudis have stepped up the bombings in Yemen, Washington has become concerned about the widespread collateral damage.

Since mid-March, the fighting in Yemen has killed over 1,800 people and injured another 7,300, about half of them civilians, according to the United Nations.

Another 550,000 have been displaced and well over half the country’s 26 million people need food assistance. Saudi Arabia has come under increasing pres-

There’s an old saying: You can rent Yemenis but you can’t buy them, and that is perfectly correct. They will take money from anybody and they will do for anybody some of what those anybodies want them to do, but not everything. And if someone else comes along with a little more money or enticement, whoops, the alliances are shifting again…. In fact, Yeminis will fight, squabble and go to war with each other because it’s their pastime.

”

— Edward “Skip” Gnehm Jr. Kuwait Professor of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Affairs at the George Washington University

The 36-year career ambassador, now retired from the Foreign Service, was U.S. ambassador to Kuwait shortly after former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the country in 1990. Gnehm also served as U.S. ambassador to Jordan from 2001 until 2004 and was deputy chief of mission at America’s embassy in Yemen during the early 1980s. More recent postings include director general

4

sure for an indiscriminate aerial assault and blockade that has kept desperately needed food, medicine and fuel out of the country.

“We’ve since become more critical about the bombings in Yemen because of the collateral damage, not only the human losses but destruction of infrastructure,” Gnehm said. “We’ve certainly counseled them to back off, stop and try

The Washington Diplomat

Photo: The George Washington University

to get this back into a political process.”

A brief ceasefire last month allowed some aid deliveries to trickle in, although negotiations went nowhere, with the Houthis rejecting demands to relinquish the cities they’ve seized and reinstate President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.The United Nations has been working to restart peace talks without preconditions, so far with mixed success.

Saudi airstrikes resumed after the fiveday pause but have so far failed to claw back the Houthis’ territorial gains. Plans by the ousted Yemeni government, which is now based in Riyadh, to arm local militia groups could further splinter the country into warring fiefdoms and make restoring central authority that much harder.

Gnehm says there is only so much outsiders can do to get the parties to come together — and he contends that fighting between the Houthis and the internationally recognized Yemeni government would be happening regardless of Saudi Arabia’s intervention.

“This is an ingrown Yemen problem,” he explained. “The Houthis are part of Yemen society and there have long been internal troubles between tribes and the central governments. If you took out Iran [which is widely believed to be agitating

for the rebels within Yemen], and everybody who had anything to do with Iran went home, and the Saudis stopped bombing and went home, and the U.S. didn’t do anything except hit al-Qaeda, they’d still be fighting.

“It’s a problem inside their country,” Gnehm said.“Is there anything we can do there? Not a lot.”

However, the retired, plainspoken diplomat said Washington might have managed the conflict better in its early stages last year.

“I think we could have taken more initiative with the Houthis by reaching out to them,” he told us. “I know their propaganda is ‘down with America’ and whatever else. But the Houthis really have no reason to be anti-American except if that gives them some payback from Iran.”

Iran has provided some support to the Houthis, although many experts say Saudi claims that Iran is propping up the rebels are inflated. Allegiances in Yemen — a destitute country riven by northern and southern factions that only united in 1990 — are convenient and fickle. Saudi Arabia has a long history of meddling in its southern neighbor, which controls the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key chokepoint for the global transit of oil.

June 2015

The northern-based Houthis, who follow the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam and make up about a third of Yemen’s population, have long complained of marginalization from the central government. Angered by a proposed constitution that they said would divert resources from the north to the south, they seized the capital of Sanaa and forced the Saudi-backed government to flee earlier this year.

They also appear to have teamed up with Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president who was ousted in an Arab Spring uprising in 2012 but retains strong support among the armed forces. It’s an unlikely alliance given that Saleh waged several wars to tamp down a Houthi insurgency while he was in power.Today, however, the former strongman appears bent on taking down the Western-backed government that replaced him — and exacting revenge on his former Saudi patrons who helped install that government.

In the meantime, both the exiled government and Houthi leadership oppose al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which along with the Islamic State have taken advantage of the power vacuum to stage deadly attacks and stir sectarian unrest.Amid the chaos, the United States has pulled its diplomatic and security personnel out of the country, limiting its ability to conduct drone strikes on AQAP and reportedly resulting in the loss of $500 million in American-supplied weapons.

As he spoke about the war-torn nation, Gnehm smiled and recounted an adage he’s heard repeatedly in his dealings with Yemenis over the years. “There’s an old saying: You can rent Yemenis but you can’t buy them, and that is perfectly correct,� he said. “They will take money from anybody and they will do for anybody some of what those anybodies want them to do, but not everything. And if someone else comes along with a little more money or enticement, whoops, the alliances are shifting again. “You can’t pick a tribe, give them money and

Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

President Obama, at right, shakes hands with Emir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah of Kuwait as Gulf Cooperation Council leaders prepare for a group photo at the end of their Camp David summit on May 14.

build waterworks, electrics etc., and count on them to be your ally forever,� he added. “It doesn’t happen because inside Yemen the rivalries among the tribes and the geographic areas are far more important than the outside. “In fact, Yeminis will fight, squabble and go to war with each other because it’s their pastime,� Gnehm continued. “But throw in someone else — Iran or Western countries or someone else — in the mix and they all turn on the foreigner.�

Asked what the U.S. wants from Saudi Arabia and Gulf states with respect to Yemen, Gnehm said America wants “public affirmation that we need to bring the parties together peaceably for negotiations.� “I don’t think we’ll have a problem getting that, but the details — putting meat on the bones — are harder,� he said.

The Diplomat interview took place less than

a week before President Obama was scheduled to meet with the Gulf Cooperation Council in Washington. Obama was surely expecting a good turnout for his GCC meetings at the White House and Camp David in mid-May, but only two heads of state decided to attend this summit. Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent only deputies to join the emirs of Kuwait and Qatar.

Gnehm said the snub was a sign of deteriorating relations between the administration and Gulf allies that feel threatened by Washington’s nuclear talks with their regional adversary Iran; Obama’s remarks that Gulf states need to focus on internal problems like youth unemployment and political reform didn’t help matters. “I think, unquestionably, their decision not to attend the summit was a signal of displeasure with the administration. There are multiple factors worth mentioning. Certainly one has

to be their calculation that the outcome of the summit would not sufficiently meet their concerns, i.e. Iran’s nuclear program or a treaty commitment to their security. I also think that President Obama’s public comments a week before the summit that regional states needed to address their internal problems was a factor.

Leaders in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain would interpret those remarks as unfriendly or, in a worst case, undermining of their authority.

Even if valid, the president’s timing was ill advised.�

Gnehm said Persian Gulf states came to Washington with a wish list that included major new weapons systems and concrete security commitments in return for supporting any potential deal with Iran. While Gulf leaders didn’t walk away with a blanket NATO-style defense treaty (which would’ve upset American guarantees to give Israel a qualitative military edge in the region), the summit ended on a relative high note, with an “unequivocal� pledge that America would “deter and confront� any aggression from Iran and tentative Gulf backing for Obama’s negotiations with Iran. “The United States has been a security partner for these countries for a long time, but they want reassurances, and that hasn’t changed,�

Gnehm said.“They have concerns from a number of different angles. One could argue they are valid or not valid, but I think for the point of view of the United States you have to accept it and deal with it. “They really do have significant concerns about Iran and its desire to be hegemonic and dominate the region,â€? Gnehm added.“They also fear the Iranian ability to create disturbances through their own Shia minorities. Saudi Arabia has its Shia groups and it’s afraid about Iran’s influence ‌ Kuwait does, the UAE does.â€?

More than that, Gulf leaders worry that a breakthrough on the nuclear front could herald a larger rapprochement between Tehran and

See Gnehm, page 8

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The Washington Diplomat Page 5

International Relations

Persian Gulf

As Saudi Coalition Bombs Yemen, Gulf Summit Yields Few Tangibles

by Larry Luxner

S

audi Arabia and its five smaller neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council may be awash in petrodollars — allowing these oil-rich desert monarchies to splurge on glittering skyscrapers, lavish soccer stadiums, giant shopping malls and Ferraris. But there are some things money just can’t buy, like a formal defense treaty with the Pentagon that would protect GCC member states from enemies such as Iran.

That became evident last month, after GCC officials — wrapping up a May 14 summit at Camp David — endorsed President Barack Obama’s proposed Iranian nuclear deal with a vague statement that a “comprehensive, verifiable” accord is in their interests, in return for equally vague assurances that the U.S. would come to the defense of its Gulf partners to “deter and confront an external threat.”

The summit, which followed a White House dinner the night before, involved 10 hours of talks between Obama and his Arab guests. Also present were Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an expert on the intricacies of the Iran nuclear accord. At the end, the United States and GCC issued a joint communiqué and agreed to meet again in 2016.

However, the outcome was less than pictureperfect on either side.

For one thing, four of the GCC’s six heads of state, including Saudi Arabia’s newly anointed King Salman and the leaders of Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, stayed away from Camp David. Salman canceled at the last minute, and the king of Bahrain instead chose to attend the Royal Windsor Horse Show outside London. In the end, only the leaders of Kuwait and Qatar showed up.

As Obama huddled with his Arab visitors in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, the proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran continued raging throughout the Middle East — not only in impoverished Yemen, but also in Syria, where Iran supports the regime of President Bashar al-Assad while the Saudis have been backing a motley crew of rebels (some of them Islamist radicals).

“I believe that the Camp David commitments I have described today could mark the beginning of a new era of cooperation between our countries, a closer, stronger partnership that advances our mutual security for decades to come,” Obama said in a statement. “But I want to be very clear: The purpose of any strategic cooperation is not to perpetuate any long-term confrontation with Iran, or to even marginalize Iran.”

That last bit cuts to the heart of the fundamental divide between the Gulf states and Washington: Obama believes that ending Iran’s international isolation is the best way to keep it from getting a nuclear bomb, while Saudi Arabia and its partners don’t trust their Persian rival and fear an ascendant

6

The Washington Diplomat

credit: U.S. Marine Corps Photo by Gunnery Sgt. Rome M. Lazarus

U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Riley C. Wells, left, watches over Saudi soldiers during bilateral machinegun live-fire training as part of a U.S. 5th Fleet exercise last December. The United States hasn’t directly participated in the Saudi-led aerial bombing campaign in Yemen but has provided intelligence and refueling assistance.

“

The GCC leaders came to Camp David with pretty low expectations, and they left with a sense of little accomplished.

— Kenneth Pollack

”

senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Iran may threaten their own regional interests.

The summit was part of the president’s delicate balancing act to reassure the Gulf states that America wasn’t abandoning them in favor of striking a nuclear bargain with Tehran.

Speaking to reporters at the summit’s conclusion, Obama said he was “very explicit” that “the United States will stand by our GCC partners against external attack.”

Obama went on to list specific ways the Pentagon would commit to defending the Persian Gulf, including helping to develop a collective missile defense system, expediting arms transfers to the region, staging a new large-scale military exercise against terrorism and cyber attacks, and forming a new partnership to improve counterterrorism.

But the White House wouldn’t commit to the type of written NATO-style security guarantees that the U.S. has with allies such as Japan — nor did it promise the kind of advanced weapons systems that some Gulf nations want, but that could erode Israel’s qualitative military edge.

Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, said the summit produced

exactly what most observers thought it would produce: very little.

“The GCC leaders came to Camp David with pretty low expectations, and they left with a sense of little accomplished,” Pollack told The Washington Diplomat.

Basically, he said, what the GCC wanted was to kill the Iran nuclear accord, have the administration endorse a formal defense treaty with the bloc and get a commitment from Obama that the United States would take a much more aggressive approach toward Iran’s support of Shiite rebels and terrorists throughout the Middle East.

“They didn’t get any of that,” Pollack said.“They didn’t really think they would, but they came to Washington because the president of the United States asked them to.”

To be fair, Sultan Qaboos of Oman is 74 and reportedly bedridden, while the UAE’s elderly Sheikh Khalifa is said to be unwell as well.

King Salman Saudi Arabia’s King Salman also had a of Saudi Arabia good excuse for missing the party. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir — who up until last month was Riyadh’s ambassador to the United States — said the aging king had to stay home to oversee his country’s continued air strikes against Yemen to defeat Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

The Camp David summit did give administration officials a chance to size up Saudi Arabia’s future leaders: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the minister of defense and second in line to the throne.

A virtual unknown who was appointed to the position when his father announced a royal shakeup in June 2015

April, Deputy Crown Prince Salman has been leading Saudi Arabia’s controversial bombing campaign in neighboring Yemen.

The Saudis aim to restore the Yemeni government, which was overthrown by Houthi rebels earlier this year.The intervention signals that King Salman intends to pursue a more muscular, independent foreign policy in the wake of fears that Washington is cozying up to Iran. But the Saudi air strikes have failed to stop the Houthis’ advances and sparked concerns that Salman’s son, the inexperienced young new defense minister, has embroiled Riyadh in a sectarian quagmire.

A brief ceasefire aimed at ending the bloodshed in Yemen had already fallen apart as The Washington Diplomat went to press, with both sides blaming the other of violating it. The Saudi-led coalition accused Houthi rebels of preventing civilians from leaving Sanaa and other cities where Houthis are believed to be hiding weapons — in effect using them as human shields.Yet the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Yemen blames the Saudi aerial assault for exacerbating the suffering in the Arab world’s poorest country.

“The indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, with or without prior warning, contravenes international humanitarian law,” Johannes Van Der Klaauw said in May.The U.N. estimates the conflict in Yemen has killed more than 1,800 people and injured 7,300 since it began in mid-March.

Pollack of the Brookings Institution says it’s “highly unlikely” that a Saudi offensive — or even a pan-Arab air campaign — will make much of a difference. Likewise, he said, any Arab ground invasion in Yemen is doomed to fail.

“When it becomes clear that the airstrikes

Photo: Gordon Zammit / GFDL 1.2 via Wikimedia Commons

A Royal Saudi Air Force Eurofighter EF-2000 Typhoon takes off. A Saudi-led coalition began air strikes in late March on Yemen in an effort to reverse a Houthi rebel takeover of the country.

aren’t doing the job, the Arabs will feel pressured to go in on the ground. And that will be a disaster,” he warned.“The United States ought to be doing everything it can to keep its allies out of Yemen.”

Saudi Arabia has proposed creating a panArab military bloc that could counter threats from Iran, Islamists, the Houthis and others, but the plan is long on ambition and short on details. The idea of a joint Arab military force has been around for decades, but competing national agendas have kept it from becoming a reality. Those differences have only grown more pronounced since the Arab Spring, which

has blurred traditional alliances and triggered a scramble for influence in battlefields across the region. (In Libya for example, Egypt and the UAE are on opposing sides with Turkey and Qatar, but all four are on the same page in Yemen; the Saudis, Egyptians,Turks and Qataris all differ in their vision for Syria, etc.)

While Egypt, which has the region’s largest army, is on board with the Saudi proposal for an Arab force, it may be hesitant to commit ground troops to Yemen. Egypt lost an estimated 25,000 soldiers fighting in Yemen’s civil war in the 1960s in what many consider to be the country’s Vietnam War. Arab ground troops —

many from nations where they’ve been largely untested in battle — would also face a formidable adversary in the Houthi rebels, who have guerilla-warfare training and numbers on their side.

One knowledgeable Washington source who deals regularly with GCC officials says the Saudi-led air campaign has been a tactical failure — but a ground invasion would spell all-out disaster.

“In my opinion, you don’t win a war from the air. The Saudis have done an immense amount of damage on the ground, and politically, the Yemenis are very upset,” said the source, who asked not to be named. “The danger of bombing civilians is that you create more extremism, and drive more people into the arms of al-Qaeda or the Houthis.”

He added: “The Houthis know that the Saudis can’t do it on the ground. They don’t have what it takes.Are they going to send in the Egyptians to fight them? They’ll eat them alive.

This is a much more sophisticated fighting force than anything the Egyptians faced in the ’60s.”

Richard Schmierer, a former U.S. ambassador to Oman, agrees that the Saudi air campaign is having unintended and tragic consequences.

“The last thing the Saudis want to do is alienate the Yemeni people. Until this military campaign, Yemenis have supported Saudi Arabia,” he said. “But the country is already very poor, and they’re bombing key elements of its infrastructure.”

However, Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners want to send a message to Iran that Yemen is a red line that must not be crossed, said Schmierer, who now sits on the board of the

Continued on next page

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they often do not act as friends,” But Edward Gnehm, a former U.S. wrote Jeremy Shapiro and Richard ambassador to Kuwait and Jordan, Sokolsky in the Foreign Policy piece said the idea of a pan-Arab Gulf coaliMiddle East Policy Council.

“Saudi Arabia is willing to accept “It’s Time to Stop Holding Saudi tion to defend the region against, say, Iranian aggression doesn’t seem very the potential downside of the ill will Arabia’s Hand.”

“The United States is a multi-eth- reasonable — even if Kuwait and [in Yemen] in exchange for a very clear signal to Iran that if they’re nic, multi-confessional democracy Bahrain, which faces unrest from its involved with the Houthis and committed to universal human Shiite majority population, were to Yemen’s internal affairs, the GCC is rights. Saudi Arabia is an authoritari- go along with it.

“The GCC states have talked not going to stand for that kind of an monarchy committed to mainbehavior,” he told The Diplomat. taining a society based on harsh about this forever and they have “Sending that signal has trumped political repression, religious intoler- never been able to do it, because the concern about potential ill will.” ance, and a fundamentalist interpre- they’ve never been prepared to have Other experts say it’s about time tation of Islam at odds with univer- Saudi Arabia dominate the structure. that Saudi Arabia take responsibility sally recognized human rights,” they Most of the smaller states have for its own security, instead of con- argued. “Some GCC countries are in resisted going in that direction,” stantly relying on the U.S. to put out fact often the source of both the Gnehm told us.

“I don’t see it being any more Mideast fires. Both Riyadh and ideology and the money that supWashington have a vested interest in ports Islamist terrorism around the likely now than it has been over the keeping oil markets stable, but oth- world. And GCC interests and U.S. last several decades, even with the erwise the two allies often diverge interests increasingly diverge over Iranian threat,” he explained. issues such as Iran, Syria, the need “Different countries have different on key foreign policy issues.

NOTE: Although every effort is made to assure your ad is free of mistakes in spelling and “First, Saudi Arabia and its GCC for internal reforms in the Gulf views about that threat. Certainly it is ultimately the customer to make the the final proof. states, and how to deal with the Omanis do not share the views partners content are not formal treaty alliesup to of the other five. Qatar is also not of the United States and, moreover, regional threat of political Islam.”

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Gnehm

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exactly on that same wavelength, since they share a huge gas field with Iran and they’re not interested in that kind of confrontation.”

On the other hand, Gnehm said the whole idea of a mutual defense treaty with Washington “is a bit on the preposterous side.”

“There’s no way whatsoever that the U.S. Senate is going to agree to any sort of a treaty that requires a two-thirds majority. It’s impossible, and they knew that before they came,” said Gnehm, who teaches at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs (also see this month’s People of World Influence column on page 4).

“We do, of course, have cooperation agreements with Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, and something like that with the UAE. It’s really only Saudi Arabia where we don’t have any kind of agreement, and that goes back to the early years of the 1950s

archenemy that has been hostile to U.S. interests for over 35 years is simply not in the cards.

Furthermore, they argue that constructive engagement with Iran is the best way to ensure that the country doesn’t acquire a nuclear bomb and that it becomes a responsible member of the “community of nations,” as Obama puts it.

Gnehm agrees that the Saudis’ concerns are unwarranted.

“It is paranoid,” he said.“I’ve gone over it with them many times and it’s like a rubber band.

The more I talk, I can convince them and then when I finish, the rubber band goes right back where it was.”

Gnehm pointed out that the Gulf states’ unparalleled oil reserves would always prevent us from abandoning the region.

“Look at the oil-producing capacity,” he said.

“We’re not going to just turn in. We’ve been there since 1946 with our navy. We’re not going home, although, of course, Iran would like us to.”

Still, perceptions matter and Gnehm said his former colleagues in the Gulf states are telling him they worry the U.S. is losing interest in its old alliances.

“They fear the U.S. believes the relationship with Iran is more important than the one we have with them,” Gnehm said. “I’ve argued against that — it’s outrageous; it’s not true — but we have to deal with it.”

What precipitates this belief?

“We had a great relationship with Iran before the fall of the Shah” in 1979, Gnehm pointed out. “In fact, we used Iran as one of our pillars [in the region]. We armed it and we used it in whatever way we wanted. They are worried that we would be willing to compromise or concede points to get that relationship back, all of which would be at their cost.”

Gnehm said he reminds his friends in the Saudi government that when the United States was “using” the Shah and Iran for its own geostrategic purposes in the 1970s, the Shah declared that Bahrain was part of Iran in a preemptive move to annex the country.

“We said, ‘No, it isn’t,’ and moved our fleet out into the Persian Gulf between Iran and Bahrain,” Gnehm recalled. “And he finally backed down.”

As much as the White House vows it is not sacrificing old friendships for new ones, Gnehm said the Gulf states simply don’t trust Iranians to keep their end of any bargain and believe they will play the Americans for fools in the nuclear negotiations.

“Their opposition isn’t that different from the Republicans in Congress or the Israelis,” he

and 1960s.”

Schmierer agrees that a NATO-like treaty — which would obligate the United States to repel an attack on any of the six GCC member states as if it were an attack on U.S. soil — is pie in the sky.

“Everybody understood that a formal arrangement was just not possible,” he said. “First of all, it would have to go through Congress. That process in itself would be so difficult, laborious and time-consuming that the effort probably isn’t worth making.”

Larry Luxner is news editor of The Washington Diplomat.

Follow the diplomat Connect at www.washdiplomat.com.

said.“They think the Iranians are playing around with us, that it’s all deception and no matter what they agree to, they know how to get around it so they’re going to still do it.”

He also said the Saudis suspect the U.S. may be striking “sub-agreements” as part of the nuclear deal that are not being made public, although Gnehm does not anticipate such sideline agreements to be part of any final package.

“I cannot see the relationship with the U.S. and Iran reaching a point where there would be any of those sub-agreements that would be significant,” he said. “We would not concede anything that would raise security concerns for the Arab Gulf states because of the interests we’ve got.”

Other disputes have also eroded trust between Washington and its Gulf partners.

Saudi perceptions that Obama abandoned a longtime ally in Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak are still a sore point. The Saudis also worry that U.S. inaction in Syria, where more than 220,000 people have died in the civil war, signals that perhaps Washington’s loyalty to the Gulf states could be fleeting.

“If we don’t do it in Syria, maybe we won’t do it for them,” Gnehm said, relaying concerns he hears from Saudi colleagues.

Gnehm said Obama’s now-infamous declaration that the United States would punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if he crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons — but then never did — has hurt U.S. credibility.

“We announced we would do something but then we didn’t — which is worse,” Gnehm said, adding that U.S. diplomats were in private conversations with the Saudis prior to Obama’s declaration.

“We were talking with the Saudis about what would happen in Syria among the opposition when we did in fact hit Assad’s forces,” Gnehm recalled.“The Saudis were working, as were the other Gulf states, to be ready to take advantage of our military action.”

And then Obama announced that the U.S. wouldn’t take military action in Syria, but no one in the government bothered to inform the Saudis.

“We didn’t have the courtesy to talk to them privately before it came out, and that was very embarrassing,” Gnehm said. “They were asking, ‘Does the United States really understand the consequences of what they do?’And the answer, right now, is I don’t think so.

“It’s a matter of confidence and trust.”

Michael Coleman (@michaelcoleman) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

June 2015

Defense

United States

ACLU Lawsuit Seeks to Pry Open Secretive U.S. Drone Policy

by Dave Seminara

F

or opponents of drone strikes, the U.S. government’s April 23 disclosure of the grim news that a drone strike had inadvertently killed two al-Qaeda hostages — Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian, both humanitarian aid workers — felt like a shocking admission that might turn public opinion against the covert program.

But an AP poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure revealed that just 13 percent of Americans oppose the use of drone strikes, including just 16 percent of registered Democrats.

If the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto failed to impact support for targeted killings, what else might?

Drone strike skeptics hope that it could be a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in March.The suit seeks to force the U.S. government to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that would reveal the government’s criteria for placing militants on kill lists; divulge how the government determines whether civilians are likely to be harmed in strikes; disclose how it verifies whether civilians were in fact harmed by drone strikes; and detail basic data the Obama administration has withheld regarding the number and identity of persons killed or injured in drone strikes.

Would the release of this information help the public make a more informed decision on whether to support drone strikes? Or might it simply expose intelligence sources and methods, provide a propaganda victory for jihadists or even remove a tool of warfare that many believe is less dangerous for civilians than other tactics, such as ground invasions?

In the last six years, Obama has ramped up the clandestine campaign to kill terrorists via remote control, expanding it to places like Yemen and Somalia and fighting detractors in court to keep the program shrouded in secrecy. The president has vowed that drone strikes are undertaken with the “near certainty” that they won’t cause civilian deaths, and supporters point out that hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters have been killed without endangering U.S. troops. But opponents say the government routinely low-balls civilian casualty counts and the strikes breed resentment and radicalization, creating more terrorists than they kill.

Using the average of three separate studies conducted by the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Long War Journal, since the first CIA drone strike in 2002, 522 strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have killed 3,852 people, including 476 civilians. Strikes have declined substantially since peaking in 2010. Establishing a definitive count is nearly impossible given the government’s secretive policy, the difficulty of defining who is a civilian and the reality that few interested parties have the resources to conduct field research in the kind of dangerous, remote places where the CIA conducts most of its strikes.

The U.S. government has acknowledged that a total of eight Americans have been killed in drone strikes since 2002, when Kamal Derwish, a Buffalo, N.Y., native suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda, was inadvertently

June 2015

Credit: U.S. Air Force Photo by Master Sgt. Rob Valenca

An MQ-1 Predator drone takes off from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada during the first operational test of the latest upgrade to the Predator in 2005. The Predator has become one of the primary unmanned aircraft used in U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. expressed disapproval.

Despite this unpopularity, governments are racing to It’s clear that many Americans acquire drone technology, raising fears that the United States won’t have the monopoly on long-distance killing are generally supportive of the drone for much longer.

In an interview with The Diplomat, Jameel Jaffer, the program. But to what extent is that a ACLU’s point person on drones, said that through its lawsuit, the group seeks to help Americans understand function of the way the government what people on the ground in countries like Pakistan has controlled information? and Yemen already know about drone strikes.

“Don’t [Americans] need to know what the threat is — Jameel Jaffer that’s posed, how certain are we that the threat is real, how imminent is it and how likely is it that civilians will deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties be injured or die?” he said.“It’s clear that many Americans Union and director of the ACLU Center for Democracy are generally supportive of the drone program. But to what extent is that a function of the way the governkilled in a Predator drone strike. ment has controlled information? This last set of discloOnly one of the American citizens killed — Anwar alsures [regarding the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto] is Awlaki, a cleric killed in Yemen in 2011—was identified remarkable for its rarity. The vast majority of drone and deliberately targeted. The rest perished in strikes strikes aren’t discussed. We don’t have the information aimed at other targets, or in what the government calls we need in order to make a full assessment of the gov“signature strikes,” which are attacks — like the one that ernment’s practices.” killed Weinstein and Lo Porto — where American drone Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University operators fire missiles at targets based on profiling the of Notre Dame and an outspoken critic of the drone movements of military-age males observed in suspicious strike program, supports the lawsuit but says it shouldn’t activities on the ground. U.S. officials say the intelligence be necessary. is based on hundreds of hours of surveillance; critics call “We already know we are violating the law, but this it educated guesswork, at best, as the botched strike on might just provide more of the gory details of how we Weinstein and Lo Porto demonstrates. are doing this,” she said in a telephone interview. “The Critics also say that these cloaked-in-secrecy signature lawsuit will show that plenty of civilians have been strikes run a greater risk of harming civilians and drone killed. It will further undermine our credibility.We’ll have strikes of any kind are remarkably unpopular outside the more evidence that our government isn’t complying United States, Israel and a handful of other countries. A with international and constitutional law.”

2012 Pew Research poll of 19 countries found that Monica Hakimi, a law professor at the University of respondents in every country save India disapproved of Michigan, contends that international law regarding America conducting drone strikes to target extremists in drone strikes is open to debate.

Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. In many countries — “The use of the drone program is not in violation of including Greece (90 percent), Egypt (89 percent), international laws governing use of cross-border force Jordan (85 percent), Turkey (81 percent), Brazil (76 percent) and Japan (75 percent) — a huge majority See drones, page 11

“

”

The Washington Diplomat Page 9

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Sultanate of Oman Seeks To Diversify Oil-Based Economy

H

adid Jaman Bait Shamasa, a cheerful, hardworking Omani employed at the Salalah Marriott Resort, was recently honored with a prestigious award for his dedication and service to the international hotel chain — and for serving as a symbol of the top-notch labor force that is modernizing Oman.

“While the UAE always comes to mind as a successful diversification story in the region, Oman can be a stabilizing force in the Gulf,” he said, estimating that Oman has attracted $16 billion in overall investment in ports, free zones, transport networks and infrastructure. “By attracting a variety of investments and developing human resources, Oman can become a regional center for manufacturing, IT and entrepreneurship.”

Ithraa, Oman’s Public Authority for Investment Promotion & Export Development, has been helping the country’s non-oil exporters penetrate mature and emerging markets worldwide, create jobs at home and ensure Oman’s long-term, sustainable economic growth HADID JAMAN BAIT SHAMASA since 1997.

To that end, the Omani government has developed the Special Economic Zone stakeholders, is working hard to promote Oman’s Authority at Duqm, a project twice the size tourism worldwide. Given the increase in visitor of Singapore; expanded ports in Salalah and Sohar; numbers, it’s clear their efforts are paying dividends. and continues the expansion of Oman’s transport And I’m proud to say more tourists are discovering infrastructure, free zones and industrial estates and beautiful Salalah.” tech parks.

Indeed, as Huntsman said in his recent speech, Ithraa recently partnered with Deloitte to Oman has much to offer tourists. develop a new plan to attract higher levels of “This is a gorgeous country. The problem is, investment and talent to Oman in order to capitalize not enough Americans know about Oman,” he said. on these sizeable investments. In order to find out “Tourism contributions have been modest, but that what really attracts foreign investors, Ithraa met can change with more aggressive promotion. with 120 representatives of Fortune 500 companies.

I commend the Omani Embassy and the country’s Their responses highlighted: quality labor force; leadership in Muscat for realizing the economic favorable government business regulation; access potential of tourism.” to a large customer base; and strong transport As Hadid, the former bellboy and now networks that connect cities regionally and front-desk clerk, says: “I love to meet people internationally. More than a third mentioned access from all over and make friends. I’m deeply proud to talent as a key factor in their of my country. Oman has a distinctly unique and decisions for where to set up authentic personality, one that can’t be equaled. operations and live.

Come and visit us.”

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For his sacrifices and hard work to Marriott, Hadid last month won the prestigious J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence, along with seven other associates from around the world. Before a packed auditorium of 800 in Bethesda, Md., the shy Omani — who has four sisters in school and a brother in the army — became only the second Middle East employee to win the award since its establishment in 1987.

“Hadid has made significant sacrifices to get where he is today. He’s passionate about his work and we’re deeply proud of him. Indeed, we expect great things of him in the future,” said Ayatullah Nimer, the hotel’s food and beverage director, who nominated Hadid for the prestigious award.

“Others might have taken an easier route but Hadid showed real character and is firmly focused on carving out a career for himself. I salute his commitment,” added Nimer, whose hotel employs 263 people and pays its workers an average salary of 600 Omani riyals (about $1,400) per month.

Jon Huntsman Jr., the respected former governor of Utah, U.S. ambassador to China and one-time Republican presidential candidate, praised the sultanate at the recent Omani Scholarly Symposium in Washington, D.C. “When Sultan Qaboos became leader of Oman in 1970, he inherited a heavily underdeveloped country from his father. Oman had only six miles of paved roads and three schools with 900 students,”

“ and

”

Hadid Jaman Bait Shamasa recipient of the J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence said Huntsman, chairman of the Atlantic Council.

“Today there’s around 5,000 miles of paved roads and half a million registered students scattered in 1,000 schools. Oman has one of the most respectable literacy rates and women’s rights records in the Arab world.”

Yet Oman’s biggest challenge, he said, is diversifying its economy and ending the country’s economic dependence on energy.

“Oman has a small population, so the emphasis is on trade and serving as a gateway to an Asian market of 2 billion consumers — and in the future, to a market of 80 million in Iran,” he said.

Huntsman added that the Indian Ocean port of Salalah — located more than 1,000 kilometers southwest of Muscat, Oman’s capital city — is destined to become one of the world’s most important container terminals.

10 June 2015The Washington Diplomat

June 2015 The Washington Diplomat Page 1

Approved __________________________________________________________ Changes ___________________________________________________________

from page 9

drones when we have the consent of the government in whose territory we are acting or in some circumstances when we are acting in self-defense against non-state actors,” she said. “The debate revolves around what those circumstances may be.”

Hakimi said the lawsuit may succeed in shaking free some information about the drone strike program, but adds that because U.S. courts have been broadly sympathetic to the government’s argument that releasing too much information about the program will compromise intelligence-gathering techniques and sources, the ACLU is unlikely to get all the information it seeks. Previous ACLU lawsuits contesting the drone program have been dismissed on national security grounds. (In a separate lawsuit, however, the group recently won a federal appeals court verdict that deemed the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records illegal, following Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.)

Hakimi also pointed out that the government can’t release information about the “outer limits” of what it considers lawful on drones because it has purposely not defined what those outer limits are.

“They are preserving flexibility so they can interpret their authority as new cases and situations arrive,” she said.“They have a basic framework but justify individual cases based on the facts without necessarily defining the outer bounds of its legal authority.”

Tom Rogan is a writer who has penned articles for National Review and other publications in defense of drone strikes. He says that he opposes the ACLU lawsuit and broader disclosure efforts because they threaten national security. “[Their] approach looks good on paper, [but] greater public disclosure runs far greater risk of disrupting CIA sources and methods,” he said in an e-mail interview.“The intelligence that drives drone strikes is highly sensitive and often involves the most important collection capabilities in the CIA — human sources on the ground, who would be tortured and murdered if identified.Also, publicity would be used by U.S. adversaries to sculpt adverse propaganda.”

Jaffer acknowledges that releasing more information about drone strikes could cast an unfavorable light on our policies that might allow our enemies to reinforce their propaganda, but says this is a risk worth taking.

“What’s the other option, to allow the government to suppress anything that would present its policies in a negative light?” he asked.

“That can’t be the answer.”

Scott Shane, a national security reporter for the New York Times, made the moral case for the use of drones in a 2012 op-ed, arguing that they are the best way to neutralize terrorists plotting the murder of innocent civilians while avoiding the type of civilian casualties often associated with full-scale military interventions.

Citing data provided by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, he noted the drop in the civilian proportion of drone casualties, from 28 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2011 to just 2 percent in 2012, and called drone strikes “precision killing” that offered “perfect safety” for their operators.

Neither O’Connell nor Jaffer buy the argument that drone strikes are the most humane or effective way to fight the global war on terrorism. And Jaffer denies that the information the ACLU seeks would threaten intelligence-gathering sources and methods.

“The drone program is part of a complex of policies adopted after 9/11 which collectively have shown themselves to be ineffective at doing what they were supposed to do, which was to make us safer,” Jaffer argued. “Indefinite detention policies, Guantanamo, torture and the drone program — these programs have not just undermined our standing in the world and our moral credibility, but they’ve also generated June 2015

thousands of new enemies.”

Jaffer said there are times when drones are not only lawful, but also the best strategy for combating legitimate terror threats. But he maintains that outside combat zones, the authority to use lethal force should be a last resort used only when a target presents an imminent threat. And he doesn’t accept the premise that if we weren’t using drone strikes, U.S. troops would be at greater risk in apprehending terrorists.

“It’s a false choice — it isn’t a choice between drones and invasion,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s drones or diplomacy, or drones or law enforcement, or drones and calling on another government to arrest someone who can actually be arrested.”

O’Connell echoed that point, citing the peaceful arrest last year of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, suspected of involvement in the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

“We arrested him without firing shots,” she said.“Why does he get a trial but others don’t?”

In the wake of the Weinstein and Lo Porto deaths, President Obama ordered an internal review of the CIA’s drone operations and promised to renew his efforts to shift control of the program from the CIA to the Department of Defense. But would such a move make a difference? Jaffer acknowledged that some believe the government could be more transparent if control of the program was moved to the Pentagon, but he said it wasn’t obvious to him that this would happen.

“We are less concerned with whose finger is on the trigger than on when the trigger is actually being pulled,” he said.

Rogan supports shifting control of the program to the Defense Department because he thinks it makes sense for the military to be in charge of military strikes, but he says that doesn’t diminish his concerns about the ACLU lawsuit’s potential for exposing intelligencegathering tools.

Hakimi’s concern is that the suit carries some risk because if the courts rule against it, the verdict could turn aspects of our drone strike policy that are currently in a legal gray area to entrenched legal precedents that the government could use to justify elements of the program.

“There is a risk to pursuing legal remedies when you lack strong political support,” she said. “You could get what has happened with Guantanamo, where the courts have justified many of the detentions.”

The biggest unanswered question is what we might find out if the ACLU’s disclosure efforts bare fruit. O’Connell says we’d find out that what the government is telling us about the drone program isn’t what is actually happening on the ground. She thinks the disclosures could cause a shift in public opinion, with more Americans recognizing that our own actions have locked us in an endless, unwinnable cycle of violence.

Hakimi isn’t as distrustful of the government’s drone program, but still has reservations.

“My impression is that they are more triggerhappy than I would like based on intelligence that is sometimes questionable,” she said. “But the question I have is whether they are consistently pushing boundaries on this front and my sense is that they are not.”

Jaffer says the lawsuit may be able to bring the drone issue into the national conversation in a way that hasn’t happened before.

“Think about the police brutality controversy here in the United States,” he said. “That controversy is due in large part to videos where we see police being violent and you see the victims; you understand the humanity of the victims because you see them in the video.

But we don’t have anything like that with the drone strike victims. The effects are almost entirely hidden from us.”

Dave Seminara (@DaveSem) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

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June 2015

Diplomacy

United States

Gay Rights Becomes Pillar Of U.S. Foreign Policy

by Sean Lyngaas

P

resident Barack Obama’s choice of James “Wally” Brewster as ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 2013 elicited a nasty response from some quarters of the Caribbean, Roman Catholic country.

A Dominican cardinal referred to Brewster as a “faggot” in Spanish; the ambassador said his husband faced discrimination in the diplomatic corps. Yet the backlash turned out to be an opportunity for Brewster, one of six openly gay U.S. ambassadors.

According to Brewster, Dominicans approached the ambassador and his husband on the street to apologize for the cardinal’s slur. “It became a social conversation that needed to be had in the Caribbean and we were just the ones that President Obama happened to send there,” Brewster said at a March event at the Newseum in Washington.

The ambassador and his husband both have “a very strong Christian belief, and so nobody is going to ever tell me God does not love me,” Brewster said poignantly, his eyes glimmering.“So from that perspective it was very easy to argue the point. You don’t address the people that make the bad comments.All you do is talk about love … and when you talk about that, the goodness of the people [comes] out.”

Brewster’s reception in the Dominican Republic was a reminder that gay ambas-

advocacy counsel for LGBT rights at Human Rights First. “When we talk to activists in other countries, we’re often hearing how much a source of support the United States embassy is for them.”

Holy See Opposition The Dominican cardinal’s slur on Brewster was but one reaction to America’s six openly gay ambassadors abroad. Another is how Daniel Baer, the openly gay U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has been received at his post in Vienna.

“I have never felt like … my ability to carry out my job is at all hampered by other people’s responses or discomfort [to my sexuality],” Baer said in an interview. “If anything, it gives me some advantages since I’m totally comfortable with it, if they’re uncomfortable … that’s not such a bad thing,” Baer said, hastening to add that such a calculus is far from his mind in his daily work.

But at least one OSCE member has taken exception to the U.S. policy of supporting LGBT rights through the

“

When we talk to activists in other countries, we’re often hearing how much a source of support the United States embassy is for them.

— Shawn Gaylord

”

advocacy counsel for LGBT rights at Human Rights First

sadors are still often judged on their homosexuality rather than their merit.

He and the five ambassadors he took the stage with at the Newseum are the personification of the Obama administration’s policy of considering the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people to be human rights.

Obama elevated LGBT rights to a tenet of U.S. foreign policy with a December 2011 memo that, among other things, instructed federal agencies engaged abroad to “combat discrimination, homophobia and intolerance on the basis of LGBT status or conduct.”

American foreign policy arguably hasn’t been the same since.

Obama’s 2011 memo was “groundbreaking and historic” and is bearing fruit abroad,according to Shawn Gaylord, June 2015

organization.

On several occasions when Baer delivered a statement in support of LGBT rights, the Vatican “has chosen to speak up in the permanent council and at one point even read the Bible to me,” he said. “But I would hope that that has nothing with my being gay and more a response to U.S. policy, one that I think the Holy See is … increasingly in an uncomfortable position on right now.”

In fact, a recent article in Foreign Policy said that Pope Francis has urged the Vatican’s diplomats at the United Nations to focus more on poverty and inequality, rather than emphasizing Church dogma on gay rights and abortion.

But Column Lynch wrote that despite the pontiff’s emergence as a global diplomatic player, “the pope’s envoys

Photo: Blake Bergen / GLIFAA

America’s six openly gay ambassadors met in March at a Newseum event hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, Harvey Milk Foundation and GLIFAA. From left are: John Berry (Australia), James Brewster (Dominican Republic), Rufus Gifford (Denmark), Daniel Baer (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), James Costos (Spain) and Ted Osius (Vietnam).

remain very much entrenched on the front lines of the culture wars the pope himself has suggested he wants to leave behind.”

Gay rights were at the center of a recent diplomatic spat between the Vatican and France, which nominated an openly gay official to be its ambassador to the Holy See. For four months, the Vatican has quietly refused to accredit Laurent Stefanini, the protocol chief at the French Presidential Palace and a vocal advocate for same-sex marriage.

France’s ambassador to the United States is the only openly gay ambassador in Washington’s diplomatic corps at the moment. Gérard Araud, a Mideast and security expert who previously served as Paris’s envoy to the U.N. in New York, has said he doesn’t want to be known as the “gay ambassador,” telling Vogue last year that he wouldn’t “want to be reduced to one dimension.”

But being an openly gay ambassador is still somewhat of a novelty, even in the U.S. and Europe. Baer was just 36 when he was nominated for the OSCE post. He thought his youth might be more remarkable than his sexuality, but press coverage of his nomination concentrated on the latter feature.

“It has become a cliché for people to remark that nobody could have imagined how quickly things changed in the United States” when it comes to gay rights, Baer said. Yet clichés have the virtue of being true.“I think it is incredible that when I finished high school, people could still be fired from the State Department for being gay,” he added.

GLIFAA’s Evolution A group of State Department employees founded GLIFAA in 1992 to form a voice against the discrimination of gays and lesbians in the security clearance process. One of the founding members of GLIFAA was Ted Osius, the current U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

When the organization was formed, “straight allies were much fewer and farther in between,” GLIFFAA President Selim Ariturk said in an interview. But times have changed, as has GLIFAA’s role in the conversation around gay rights in the Foreign Service.

For one, the group’s mandate has broadened to support the rights of bisexual and transgender people. Robyn McCutcheon, the first transgender Foreign Service officer to come out on the job, preceded Ariturk as GLIFAA president.

A more complicated shift in mission for GLIFAA has been figuring out how to complement and augment the work of a White House that has broke ground on LGBT rights. One obvious area of improvement is that all six openly gay ambassadors are men (and white).When Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to GLIFAA last year, he said he wanted to be the first secretary to nominate openly lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as ambassadors, according to Ariturk.

GLIFAA wants to pressure the administration on other fronts as well. The

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Office of Personnel Management last year ordered the lifting of a ban on providing transition-related care to transgender people under the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, but the move appeared to leave the door ajar to discrimination.

“We’re glad that the ban has been lifted, but … there are only two insurance companies that actually have stopped discriminating against transgender people,”Ariturk said.

“The rest of them are still exercising their right to continue discriminating.”Those two providers are Aetna and the Foreign Service Benefit Plan, according to Ariturk, who said his organization is asking OPM to require that all federal benefit plans serve transgender people.

Despite the support shown at the highest levels of the Obama administration for LGBT rights, that support could be firmer in some cases, according to a recent BuzzFeed report.

The State Department has bowed to pressure from host countries not to let gay and lesbian diplomats bring their families to posts, the report said, citing interviews with multiple LGBT Foreign Service officers.

That kind of pressure kept America’s first openly gay ambassador, James C. Hormel, from being sent to Fiji, where then-President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as ambassador in 1994 (homosexual activity was punishable by law in Fiji). Five years later, Hormel officially became the first openly gay U.S. ambassador when he was posted to Luxembourg — but only after a recess appointment. His nomination had stalled in the Senate following fierce protests by religious conservatives, some of whom labeled Hormel a pedophile.

“All the nonsense in Washington over my nomination, the carrying-on, the handwringing, and the nasty behavior, the charges, the accusations and the dirt that didn’t stick — none of it mattered,” Hormel wrote in his 2011 memoir “Fit to Serve.”

“All the distinctions that had been assigned to me and used to define me fell away.… No one considered my race, my gender, my religion or my sexuality. I was an honorable person representing an honorable country.”

Despite Hormel’s groundbreaking appointment, there have only been a handful of gay American ambassadors in the last 16 years, even though gay rights advocates have made significant legal strides in the United States in recent years and public opinion on same-sex marriage has dramatically shifted. Advocates say the U.S. Foreign Service should reflect those advances, and serve as a model for countries where being gay is still illegal or even tantamount to a death sentence.

In his appearance at the Newseum, Ariturk called for the State Department to stand up to a“rising global wave of homophobia [that] is causing more and more countries to say, ‘We don’t want that kind of American here.’”

1.877.WOLFTRAP

The Washington Diplomat

The trajectory of LGBT rights globally has been anything but smooth. While the issue has gained prominence at the United Nations, regimes around the world have moved to persecute LGBT persons.

Homosexuality is illegal in 37 of the 54 African countries, according to Human Rights First. Russia’s infamous “gay propaganda” law criminalizes the spread of information on “nontraditional relationships” among children. Egyptian police have used dating apps to arrest gay people.

These repressive policies come as the United States is expanding its global efforts to have LGBT rights recognized as human rights. Kerry in February tapped Randy Berry as the State Department’s first special

envoy for the human rights of LGBT persons. Berry has twice held State Department posts in Uganda, where an anti-gay law took hold last year before being overturned by a constitutional court.

Berry’s charge is to coordinate the State Department’s programs related to LGBT people in other countries, while working with civil society and other governments. In an interview with the Washington Blade in April, Berry said he would take a “nuanced” approach that varies from country to country, including those in the “vast middle” that have unenforced laws that still criminalize homosexuality.As an example, he noted the administration’s decision to drop Gambia from a duty-free trade program amid concerns over the country’s LGBT crackdown and other human rights abuses.“Our toolkit in each case is going to be slightly different,” Berry told the Blade’s Michael K. Lavers.

For Gaylord, the advocacy counsel at Human Rights First, it will be important for Berry to tailor his engagement with each country where LGBT people face legal discrimination to the facts on the ground, rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.

Debate of LGBT rights at the United Nations last year highlighted the deep divide among countries on the issue. The U.N. Human Rights Council in September passed a resolution deploring “acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

But at 25-14 (with seven abstentions), the vote was far from unanimous, with Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia among the “no” votes. Pakistan’s representative to the council called the measure “divisive and controversial,” while Saudi Arabia’s envoy railed against “an attempt to impose uniculturality” that “runs counter to religious and cultural practices of some countries.”

The charge of attempting to “impose uniculturality” is a common one made by countries opposed to codifying LGBT rights at the United Nations. But Baer sees the world body as a place for gradually building consensus. A U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights report on the protections that international law affords LGBT rights, for example, is “a normative basis for continuing to make the case to recalcitrant governments that they actually have human rights obligations that pertain to their treatment of LGBT people as equal citizens under the law,” Baer said.

But leaders in Nigeria, Russia, Kenya, Pakistan and elsewhere argue that Western nations are trying to force an agenda on them that disrespects their traditions. Some Domin­icans, for example, called Brewster’s appointment an “insult.”America’s well-organized gay rights movement and pressure that Western governments have applied on countries such as Uganda — including foreign aid cuts — have inspired a fierce pushback that some fear will only fuel more discrimination.

Baer countered the notion that the United States and other countries were imposing their values on other countries by supporting LGBT rights by saying that “sustainable change comes from within … one of the most effective ways to see change happen in the world is to support those who are making the case for change in their own communities and on the front lines.”

Sean Lyngaas (@snlyngaas) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

Your Source for Diplomatic News. www.washdiplomat.com

June 2015

COVER PROFILE

Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi

Hungary’s New Envoy Tries to Set Record Straight About Her Boss

by Larry Luxner

F

or several years, Hungary’s relationship with the United States has been in a free fall — spurred on by mini-crises like the State Department’s denial of visas to six Hungarian officials accused of corruption, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 2014 vow to build an “illiberal state” à la China and Turkey, his angry opposition to European sanctions against Russia and a subsequent outburst by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who called Orbán a “neofascist dictator.”

And conservative Orbán seems downright tame compared to Hungary’s extreme-right Jobbik party, which recently called for the country’s 120,000 Jews to be registered because they “pose a national security risk.” In midApril, Jobbik won its first local by-election, narrowly defeating Orbán’s centerright Fidesz in the western district of Tapolca — and further cementing Jobbik’s position as the third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament.

In the midst of all this bad blood, two women hope to reverse the bilateral decline and put U.S.-Hungarian relations back on track: Réka Szemerkényi, Hungary’s new envoy in Washington, and her counterpart in Budapest, U.S. Ambassador Colleen Bell.

“There’s a nice symbolism in this,” Szemerkényi said during a lengthy interview at her Washington residence.“She’s a serious woman with a business background and has four children. I have a background in security policy, and I also have four children. And we have lots of common friends in Washington.”

But their backgrounds aren’t that similar: Bell, an Obama campaign bundler, was a producer for the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.”

“

became the newest of 28 female ambassadors in town. She’s also one of a new crop of Hungarian women representing their landlocked, Indiana-size nation overseas, in diplomatic outposts such as Athens, Geneva, Lisbon, Madrid, New York and Stockholm. “This is an important period for our two countries,” said Szemerkényi, a veteran Fidesz supporter and longtime advisor to the prime minister’s office on foreign and security policy. “I’ve been working on this relationship for many years.”

Yet not everyone is thrilled with her appointment.

“No ambassador can improve relations between the U.S. and Hungary as long as Viktor Orbán is the prime minister. Not even a mother of four,” wrote political pundit Eva Balogh, whose Hungarian Spectrum blog is deeply critical of Orbán.“Szemerkényi, although she might be well-qualified for the job, is known to blindly follow the party line. I’m sure that the idea of having the clone of Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian Embassy in Washington doesn’t warm the cockles of anyone’s heart in the U.S. capital.”

The selection of Szemerkényi’s counterpart, Colleen Bell, as U.S. envoy to

This ‘Hungary bashing’ in the international media has created an image that the U.S. does not understand what’s going on. Critical tones are based on these impressions.

But if you go around the countryside, the trust in democracy is very strong, and we’re very proud of that. People don’t want to go back to pre-1990 days.

”

— Réka Szemerkényi, ambassador of Hungary to the United States Szemerkényi is a European defense and energy expert who has worked as national security advisor to the prime minister in addition to stints at the World Bank, think tanks, NGOs and Hungary’s main oil and gas company.

She speaks impeccable English and is the first woman ever to represent Hungary as ambassador here.

Upon presenting her credentials in February to President Obama, she June 2015

Hungary also ruffled more than a few feathers.

Bell, a TV producer and philanthropist who raised at least $500,000 for President Obama’s re-election campaign, was branded as “totally unqualified” by McCain to represent Washington’s interests in Budapest.

“I am not against political appointees,” the Republican from Arizona told fellow lawmakers prior to Bell’s confir-

Photo: Lawrence Ruggeri of Ruggeriphoto.com

mation vote. “I understand how the game is played, but here we are, a nation on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a neofascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin, and we’re going to send the producer of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ as the ambassador. I urge my colleagues to put a stop to this foolishness.”

His colleagues didn’t listen, and the Senate confirmed Bell by a vote of 52-42.

The two newly minted ambassadors had a four-week overlap in Budapest before Szemerkényi began her posting here in February.

“We met at the very beginning of her mission in Hungary, and we immediately became very good friends. We have a professional understanding and a personal touch,” said Szemerkényi, who during our interview was joined by her 6-year-old daughter, also named Réka (the ambassador’s other children are ages 11, 12 and 14). “We’re working in the same direction, to improve the HungarianAmerican relationship. That’s one of the most important characteristics of this new chapter in bilateral relations.

“As a result of these negative spirals, many of the decisions were either not understood or interpreted in a negative light,” she insisted. “This ‘Hungary bash-

ing’ in the international media has created an image that the U.S. does not understand what’s going on. Critical tones are based on these impressions.

But if you go around the countryside, the trust in democracy is very strong, and we’re very proud of that. People don’t want to go back to pre-1990 days.”

Orbán himself knows those dark days well. In 1989, he gave a rousing speech in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square demanding free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, catapulting him to national stardom. Just three years later, he became the leader of Fidesz, eventually transforming it into a political powerhouse.

Riding a wave of popularity, Orbán secured a two-thirds majority for his party in parliament in 2010 and is now on his third term as prime minister.

He’s also presided over modest economic growth in recent years and major structural reforms in an effort to overcome decades of economic mismanagement.

But the prime minister grew disillusioned with Western economic prescriptions following the 2008 global recession, which hit Hungary hard, and

Continued on next page The Washington Diplomat Page 15

Continued from previous page said his country would forge its own economic path.

The result has been a mixed bag of what Orbán describes as much-needed reforms, but what critics in the European Union and United States call worrying signs of regression.

The prime minister used his party’s supermajority in parliament to rewrite the constitution and push through laws that circumvent the courts and remove checks and balances. Orbán defended the move, saying that Hungary’s hybrid electoral system was one of the most complicated in Europe, an unwieldy relic of communism that politicians of all stripes had wanted to overhaul.

He’s been called a power-hungry strongman who muzzles the media, stifles dissent, cracks down on NGOs and uses government purse strings to weaken opposition parties. Yet the type of media censorship and restrictions on protesters seen in Russia are largely absent from Hungary. He’s embraced Putin as a key ally, in part out of necessity given Hungary’s complete reliance on Russia for natural gas.

Orbán has also railed against EU bureaucrats but accepted their money to boost Hungary’s competitiveness.

Szemerkényi says she is determined to present a more nuanced picture of her boss than the black-and-white portrayal he often receives in U.S. media, explaining the roots of complicated policies that have alarmed Brussels and Washington.

Szemerkényi, whose home is decorated with vintage black-and-white photos of the 1956 Soviet invasion that crushed Hungary’s democratic dreams, grew up under communist rule.

Yet by the 1980s, she said, the authorities — wary of provoking another violent revolt — had instituted a softer, Hungarian-style “goulash

Hungary at a Glance independence day: Nov. 16, 1918 (republic proclaimed) national day: aug. 20 (Saint Stephen’s Day) Capital: budapest Location: Central Europe, northwest of romania population: 9.9 million (July 2014 estimate) Life expectancy: 75 years Ethnic groups: Hungarian 92.3 percent, Roma 1.9 percent, other or unknown 5.8 percent (2001 census) religions: Roman Catholic 37.2 percent, Calvinist 11.6 percent, Lutheran 2.2 percent, Greek Catholic 1.8 percent, other 1.9 percent, none 18.2 percent, unspecified 27.2 percent (2011 estimate) Gdp (purchasing power parity): $240 billion (2014 estimate) Gdp per-capita: $24,300 (2014 estimate) Gdp growth: 2.8 percent (2014 estimate) Unemployment: 7.1 percent (2014 estimate) population below poverty line: 14 percent (2012) Exports: Machinery and equipment 53.5 percent, other manufactures 31.2 percent, food products 8.7 percent, raw materials 3.4 percent, fuels and electricity 3.9 percent (2012 estimate) imports: Machinery and equipment 45.4 percent, other manufactures 34.3 percent, fuels and electricity 12.6 percent, food products 5.3 percent, raw materials 2.5 percent (2012 estimate)

Source: CIA World Factbook

communism” that gave people a modest measure of freedom and basically ignored those who weren’t politically active.

“We listened to Radio Free Europe all the time. Only three or four people in our class at school cared about politics. The other 30 were indifferent,” she recalled. “The party had a sub-

tle, unspoken deal that if you didn’t go to demonstrations or give out pamphlets, they wouldn’t bother you. I think that for a large and significant segment of society, that was a comfortable life since they never confronted the regime.”

In fact, Hungarians enjoyed the highest living standards of any Soviet satellite in Eastern Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the U.S.S.R. began self-destructing the following year, those living standards began falling rapidly, which perhaps accounts for why some Hungarians may not be as enamored of the transition to EU-style democracy as their counterparts in Poland and elsewhere were.

In this post-communist haze, Hungary’s traditional, male-dominated political hierarchy survived.

“When I went to the Ministry of Defense in 1990 after the first free elections, I was one of 10 civilians ever to set foot there. I was also the only woman in this group, and the youngest,” recalled Szemerkényi, who later became involved in the NATO enlargement while at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Within a few years of communism’s collapse, newly elected democratic governments quickly instituted political and economic reforms in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland — but not in Hungary.

“For a fundamental change to take place, most of the major fields of reform were linked to a two-thirds majority in parliament,” said the ambassador. “That was seen as practically unachievable for over three elections after 1990.”

That rule, she said, was a clever legacy of Hungary’s communists, who knew they couldn’t avoid free elections but still hoped to remain in parliament by requiring at least twothirds of Hungarian lawmakers to change the constitution.

“That was behind the idea of linking changing the constitution to a two-thirds majority,” she said, noting that this didn’t happen in the elections of 1990 — nor in the subsequent elections of 1994, 1998, 2002 or 2006. Once Fidesz finally won in 2010, she said,“practically all of our attention went into [reforming the economy], and no serious energy was left in the country to explain what was happening to our allies and friends.”

The ambassador said that in 2010, after eight years of leftist governance, the Hungarian economy was in shambles.

“By then, after these two socialist terms, Hungary’s level of national indebtedness was higher than in 1990, after 40 years of communism,” Szemerkényi told The Diplomat.“Because of the irresponsible policies of the previous government, Hungary was hit harder than any

See hUnGary, page 45

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LEttER tO tHE EDItOR larry luxner’s april 30 article, “hong kong anxiously Counts down to 2017,” gets some very important facts wrong on hong Kong’s constitutional reform. implementation of universal suffrage for the election of our Chief Executive (CE) requires constitutional changes — a tripartite process that involves approval by our legislature, the Chief Executive and the central government in beijing. this is not a matter that hong Kong can decide alone. it is wrong to say that constitutional reform, which would allow five million eligible hong Kong voters to directly elect our Chief Executive in 2017, was “shot down by the Chinese Communist Party” as luxner incorrectly reports. instead, a package of proposals was only recently put to our legislature on april 22 for consideration, with arrangements to ensure that elections would be conducted in an open, fair, transparent and competitive manner. as part of the institutional process, it is up to our legislature to pass the reform package. If it passes by a two-thirds majority, Hong Kong will have reached a milestone in its democratic development.

If the package is rejected, our demo-

cratic development will come to a standstill. the introduction of universal suffrage for our Chief Executive, as well as for our legislature, will be delayed. this is a choice that our legislators in hong Kong will have to make. the hong Kong Police is responsible for maintaining hong Kong’s law and order. the Police displayed strong restraint and tolerance during the 79-day Occupy protests, which gridlocked our city. The operations to reopen the roads were carried out by the hong Kong Police and unarmed bailiffs enforcing court injunction orders, not by beijing or “Chinese authorities” as luxner erroneously reports. the process was largely peaceful and with minimum confrontation because of overwhelming public support to restore order and ample notice and warnings. Most protesters actually left the illegally occupied thoroughfares voluntarily. regards, Clement leung Hong Kong commissioner to the United States

June 2015

Diplomacy

Washington, D.C.

Women’s Foreign Policy Group Celebrates 20 Years of Gains

by Larry Luxner

W

hen Patricia Ellis and Julia Bloch formed the Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) in June 1995, Washington had barely a dozen female ambassadors.

Today, as WFPG marks its 20th anniversary, the group notes that a record 27 women ambassadors and chargés d’affaires are posted to the United States — along with 23 female deputy chiefs of mission in Washington and 39 women permanent representatives to the United Nations in New York (not to mention 28 female foreign ministers and 20 female heads of state worldwide).

Ellis recalled how she and Bloch, who later became U.S. envoy to Nepal and now runs the US-China Education Trust, started the nonprofit group from her kitchen table.

“All of us were women working on foreign policy issues, mainly at the State Department, USAID, think tanks and the media,” she said. “At the time, I was a journalist with MacNeil-Lehrer, covering foreign affairs.

From the very beginning, the organization was a network for women from across the foreign policy field. It wasn’t focused on any one region, issue or discipline.

It was multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral — and that’s always been one of our strengths.”

These days, WFPG has more than 300 members, each of whom pay annual dues of $250. It also counts a number of Fortune 500 firms as corporate members, including Coca-Cola, General Mills, Lockheed Martin, Kellogg Co., Procter & Gamble and CH2M Hill.

No more than five men are dues-paying members, though more and more men are showing up at WFPG events, especially those that deal with substantive issues like the Middle East or the future of NATO. From its modest headquarters at 16th and M Streets, WFPG runs an array of programs ranging from brownbag lunches and author series to State Department briefings and embassy receptions. Dozens of ambassadors — from countries such as Japan, France, Indonesia, Italy and Britain — have participated in WFPG talks.

One of the group’s earliest speakers was Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, who told WFPG members shortly after Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election: “It used to be that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador’s lap.”

More recent events have featured high-profile speakers such as Brookings scholar Fiona Hill, who gave a lecture April 29 on Russian President Vladimir Putin; German Ambassador Peter Wittig, speaking May 18 on “Common Challenges of the Transatlantic Relationship”; recently appointed European Union Ambassador David O’Sullivan talking May 1 about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean; and Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, who spoke May 13 on the recent U.S. rapprochement with Cuba.

“We’ve always promoted women’s voices and women’s leadership, as well as global engagement and mentoring,” said Ellis.“We also have a very active internship program, and we do mentoring fairs every year.

June 2015

Photo: Women’s Foreign Policy Group

“

If a man has to work 100 percent, then you have to work 150 percent. But once you reach that point, then you can be much more comfortable with yourself and everyone around you.

— Faida Mitifu

”

ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the United States

This is a growing area for us, and it allows us to give back to the next generation.”

Among the 27 female ambassadors and chargés d’affaires posted to Washington are Maguy Maccario Doyle and Claudia Fritsche, who represent Europe’s two smallest and wealthiest countries: Monaco and Liechtenstein, respectively.

Both women were their country’s top diplomats in New York for years before coming to Washington.

Fritsche was Liechtenstein’s permanent representative to the United Nations from 1990 to 2002, the year she arrived here as ambassador. Likewise, Maccario began her career in 1976 at the Monaco Government Tourist Office in New York and was promoted to consul-general in 1997 — making her the first Monégasque woman ever to hold that position worldwide.

Patricia Ellis, cofounder of the Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG), left, greets then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the 2007 Celebrating Women Leaders Luncheon. Now in its 20th year, WFPG has attracted hundreds of high-level speakers and members, from State Department officials to foreign ambassadors.

“There are only 8,000 of us. It’s very difficult to get Monégasque citizenship. Normally you need three generations,” said Maccario, who hosted a WFPG reception at her official residence on April 23.“On the other hand, there is no income tax, and in one square mile, we have 120 nationalities, and everyone gets along very well together.”

Fritsche, the fourth longest-serving ambassador in D.C. after Djibouti’s Roble Olhaye, Palau’s Hersey Kyota and Congo’s Faida Mitifu, said not a single woman worked in Liechtenstein’s foreign service when she started her career.

“I’m not so proud to say that Liechtenstein introduced the right for women to vote only in 1984 — not 1884 — so we had a lot to catch up on,” Fritsche said recently. “I was personal assistant to the foreign minister, which is when my interest in foreign cultures was awakened. The choice was clear, and I’ve never regretted it.”

Today, she said, 40 percent of the Alpine mini-state’s diplomats are women.

“I try to invite every newly arrived female ambassador for lunch,” said Fritsche, who’s now served in Washington for nearly 13 years. “Having been here so long, I know she probably has a very experienced staff, but there are little things you need to know that the staff can’t tell you. So I always keep my door open.”

See WFPG, page 47 The Washington Diplomat Page 17

Diplomacy

United States

New Book Describes Good, Bad And Ugly of ‘American Ambassadors’

by Dave Seminara

E

dward Rumsey Wing, who in 1869 became America’s youngest-ever chief of mission at age 24, drank himself to death within four years of arriving at his post in Ecuador.

In the 1980s, John Upston bounced so many checks that the State Department reportedly instructed his mission in Rwanda to stop accepting them.

More recently, the allegedly abusive management style of Cynthia Stroum, a campaign bundler for President Obama who headed America’s Luxembourg mission, led several of her subordinates to volunteer for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another deep-pocketed political appointee, Colleen Bell — the one-time producer of the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” who is now the U.S. ambassador to Hungary — couldn’t clearly articulate what our national interests are in that country during her confirmation hearing last year. And George Tsunis, Obama’s nominee to become ambassador to Norway in 2014, famously knew less about that country at his confirmation hearing than anyone who may have perused its Wikipedia page.

How did these diplomatic neophytes earn their ambassadorial nominations? How do their paths differ from those of career Foreign Service Officers, who often spend years slugging through remote, unglamorous postings while their well-connected counterparts race to the front of the line? How is an embassy shaped and defined by the ambassador who runs it?

Dennis Jett, a professor of international affairs at Penn State and former U.S. ambassador to Mozambique and Peru, sheds light on these and a number of other questions in his richly detailed and engaging new book, “American Ambassadors: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Diplomats.”The book isn’t all about incompetent ambassadors — we also learn about the history of American diplomacy, how career diplomats become ambassadors, the confirmation and clearance process, where ambassadors go and what they do, among other things.

We caught up with Ambassador Jett recently to talk to him about the book and how America’s system of diplomatic appointments might be reformed.

The Washington Diplomat: According to your research, we’ve historically seen a roughly 70/30 split between career appointees and political appointees in the ambassadorial ranks, with the percentage of career appointees spiking under the Eisenhower and Carter administrations and the percentage of political appointees peaking under Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan. The LA Times recently reported that President Obama has appointed 41 percent political appointees so far in the second term and 35 percent overall. Those figures are high based on the historical standard, are they not?

Dennis Jett: The short answer is yes. Political appointees tend to be front-loaded, so at the beginning of a new term you see a lot of these appointments being made and the career people serve out their terms, which are usually three years. It’s a little disturbing though, especially because during the campaign Obama said that people should be selected based on merit. If it holds up,

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Dennis Jett

“

Photo: Penn State University

There’s this perception that the only thing diplomats do is go to cocktail parties and not pay their parking tickets. Well, there’s other work being done…. Drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism — these are global problems that affect even the smallest countries. Incompetent ambassadors are a threat to national security wherever they are.

— Dennis Jett

”

author of ‘American Ambassadors: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Diplomats’

his number will be historically high. Reagan was at 38 percent political appointees and he had some of the worst of any president — what we’re seeing now is the corrupting influence of money. Obama and [Republican president candidate John] McCain spent a combined billion dollars in 2008. In 2012, Obama and [Mitt] Romney spent a billion each. And in 2016, there’s been talk that Hillary [Clinton] might spend $2 billion.

This means you’re going to have to sell ambassadorships. The flipside of this is the Washington appointments. Those jobs are more for political operatives than big givers. On that side, the appointments are 70/30, with 70 percent of the top jobs at the State Department going to political appointees and 30 percent going to career people in Washington.

TWD: You wrote that the White House has to come to an agreement with the State Department on which posts will be

political appointees. But how often does State push back in these negotiations?

Jett: It’s always a negotiation. The amount of pushback depends on the personalities involved. The president is usually above the fray so they are rarely involved in this.

TWD: You talked about how few diplomats ever become ambassadors. There are about 8,000 Foreign Service Generalists with a theoretical chance to become an ambassador. But there are only about 120 posts where ambassadors tend to be taken from the career ranks?

Jett: Right. I think that over the course of one’s career, you have about a 5 percent chance of becoming an ambassador and of course that depends on what cone you’re in and a number of other factors. The odds are even longer for consular officers and public diplomacy officers.

TWD: The clearance and confirmation process seems to take an extraordinary amount of time, especially in recent years.

The GOP has blocked dozens of ambassadorial nominations of late. Has it always been a long, slow process?

Jett: It’s been slow but it’s gotten worse. The biggest time consumer used to be the background check. The congressional part used to take two to three months.

Now there are people waiting for a year just because of the senatorial gridlock. Our ambassador now in Peru, I think he had to wait over a year. He was a career guy and there was no controversy. It’s just fighting — partisan bickering. It’s quite a shocking waste of time.

TWD: In the book, you wrote that it was rare for someone to get to the top at the State Department on performance alone.

You asserted that self-promotion and making the right contacts are also critical. Do you believe this is the same dynamic in the diplomatic corps of most Western nations?

See Jett, page 44 June 2015

DIGItaL DIPLOmaCy FORUm

21st-Century Statecraft

Beyond 140 Characters: Twiplomacy Survey Offers Lessons for Leaders

by Molly McCluskey

t

he recent election in the United Kingdom showed that social media has become the great equalizer for political campaigns, with candidates from all parties posting short campaign videos and pithy explanations of their stances on nationalism, a possible Brexit and immigration.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton made her longawaited presidential bid exclusively via Twitter and YouTube, while other candidates are hiring an army of digital strategists to amplify their voices across various social media platforms.

But those who weather, and ultimately win, their campaigns may find another challenge on their hands once they take office: changing the format of their channel from a one-way broadcasting megaphone into a truly interactive means of engaging the public in 21stcentury statecraft. Some leaders have mastered the art of social media conversation, while others have tuned out their listeners.

A new study by Burson-Marsteller looked at the effectiveness of world leaders on Twitter — which the PR firm calls the social media channel of choice for world leaders — measuring not only the number of their followers, but also engagement with peers, influence in the Twitter sphere, tone and how they manage dormant accounts, such as those for now-completed campaigns. The report, “Twiplomacy 2015: How World Leaders Connect on Twitter,” found that more than 4,100 embassies and ambassadors are now active on Twitter, as are the vast majority (86 percent) of the 193 U.N. member states. In addition, 172 heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network, as well as more than half of the world’s foreign ministers and their institutions.

In all, the study analyzed 669 government accounts in 166 countries and found that together these accounts boast a combined audience of 212 million followers.

“In short Twitter has become an indispensable diplomatic networking and communication tool,” the report says.

The most-followed world leader is President Barack Obama, with 59 million followers. His account, @ BarackObama, will stay in his possession when he leaves office, unlike first lady Michelle Obama, who currently uses the @FLOTUS handle. (Obama also finally activated an @POTUS account last month, attracting 1.6 million followers in the first 24 hours; it will be passed down to his successor should the next president want an official account rather than a personal one.)

However, despite his massive following, Obama’s Twitter engagement has been on the decline over the past several years. Why? It was set up as a campaign account and still behaves largely as one, full of smiling photos, video clips of news appearances and links to fluff articles about field trips to classrooms. Rarely does the account dive into weightier issues (it ignored the recent Baltimore riots entirely) or discuss foreign relations. The account acts more as a megaphone than a telephone, with one-way communications and the occasional call for engagement via an online petition or June 2015

PHOTOS: BURSON-MARSTELLER

survey.

This level of engagement is a sharp contrast to Pope Francis (@Pontifex), whose nine language accounts rack up nearly 20 million followers total. Judging by the number of retweets, however, the pontiff is far more effective than the American president, garnering nearly 10,000 retweets for every tweet he sends on his Spanish account and 7,527 retweets on average on his English account. Obama’s tweets earn a mere 1,210 retweets, on average.

Obama and the pope aren’t the only two world leaders to make both the “most followed” and “most effective” lists. India’s recently elected prime minister, Narendra Modi (@NarendraModi) has moved into third place of “most followed” world leaders and the fifth “most effective” since his election a year ago (during which he posted a selfie from an election booth).

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo�an (@RT_ Erdogan) and @WhiteHouse are in fourth and fifth places for the most followed accounts, respectively.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman (@KingSalman) and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) follow Pope Francis for second and third place in the most effective category, with Obama and Modi coming in fourth and fifth.

While not on any top five lists, Rwandan President Paul Kagame (@PaulKagame) is Africa’s most-followed head of state; the account of British Prime Minister

David Cameron (@Number10gov) is the most followed head of state in the European Union; and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (@EPN) takes the title for most followed leader in Latin America.

mUtUaL RECOGNItION While millions of followers are impressive, more impressive is who’s among them. Many heads of state and ministers make a concerted effort to connect with their peers, forging a “virtual diplomatic network” of sorts. According to the “Twiplomacy” report, members of this informal network “can and do send each other private direct messages on the platform which are often faster and more effective than traditional diplomatic demarches.” Mutual following is considered a polite nod, at the very least, and in some cases foreign offices have used Twitter’s direct message function to quickly clear up a misunderstanding, or coordinate schedules and campaigns.

The study also found that such connections are particularly valuable for smaller countries, such as Croatia, whose government is mutually following more than 500 of its peers.

In fact, since Burson-Marsteller’s last study in 2014, foreign ministers and their ministries appear to have

See twipLOMaCy, page 46 The Washington Diplomat Page 19

MEDICAL

Heart Disease

New Cholesterol-Busting Drugs Offer Potential Breakthrough

by Gina Shaw

W

hen it comes to LDL cholesterol — the “bad” cholesterol — experts agree that lower is better, especially when it comes to preventing heart attacks and other “cardiovascular events” among people who already have heart disease.

Most of the time, people with high cholesterol and coronary artery disease (CAD) can lower their LDL levels by taking one of the multiple commonly prescribed statin drugs.

But for about one out of every five people with CAD, statin therapy doesn’t lower their cholesterol levels at all. And a study published in February found that these “statin nonresponders” also had a faster buildup of plaque in their arteries than the people who responded to statin treatment.

As of this summer, there is likely to be at least one, and probably two, new medications available for these patients — with the promise of more to come. They’re part of a new class of drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors, and they’re likely to make some dramatic changes in how cardiovascular disease is treated.

The PCSK9 gene provides instructions for making a protein that helps regulate the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream; it controls receptors for low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, particularly in the liver, which is responsible for breaking down and removing most excess cholesterol in the body. But an overactive PCSK9 protein destroys LDL receptors on liver cells too quickly and efficiently, so the LDL cholesterol builds up in the bloodstream.

PCSK9 inhibitors inactivate PCSK9, allowing LDL cholesterol to be more efficiently swept from the bloodstream. And the Food and Drug Administration is due to make a decision about approving two of these drugs this summer: Sanofi’s alirocumab (Praluent) on July 24, and Amgen’s evolocumab (Repatha) on August 27.

Most experts think these drugs are likely to be approved, especially based on the results of three major clinical trials presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting in March.

Participants in these large trials all took a statin in combination with either a placebo or one of the two PCSK9 inhibitors. One year later, patients taking a PCSK9 drug had 60 percent lower LDL levels than those taking placebo. Now, lower LDL is all fine and dandy, but what about actual health outcomes? In a follow-up “extension” trial, patients taking evolocumab were about half as likely to die, have a heart attack or stroke, or be hospitalized than those taking a placebo. (The outcome results on alirocumab are still in development and not expected until 2017.)

“We won’t have any definitive answers until this larger trial we are doing is complete, but these data now give us a sense for the potential

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Photo: Sherry Yates / fotolia

Most of the time, people with high cholesterol and coronary artery disease (CAD) can lower their LDL cholesterol levels by taking one of the multiple commonly prescribed statin drugs. But for about one out of every five people with CAD, statin therapy doesn’t lower their cholesterol levels at all. clinical benefit of these drugs,” Dr. Marc Sabatine, a senior cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a lead investigator on the evolocumab trial, known as OSLER, said in a statement. “We know from previous research that evolocumab lowers LDL cholesterol, but these data offer support for their potential to reduce major adverse cardiovascular events in our patients.”

But statins have been around a long time, and they’re relatively cheap, particularly because generic versions are available that can cost as little as $4 a month. Experts predict that PCSK9 inhibitors may cost anywhere from $7,000 to $13,000 a

year. Considering that 25.2 million people take statins now, that’s a pretty hefty price tag for insurance companies — not to mention patients themselves, who are likely to have to shoulder a greater percentage of the cost for these medications, considered “specialty” drugs, than they do for statins.

That probably means that PCSK9 inhibitors will be limited to certain groups of patients: those with a genetic disorder involving high cholesterol, known as familial hypercholesterolemia; people who still have high LDL cholesterol levels even after taking statins; and people who cannot take statins due to their side effects. But that population alone will probably number in the millions.

And if competing products (of course other drug companies are chasing this golden goose as well) come to market, that will probably lower the price and make these drugs more palatable to the people who pay for them.

Just how good PCSK9 inhibitors really are at not only lowering cholesterol, but cutting the risk of heart attacks, strokes and death — the real goal here — won’t be known until around 2017 or 2018, when the long-term outcomes of the large studies are reported. But if they come anywhere close to meeting their early promise, these new medications could change cardiovascular care forever.

Gina Shaw is the medical writer for The Washington Diplomat.

June 2015

L U X U R Y

LIVING

Building a

■ a special section of the Washington diplomat

■ June 2015

The 11th Street Bridge Park, Washington’s first elevated park, will span the Anacostia River and offer water features, play places, concert spaces and educational facilities.

GLOBAL CITY

by Stephanie Kanowitz

Architecture of Nation’s Capital Reflects International Influences Photo: omA+olin

“One of the goals that most viscerally connects with the public is that this is a physical bridge but also a metaphorical bridge, encouraging the residents from both sides of the river to travel to the adjacent neighborhoods that have long been divided by the Anacostia River…. We also see this as a bridge between countries.”

— ScOtt KrAtZ director of the 11th Street Bridge Park Project

June 2015

T

he united States is often referred to as a melting pot because of the mix of cultures and languages that coexist here. And in many ways, the nation’s capital exemplifies that amalgam. Sure, there’s the obvious variety of races and religions, but the story of America, of Washington, d.C., is told in subtler ways, too.

Like the faces of the people who inhabit the nation’s capital, the architecture of the buildings here reflects a history rooted in international relations.

“In a way, it’s sort of the distillation of America and in some ways it is very unlike any place else in America,” said G. Martin Moeller Jr., senior curator at the National Building Museum.

Foreign flair has touched D.C. from the start. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-born architect, designed the city’s layout in 1791. He developed a Baroque plan with ceremonial spaces and grand radial avenues, resulting in the intersecting diagonal avenues superimposed over a grid that we know today, according to the National Park Service.“The avenues radiated from the two most

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significant building sites that were to be occupied by houses for Congress and the President,” NPS added.

But after clashes with government officials and city commissioners, L’Enfant was forced out and much of his vision never materialized. That is, until another pivotal shaper of Washington stepped in.At the turn of the 20th century, Sen. James McMillan orchestrated an effort, the McMillan Plan, to remove the train tracks crisscrossing Washington and replace them with what we know as the National Mall.

The design team responsible for the transformation had to do something first:“They convinced Sen. McMillan

Continued on next page

The Washington Diplomat Page 21

National Museum of African American History and Culture

Continued from previous page

that in order to do their job properly, they David Adjaye, who was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian needed to go spend five weeks in Europe,” parents and whose offices are based out of London and Moeller said.“They did this incredible tour New York, won a design competition in 2009 for this of the great capitals — Paris, Rome,Vienna, new Smithsonian museum that’s slated to open in 2016.

Budapest — taking notes on what worked The vision, according to Freelon Adjaye Bond/ and what didn’t, and brought back those SmithGroup, was derived from a tripartite column and European influences as they then started the Yoruba (a culture found primarily in West Africa) to work on the plan, which gave us, essenidea of a column or wooden post capped by a crowntially, the Mall as we know it today and the like form, according to the description the firm gives monumental core as we know it today…. on the museum’s website. The bronze-clad corona will The green portion of the Mall, if you’ve stretch skyward and inside the building it forms a ever been to Versailles, you understand perimeter to the galleries through which daylight will exactly where that comes from.” pass.

Indeed, a glance around D.C. reveals “My design is about celebrating the contributions many foreign design influences. The neothat African Americans have made to the United States classical architecture of many government and through that, telling a story about how a migration buildings, including the Capitol and the of a people has infused American culture with an Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, was African sensibility,”Adjaye told us via email. derived from Greek and Roman classical His choice of materials also brings the narrative he’s architecture, said Mary Fitch, executive Photo: Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup trying to describe to life. Bronze panels will reference director of the Washington Chapter of the history of post-war black ironworkers, while the the American Institute of Architects This rendering shows an interior of the National Museum of African American History and Culture that’s slated to open in 2016. form of the building evokes West African art, Adjaye (AIA). said. “There are also very clear references to the mate“The winner of the original design competition for the White House was James Hoban, an Irish architect who immigrated to the riality of the Washington Monument.The design is very much about the layering of these difUnited States after the Revolutionary War,” she added. “And of course, the Washington ferent conditions.”

Overall, he hopes that visitors to the museum, or at least admirers of its design, feel Monument is based on the design of Egyptian obelisks.”

Additionally, although it was designed by an American, the main entryway arch at Union uplifted.

“The form of the building suggests a very upward mobility,” he said. “It’s a ziggurat that Station, for instance, is based on Roman arches, and the building’s expansive interior is modmoves upward into the sky, rather than downward into the ground. When you see this buildeled after the great spaces of ancient Roman baths.

Foreign-born designers and influence decreased somewhat in the 20th century, thanks to ing, the opaque parts look like they’re being levitated above this light space, and when you the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. Work largely shifted to American architects. look at the circulation, everything lifts you up into the light. I want people to see that this is Today, there’s again an uptick in international flavor, Moeller said. For example, Spain’s Rafael not a story about past trauma. It’s not a story of a people that were taken down, but actually Moneo designed the Spanish ambassador’s residence about 18 years ago.“It’s clearly inspired one about a people that overcame and transformed an entire superpower into what it is today. by the vernacular architecture of Spain,” Moeller said. “It picks up on the masonry of Spain, The sacrifices of the African American people has made America better.” even going back to the Moors.”

In 2010,Vancouver-based Bing Thom Architects spearheaded the Mead Center for American 11th Street Bridge Park Theater at Arena Stage, doubling the facility’s size.The next year, Moshe Safdie, an Israeli-born Washington’s first elevated park will span the Anacostia River, providing water features, play architect with offices there, in Canada and the United States, designed the U.S. Institute of places, concert spaces and educational facilities. But as it connects two parts of the city — Peace. Currently, Foster + Partners, a British architecture firm, is responsible for several build- Capitol Hill and Anacostia — it’s also bridging international relations. ings at CityCenterDC. Let’s take a closer look at some other recent projects handled by international design firms: See Architecture, page 24

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June 2015

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The Washington Diplomat Page 23

from page 22

Architecture A Dutch architecture firm called OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) was chosen to design the $40 million park along with Olin, a Philadelphia-based landscape architecture company. The joint public-private venture is still in the planning and fundraising stages right now; it could open, at the earliest, at the end of 2018. The design calls for an X-shaped span that’s home to a central plaza, an environmental center, an amphitheater, picnic spots, waterfalls and more. There’s even a series of nets that allow people to dangle over the river. But what’s especially interesting is how two trusses will sit atop the existing piers to elevate the new civic space, said Scott Kratz, director for the park project.

“One of the goals that most viscerally connects with the public is that this is a physical bridge but also a metaphorical bridge, encouraging the residents from both sides of the river to travel to the adjacent neighborhoods that have long been divided by the Anacostia River,” Kratz told us. “We also see this as a bridge between countries.”

Although Washington was founded specifically because it sits at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, the city has long forsaken the waterways, he said. There’s a lot to learn from other river-based capitals such as London and Paris that are re-engaging with their central feature. For example, Paris built a beach area, the Paris Plages, along the Seine a couple of years ago.

For years, the Anacostia River was more known for pollution and poverty than parks and playgrounds. The ambitious 11th Street Bridge project aims to change that by transforming perceptions of the

Photo: U.S. Navy / Johnny Bivera

neglected river. That interaction with water was one of the 13 design principles OMA addressed in the Dutch firm’s winning approach — not surprising given that the flood-prone Netherlands has developed one of the best water-management systems in the world.

“It’s my understanding that the Dutch have been thinking an awful lot about water, how to keep water out but also how to live with it,” Kratz said.“They actually went so far as to create ways to make sure that we are physically cleaning the water because water plays a critical role.”

To that end, the park will include a series of waterfalls beneath the bridge to

French-born architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s vision for the National Mall became a reality at the turn of the 20th century when Sen. James McMillan orchestrated an effort to remove the train tracks crisscrossing Washington and replace them with what we know as the Mall.

re-oxygenate the water to support marine ecosystems, for instance.

The Dutch are designing another major city project. The Mecanoo design firm is handling the renovation of Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library on 9th and G Streets. The plan is to retain the original modernist layout while transforming the main entrance and adjacent cores “into focal points to make them more vertical, transparent, allowing more daylight and visibility to these public cores,” Francine Houben, creative director and architect at Mecanoo, told us in an e-mail. “The result is a modern library that reflects a focus on people, celebrating the exchange of knowledge, ideas and culture.”

Water Pollution Control 4 Plant Fence Enhancement A stone’s throw from Washington, yet another Dutch team — Tejo Remy and René Veenhuizen — are working to improve a portion of a fence that surrounds the Water Pollution Control Plant in Arlington, Va. The section they were selected by Arlington Public Art to work on in March 2012 measures 800 feet and runs parallel to a bike and pedestrian trail along the Four Mile Run stream.The effort is part of a larger initiative called the Four Mile Run Restoration Project, an inter-jurisdictional project involving Arlington, the Army Corps of Engineers and the city of Alexandria to restore the streambed.

The designers were inspired by the workings of the plant and by the water, said Deirdre Ehlen, Arlington Public Art project manager — “this change of taking the dirty water, cleaning it and then putting it back into the river, and that process is done through a very natural process using microorganisms.Tejo and René took that idea of microorganisms and what they look like under a microscope,” she explained, noting that they also incorporated tools such as hand wheels and screwdrivers that are involved in water maintenance.

“There’s going to be an abstract pattern that’s going to be created two different ways,” added Angela Adams, Arlington Public Art administrator.“One through the overlay of shaped fence — a dimensional fence that will be made out of the same material that will be added to the fence Blancpain_WashingtonDiplomat_Villeret_DDF.indd 1

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Photo: Arlington Public Art

itself, so it will give a sense of volume, and as you move along it, there will be a bit of a moray effect … in that it will look like it’s in motion. The other design will be created through these waves of colorful widgets.”

The Arlington Public Art program sent a call out nationally for design entries, and a local gallery that represents Tejo and René applied on their behalf, Adams said. About half the art in the program’s collection comes from local or regional artists, and most international contributions come through a sister-city exchange program.

Capitals with Culture Washington is not the only major city or capital to have well-recognized buildings that were designed by architects who hail from other countries, said AIA’s Fitch.

Some examples include the Shard skyscraper in London, the tallest building in the European Union, which was designed

by Renzo Piano of Italy, as well as three skyscrapers in Shanghai’s central Pudong district — the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Shanghai Tower (the second tallest building in the world) — that were designed by U.S. firms.

“In our age of globalization, the use of foreign architects is a worldwide phenomenon, particularly for major commercial buildings or marquee cultural projects,” Fitch said.

Stephanie Kanowitz is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

12/8/14 10:49 AM

June 2015

[ furnishings ]

Universal Craftsmanship Iconic American Furniture Maker Reflects on International Influences

F

by Stephanie Kanowitz

urniture maker Tom Moser prides himself on creating unornamented pieces derivative of 19th-century American primitive forms using hardy American wood, mainly cherry and walnut. But in talking with the 80-yearold designer — who recently reopened Thos. Moser Handmade American Furniture in Georgetown — a foreign influence becomes apparent.We sat down with him while he was in town for the reopening of his 5,500-square-foot showroom off M Street to find out where he finds inspiration after 43 years in the business, including about 35 years with a store in Washington. the Washington Diplomat: Has D.C. home furnishing style changed over time? tom Moser: Twenty-five years ago, Washington was emulating Williamsburg, [Va.]. Williamsburg, of course, was reliving the 18th century, and so you had all this mahogany furniture — period [pieces], such as Chippendale — that was very common in everybody’s living room. Typically you had Oriental rugs, mahogany furniture, and it was almost all made in North Carolina, which was the capital of the furniture world. That has migrated to China — probably 85 percent of the furniture sold in Washington, D.C., for a residential use is made in Asia — so that’s been a big change, and the styles have been a big change, away from what I would call formal furniture to more crafted and uniquely American forms. tWD: Have you updated or changed any of your furnishings to reflect these new tastes?

Moser: No, not really. I always say the new tastes are more reflective of our old tastes. tWD: Do you have an international following?

Moser: Some years ago we had a relationship with a group in Kyoto, [Japan], and that was very successful until their recession hit in the mid-’90s and that slowed things down. In the meantime, every month there’s another piece going to Europe, principally to Americans who are living there. One time I got a call from a person with a Middle Eastern accent who wanted to buy $100,000 worth of furniture, which for us would be a huge order. He said,“Give me your checking account number and I’ll transfer the money.”That sounded like that might be a scam, so he said,“Go down to the Moroccan Embassy and they will vouch for me.” It turned out to be the king. tWD: You spent a year teaching English in Saudi Arabia. How did that experience affect you?

Moser: I had a wonderful, wonderful time.We set up language labs for the teaching of English [at what’s now the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals].That was in 1965.There were about 60 students when I got there. I was one of about six Ph.D.s in the kingdom. I got to travel. I went to pretty much every Middle Eastern country — Iraq, Iran, Kuwait.

tWD: What furniture do you admire elsewhere?

PhotoS: trent Bell PhotoGrAPhy / thoS. moSer

Moser: I like Scandinavian design because it shares many of the values I have about functionalism, an honesty in materials, understanding the materials, particularly wood, and they don’t do too much with ornamentation. I did show our work at the Scandinavian Furniture Show in Copenhagen some years ago, and it had very much a Shaker feeling, and I was amazed at how much the Danes — in fact, the Scandinavians generally — admire American Shaker forms. That is somewhat at the route of what you would call Danish or Scandinavian modern back in the ’50s and ’60s.

Of course, I love much of the contemporary Italian design. They are probably the leading proponents of contemporary design in the world today. tWD: What is your favorite piece of furniture to use?

tWD: Do you still travel?

Moser: The chair that I sit on at my desk at home — I spend quite a bit of time in it — is a low-back Windsor, which we call the Newport Chair. It’s a beautiful design. It’s very fluid. It’s based on a captain’s chair formula, which has been around for several hundred years. Incidentally, I also like our Continuous Arm Chair, which is our standard piece that most people identify with us.

Moser: Yes.

tWD: If you could put one of your pieces in the White House, what would it be?

tWD: During your travels, do you pick up any ideas for furniture?

Moser: We did that. It happened to be the Harpswell Chair.When Pope Benedict came here several years ago to visit George W. Bush, Laura Bush asked if we would make several chairs for the reviewing stand. She used a custom fabric, and I signed one of them with a W. That’s the one George sat in, and I signed the other with a B. That’s where the pope sat. That design is more European than American. I would have preferred that they sat in Windsor chairs, and even those aren’t really American. They started in Windsor, England.They were perfected here in this country.

Moser: Oh, sure. I’m awful that way. I turn over chairs. I’m forever exploring and investigating. Last summer, I took a ferryboat from Portland, Maine, to Nova Scotia, and on that boat were some small stackable chairs. I think they were made in Italy.They were aluminum with an artificial leather seat and back — just a very simple stacking chair, but the architecture of the back was fascinating because it was like a potato chip curled in both directions. It was concave and convex at the same time. That inspired me and just two weeks ago I finished a prototype using that architecture.

June 2015

handmade American wood is the backbone of thos. moser furniture, as seen in its Cumberland chair, above, and a circular bench display at the furniture maker’s showroom in Georgetown.

Stephanie Kanowitz is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

LUXURY LIVING

The Washington Diplomat Page 25

Come see an installation that illstrates a complicated contentious relationship in resplendent ruin collapsing under its own dramatic history and excesses

#filthylucre

asia.si.edu/filthylucre

Peacock Room REMIX is organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Darren Waterston’s installation Filthy Lucre, 2013–14, was created by the artist in collaboration with

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, North Adams, Massachusetts.

June 2015

culture & arts

■ WWW.WASHDIPLOMAT.COM

DIPLOMATIC SPOUSES

Demands of Diplomacy Jamaica’s Lisa Vasciannie put her successful university lecture career on hold to join her husband in D.C. and raise their two young boys, though she hasn’t given up her passion for education. PAGE 29

THEATER

entertainment

EMERGING from the SHADOWS

■ JUNE 2015

Elaine de Kooning made a name for herself in part because she was married to Willem de Kooning, one of the supernovas of American abstract expressionism. But as a retrospective of her work at the National Portrait Gallery shows, she made a legacy for herself by emerging from her husband’s shadow and finding her place in a male-dominated, masculine art movement. PAGE 28

Patchwork of Pain A quilt is a patchwork of many things, individual yet undivided.

Playwright Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt” is a narrative quilt that ties together the scattered stories of siblings’ lives into one explosive weekend that threatens to unravel an entire family. PAGE 30

PHOTOGRAPHY

Ride in Time On Spanish Trail Spanish photojournalist Janire Najera takes a road trip back in time to explore the Old Spanish Trail, a historical trade route that connected New Mexico settlements to California, in the immersive exhibit “Moving Forward, Looking Back.” PAGE 31 PHOTO: ELAINE DE KOONING TRUST / NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

DINING A swirl of vibrant colors, upbeat vibe and a creative hodgepodge of Peruvian, Japanese and Chinese cuisine are the hallmarks of José Andrés’s latest D.C. eatery, China Chilcano. PAGE 32

[ art ]

Not So Little Lady Elaine de Kooning, Eclipsed by Husband, Shines in Portrait Show

by Gary Tischler

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e get lost in the thick paint, the whirls, the faceless men, their splayed lower bodies and the gestural essence of portraits that loom large in life and personality. But a small part of our hypnotic fascination, and admiration, may lie in the fact that the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is called “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits,” and not “Elaine Fried: Portraits.”

That is to say that Elaine de Kooning was married, with interruptions for a lengthy separation, to Willem de Kooning, one of the supernovas of American abstract expressionism, which shifted the balance of cutting-edge and contemporary art from Paris to New York beginning in the 1940s. The de Koonings lived and loved and fought as part of a scintillating New York art and cultural scene, and de Kooning was by all accounts a mentor to the young Elaine, whom the Dutch-born painter took under his wing in 1938.

PHOTOS: ELAINE DE KOONING TRUST / NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY While his career eclipsed hers, in many ways, she was every bit as much a member of the abstract expressionist club as was Willem. Still, Among the works featured in the National Portrait Gallery retrospective of Elaine de Kooning the marriage is one of those aspects of biography that has cast a considerable, if not (pictured at top) are “The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue,” above, as well as portraits overwhelming, spell over the exhibition — and over Elaine’s legacy. of (from bottom left) poet Frank O’Hara, artist Robert de Niro Sr. and artist Fairfield Porter, This is not to suggest that Elaine de Kooning’s work is not worthy of a major retro- along with iconic portraits of President John F. Kennedy, pictured on the culture cover. spective. National Portrait Gallery chief curator Brandon Brame Fortune, in dealing with the omnipresent issue of marriage, recalled a story about Elaine being asked how it felt to have worked in Willem’s shadow. She replied,“I didn’t work in my husband’s shadow. I worked in his light.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918-89) was a bright star herself: a woman in a male-dominated, masculine art movement. Between the two, Willem was probably the one who was, category-wise, more of an abstract expressionist (although he hated the idea of art being submerged into “schools”). Both he and his wife pursued figurative works in the form of portraits.

Which brings us to this simple sentence: Willem painted women, while Elaine, with some exceptions, painted men. The divergence doesn’t stop there: Willem is famous — or infamous if you talk to critics who considered some of his portraits misogynistic — for his 1950s “Woman” series, with its ferocious teeth, bulging energy and angry lines that are not just furiously affecting Elaine never painted from life. She worked off her but downright scary. The most delicate own drawings, not photographs, and the drawings of work in this exhibition, on the other hand, Elaine de Kooning: Portraits Kennedy and others are in and of themselves essential is his almost tender, lovingly detailed through Jan. 10 to her oeuvre. Bereft of color, the Kennedy drawing is drawing of his wife.

National Portrait Gallery like a half-memory drawn, trying to catch up to the Elaine never quite jumped over the cliff into predomidetails of a dream just dreamt — unfinished and at the nantly abstract works, but her portraits of men have their 8th and F Streets, NW. same time done. own sharp, slashy, splashy characteristics — defining the For more information, please call (202) 633-8300 Surprises abound among the men in these portraits. subjects not by face (some are faceless), but by arms, legs or visit http://npg.si.edu.

There’s a group portrait of“The Burghers of Amsterdam and feet, which hardly ever seem in repose.

Avenue” that captures the jaunty eagerness and restYet, they subjects are always differentiated, if not recognizable. Lounging in gaudy, ill-fitting suits, feet splayed or strongly rooted, the back- lessness of young men.There’s the portrait of poet Frank O’Hara, casually posed, with ground stroked furiously, they are themselves. If Willem’s women had threatening, one knee slightly bent, hand on hip — deceptively light and, like one of his poems, sharp teeth (some of them at least), these men are empathetic in their restless abbreviated. Painter Robert De Niro Sr. is here, big in the flesh, completely unlike his chameleon actor son, along with an intense, edgy, defiant portrait of choreographer poses.

Some of Elaine’s men are famous — among them John F. Kennedy, poet Allen Merce Cunningham.

Elaine de Kooning did other things besides portraits, of course, and her marriage Ginsberg and painter Fairfield Porter, who commented that her images of men “are endured despite mutual extramarital affairs and a lengthy separation.The two reunitboth sympathetic and frighteningly acute.”

Color defines her.This is evident in the most telling and, let’s face it, crowd-pleasing ed in the 1970s and she took care of Willem when he was struck with Alzheimer’s, section: a roomful of John F. Kennedy portraits in Florida, a commissioned series of though she did not outlive him.

In many ways, his legacy also outlived hers. But looking at these paintings — some works because JFK thought Elaine would be the most appropriate artist for him.

For a man who’s famous for his blasting, wipe-out-the-sun smiles, there’s nary a grin of them big and unapologetically bright on the walls — you think differently of what to be caught in gossamer here. This is a restless Kennedy, trying to look easy in the she once said. She painted neither in the shadow of Willem nor in his light. Rather, she sun, often bathed in Irish green and always thoughtful, even at a distance. I suspect made her own light of colors and bold strokes and let it shine on her subjects. the smile always disguised the detachment, except when in the comfort zone of near Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat. and dear, especially his children.

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[ diplomatic spouses ]

Lesson in Sacrifice Jamaican Educator Balances Demands of Diplomatic Life

by Gail Scott

“E

ducation has always been the center of my life,” said Lisa Vasciannie, the Ph.D. wife of Jamaican Ambassador Stephen Vasciannie and mother of their two boys, fourth-grader Dominic and sixth-grader

Sean.

Back home, Lisa was a lecturer at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, a top regional university known for world-class higher education that was created to serve 18 English-speaking Caribbean nations and territories. There, she lectured for three classes: “International Political Theories and Issues”; “Introduction to International Relations”; and “International Relations: Theories and Approaches.”

Lisa, whose doctoral thesis dealt with election observation in the Caribbean, has also observed elections in Jamaica, Guyana and the Maldives and written papers on observing international elections in the Commonwealth Caribbean. In addition, she worked as a research assistant to legendary Jamaican political scientist Trevor Munroe and was a research officer for former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley.

Lisa is honest about the sacrifices of Lisa Vasciannie and her husband, Jamaican Ambassador Stephen being married to an ambassador and having Vasciannie, pose with their sons Sean and Dominic. The couple met while to put your own successful career on hiatus for the sake of diplomacy.

“It’s always a balance between professional and personal interests. For teaching at the University of the West Indies. the past three years, I haven’t worked here. I have been dedicated to our children and supporting my spouse,” she told us.

Sean plays the tenor, alto sax and clarinet, while 10-year-old Dominic plays “The first year here, I was almost resentful with being at home, just doing the piano. the laundry and the cooking. Then one day our older son forgot his home“Dominic is a book worm and a performer but wants to be a scientist work. I found it and took it back to him.When he saw me in the school hall and a professor. Sean likes basketball and cricket but could draw all day holding his paper, he looked at me like I was from Mars. That was my long. The music and art here have awakened his spirit. At home they went Eureka moment. I didn’t want to be a ‘helicopter mom,’ hovering over our to private Catholic schools, where you had to wear uniforms and you two boys, but I did want to help.” showed respect by not ever lookLisa didn’t abandon the education scene ing at your teacher in the eyes. It’s altogether, finding ways she could still conthe opposite here,” Lisa explained.

It’s always a balance between tribute her time. She spent a recent weekend “The boys have become very selfin the Jamaican stall at Norwood School’s professional and personal interests. driven — not helicopter but ‘freeMulticultural Festival, for example, and also range’ children. We are trying to For the past three years, I haven’t worked find the balance.” worked the 17th Food Festival of the Americas, which was held at the Organization of Lisa will readjust that balance here. I have been dedicated to our children again American States on May 17. She’s also volunwhen she picks up her old teered for a variety of causes and says she has teaching position at the University and supporting my spouse. met whole new groups of people that she of the West Indies as soon as they would never have known otherwise. return to Jamaica this summer.

— LISA VASCIANNIE Still, “not having my family support here Not only is the university where — my mother, father, sister and uncle — I wife of Jamaican Ambassador Stephen Vasciannie she spent her undergraduate years have been apprehensive in hiring just any and earned her master’s and doctorbabysitter,” Lisa said, noting that she had her fingers crossed when Sean ate degrees, it is also where she and her husband first met.“We were profeswent on an overnight camping trip recently. sional colleagues,” she explained, making sure I understood that he wasn’t Lisa is also discovering the different parenting styles in the United States. her boss.“He is brilliant and humble. We enjoy each other’s company.”

“It has struck me how structured American children are.Things are planned Stephen Vasciannie, who was appointed to Washington in 2012, also so far ahead by parents — from 1:15 to 2:35 two Tuesdays from now.” lectured at the University of the West Indies, where he was an international But she said the many extracurricular activities at Norwood School, law professor and principal of the Norman Manley Law School. located in Bethesda, Md., have allowed both of her boys to flourish and find Lisa herself has traveled extensively to participate in academic confertheir niche interests. ences and seminars and give lectures and tutorials. Her first trip away from “Norwood is an oasis; everything really happens at that school.There are her colorful island was to Sweden, where she went to the Cathedral School rigorous studies but also student art on the walls and in fifth grade, everySee DIPLOMATIC SPOUSES, page 33 one has to choose a [musical] instrument,” she said, noting that 12-year-old

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[ theater ]

Hanging on by a Thread ‘Blood Quilt’ Stitches Together Patchwork of Emotions

by Lisa Troshinsky

A

quilt is a patchwork of many things, individual yet undivided. It starts with millions of threads woven into cloth, from which memorable samples are chosen and sewn into a cohesive whole. A quilt shields with its physical warmth on cold winter nights and feeds the soul with memories stitched together from different stories.

Playwright Katori Hall’s newest script is a narrative quilt that ties together the scattered stories of siblings’ lives into one explosive weekend that threatens to unravel the family.

But like some overzealous collages, “The Blood Quilt” packs in too many pieces, sometimes muddying its central theme.

In its world premiere at Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater, “The Blood Quilt” celebrates the timehonored tradition of quilt-making, a rite that goes back as far as slaves who sewed cryptic messages to communicate with one another and survive. Hall explores the need to keep African ancestral traditions alive in the face of PHOTOS: C. STANLEY PHOTOGRAPHY family dysfunction and dissolution.

Above from left, Meeya Davis, Nikiya Mathis, Caroline Clay, Afi Set on a tiny, imaginary, remote island off the coast of Georgia, the Bijou and Tonye Patano star in Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt” at play reunites formerly scattered half-sisters — one especially Arena Stage. At left, Clay portrays Gio, the most disturbing, yet estranged — for an annual quilting bee at their childhood home.This entertaining, of the play’s four sisters. summer, however, their task is poignantly difficult because their mother, a strong matriarch with a troubled past, has just passed being left out of the will, occasionally crosses the line into away. needless venom, and the audience feels a spasmodic wince.

“The quilting becomes a reading of their mama’s will. Secrets are Amber, played a bit too coolly by Meeya Davis, is Gio’s polar revealed and relationships are tested,” Hall told Arena’s dramaturg opposite, a rich L.A. entertainment lawyer who was their Linda Lombardi. mother’s “golden girl.” Arriving late to the gathering, conservaDespite the fact the play overflows with too many personal contively and expensively dressed,Amber is a psychological conunfessions at a rapid-fire pace, it uncovers the realistic pathos and drum who paid for, but didn’t attend, her mother’s funeral.The upheaval that often accompanies the death of an important family reason could be her provocative secret that explodes and polarmember. izes in Act II. Hall, who came to Arena as an inaugural resident playwright of its The other two daughters — level-headed Cassan and the American Voices New Play Institute, uses her platform to expose the long-suffering oldest sister, Clementine, played by Tonye Patano rich cultural heritage of the Jernigan family, made up of four diverse — try to stay out of the fight between Amber and Gio, as they sisters and one sister’s daughter — all powerhouses who struggle have their own concerns. Cassan is holding on to a nebulous, with their individual identities, their pasts and their uncertain distant husband and struggling financially, while futures.

Clementine, their mother’s only caretaker, futilely tries They discover that their mother owes over $256,000 The Blood Quilt to ward off gentrification of the island and the ineviin back taxes on the house, where the eldest daughter through June 7 table slipping away of the family’s traditional way of still resides, and their only collateral to save the property life. are their irreplaceable, highly valuable quilts sewn by Arena Stage The audience, like Clementine, wants the family to long-deceased ancestors.

1101 6th St. stay together, and perhaps this is the reason why the While the sisters come to terms with this unwanted Tickets are $45 to $90. oldest sister is the most comforting. When it’s time to legacy and divulge painful truths about their private For more information, please call (202) 488-3300 put the others in their places, Patano steps up to the lives, Hall keeps the play afloat with humor, poking fun or visit www.arenastage.org. plate and displays an emotional depth of which the at each character’s stereotype as a way to cope with others only scratch the surface. their collective agony.

This production’s technical aspects, in part, make up for what the script lacks in Zambia, the teenage niece, played by a spunky Afi Bijou, arrives wearing a hijab head covering. Her mother Cassan (Nikiya Mathis) explains that this month her daughter is conciseness.

Michael Carnahan’s set — a cozy, modest homestead decorated with countless mula Muslim, last month she was a Goth and the month before that she wanted to be a vampire. A typical teen of today’s obsessive Facebook and cell phone user variety, she ticolored quilts and surrounded by water signifying the ocean — is mystical and intriguspeaks in text emoticons, exclaiming “smiley face” when she is pleased,“LMAO” when ing. Ominous thunderclaps threaten the women’s safety, thanks to sound designer she finds something hilarious and threatening to un-friend her aunts when annoyed Timothy Thompson, while composer Toshi Reagon, the daughter of Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock, provides a hauntingly beautiful musical score. with them.

Plays, like quilts, are original works of art.This one clearly shows the love and reverThe most disturbing, yet entertaining sister, Gio, is an unruly cop played convincingly by Caroline Clay, who spouts off one-liner jabs at her nemesis and youngest sister, ence that went into composing it.

Amber, all while guzzling beer, smoking pot and relaying personal details of her divorce and sexual desires. Her biting humor, meant to hide the pain of personal failure and Lisa Troshinsky is the theater reviewer for The Washington Diplomat.

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[ photography ]

Trek in Time Photojournalist Takes Reflective Road Trip Across Old Spanish Trail

by Kate Oczypok

I

[

n 2014, Spanish photojournalist Janire Najera, along with her assistant Matt Wright, took a road trip back in time across the American Southwest to explore the Old Spanish Trail, a historical trade route that connected New Mexico settlements to Los Angeles and other parts of California. The two documented their experience in“Moving Forward, Looking Back: Journeys Across the Old Spanish Trail,” a project that combines photography, video and sound and is now on display at the Spanish Embassy’s cultural center off 16th Street, NW. “Hopefully … this would make people more curious to explore the arduous route that connected New Mexico with California in the 1800s,” Najera said.

According to the photojournalist, who studied in Madrid and Wales, the trail was mainly conceived as a trade route used for business and commerce — a 1,200-mile trek that cut through mountains, deserts and canyons. “I hope with this project people also get an idea of how it changed the lives of some people that decided to settle in a different state and start all over again,” Najera said.

Najera and her assistant followed in the footsteps of Antonio Armijo, a Mexican explorer and merchant who was the first to traverse the Old Spanish Trail. Najera and Wright’s journey combined the past and present, capturing both the vast, sparse, imposing landscape that Armijo encountered, as well as the urban sprawl, freeways, farmland and other trappings of modern life that now punctuate the landscape.

Throughout their road trip, Najera traveled in a 1984 RV that morphed into a portable studio, home and meeting place for the Spanish descendants she interviewed for her piece.

These descendants spoke to Najera about how the traditions of the first settlers merged with local cultures and how this Spanish heritage continues to influence today’s cities and pueblos.

Najera — who was born in the Basque Country, studied in Madrid and now lives in Wales — belongs to a generation whose roots are scattered, and she said it’s hard for her to identify with one particular place. Her other documentary work highlights communities that have been displaced by social and economic change.

Her journey throughout Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico Moving Forward, Looking Back: and California led her to reflect on the Journeys Across the Old Spanish Trail concept of roots.“I asked myself questions about identity and about what it through June 28 means to be here or from there,” Former residence of the Najera said. “Working on this project ambassador of Spain has allowed me to meet with many 2801 16th St., NW people that have a strong interest in knowing more about their family hisFor more information, please call (202) 728-2334 tory and who feel proud about their or visit www.spainculture.us. connections to Spain.”

Each portrait in the exhibit includes taped conversations between Najera and the subject, adding a deeper dimension to the people we see in her striking photographs. Najera said that by using different layers of interaction, the work becomes more accessible.“I thought it was important to include the oral histories recorded with the Spanish descendants that I met to allow them to tell the visitors their own story, with their own voices,” she said.

If Najera were to do the project over again, she said she would’ve budgeted more time on the road because it was often hard for her to drive many miles

June 2015

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PHOTOS: JANIRE NAJERA / SPAIN ARTS & CULTURE

Last year, Spanish photojournalist Janire Najera, pictured at top, took a road trip in a 1984 RV across the American Southwest to follow the Old Spanish Trail that connected New Mexico settlements with California and interview the area’s Spanish descendants.

while preparing the logistics to meet and photograph people and conduct interviews as well.

Upcoming projects include preparing the exhibition to tour other U.S. cities and, hopefully, at some point Spain. Najera is also working on a new photo book called “The Black Hole,” a project produced in New Mexico. Like the Old Spanish Trail exhibit,“The Black Hole” is premised on an interesting duality: It offers an iconic portrait of Middle America, with its manicured lawns and picket fences, while exploring the nuclear waste dumps and military testing sites that lie behind the perfect façade.

Najera’s work on “Moving Forward, Looking Back” also prompted self-reflection on two seemingly opposing concepts — the past and present — and how the two coexist.“It has facilitated me to rethink why sometimes looking back, it helps us to understand who we really are,” she said.

Kate Oczypok is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

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[ dining ]

Andrés’s Latest Journey Peru, Japan, China Collide In Dizzying China Chilcano

by Michael Coleman

S

tep into China Chilcano, José Andrés’s trendy new Peruvian-Asian restaurant in Penn Quarter, and it immediately feels like a night on the town — and around the world.

A swirl of vibrant colors, inviting aromas and a buzzy, upbeat vibe envelope you, creating a sensory “wow” factor that is unrivaled in D.C.’s dynamic dining scene. Even better, the cheerful hostess informed us that our reserved table was ready when we arrived — no cooling our heels over expensive drinks at the bar, which seems to be the modus operandi at many upscale eateries these days.

While it’s tempting to describe China Chilcano as a fusion restaurant, prolific restaurateur/celebrity chef Andrés apparently resists that label.

There is, in fact, a historical correlation between Asian and Peruvian cuisine.

“In late 19th century, Chinese and Japanese settlers traveled to Peru and made it their home, bringing with them the time-honored cooking traditions that sparked the beginning of the rich multicultural offering that is Peruvian cuisine,” a glance at the dinner menu informed us.

With that bit of history in mind, we scanned the drink menu and asked for recommendations. A cheerful server steered us toward the pisco, a traditional Peruvian libation.

One of us took the bait, choosing the signature Chilcano, made from Macchu Pisco, lime,Amargo Chuncho bitters and ginger ale. Refreshing and bracing, the tart concoction was a pleasant prelude to the culinary adventure ahead.

I’m a sucker for Korean kimchi, so we had to have the Nabo Encurtido, a chifa-style pickled daikon that sounded similar (chifa is a Peruvian term that refers to Chinese cooking). The small bowl of thinly sliced, crisp white radish was an excellent starter, with a piquant flavor that awakened the entire palate.

And you can’t go to an exotic restaurant without trying something a little adventurous, right?

That’s how we found ourselves ordering a few pieces of barbecued duck tongue. I’ll readily admit to China Chilcano some trepidation. After all, the words “duck tongue” don’t really 418 7th St., NW roll off the human tongue as some(202) 783-0941 thing delicious-sounding. We were www.chinachilcano.com pleasantly surprised.

Not at all “gross,” as my dining Lunch: Daily, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. companion predicted, the small Dinner: Tue.-Thu., 2:30-11 p.m.; morsels of tender, charred meat held a flavor of light smoke and Fri.-Sat., 2:30 p.m.-12 a.m.; spice. And if the tart little cape Sun.-Mon., 2:30-10 p.m. gooseberries that topped each slice Prices: $2 - $70 helped mask any gamy taste, who am I to complain?

Causagiris — an invented word combining the Peruvian potato roll dish called causa with Japanese nigiri, or raw fish — presented another interesting international option.We opted for the “California” version — potato causa, jumbo lump crab, tobiko, spicy mayo, cucumber, avocado and huancaina, a spicy Peruvian cream sauce.

While we could appreciate the chef’s ambition with this hybrid experiment, the dish’s execution — at least the version of causagiris we ordered — missed the mark. The spicy mayonnaise, while pleasant enough, over-

[ ] want to

go?

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PHOTOS: KEN WYNER

José Andrés’s latest vibrant new creation is China Chilcano, which mixes Peruvian, Japanese and Chinese influences in dishes such as the Concolón, below, a crispy fried rice pot with pork belly, Nikkei broth, pickled turnip, egg, lap chong sausage, shiitake mushrooms, bok choy and chi-racha.

whelmed the overall flavor and texture of the roll. The entire thing also collapsed into a soggy mess, regardless of whether you used chopsticks or a fork.

A decision about main courses at China Chilcano can cause a temporary case of mental paralysis.

Do you opt for one of the intriguing Chinese-Peruvian dishes, a more hearty and traditional Peruvian plate or maybe something from the tantalizing selection of fried PHOTO: GREG POWERS rice and noodle bowls?

Our choices turned out to be a mixed bag. We picked one entrée from the Chinese-Peruvian fusion list that turned out to be rather ho-hum and another — the traditional Peruvian Ají de Gallina chicken dish — that was so outstanding it pretty much redeemed any other shortcomings encountered elsewhere in the meal.

Let’s start with the disappointment.The Camarón Saltado Maestro Wong — wild gulf shrimp, fermented black bean, wood ear mushroom, spring onion and rice — registered on the palate as akin to upscale but, unfortunately, only slightly better than decent take-out Chinese food. The rather bland concoction was enlivened somewhat by the fresh onion and texturally interesting wood ear mushrooms, but otherwise our reaction was a collective shoulder shrug.

On the other hand, the Ají de Gallina was a gustatory revelation — a showstopper. It’s described on the menu as “Peru’s most precious dish,” and one can easily taste why. The entrée features free-ranch chicken from Lebanon, Pa., and is prepared as a stew flecked with botija olives, fresh

June 2015

If the ad is correct sign and fax to: (301) 949-0065 The Washington Diplomat

needs changes

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DINING GUIDE

THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT

June 2015

THE DIPLOMAT DINING GUIDE YOUR RESTAURANT HERE 123 Dining Way www.web.com • (123) 555-1234

h

With more than 120,000 readers, The Washington Diplomat is the flagship newspaper of the diplomatic community, featuring news and culture stories that reach our highly targeted and lucrative market. The new dining guide is a unique opportunity to put your restaurant in front of our readers. Call (301) 933-3552 to advertise in the dining guide of our next issue.

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cheese, pecans, a small boiled, sliced egg and rice.The steaming hot dish immediately perks up the olfactory senses and boasts an attractive golden hue. Hearty and velvety, with hints of cardamom and citrus, Ají de Gallina would be a perfect way to warm the bones on a chilly winter afternoon. It also tasted pretty fabulous on a warm spring night.

For dessert, we split the Yàn W “Birds Nest” Soup, an inventive and novel “soup” concoction featuring pink grapefruit sorbet, mint, sesame and ginger. The effect was tart, almost like a key lime pie, but without the sugary aftertaste. The grapefruit and mint combination actually was an effective and delicious palate cleanser.

China Chilcano, which shares the block with Jaleo, the Spanish tapas restaurant that made Andrés a local dining legend, is a fun and flashy, if somewhat uneven, smorgasbord of three culinary traditions. It captures Andrés’s boundless energy and colorful brashness, though it can be hard at times for diners to keep up. Still, anyone looking for an adventurous restaurant — maybe a place to impress a date or an out-of-town friend — would do well to hop along for the voyage.

Michael Coleman (@michaelcoleman) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

Red snapper is on the Peruvian side of the menu at China Chilcano.

PHOTO: JEFF MARTIN

June 2015

Call (301) 933-3552 to Advertise Your Restaurant in the New Diplomat Dining Guide.

from page 29

Diplomatic Spouses in Lund in 1989 as part of the American Field Service student-exchange program, just before she started her master’s degree in Mona.

She remembers being surprised when “my host mother who was working outside their home would put her apron on as she came through the door and make dinner. She wasn’t too sophisticated, even though she was a career woman, to do this. She also washed the clothes and raked the yard.That was a culture shock to me; in Jamaica, she would have a helper.”

When I asked her why she chose to go to Sweden of all places, Lisa had an interesting answer: “My classmates were intrigued to go all over the world but no one mentioned Sweden. I wanted to go where no one else was going. I learned Swedish and can still speak it. I learned to ride a bicycle too!”

Although she enjoyed experiencing a Nordic nation, Lisa said she is very proud of being Jamaican and appreciates the opportunity to tell her new friends here about her island home.“We have African ancestry and a mixture of backgrounds: Indian, Chinese and Lebanese.We say,‘Out of many, one people.’ In Jamaica we don’t talk about minorities,” she said.

“We have a female prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, who is serving in this top political position for the second time. We have the Bob Marley Museum and the fastest runners in the world, Shelly-Ann Fraser-

Lisa Vasciannie was a lecturer at the University of the West Indies before coming to D.C., along with her fourth-grader Dominic and sixth-grader Sean, when her husband Stephen became Jamaica’s ambassador to the U.S.

Pryce and Usain Bolt. Many tourists visit our beautiful Montego Bay. “Yes, we are ‘happy-go-lucky’ people, but we are much more than just tourism. We have wonderful artists, great authors and an important university,”she added.“Jamaica is not in Latin America or Central America.

We are in the Caribbean. Caribbean people are their own subset of the Americas.

“Last summer, I took the boys home. I felt that they had been living in a bubble. I mean, life is wonderful here and they have traveled a lot, but I wanted them to be home,” Lisa explained. “The day after we arrived, we went to the beach. It was windy, there were rough seas and seaweed

all over. Immediately, they rolled in the sand as if they were dropping all their anxiety.”

Lisa admitted that one of the biggest challenges in Washington, especially with her background in international relations, is being careful about speaking out on controversial global issues and making sure she is not in conflict with Jamaica’s positions.

“I’m learning to hold my tongue,” she said wryly, marveling at “how Michelle Obama has learned to gracefully restrain herself and let her husband be president.”

Gail Scott is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

The Washington Diplomat Page 33

[ film ]

CINEMA LISTING *Unless specific times are listed, please check the theater for times. Theater locations are subject to change.

Bengali

THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT

June 2015

presents itself when Dinah, a professional streetwalker, crosses his path in need of help.

Félix and Meira

AFI Silver Theatre Fri., June 12, 9:45 p.m.

Two wayward strangers find comfort in one another when Meira, a young Hasidic housewife and mother, and Félix, a man mourning the recent death of his father, unexpectedly meet at a local bakery in Montreal.

Directed by Maxime Giroux (Canada, 2015, 105 min.)

Hamlet Apu Trilogy Directed by Satyajit Ray (India, 1960, 105 min.)

By the time “The World of Apu (Apur Sansar)” was released, Satyajit Ray had directed not only the first two Apu films but also the masterpiece “The Music Room” and was well on his way to becoming a legend. This extraordinary final chapter brings our protagonist’s journey full circle.

Landmark’s E Street Cinema Opens Fri., June 26

English Aloft Directed by Claudia Llosa (Spain/Canada/France, 2015, 112 min.)

As we follow a mother and her son, we delve into a past marred by an accident that tears them apart (English and French).

Landmark’s E Street Cinema Opens Fri., June 5

Cu-Bop: Cuba-New York Music Documentary Directed by Shinichi Takahashi (Cuba/Japan, 2014, 109 min.)

Separated by an ocean, two Cuban jazz musicians continue to perform in spite of the difficulties they face (English and Spanish).

AFI Silver Theatre Fri., June 12, 7 p.m.

Cymbeline aka Anarchy Directed by Michael Almereyda (U.S., 2015, 97 min.)

Michael Almereyda transposes Shakespeare’s romance from Roman Britain to the gritty present, where Cymbeline, King of the Briton Motorcycle Club, must contend with the dirty cops on the local force who run things on both sides of the law, including the slimy Iachimo.

AFI Silver Theatre Thu., June 25, 6:45 p.m., Tue., June 30, 9:20 p.m.

Every Last Child Directed by Tom Roberts (UAE, Pakistan, 2014, 83 min.)

“Every Last Child” is the dramatic story of five people impacted by the current polio crisis in Pakistan. Taking place on the front line of the fight against the disease, it is a story of sacrifice, fearless determination and sorrow in the face of mistrust, cynicism and violence (English, Urdu and Pushto).

Theater TBA Opens Fri., June 19

God Loves the Fighter Directed by Damian Marcano (Trinidad and Tobago, 2013, 104 min.)

King Curtis, a vagrant on the streets of Port of Spain, is constantly ignored by passersby. Charlie, a resident east of the lighthouse, is trying his best to stay on the right path. A chance of redemption

34

Directed by Franco Zeffirelli (U.S./U.K./France, 1990, 135 min.)

Franco Zeffirelli directed this energetically realized screen version of “Hamlet” for action star Mel Gibson, who acquits himself admirably as the troubled Prince of Denmark.

Angelika Pop-Up The Avalon Theatre

Marie’s Story (Marie Heurtin)

AFI Silver Theatre Sun., June 7, 5:45 p.m.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Améris (France, 2014, 95 min.)

Hamlet Directed by Michael Almereyda (U.S., 2000, 112 min.)

Michael Almereyda’s visionary, bleeding-edge contemporary reimagining of “Hamlet” stars Ethan Hawke as the moody prince, a film student in New York whose uncle Claudius has recently assumed control of the family business, Denmark Corp.

AFI Silver Theatre June 24 to July 1

Legends of Ska: Cool & Copasetic Directed by Brad Klein (Jamaica, 2014, 102 min.)

Before reggae conquered the world, Jamaica gave the world ska. This exciting and uplifting documentary tells the story of ska music in the words of the musicians themselves.

AFI Silver Theatre Sat., June 13, 8:30 p.m.

A Little Chaos Directed by Alan Rickman (U.K., 2015, 112 min.)

Two talented landscape artists become romantically entangled while building a garden in King Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.

Theater TBA Opens Fri., June 26

Looking for Maria Sanchez (200 Cartas) Directed by Bruno Irizarry

A struggling Nuyorican comic book artist meets the girl of his dreams one fateful night, but before he can get her number, she vanishes, leaving her locket behind.

Knowing only that she lives in Puerto Rico, Raul hops on a plane to find his love (English and Spanish).

AFI Silver Theatre Sat., June 13, 4 p.m.

Madam Bovary Directed by Sophie Barthes (Germany/Belgium/U.S., 2015, 118 min.)

In Gustave Flaubert’s classic story, a young beauty impulsively marries a small-town doctor to leave her father’s pig farm far behind, but after being introduced to the glamorous world of high society, she soon becomes bored with her stodgy husband.

Theater TBA Opens Fri., June 12

My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities Directed by Barbara Hammer (U.S., 2001, 53 min.)

Photo: Allen Fraser / Sony Pictures Classics

Cillian Murphy stars as a falconer who must come to grips with his estranged mother (Jennifer Connelly) in “Aloft.”

Barbara Hammer focuses attention on her own heritage and the developing self-identity of contemporary women in the Ukraine during the difficult post-Glasnost era. Preceded by “Diving Women of Jeju-Do” (South Korea, 2007, 25 min.), a remarkable first-person account of a fascinating yet diminishing community made up of the famous women free divers (haenyo) of South Korea’s Jeju province.

Testament of Youth

National Gallery of Art Sat., June 27, 3 p.m.

An American pulp novelist in postwar Vienna finds himself enmeshed in the hunt for an old friend, now a notorious black marketeer.

Pan! Our Music Odyssey Directed by Jérôme Guiot and Thierry Teston (Trinidad and Tobago/France, 2014, 80 min.)

This is the story of the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, the only new acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century (English, French and Japanese).

AFI Silver Theatre Sun., June 14, 4 p.m.

Pina Directed by Wim Wenders (Germany/France/U.K., 2011, 103 min.)

“Dance, dance, or we are lost.” Wim Wenders’s landmark documentary commemorates the artistic legacy of dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch (multiple languages).

AFI Silver Theatre Sat., June 27, 1:15 p.m., Sun., June 28, 7:45 p.m.

Sunshine Superman Directed by Marah Strauch (Norway/U.S., 2015)

This heart-racing documentary examines the life of Carl Boenish, the father of the BASE jumping movement, whose early passion for skydiving led him to ever more spectacular, and dangerous, feats of foot-launched human flight.

Directed by James Kent (U.K., 2015, 129 min.)

A British woman recalls coming of age during World War I. Landmark’s E Street Cinema Fri., June 12

The Third Man Directed by Carol Reed (U.K., 1949, 104 min.)

AFI Silver Theatre Opens Fri., June 26

Directed by Raoul Peck (Haiti/France/Norway, 2014, 130 min.)

After the terrible January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, an intellectual bourgeois couple struggles to reinvent a life amid the rubble of their luxurious home. Needing money to survive, the couple decide to rent the remaining habitable part of the villa to a high-level foreign relief worker (French and Creole).

AFI Silver Theatre Sat., June 13, 6 p.m.

Directed by Andrew Morgan (Multiple countries, 2015, 92 min.)

Directed by André Téchiné (France, 2015, 116 min.)

“The True Cost” is a powerful documentary film that explores the impact of fashion on people and the planet and how the decrease in the price of clothing has increased the human and environmental costs.

Theater TBA

French The Connection (La French) Directed by Cédric Jimenez (France/Belgium, 2015, 135 min.)

A stylish, ’70s-period crime thriller inspired by true events, “The Connection” tells the story of real-life Marseilles magistrate Pierre Michel and his relentless crusade to dismantle the most notorious drug smuggling operation in history: the French Connection.

Landmark’s E Street Cinema Opens Fri., June 5

Survivor

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (France, 2014, 131 min.)

Theater TBA

Murder in Pacot (Meurtre à Pacot)

In the Name of My Daughter (L’homme qu’on aimait trop)

Eden

A Foreign Service Officer in London tries to prevent a terrorist attack set to hit New York, but is forced to go on the run when she is framed for crimes she did not commit.

Angelika Pop-Up

The True Cost

Landmark’s E Street Cinema

Directed by James McTeigue (U.S./U.K., 2015, 96 min.)

At the turn of the 19th century, Marie Heurtin is born both blind and deaf. To avoid being sent to an asylum, 14-yearold Marie enrolls in the Lamay Institute, where Sister Marguerette wins her trust and teaches her how to express herself.

“Eden” looks at the life of a French DJ who’s credited with inventing “French house” or the “French touch,” a type of French electronic music that became popular in the 1990s (French and English).

Landmark’s E Street Cinema Opens Fri., June 26

In 1976 Nice, Agnès Le Roux, daughter of the owner of the Palais de la Méditerranée, falls in love with Maurice, a beautiful lawyer 10 years her senior.

After Maurice loses the casino, Agnès disappears and 30 years later, her mother is determined to see him put behind bars.

Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema

Saint Laurent Directed by Bertrand Bonello (France/Belgium, 2014, 150 min.)

Yves Saint Laurent’s life from 1967 to 1976 is depicted, during which time the famed fashion designer was at the peak of his career (French and English).

Area theaters

German Berlin Babylon Directed by Hubertus Siegert (Germany, 1996-2001, 93 min.)

Over the course of six years, filmmaker Hubertus Siegert observed and documented the transformation of Berlin in the 1990s after the fall of the Wall — with fascination and skepticism, but without commentary.

Goethe-Institut Wed., June 17, 6:30 p.m.

Crossing the Bridge – The Sound of Istanbul Directed by Fatih Akin (Germany, 2005, 91 min.)

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

Sign Languages

German musician Alexander Hacke and filmmaker Fatik Akin embark on a musical expedition through the city of Istanbul. Utilizing a mobile recording studio, the two gather inspiring impressions of the broad variety of Turkish music, ranging from traditional sounds to hip-hop and rap.

Venice (Venecia) Directed by Kiki Álvarez (Cuba/Colombia, 2014, 74 min.)

The Tribe (Plemya) Directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (Ukraine/Netherlands, 2014, 132 min.)

A Friend of Mine (Ein Freund von mir)

A deaf teenager struggles to fit into the boarding school system. “The Tribe” unfolds through the non-verbal acting and sign language from a cast of deaf, non-professional actors — with no need for subtitles or voice over.

Directed by Sebastian Schipper (Germany, 2006, 84 min.)

AFI Silver Theatre Mon., June 22, 7:15 p.m.

Goethe-Institut Mon., June 22, 6:30 p.m.

Insurance worker Karl is sent on an undercover mission by his boss, allegedly to inspect a dubious car rental service.

In reality, however, Karl’s boss hopes that by working at the car rental agency, his withdrawn and rather depressed employee will come out of his shell.

Goethe-Institut Mon., June 29, 6:30 p.m.

Full Metal Village Directed by Sung-Hyung Cho (Germany, 2006, 90 min.)

The world’s biggest heavy metal festival, where northern German farmers from the village of Wacken rub shoulders with international hard-rock fans, is peacefulness personified.

Goethe-Institut Mon., June 15, 6:30 p.m.

Villalobos Directed by Romuald Karmakar (Germany, 2009, 110 min.)

How does Ricardo Villalobos, one of the most acclaimed DJs of electronic music, think? How does he hear? And What happens inside his machines and modules long after they are switched off?

How do people react to his art of DJ-ing at Berlin’s famous club Berghain, the temple of techno?

Goethe-Institut Mon., June 8, 6:30 p.m.

Japanese When Marnie Was There (Omoide no Mânî) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Japan, 2014, 103 min.)

Anna, a troubled, lonely 12-year-old orphan, is sent to a sleepy town by the sea, where she is drawn to a magnificent, apparently deserted mansion in the marshes and meets a mysterious but outgoing new friend.

Landmark’s E Street Cinema Opens Fri., June 12

Korean Confession (Joeun chingoodeul) Directed by Lee Do-yun (South Korea, 2014, 114 min.)

Lee Do-yun’s impressive, noir-inflected directorial debut is an action thriller about three childhood friends whose bonds are tested when they are asked to stage a robbery so one of their mothers can collect on an insurance policy.

AFI Silver Theatre Mon., June 15, 9:15 p.m., Wed., June 17, 9:15 p.m.

End of Winter (Cheol-won-gi-haeng) Directed by Kim Dae-hwan (South Korea, 2014, 102 min.)

June 2015

PHOTO: LAURIE SPARHAM / SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

After celebrating his retirement from teaching at a provincial school, Kim Seong-geum surprises his family by announcing that he’s getting a divorce. A snowstorm prevents his wife and sons from returning to Seoul, and the family is forced to reckon with one another.

Freer Gallery of Art Sun., June 7, 2 p.m.

Haemoo Directed by Shim Sung-ho (South Korea, 2014, 110 min.)

After a disappointing catch, the crew of a rundown fishing boat agrees to transport 30 illegal Chinese immigrants. A shocking and tragic accident occurs, and the crew must decide just how much their cargo’s lives are worth — and how far they’ll go to protect themselves from prosecution.

Freer Gallery of Art Fri., June 5, 7 p.m.

A Hard Day (Kkeutkkaji ganda) Directed by Kim Seong-hun (South Korea, 2014, 111 min.)

Homicide detective Go Geon-soo’s hard day includes being called away from his mother’s funeral to deal with an embezzlement investigation at work, on the way to which he commits an apparently fatal hit-and-run. And that’s just the beginning of a twist-filled plot.

to fall apart.

Freer Gallery of Art Fri., June 12, 7 p.m.

A Midsummer’s Fantasia (Han yeo-reum-ui pan-ta-ji-a) Directed by Jang Kun-jae (South Korea, 2014, 96 min.)

AFI Silver Theatre Tue., June 23, 7 p.m., Wed., June 24, 9 p.m.

Ode to My Father (Gukjesijang)

Hill of Freedom (Ja-yu-eui eon-deok)

Separated from his beloved sister during his family’s harrowing evacuation from the North Korean port of Hungnam in 1950 during the Korean War, Deok-su works his way from the coastal city of Busan to the coalmines of Germany, to the battlefields of Vietnam, all the while hoping to reunite with his family.

A young woman named Kwon begins reading a packet of letters that have fallen out of order. The film depicts what she reads, leaping back and forth in time to tell the story of the relationship between Kwon and the writer.

Freer Gallery of Art Sun., June 14, 2 p.m.

The Liar (Geo-jin-mal) Directed by Kim Dong-myung (South Korea, 2014, 95 min.)

A beauty clinic worker who shares a cramped apartment with her alcoholic sister imagines herself to be rich, shopping for luxury apartments and fancy cars as if she has the means to buy them. As her attempts to maintain her fantasy life become more and more complicated, her real life threatens

Directed by Ernesto Daranas (Cuba, 2014, 108 min.)

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann)

A cinematic sensation in Havana and a festival favorite around the world, this film takes a courageous look into the complexities of the Cuban education system as it charts the journey of an 11-year-old forced to train fighting dogs and sell messenger pigeons to support his troubled mother.

Based on the internationally bestselling novel by Jonas Jonasson, a 100-yearold dynamite expert decides it’s not too late to start over and escapes the old folks’ home to embark on an unexpected journey.

Behavior (Conducta)

AFI Silver Theatre

Directed by Felix Herngren (Sweden, 2013, 114 min.)

Landmark’s E Street Cinema

Although every effort is made to assure your ad is free of mistakes in spelling and This quiet, subtle feature is divided into NOTE: Sat., Junecontent 13, 2:30it p.m. is ultimately up to the customer to make the final proof. two parts. The first section, shot in black Swiss-German and white, follows a filmmaker scouting On the Road, Somewhere locations in a sleepy Japanese town The first two faxed changes will be made at no cost to the advertiser, subsequent changes will(Algún be billed at a rate of $75 per faxed alteration. Signed ads are considered approved. lugar) dominated by the elderly because the Dark Star: HR Gigers Welt Directed by Guillermo Zouain younger people have all moved away.

Please check this ad carefully. Mark anybychanges to your ad.

Directed Belinda Sallin (Dominican Republic, 2015, 71 min.)

Switching to color, the second part is a (Switzerland, 2015, 95 min.)

A middle-class teenager about to story invented by the filmmaker in theIf the ad is correct fax to: needs Surrealist artist H. changes R. Giger (1940-2014) graduate fromsign highand school sets(301) off 949-0065 first half (Korean and Japanese). terrified audiences with his Oscaron a trip across the Dominican Republic Freer Gallery of Art The Washington Diplomat 933-3552winning monsters in Ridley Scott’s with his two best friends. But(301) reaching Sun., June 14, 3:30 p.m.

“Alien.” But his dark creations their destination won’t be so simple Approved depicting birth, death and sex also and,__________________________________________________________ after a series of misadventures, Miss Granny Changes ___________________________________________________________ influenced music, album covers, the trio evolve into the next stage (Soosanghan geunyeo) ___________________________________________________________________ tattoos and fetish art, as seen in this of their lives with one constant: their Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk documentary that ventures into his friendship.

(South Korea, 2014, 124 min.) macabre realm.

AFI Silver Theatre On the day she learns she’s going to Landmark’s E Street Cinema Sun., June 14, 6 p.m. have to move to a nursing home, septuagenarian grandmother Oh Mal-soon wanders into a mysterious photo studio and emerges magically transformed into her 20-year-old self and sets off to The Washington reclaim her lost youth.

AFI Silver Theatre Tue., June 23, 9:30 p.m., Thu., June 25, 9 p.m.

Directed by Hong Sang-soo (South Korea, 2014, 67 min.)

AFI Silver Theatre Sun., June 16, 8:30 p.m.

Swedish

Spanish

Alicia Vikander, left, and Kit Harington discover love in World War I Britain in “Testament of Youth.”

Mónica, Violeta and Mayelin are coworkers at a beauty salon in Old Havana. On payday, they decide to go out for a night on the town, starting an unexpected and debauchery-filled journey into the depths of Havana nightlife.

Directed by Yoon Je-kyoon (South Korea, 2014, 126 min.)

AFI Silver Theatre Mon., June 8, 7 p.m., Wed., June 10, 9:20 p.m.

We Are Brothers (Urineun hyeongjeibnida) Directed by Jang Jin (South Korea, 2014, 101 min.)

Satire specialist Jang Jin pokes fun at everything from reality TV to organized religion in this comedy about two brothers, separated as children when one was adopted by an American family, who are reunited by a tear-jerking talk show.

AFI Silver Theatre Mon., June 1, 9 p.m., Wed., June 3, 9:20 p.m.

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[ around town ]

EVENTS LISTING **Admission is free unless otherwise noted.

All information on event venues can be found on The Diplomat Web site at www.washdiplomat.com. Times and locations are subject to change. Unless listed, please call venue for specific event times and hours of operation.

ART June 5 to Sept. 13

Organic Matters – Women to Watch 2015 / Super Natural

Two exhibitions explore what women artists — from the 17th century to today — have to say about nature and the environment. Societies have long encouraged women artists to study nature, thought to require only simple observation. However, women artists have upended stereotypes to address nature’s strangeness, diversity and power.

National Museum of Women in the Arts June 6 to Sept. 13

American Moments: Photographs from the Phillips Collection In celebration of recent major gifts, the Phillips presents for the first time a major photography exhibition drawn exclusively from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibit showcases more than 140 photographs that capture the changing landscape of America after World War I, with more than 30 renowned artists represented and many works new to the collection.

The Phillips Collection June 6 to Dec. 31

Ingénue to Icon: 70 Years of Fashion

The first exhibition at Hillwood to present Marjorie Post’s full range of style, “Ingénue to Icon” will examine how Post’s lifelong passion for objects that were exceptionally beautiful and impeccably constructed extended to her taste for clothing Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens Through June 7

Libertad de Expresión: The Art Museum of the Americas and Cold War Politics

Following the creation of the Organization of American States in 1948, its Visual Arts Section, under the direction of Cuban José Gómez Sicre, began an ambitious exhibition program that would further awareness of the art of the Caribbean and Central and South America in the United States.

Sicre’s support for international modernism also allied him with U.S. Cold War Warriors, who used freedom of expression as a tool in the cultural and intellectual struggle against the Soviets.

Art Museum of the Americas Through June 7

Perspectives: Chiharu Shiota

Performance and installation artist Chiharu Shiota, Japan’s representative at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, will recreate a monumental yet intimate work in the Sackler pavilion that amasses personal memories through an accumulation of nearly 400 individual shoes, each with a note from the donor describing lost individuals and past moments.

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

36

Through June 7

Splendor and Surprise

More than 80 remarkable boxes, coffers, chests, and other containers reveal the beautiful and unexpected ways that cultures have contained their most treasured items and everyday objects from the 17th through the 20th century.

Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens Through June 7

Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips

Wendell Phillips, a young paleontologist and geologist, headed one of the largest archaeological expeditions to remote South Arabia (present-day Yemen) from 1949 to 1951. Through a selection of unearthed objects as well as film and photography shot by the expedition team, the exhibition highlights Phillips’s key finds, recreates his adventures (and misadventures), and conveys the thrill of discovery on this important great archaeological frontier.

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery June 7 to Oct. 4

Recent Acquisitions of Italian Renaissance Prints: Ideas Made Flesh

Prints played a pivotal role in the development and transmission of Italian Renaissance style. But because many of these 16th-century prints reproduce the designs of other artists, they have often been undervalued. This exhibition presents some two dozen, reflecting the principal styles and numerous major masters of the period.

National Gallery of Art Through June 12

Blossoming Washington Pear V

This group exhibition of diverse art styles explores the personal resilience and life journeys of 15 Korean women in the D.C. area. Working across a variety of media including sculpture, visual art, ceramics, metalworking and fluorescent lighting installation, the artists strive to express the moral fiber that defines the experiences of many women: balancing family, self, and profession, adapting to life across borders and flourishing in the face of ad­­ver­sity.

This exhibition also aims to characterize the unique Korean American ex­­perience through reflections of Korean heritage that are as diverse as the artists themselves.

More than 50 works are presented.

Korean Cultural Center June 13 to July 26

Travels in the Imagination

The personal, poetic and playful work of Visvaldis Ziediņš — a Latvian artist who lived and worked during the Soviet era but was not discovered until 2009, two years after his death — changes the perception of the nature of Latvian art during the Soviet era, and refutes the commonly held idea that Latvia did not produce non-conformist art.

AU Museum at Katzen Arts Center June 13 to Aug. 16

Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, this exhibit will showcase 20 artifacts col-

THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT lected from the debris of the bombings, six large folding screens that depict the horrors of the bombings and a collection of drawings by Japanese children created two years after the war ended.

AU Museum at Katzen Arts Center Through June 14

Zen, Tea, and Chinese Art in Medieval Japan

Zen Buddhism, tea and ink painting — well-known expressions of Japanese culture — have their roots in Chinese arts and ideas brought to medieval Japan from the late 12th to the 16th century. Chinese and Japanese paintings, lacquer ware and ceramics illuminate this remarkable period of cultural contact and synthesis.

Program’s 20th anniversary.

Embassy of Finland Through June 28

Moving Forward, Looking Back: Journeys Across the Old Spanish Trail

During A road trip across the Southwest, Spanish photojournalist Janire Nájera AND her assistant Matt Wright followed IN the footsteps of trader Antonio Armijo, who opened the route of the Old Spanish Trail between the states of New Mexico and California in the 19th century. Nájera captured her experience along the route in a daily log, a book and a photography exhibition that will travel across the U.S. and premieres in D.C. Former Spanish Ambassador’s Residence

Freer Gallery of Art

June 28 to Oct. 4

Through June 20

Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye

Latvian-American Artist Laimons Eglitis: Retrospective

This retrospective of Latvian-American artist Laimons Eglitis (1929-2007) is a tribute to his prolific life. Born in Latvia, the artist fled his homeland during World War II, settling in Philadelphia and later painting and teaching in the Baltimore area. He was a semi-abstract painter who worked in oils, acrylics and watercolors, whose paintings won many prizes over the years and are represented in museums and private collections all over the world. “Mysticism and symbolism is mainly having fun with forms,” Eglitis once said, “but it is also the desire to involve the viewer in the painting process by offering the opportunity to look for a translation of the symbolism and the meaning of the mysticism.”

June 2015

Caillebotte (1848–94) was among the most critically noted impressionist artists during the height of their activity in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Some 45 paintings from the period when Caillebotte was fully engaged with the impressionist movement will provide a focused understanding of the provocative character and complexity of his artistic contributions.

National Gallery of Art June 28 to Oct. 4

Pleasure and Piety: The Art of Joachim Wtewael

June 20 to Jan. 3

The first monographic exhibition on Dutch painter Wtewael will showcase his international mannerist style and remarkable technical ability through some 45 complex biblical and mythological narratives, as well as portraits and genre scenes.

Enigmas: The Art of Bada Shanren (1626-1705)

Through July 3

Embassy of Latvia Art Space

Born a prince of the Ming imperial house, Bada Shanren (1626–1705) lived a storied life, remaking himself as a secluded Buddhist monk and, later, as a professional painter and calligrapher.

Featured in this exhibition are examples of his most daring and idiosyncratic works, demonstrating his unique visual vocabulary.

Freer Gallery of Art Through June 26

Traverse

As part of its efforts to highlight the work of Colombian artists, Ana Patricia Palacios will have her work, “Traverse,” showcase at the residence of the ambassador.

Colombian Residence Through June 28

Annual Rings

This exhibition co-produced by the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Aalto University Wood Program tells the story of the renaissance of the Finnish wood architecture over the past two decades. Starting from the early 1990s and continuing to the present, the 14 projects demonstrate the wide range of scales and forms in which wood has been put to use, and the boundless opportunities wood offers to contemporary architecture, from offices and homes to public buildings and churches.

The display also celebrates the Wood

National Gallery of Art

Take It Right Back: Works by Paula Doepfner

In her graphic and sculptural pieces, Berlin-based artist Paula Doepfner works with natural shapes, materials and products such as flowers and ice, alongside iron and glass, as material ways of conveying stories, processes, feelings and utopias.

Goethe-Institut Through July 26

Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns

This first comprehensive exhibition to examine the history of metalpoint — the art of drawing with a metal stylus on a specially prepared ground — presents some 90 drawings from the late Middle Ages to the present, from the collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery of Art and other major museums in the United States and Europe.

National Gallery of Art Through July 26

In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art

Highlighting exquisite 19th-century works and turn-of-the-century pictorialist photographs; exceptional examples of international modernism from the 1920s and 1930s and seminal mid-20th-century American photography; as well as

photographs exploring new directions in color and conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition demonstrates the richness of the National Gallery’s photography collection.

National Gallery of Art Through Aug. 2

From the Library: Florentine Publishing in the Renaissance

This exhibition presents a variety of books from the late 15th through the early 17th century and explores the development of publishing related to the artistic and scholarly community in Florence.

National Gallery of Art Through Aug. 5

War & Art: Destruction and Protection of Italian Cultural Heritage during World War I

This photographic exhibition illustrates the Italian people’s struggle to protect their cultural patrimony from the ravages of war. A century later, the images not only document early preservation efforts, but have become works of art in their own right, reminding us of the enduring struggle to save the highest expressions of the human spirit from the degradations and savagery of war.

Woodrow Wilson House Through Aug. 9

Jacob Lawrence: Struggle … From the History of the American People

Produced between 1954 and 1956, Jacob Lawrence’s “Struggle … From the History of the American People” portrays scenes from American history, chronicling events from the Revolutionary War through the great westward expansion of 1817.

The Phillips Collection Through Aug. 23

Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude

To mark the 300th anniversary of the passing of the Longitude Act in 1714, this landmark exhibition tells the extraordinary story of the race to determine longitude (east-west position) at sea, helping to solve the problem of navigation and saving seafarers from terrible fates including shipwreck and starvation.

Folger Shakespeare Library Through Aug. 30

Hot to Cold: An Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation

On the heels of its summer blockbuster “BIG Maze,” the international design firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) returns to take visitors from the hottest to the coldest parts of our planet and explore how BIG’s design solutions are shaped by their cultural and climatic contexts.

More than 60 three-dimensional models will be suspended at the second-floor balconies of the museum’s historic Great Hall in an unprecedented use of this public space.

National Building Museum Through Sept. 7

Watch This!

Revelations in Media Art

This exhibit of pioneering and contemporary artworks that trace the evolution of a continuously emerging medium celebrates artists who are engaged in a

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

creative revolution — one shaped as much by developments in science and technology as by style or medium.

Rooms.” Tickets are $25 to $95.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

DISCUSSIONS

Through Sept. 13

Wed., June 3, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Chief S.O. Alonge: Photographer to the Royal Court of Benin, Nigeria

This retrospective showcases the work of noted Nigerian photographer Chief S.O. Alonge, the first indigenous photographer of the Royal Court of Benin, in conjunction with royal arts from the Benin kingdom. The collection of historic photographs was captured on Kodak glass-plate negatives and documents more than 50 years of the ritual, pageantry and regalia of the obas (kings), their wives and retainers.

National Museum of African Art Through Sept. 13

The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art

In the decades since 1990, the concepts of time and memory have been frequently explored by photographers who seek not simply to reflect the world but to illuminate how photography constructs our understanding of it. This exhibition explores the work of 26 contemporary artists who investigate the complex and resonant relationship of photography to time, memory and history.

National Gallery of Art Through Sept. 20

Shirin Neshat: Facing History

This major exhibition of works by Iranian-born, New York-based video artist, photographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat is the first to place Neshat’s work in the context of the history of modern Iran, a significant influence on her career.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Through Jan. 2

Peacock Room Remix: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre

“Peacock Room REMIX” centers on “Filthy Lucre,” an immersive interior by painter Darren Waterston who reinterprets James McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room as a resplendent ruin, an aesthetic space that is literally overburdened by its own excesses — of materials, history, and creativity. Like “Filthy Lucre” and the original Peacock Room, this exhibition invites viewers to consider the complex relationships among art, money and the passage of time.

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater

Ancient City of Tyre Symposium

The African and Middle Eastern Division in the Library of Congress, in cooperation with Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.) and the American Committee for Tyre, will present a symposium on the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre.

Library of Congress Jefferson Building Wed., June 10, 12 p.m.

Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Dark Future?

Terrorism expert and author Gabriel Weimann will discuss the recent trends in online terrorism, emerging threats and possible countermeasures, in a lecture.

Library of Congress James Madison Building Sun., June 21, 8:30 a.m.

First International Day of Yoga

To honor the first International Day of Yoga, declared by the U.N. General Assembly last year, Friends of Yoga along with the Indian Embassy present a day of exclusive yoga demos, talks, videos as well as Indian dance and musical performances. For information, visit https://www.indianembassy.org/yoga.

National Mall (Sylvan Theater)

FESTIVALS July 1 to 5

Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The theme of the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival — an international exposition of living cultural heritage produced annually outdoors on the National Mall — is “Perú: Pachamama,” exploring the country’s stunning vertical landscape that integrates a diversity of ecosystems and cultures. Visitors to the Peru Festival program will experience these unique connections through cooking and craft demonstrations, music and dance performances, moderated discussions, ritual and celebratory processions, and other participatory activities.

National Mall Sun., June 7, 11 a.m.

Discover Strathmore: Colors of the Caribbean

Strathmore’s annual family-friendly open house is full of free music and dance performances, workshops, artistic demonstrations and hands-on art activities celebrating the vibrant diversity and rich cultural heritage of the Caribbean.

Music Center at Strathmore

DANCE June 9 to 14

The Royal Ballet

Great Britain’s acclaimed company returns with the U.S. premiere of Carlos Acosta’s new “Don Quixote,” which follows the eccentric knight and his loyal squire — and young lovers Kitri and Basilio — through hilarious misadventures. Tickets are $30 to $155.

Kennedy Center Opera House June 23 and 24

The Laurel Fund for the Performing Arts Presents: Polish National Ballet

The Polish National Ballet has existed in one form or another since 1785 and is the national ballet company of Poland.

Directed by internationally renowned choreographer Krzysztof Pastor, its repertoire is a mix of classical and contemporary ballet. The company will perform three contemporary ballets, including Pastor’s highly acclaimed “Moving

Cuba’s Coro Entrevoces is known for its unparalleled performances of music from all periods and styles; part of Classical Movements’ “Best of Serenade!”

Washington, DC Choral Festival.”

Thu., June 11, 6 p.m.

AMA’s Spring Benefit Recital

This selection of classic Ibero-American songs, introduced by PostClassical Ensemble Music Director Angel GilOrdóñez, will benefit the Organization of American States Art Museum of the Americas and is presented in partnership with the Spanish Permanent Mission to the OAS. The recital will be followed by Spanish and Latin dishes on the museum’s garden terrace; proceeds support the publication of AMA’s forthcoming collection book. Tickets are $159; for information, visit http://museum.oas.org.

OAS Art Museum of the Americas Fri., June 12, 7:30 p.m.

Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, Cello

“Charismatic” (New York Times) cellist Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, who recently made her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was praised by the LA Times praised her for her “emotional intensity.” She performs a program of Brahms, Schubert, Webern and Jón Nordal for the Embassy Series.

Tickets are $100, including buffet and wine; for information, visit www.embassyseries.org.

Icelandic Residence Sun., June 14, 8 p.m.

The Beatles – Abbey Road

World-class musicians take on one of the greatest albums of all time from the English rock band that “startled the ears and energized the lives of virtually all who heard them” (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). Experience the album in its entirety and other Beatles tunes with classics like “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Tickets are $25 to $45.

Tribute to Jorge Negrete!

The InSeries presents a special concert event celebrating one of Mexico’s brightest stars, Jorge Negrete, the legendary Mexican film, opera and mariachi icon, performed by rising opera star Jesus

Kennedy Center Millennium Stage Sat., June 27, 4 p.m.

The Interior Castle

by Musica Aperta

The performance arts ensemble Musica Aperta commemorates the 500th anniversary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Ávila with a theatrical experience. “The Interior Castle” follows the professional and spiritual journey of a female reporter in the 21st Century, as she seeks to uncover the mysteries of Santa Teresa and her relevance in the modern world.

St. Anselm’s Abbey School Sun., June 28, 4 p.m.

Best of Serenade!

Co-presented by Classical Movements and now in its fifth year, “Best of Serenade!” Washington, DC Choral Festival” showcases 11 choirs from eight countries around the world, featuring ensembles from Zimbabwe, Slovakia, Cuba, Australia, Finland and the United States. The program concludes with an invigorating grand finale featuring a massed choir with all festival participants conducted by Doreen Rao. Tickets are $5 to $10

Celtic Woman

Wolf Trap Filene Center June 20 to 27

Nordic Jazz 2015

The Nordic Embassies, Twins Jazz Club, Phillips Collection and Dupont Circle Festival/Jazz in the Circle are excited to present the ninth annual Nordic Jazz Festival in D.C. Internationally acclaimed performers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden will translate the modern sound of Nordic Jazz over the course of 10 concerts. The festival presents a rare opportunity to experience five very different world-class Nordic jazz solo artists, trios and quartets — along with a unique sound that emphasizes the natural elements of the Nordic

Hope springs eternal in the post-game locker room of Barely Athletic, an amateur soccer team competing in the five-a-side pub league in Hull, a Yorkshire fishing city that’s seen better days (as have these athletes).

Tickets are $44 to $88.

The Studio Theatre Through June 21

The Price

In an overstuffed New York City attic apartment, two estranged brothers meet to sell off what remains of their deceased father’s furniture and find themselves in an emotional renegotiation of the past in Arthur Miller’s muchlauded 1968 story about story about the cost of the choices we make when caring for our families. Tickets are $38 to $65.

Olney Theatre Center Through June 21

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

In a world where heads always wins and pirates can happen to anyone, this fabulously inventive, existentialist tragicomedy thrusts two of Shakespeare’s most incidental characters into the limelight.

Tickets are $30 to $75.

THEATER

Through June 21

June 2 to July 5

Originally performed Off-Broadway to rave reviews by Everett Quinton, this irreverent comedy tells the story of a drag queen named Jerry who finds the baby at his door. To calm the child down, he enacts the entirety of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” playing all the characters himself!

Tickets start at $35.

Tartuffe

June 4 to 28

Embassy of France

Jumpers for Goalposts

Folger Theatre

Jean Rondeau in Concert: The Harpsichord Redefined

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy presents the first U.S. performance by French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau. This concert joins the spirit of the 34th annual Fête de la Musique under the 2015 theme “Vivre Ensemble la Musique - Living Music Together,” the founding value of this large event that celebrates sharing of music among the four corners of the globe.

Through June 21

Music Center at Strathmore

Tue., June 16, 7:30 p.m.

Wolf Trap Filene Center

Known as “Riverdance for the voice,” these four celestial sirens perform breathtaking renditions of contemporary ballads alongside traditional music from the Emerald Isle. Tickets are $30 to $65.

Tue., June 9, 8 p.m.

Various locations

Orgon has fallen under the spell of the pious fraud Tartuffe, at great cost to his family and household in “Tartuffe,” Molière’s crowning achievement and scathing indictment of religious hypocrisy. Tickets are $20 to $110.

Sat., June 6, 2 p.m.

Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater

GALA Hispanic Theatre

Sat., June 20, 8 p.m.

Rising Swiss-Italian pianist, a Queen Elisabeth Competition laureate, Francesco Piemontesi makes his D.C. debut in the concluding concert in Washington Performing Arts Society’s annual Hayes Piano Series with a program that includes works by Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Schumann, as well as the world premiere of a new work composed for Piemontesi by German composer–organist Maximilian Schnaus. Tickets are $38.

Coro Entrevoces

countries with a modern interpretation.

For information, visit http://usa.um.dk/ nordicjazz2015.

MUSIC Francesco Piemontesi

Thu., June 25, 6 p.m.

Vietnamese American experiences in the U.S., Boat People SOS will present “Our Journey to Freedom,” a memorable live performance offering a unique fusion of American and Vietnamese performing arts. Tickets are $75 to $150.

Daniel Hernandez. Tickets are $45.

Negrete’s career spanned the Golden Age of Mexican film, opera, mariachi and came to represent the very texture of Mexican culture; the tribute concert is cosponsored by the Mexican Permanent Mission to the OAS.

Shakespeare Theatre

Las Polacas: The Jewish Girls of Buenos Aires

Through the stories of Rachela, we experience the dreams, losses and struggles of thousands of Polish-Jewish women who were lured into prostitution in Argentina by a slave trading organization in the early 1900s. With haunting Slavic melodies and passionate tangos, this original bilingual musical underscores the strength and perseverance of women uprooted from their homeland and enslaved in a foreign culture.

Tickets are $38 to $42.

GALA Hispanic Theatre June 12 to 20

The Marriage of Figaro

In one crazy day in the Almaviva household, Figaro and Susanna must devise and disguise their way to thwarting the Count’s plans of ruining their happiness.

Written in the wake of an era in which most opera plots and characters were either mythological or historical, Mozart’s “Figaro” broke ground with its story about real people grappling with everyday problems. Tickets are $32 to $88.

The Barns at Wolf Trap Fri., June 19, 8 p.m.

Boat People SOS: Our Journey to Freedom – 40 Years of Vietnamese American Experiences

To celebrate the four decades of the

June 2015

A Tale of Two Cities

Synetic Theater Through June 21

The Trap

Ambassador Theater — in partnership with the Polish Embassy and George Washington University Department of Theatre and Dance — presents Tadeusz Rózewicz’s “The Trap,” a collage of events, images and sounds that deeply affected writer Franz Kafka. Fears and nightmares, Kafka’s real-life companions, found their way into many of his short stories and novels, which continue to fascinate and baffle readers all over the world. The play is not only his poetic farewell to Kafka and a psychological portrait of an artist, but also alters conventions of time and space by trapping the artist in the ultimate nightmare of the 20th century: the Holocaust.

Tickets are $20 to $40; for information, visit www.aticc.org.

XX Bldg 814 20th St., NW Through June 21

The Unauthorized Harry Experience – A Parody by Dan and Jeff

This acclaimed comedy production takes on the ultimate challenge of condensing, or “potting,” all seven “Harry Potter” books into 75 madcap minutes, aided by multiple costume changes, brilliant songs, ridiculous props and a generous helping of Hogwarts magic. Please call for ticket information.

Shakespeare Theatre

The Washington Diplomat Page 37

DIPLOMATIC SPOTLIGHT

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

11th Annual Embassy Golf Tournament

INTEREST 12 Months E AS CASH!

approved credit nimum purchase of 00 APR 23.97%

Golfers try to win a 2015 Volvo V60CC Premium in the hole-in-one contest at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

To view all the photos from the tournament, be sure to like The Washington Diplomat on Facebook.

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Former Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), now an executive vice president with Levick, left, talks with Ambassador of Morocco Rachad Bouhlal during the cookout lunch before the start of the Embassy Golf Tournament, held at Worthington Manor Golf Club in Urbana, Md.

From left, Brig Pari of BN Golf International LLC, Ambassador of Sri Lanka Prasad Kariyawasam, Tim White of the Spectrum Group and Timothy Chorba, president of the Council of American Ambassadors, attend the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament hosted by The Washington Diplomat. — PHOTOS BY LEAH PUTTKAMMER —

Daniel Higgins of the Embassy of Australia eyes a shot at the Embassy Golf Tournament, hosted this year

by Australia.

From left, Robert Kofman, John Garama and Kevin Cullen of the Embassy of Australia join Ambassador of Malawi Necton Mhura at the dinner awards ceremony of the Embassy Golf Tournament.

Ambassador of Australia Kim Beazley, center, poses with the golf team from the Embassy of Australia: From left are Daniel Higgins, Gillam Leary, Robert Kofman, John Garama, Consul-General Mauro Kolobaric and Kevin Cullen.

Ambassador Beazley was the honorary diplomatic host of the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament.

Representing the Malaysian Embassy at the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament were, from left, Ahmad Ramdzan Daud, Malaysian Ambassador Awang Adek Hussin, Kathiravan Subramaniam and Mohd Nazrol Marzuke.

Lauren Bennett, left, and Soraia Angiuoli represent Johns Hopkins Medicine International at the Embassy Golf Tournament, one of more than a dozen corporate sponsors of the popular annual event.

Mike Chu of the National Institutes of Health takes a shot at the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament held at Worthington Manor Golf Club in Urbana, Md.

Below, from left, Australian Consul-General Mauro Kolobaric, Stefan Laetsch of the Embassy of Germany and Eric Hepburn of the British Embassy attend the Embassy Golf Tournament.

Ambassador of Barbados John Beale, left, and Ray Friday of the United Nations Federal Credit Union (UNFCU) attend the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Giuseppe Argiolas of the Embassy of Italy, Kevin Cullen of the Embassy of Australia, Bob Buzzell from CORT Furniture Rental and David Schwehm from CORT attend the Embassy Golf Tournament.

3Golfers play against the backdrop of a barn house and 19th-century clubhouse at Worthington Manor Golf Club, an AultClark signature course that is a frequent U.S. Open qualifying site.

Consultant Vanena Wilmot takes a swing at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

4Abby Goldstein, left, and Alexandra Byrne represent the Sofitel Washington DC Lafayette Square, one of the Embassy Golf Tournament hole sponsors.

38

The Washington Diplomat

4From left, Angelique Rutledge, Col. Hans Hoogstraten, Regillio Hinds and Bill Neal represent the Royal Netherlands Embassy at the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Eugene Laney of DHL Express, Nathaniel Richard of the Maryland Department of Education, Derek Wimes of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and Ken Trice of the Central Kenworth Truck Center attend the Embassy Golf Tournament.

June 2015

Lauren Magaw of the State Plaza Hotel, one of the hole sponsors, greets guests at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Guy d’Amecourt of Summit Commercial Real Estate, Patrick Hillmann of Levick Public Relations and Strategic Communications, Timothy Gay of Levick, former Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), Ambassador of Morocco Rachad Bouhlal and Isaac Chetrit enjoy dinner at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Terry Meikle of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, David Pietsch of Meat & Livestock Australia and Chris Parker of the Embassy of Australia were the tournament winners, receiving tickets to the Washington International Horse Show Presidents Cup Party at the Verizon Center, a bottle of Peter Lehmann Cabernet wine from Australia and another round of golf at Worthington Manor.

Antonio Zorrilla, left, and Gilles Gauthier represent the Embassy of Canada at the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament.

3Players practice before the start of the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Ambassador of Malaysia Awang Adek Hussin, Ambassador of Australia Kim Beazley and Ambassador of Sri Lanka Prasad Kariyawasam attend the 11th annual Embassy Golf Tournament hosted by The Washington Diplomat.

Mauro Kolobaric, consul-general of the Embassy of Australia, right, congratulates Olivier Baldauff, deputy chief of mission of the Embassy of Luxembourg, who won two economy tickets on Etihad Airways in the raffle.

4Among the prizes at the Embassy Golf Tournament were two tickets on Etihad Airways, a flat-screen television, autographed golf bag and putter, an eight-day luxury trip to Australia and much more.

From left, Chris Parker, agriculture minister counselor at the Embassy of Australia; David Pietsch of Meat & Livestock Australia; Mark Dopp of the American Meat Institute; and Terry Meikle of Beef + Lamb New Zealand were one of the foursomes at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

4From left, Olaf van de Wolfshaar, Roger Kleinenberg, Rob Anderson, Maarten van Rossum represent the Royal Netherlands Embassy.

3From left, Aaron Weaver, Christian Martin, Ian Chase, George Bowles represent DHL Express.

Celebrity Cruises offered golfers a cornhole game break at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

3Derek Wimes of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association takes a swing at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

Ambassador of Sri Lanka Prasad Kariyawasam takes his shot at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

3Mathew Hebert, director of special events at Jasper Ventures, left, and Jim Hebert of Clarke & Sampson Insurance and Real Estate won second place at the Embassy Golf Tournament, receiving barbeque kits from Williams-Sonoma, Peter Lehmann wine donated by the Australian Embassy and a round of golf at Worthington Manor.

4From left, Jerry Audi of Waterford Consultants, Angela Moody and Geoff Castleton of Sahouri Insurance & Financial enjoy the post-tournament dinner and awards reception at Worthington Manor Golf Club.

4From left, Ray Kaddissi, Dong Han, Greg Terry and Todd French represent Kadcon Corp. at the Embassy Golf Tournament.

The Embassy of Australia was the diplomatic patron of this year’s Embassy Golf Tournament.

From left, Vince Onuigbo of Hughes Network Systems, Larry Cronise of Hughes, Misty Remington of ExploreGate and Dave Rehbehn of Hughes were the third-place winners, receiving $50 gift certificates to American Eats Tavern at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner and a bottle of Australian Groom wine.

The International Patient Program at the George Washington University Hospital A boutique concierge program offering care for our diplomats and international community:

• Language interpretation • Appointment scheduling

• Medical cost estimates • Insurance settlements

For more information, call 202-715-5100 or email helen.salazar@gwu-hospital.com

www.gwhospital.com/international

June 2015

Photo: Shiv Vachhani Physicians are not employees or agents of this hospital. 150079

The Washington Diplomat Page 39

DIPLOMATIC SPOTLIGHT

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

WPAS Gala & Auction

From left, Booz Allen Hamilton Executive Vice President and Gala Chairman Reginald Van Lee, Director of UNA Education Programs at the United Nations Foundation Troy Wolfe, Washington Performing Arts Society (WPAS) President and CEO Jenny Bilfield and Dr. Alvin Adell attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction held at the Marriott Marquis.

Ambassador of Ireland Anne Anderson and her boyfriend attend the Washington Performing Arts Society Gala & Auction, which celebrated the 40th anniversary and the proposed expansion of the Embassy Adoption Program, a partnership between WPAS and DC Public Schools that pairs fifth- or sixth-grade DCPS classes with approximately 50 embassies.

From left, Madeleine Lyrvall, Ambassador of Hungary Réka Szemerkényi and Ambassador of Sweden Björn Lyrvall attend the Washington Performing Arts Society Gala & Auction to benefit WPAS, which since 1965 has had a foundational role in the arts of our nation’s capital.

Photo: Chris Burch Photography

From left, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic José Tomás Pérez and his wife Caridad Pérez Santos join Gala Co-Chair Veronica Valencia-Sarukhan and former Ambassador of Mexico and Gala Co-Chair Arturo Sarukhan, now with the Podesta Group, at the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

Ambassador of Egypt Mohamed M. Tawfik and his wife Amani Amin attend the Washington Performing Arts Society Gala & Auction to benefit WPAS, which, through live events in 11 venues that span the D.C. area, connects the community and artists in both education and performance.

4From left, Dr. Vicken Poochikian, Irina Orazova, Gala Patron Irene Roth and Ambassador of Turkmenistan Meret Orazov attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

Photo: Chris Burch Photography

3From left, Director of Special Projects for the Washington Performing Arts Murray Horwitz, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Jane Chu and Lisa Horwitz attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

From left, Dr. Doreen Moreira, Washington Performing Arts Board member Charlotte Schlosberg and Gala Patron Robin Hammer attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction at the Marriott Marquis.

Photo: Chris Burch Photography

Jake Jones, executive director of external affairs for Daimler, the Impresario corporate sponsor of the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction, makes a bid during the live auction.

From left, Vicki Kellogg of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, Michael Finn and Gala Benefactor Keiko Kaplan attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction at the Marriott Marquis.

Photo: Chris Burch Photography

The Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction featured an array of concert and dance performances throughout the dinner.

Photos: Chris Burch Photography

Ambassador of Armenia Tigran Sargsyan and his wife Gohar Sargsyan attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction at the Marriott Marquis.

Dr. Michael Olding of the George Wash­ ington Cosmetic Surgery Center, left, and Ambassador of Liechtenstein Claudia Fritsche enjoy the mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby Watch Party ahead of the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

Actress Tamara Tunie of “Law and Order,” left, and Sela Collins attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction, which featured a silent and live auction, scholarship drive, dinner, dancing and a headline performance by the Hot Sardines.

Gala Chair and WPAS Board Chairman Reginald Van Lee, left, presents DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson with the Arts Education Award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Embassy Adoption Program, a groundbreaking program that pairs DCPS fifth- and sixth-grade students with embassies for an academic year’s worth of cross-cultural learning and enrichment activities.

Photo: Chris Burch Photography

Rhoda Septilici of the Wash­ ington International Piano Arts Council, left, and Leila Beale, wife of the Barbados ambassador, attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

40

Charlotte Cameron of the Washington Performing Arts Board, left, and Njambi attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction at the Marriott Marquis.

Donna Eacho, left, and Jay Hammer of the Washington Per­ forming Arts Board attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

Ambassador of Cabo Verde Jose Luis Rocha and his wife Yamile Luque Tamayo Saco Rocha attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction at the Marriott Marquis.

This year’s Washington Performing Arts Gala at the Marriott Marquis celebrated the Embassy Adoption Program, which to date has partnered more than 50,000 youths (from schools in all eight D.C. wards) with over 100 embassies representing countries ranging from Australia to Zimbabwe.

The Washington Diplomat

From left, Washington Performing Arts Board member Felicia Greer, Lloyd H. Buckner and Shirley Marcus Allen of Venture Philanthropy Partners attend the Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction.

June 2015

Women’s Foreign Policy

Swan Ball

photo: larry luxner

Ambassador of Oman Hunaina Sultan Ahmed Al-Mughairy, right, listens as Ambassador of Hungary Réka Szemerkényi gives a speech at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group annual Celebration of Women Diplomats reception hosted at the Monaco ambassador’s residence.

photos: women’s foreign policy group

From left, Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) President and Co-Founder Patricia Ellis, Ambassador of Jordan Alia HatougBouran and Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Congo Faida Mitifu attend WFPG’s annual Celebration of Women Diplomats reception.

photo: larry luxner

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Ann Stock gives a speech at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group annual Celebration of Women Diplomats reception hosted at the Monaco ambassador’s residence.

Among the guests at the Celebration of Women Diplomats were, bottom row from left, Ambassador of Jordan Alia Hatoug-Bouran, Women’s Foreign Policy Group President Patricia Ellis, Mamica Toska of the Embassy of Albania, Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina Jadranka Negodic, Ambassador of Monaco Maguy Maccario Doyle, and top row from left, Ambassador of Liechtenstein Claudia Fritsche, Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Congo Faida Mitifu and Ambassador of Hungary Réka Szemerkényi.

From left, Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) President and Co-Founder Patricia Ellis; U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson; WFPG Board member Marlene Johnson; moderator Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post; WFPG Board member Diana Villiers Negroponte; and Ambassador of Finland Ritva Koukku-Ronde attend a WFPG State Department Briefing with Jacobson on U.S.-Cuba relations.

Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) Board Chair Ann Stock, Ambassador of France Gérard Araud and Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) President Patricia Ellis attend a discussion at the French Residence on “France After the Terrorist Attacks in Paris” as part of the WFPG Embassy Series.

Women’s History

photo: embassy of germany

From left, Ambassador of Germany Peter Wittig, his wife Huberta von Voss-Wittig and the Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre, President of Finsbury Stephen Labaton, Miriam Sapiro of the Association of Women in International Trade and former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt attend the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball held at the German Residence to celebrate its production of “Swan Lake.”

From left, Carol Gorh, Sharon Bradley and Kristin Cecchi of Nova Bancard attend the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball held at the German Residence.

3The Washington Ballet dancers perform the pas des deux from “Swan Lake” on the pool and tiered gardens of the German Residence for the company’s spring fundraiser, the Swan Ball. photo: embassy of germany

4Elaborately decorated pink tables featuring peonies and roses filled the terrace of the German Residence for the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball, which benefited local education and community projects, including DanceDC and THEARC in Anacostia. photo: embassy of germany

Photo: Dana Rene Photography

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), left, congratulates D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier who was honored by the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) at its Women Making History Gala held at Arena Stage. Founded in 1996, NWHM is a nonpartisan nonprofit that showcases the historic contributions of women, with the goal of building a world-class, permanent museum on or near the National Mall.

Photo: Dana Rene Photography

From left, Chair of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) Board Susan D. Whiting, Director of the National Science Foundation France Córdova and President and CEO of the NWHM Board Joan Bradley Wages attend the NWHM Women Making History Gala, which honored Córdova, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier and NASA Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa.

From left, PR consultant Linda Jenckes, Cathy Sterling, Regulatory Affairs and Public Policy Leader at Pricewater­ houseCoopers Laura Cox Kaplan and Managing Director at Kent Strategies Liz Sears Smith attend the National Women’s History Museum’s Women Making History Gala.

From left, Kay Kendall, Jack Davies of Venture Philanthropy Partners and Dibbie Conahan attend the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball held at the German Residence.

From left, Morgan Rose, realtor Mark McFadden and Luan McFadden attend the Wash­ ington Ballet’s Swan Ball held at the German Residence.

Photo: Dana Rene Photography

Secretary of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) Board Ann E.W. Stone, left, and former Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) attend the Women Making History Gala. Legislation signed by President Obama in December 2014 created a bipartisan Congressional Commission to study the feasibility of building a national women’s history museum.

Senior Business Relationship Manager at Wells Fargo Pam Nachnani, left, and Treasury Management Sales Consultant at Wells Fargo Helen Baroody attend the National Women’s History Museum’s Women Making History Gala at Arena Stage.

From left, Assistant Director at the Pro Bono Institute Shannon Graving, Aleida Delgado and President of Creative Alliance Communications Aileen Schlef attend the National Women’s History Museum’s Women Making History Gala at Arena Stage.

Katherine Keyes, left, and Michelle Schoenfeld attend the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball held at the German Residence.

June 2015

After dinner, the 400 guests at the Washington Ballet’s Swan Ball danced in the entrance of the German Residence.

The Washington Diplomat Page 41

DIPLOMATIC SPOTLIGHT

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

March of Dimes

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and his wife Abby Blunt dish up food for the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala, a fundraiser in which members of Congress serve their favorite dishes and are judged by professional chefs.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) made honeyfried walleye fish for the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala held at the National Building Museum.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), left, talks with Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa) about his pumpkin cornbread at the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala held at the National Building Museum.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal and his wife Cynthia Blumenthal made cheese puffs for the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala held at the National Building Museum.

Elijah Jackson, the March of Dimes 2015 National Ambassador, center, joins his parents Elise and Todd to talk about being born premature at 25 weeks, weighing just over a pound and measuring 11 inches long, which is the length of a sheet of paper. March of Dimes works to help women have full-term pregnancies and healthy babies.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and her husband Verne Martell won the American Regional Recipe Award for their salmon cakes at the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) serves her surprise cocktail meatballs at the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala, which works to raise awareness of preterm birth. In 2012, one out of every nine babies in the United States was born premature.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), left, greets Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa) at the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala held at the National Building Museum.

Photo: St. regis

From left, bloggers Meg Biram and McKenna Bleu and photographer Abby Jiu attend the debut of the “Jazz Legends at St. Regis” series that featured a live performance by Jamie Cullum, a celebrated British jazz and pop singer-songwriter.

Jazz-pop singer and songwriter Jamie Cullum sings atop his piano in the Astor Ballroom at the St. Regis Washington, D.C., part of the hotel’s “Jazz Legends” series. The hotel was transformed by event designer EVOKE into a 1920s-era jazz club for the special event.

From left, Anil Cabraal, Events Manager and Senior Visits Officer with the British Council Kathy Culpin, MinisterCounselor at the Embassy of Mozambique Eduardo C.A. Zaqueu and Maria Do Ceú Sambo, also with the Mozambique Embassy, attend the “Jazz Legends at St. Regis” concert.

3From left, Jeff Stokes, Nicole A. Bernard of Fox Entertainment, Luca lacovoni and Stormy Stokes attend “Jazz Legends at St. Regis,” an intimate set of jazz performances scheduled to take place at St. Regis properties around the world.

Photo: St. regis

42

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) made artichoke and shrimp dip for the 33rd annual March of Dimes Gourmet Gala held at the National Building Museum.

America’s Promise

Jazz at St. Regis

Ambassador of Egypt Mohamed M. Tawfik, left, and Shirin Kooros of Metis LLC attend “Jazz Legends at St. Regis,” a series of concerts that celebrate contemporary jazz and bring a modern interpretation to beloved jazz tunes played at the brand’s flagship hotel in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and his wife Myma Cardin are longtime supporters of the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala, a competitive cookoff with a distinctly Capitol Hill flair.

Sean Quinlan, left, and Meigan Kelly attend the Jamie Cullum jazz concert at the St. Regis, where the décor and room design paid homage to the early 20th-century use of hotel ballrooms as entertainment venues.

4From left, makeup artist Carl Ray, style expert Mary Alice Stephenson and Jake Garcia attend the debut of “Jazz Legends at St. Regis” at the company’s D.C. property, which follows an exclusive jazz event with Jamie Cullum at the recently opened St. Regis Istanbul.

From left, former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell, founding chair of America’s Promise; honoree Beatrice Welters, former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago and co-founder of the AnBryce Foundation; Alma Powell, board chair of America’s Promise; and honoree Anthony Welters, co-founder of the AnBryce Foundation, attend the inaugural Promise Night Awards at Howard Theatre to recognize five people who have made an exceptional difference in the lives of America’s young people.

From left, Wilma Bernstein, Alma Powell and former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Stuart A. Bernstein attend the Promise Night Awards to honor champions who have answered the call of every American president for the last 40 years to improve the lives of young people.

Photos: Tony Brown for MBK Photo Photo: St. regis

Country singer Larry Gatlin, left, and honoree Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) attend the Promise Night Awards hosted by America’s Promise Alliance.

The Washington Diplomat

June 2015

AROUNDTHEWORLD

THE WASHINGTON DIPLOMAT

June 2015

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The Washington Diplomat Page 43

from page 18

Jett Jett: My guess is that this is true of any large bureaucratic organization — public sector, corporate, even universities. But some organizations are better at measuring performance. The State Department struggles mightily on this front. There are evaluations and your promotion prospects hinge to a large part on the ability of your supervisor to write a decent evaluation for you.Assignments are also crucial, so if you don’t have a network, you can’t work the system.

TWD: You profiled a large number of incompetent political appoin-

tees in the book. Were there one or two who stood out as being the most spectacularly unqualified or incompetent?

Jett: Probably the worst was Cynthia Stroum in Luxembourg.

hopes of becoming an ambassador might say,“Well, do I really want to bother collecting money from all my friends for the campaign?”

They like to maintain the illusion that it’s an easy job. But the title of ambassador is the next best thing to royalty or becoming a general. You’ve always got that on your business card. I certainly do. It’s worth something, so there is a vested interest in downplaying the significance of these jobs.

TWD: We saw some political appointees fumble their confirmation

hearings last summer in a very public way: Tsunis, who ultimately withdrew his nomination to be ambassador to Norway; Bell, who was a soap opera producer before she was confirmed as ambassador to Hungary; and Noah Mamet, a political operative and consultant who was confirmed as ambassador to Argentina. Do you think a lot of career diplomats took delight in watching these political appointees be exposed as lightweights?

Here you had people working for her who were volunteering to transfer to Afghanistan and Iraq.

TWD: Right. I think I read in the Office of Inspector General (OIG)

report that she went through seven deputy chiefs of mission in less than two years before she resigned.

Jett: She inherited a ton of money. She was a venture capitalist

your book, “Isn’t $250,000 a lot of money for Costa Rica?” Richard Nixon ultimately sent her to Luxembourg in 1973. But you wrote that she did an OK job?

PHOTO: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Jett: Absolutely. Tsunis —

ambassador must give at least $250,000. I think that’s where the Farkas quote comes from. Nixon maintained that we didn’t need someone with “extraordinary qualifications” to be ambassador to Luxembourg. Was that a fair point?

talk about a cringe-worthy moment!

One senator threw him a softball and asked him about business opportunities in Norway and he couldn’t even answer that. A 12-year-old could have mentioned oil exports and the energy sector. So yes, I do think career diplomats felt a little satisfied. But if McCain hadn’t shown up at the hearing to ask tough questions and if [Comedy Central’s] Jon Stewart hadn’t picked it up,Tsunis would be in Norway today.

Jett: They may be small countries but they have significant

TWD: You pointed out in your book that Tsunis had contributed to

TWD: You reported that Nixon said that anyone who wants to be an

organizations to manage. Even in a place like Luxembourg, you’re managing at least 60 to 80 people. And do you really want any element of your government done by someone who is incompetent? There’s this perception that the only thing diplomats do is go to cocktail parties and not pay their parking tickets.Well, there’s other work being done. Even small embassies have important functions. Drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism — these are global problems that affect even the smallest countries. Incompetent ambassadors are a threat to national security wherever they are.

TWD: You wrote about Nicole Avant, who was the U.S. ambassador

to the Bahamas from 2009 to 2011. She was outside the country for an average of 12 days per month during her tenure, which the OIG described as an “extended period of dysfunctional leadership.” But at a Democratic National Convention event, President Obama gave a shout-out to her and said, “It’s a nice gig isn’t it?” — referring to her Bahamas post. So do you think that even the president views these jobs as being insignificant?

Jett: I think so. If presidents and candidates said,“This is a hard

and serious job and we’re only going to put qualified people in,” then all those people who are bundling checks with the

44

The Washington Diplomat

ambassadors, but obviously there have been some of those as well.

In the book, you cited a Penn State evaluation of 139 OIG reports — 98 with career appointee ambassadors and 41 political.

Apparently there was no significant difference in their performances, although career officers tended toward average whereas political appointees tended to be good or bad?

Jett: The career people were slightly higher than the political

people, but there are good political appointees. They bring a fresh perspective and an outsider’s point of view.They aren’t weighted down by bureaucracy and bureaucratic procedures.

And they aren’t weighted down by careerist concerns. They can do things or say things and not have to worry about how it will affect their careers. When I was ambassador to Mozambique and then Peru, I often thought,“Well, how far do I want to push this thing?” Political appointees never have to worry about getting their next assignment.

Jett: The shaming aspect might deter some people who have no language abilities. Some of them claim they speak a language at the conversational level. What does that mean? With a test, we’d find out. Congress ought to know and people who want to be an ambassador would know that they’d be facing a language test.

One of my other fundamental recommendations is to empower the OIG to do a lot more inspections. You’re never going to get money out of politics — because the Supreme Court has basically endorsed the corruption of politics by money — and we have an electoral industrial complex that will resist any change. And so the most effective way to limit the number of unqualified people who want to become ambassadors is more frequent inspections and more public exposure of their incompetence.

TWD: What about Ruth Farkas? She had this quote referenced in

will succeed or fail. You can tell if someone is qualified, but it isn’t just qualifications that dictate whether someone will be a good ambassador. And post management also depends on DCMs, so sometimes a good DCM can save a horrible ambassador if they are smart enough to get out of the DCM’s way.

TWD: You didn’t highlight many career diplomats who were terrible

TWD: O One of your recommendations is to subject political appointees to the kind of language exams at the Foreign Service Institute that career diplomats take and then publicizing the results of their tests. Would this shame candidates who can’t speak the local language or what would be the point of this?

so she was probably playing with her inheritance as her supposed profession. She didn’t earn what she had and she bought her ambassadorship and was probably terribly selfconscious about that. And it reflected in the way she treated people. And of course, there were others. Douglas Kmiec in Malta wasn’t horrible, but he was weird. He thought his job was to write for religious magazines. [An OIG report on his tenure stated that he spent several hours of each workday in his residence.]

And there was Scott Gration, the former Air Force general in Kenya. He was strange as well. I think he insisted on a Hillary Clinton-like deal where he ran all his email through his Gmail account and apparently never bothered to read cables. [An OIG report conducted during his tenure rated him last in interpersonal relations and next to last in managerial skills and attention to morale. He resigned after he saw a draft of the report.]

Jett: Yes. That’s one of the challenges. You can’t predict who

cable from Washington one day stating,“Do not accept checks from the ambassador because he’s bounced one too many, so if he writes a check to obtain local currency, don’t do it.”There was some debate at post whether to follow this instruction because the alternative was letting him bounce checks out on the local market.

McCain’s campaign in 2008 but switched to Obama in 2012. So McCain had an incentive to show up and grill him, right?

Jett: That’s right. Politicians remember these things. It was also

an opportunity to stick it to the president and he did.

TWD: But you wrote that even someone like George Tsunis could turn

out to be a good ambassador. You believe that?

Jett: It’s unlikely, but not impossible. If the guy is so lazy he couldn’t even spend an afternoon reading up on Norway, it’s shocking. But if he got there and said,“OK, I’m a self-made man, son of immigrants, I’m going to be successful at this,” who knows how it would have turned out?

TWD: Were there any other noteworthy incompetent political appointee ambassadors you came across in your research?

Jett: There was Joy Silverman, whom George H.W. Bush nomi-

nated to be the ambassador to Barbados. She had never held a job and had no college degree. But she was never confirmed.

Under Reagan you had a number of incompetent political appointees like John Upston in Rwanda. The embassy got a

TWD: You also talked about creating a better system of measuring performance. What would that look like?

Jett: Ambassadors ought to be rated by those in their mission

every year. And it should be done in Washington too.

TWD: You wrote that the GOP has blocked 42 of President Obama’s

ambassadorial nominations. I don’t imagine that trend will change if Hillary Clinton wins in 2016?

Jett: No. A lot of the reaction to Obama is racism.This whole

idea that he is a Kenyan-born Muslim, socialist dictator — it’s all about legitimizing hate and bigotry. Like Rudy Giuliani saying that Obama doesn’t love his country. It’s all code words for screaming “nigger.” It may not be as bad for Hillary.

I don’t know that it will get worse and it could get a little better. Perhaps Hillary will be a better politician than Obama was.

TWD: You concluded the book by opining that, “If the best diplomats

aren’t chosen to conduct diplomacy, America proceeds at its own peril.” After conducting this research for your book, are you more optimistic that future presidents will do a better job in appointing the best quality people?

Jett: I wouldn’t say I’m more optimistic, no. I hope it doesn’t get worse. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to shine a light on this problem. It’s hard to be optimistic because you still have the corrupting influence of money and the growing size of campaign budgets and campaign staffs — that will lead to heavy pressure to make political appointments. If the Republicans win, I think it will get worse. And even if Hillary wins, she’ll have a lot of people to pay back, particularly the Israeli lobby, so I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about that aspect of our foreign policy improving.

Dave Seminara (@DaveSem) is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

June 2015

from page 16

Hungary other central European country. Analysts in London and New York were predicting that Hungary could very easily follow Greece [into bankruptcy].”

One root cause of Hungary’s fiscal decay was the proliferation of loopholes that allowed rampant tax evasion. By 2010, only 1.8 million of Hungary’s 10 million citizens were paying their taxes, depleting an already unsustainable pension system. Orbán also introduced targeted taxes on the energy, banking and telecommunications sectors while cutting gas and electricity costs, earning the wrath of the foreign nationals that invest in those sectors but pleasing many voters.

Corruption remains an endemic problem in Hungary, yet thanks to structural reforms begun by Fidesz in 2010, last year the Hungarian economy expanded by 3.6 percent, the highest in the 28-member European Union. Debt levels are at 77 percent of GDP, down from 89 percent, the country has reduced its deficit to EU-mandated levels, and foreign investment has grown by 14 percent, reaching its highest level in 17 years.

Equally important, she said, 4.1 million Hungarians now pay taxes, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.7 percent from the 10.2 percent recorded in 2010. Some 170,000 people found jobs in the private sector last year.

“As a result of these figures, Standard & Poor’s upgraded Hungary to a BB+ rating,” Szemerkényi said. “S&P also stated that Hungary has become much better prepared to withstand external shocks.”

Yet Orbán gets far more attention for reflexively opposing the West than for having steered Hungary through financial turmoil.

While the opposition remains fractured, Orbán’s party has slipped in popularity, losing ground to Jobbik and forcing it to adopt more rightwing positions. As a result, some of the bad headlines Orbán has brought on himself.

Following the recent fatal stabbing of a young woman in the Hungarian town of Kaposvár, Orbán called for the reinstitution of the death penalty. His appeal raised eyebrows across the EU, which specifically bans membership to any country that allows capital punishment.

“Hungarian political analysts say Viktor Orbán knows that it is impossible to reintroduce the death penalty, but by keeping this on the agenda, he can gain some support,” Euronews correspondent Attila Magyar reported May 9. “The latest opinion polls show that almost half the population agrees with the reintroduction of the death penalty.

So the Hungarian PM can act like the protector of Hungarian sovereignty again.”

Szemerkényi didn’t directly address the controversy, saying only that such issues must be discussed within the framework of the Council of Europe — and denying that the death penalty declaration was only a ploy to draw right-wing voters away from Jobbik.

“Many analysts say Jobbik has the potential to become the big challenger of Fidesz in the next elections. Other analysts say that because its message is so extreme, it has a limited scope in attracting people,” she explained. “We must develop good answers to very understandable concerns in society and offer them better solutions.Then they don’t have to vote for a party that doesn’t offer proper solutions.”

The ambassador also denied that her ruling Fidesz party is anti-Roma or anti-Semitic.

Hungary is home to about 700,000 Roma, or gypsies, who are frequently the target of discrimination and scorn (some polls say up to

Photo: credit

Photo: Serge Bystro from Moscow, Russia / Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Above, the Hungarian Parliament is one of Europe’s oldest legislative buildings. In recent years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s center-right party has drawn criticism from the European Union for stifling dissent, although he retains a strong base of domestic support, as seen in March 2012 demonstrations in Budapest, at left, supporting Orbán’s controversial decision to amend the constitution.

Photo: Derzsi Elekes Andor / Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

80 percent of Hungarians have a negative view of the Roma).

“Our policies for Roma inclusion are founded on two concepts: one is social funding and support for families living under the poverty line, which can only be given to families that allow their children to go to school. It’s a value decision that they have to learn how to read, write and do math. Another pillar of our policy is that it’s important for kids to see that their father gets up in the morning and goes to work.”

The ambassador added that her government has “zero tolerance” toward anti-Semitism. Despite widespread criticism of Orbán’s policies by Jewish organizations, Szemerkényi said she recently met with Annette Lantos, widow of the late Sen.Tom Lantos,a Hungarianborn Holocaust survivor, whose group had often criticized Hungary.

“But now they believe the situation is really not that bad. We have a very good relationship,” she insisted.

Still, Jobbik’s popularity and Orbán’s unabashed nationalism have prompted concern in Western capitals that Hungary has reached an inflection point, as it backslides on democracy and cozies up to Putin at a time when Russia is rattling its saber in Ukraine.

The Diplomat interviewed Szemerkényi on the 11th anniversary of Hungary’s membership in the EU, which it joined in 2004. Since 1999, it has also been a member of NATO. In fact, post-communist Hungary emerged as one of Russia’s loudest critics — until, that it,

Orbán’s became Putin’s sympathetic ear in Europe.

The ambassador, however, wasn’t shy about criticizing Moscow. She said that in the years after the Soviet collapse, the United States and its allies should have pushed even harder to enlarge NATO beyond the 28 current members of the Brussels-based military alliance.

“We had a window of opportunity after 1990, and now this window may be closing,” she lamented. “If we had been more conscious of how to profit from the gift of history, when we could build democracies, we’d have been in a different situation today.”

As a result, she said, Russia represents a “very significant strategic threat” to Eastern Europe today, evidenced by Putin’s annexation of Crimea last year and continued fighting between Ukrainian troops and Russianbacked rebels that has left more than 6,000 people dead and displaced a million more.

Meanwhile, Szemerkényi said, with the economy improving, the Orbán government intends to increase its defense budget to 2 percent of GDP, as Hungary committed to do at a NATO summit last year in Wales.

“The big question is, how can the sovereignty of Ukraine be regained? Obviously, the challenge is very subtle, in many ways bringing up issues we thought were resolved,” she said.“Nobody thought there would be such a development in Europe after 1990.”

Yet Szemerkényi must tread carefully because, as she concedes, Hungary’s delicate relationship with the Russian giant to the east is fundamentally defined by its “clear energy

June 2015

dependence” on the Kremlin.

“Our situation is probably the most sensitive one in Europe,” she said, “and the most vulnerable. Practically 95 percent of our natural gas imports come from Russia, and natural gas is a large part of our economy. Unfortu­ nately, our domestic upstream production has been seriously declining, so Hungary’s situation is more sensitive. We are totally landlocked, so we don’t have access to the sea, unlike Poland or the Baltics. Secondly, we don’t have any major transit pipelines. We’re at the end of the pipeline.”

Hungary uses nearly 9 billion cubic meters of gas per year, said Szemerkényi, who before coming to Washington was deeply involved in efforts to diversify Hungarian gas imports while developing alternatives.

“We have two nuclear power plants in Hungary built by the Russians in the ’70s and about to be phased out,” she said.“We are now contracting for two new nuclear plants from Russia. This is a policy-neutral thing and increases our energy sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, Szemerkényi is focusing her efforts on improving Hungary’s image and reassuring officials at the Pentagon, in the White House and on Capitol Hill— an uphill battle, considering the two countries’ recent rocky relations.

“Life is so dynamic in Washington, but this is a life I’d been part of for the last 25 years,” she said. “I don’t really have classic introductory meetings, since I know many of the think tank people. That’s why our discussions are so much more concrete and to the point.”

She added: “We may disagree, but we have to be very careful not to destroy a strategic connection between the two countries, which is needed now and will be needed even more five years from now.”

Larry Luxner is news editor of The Washington Diplomat.

Your Source for Diplomatic News. www.washdiplomat.com

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Twiplomacy made a concerted effort to forge mutual connections on Twitter. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius (@LaurentFabius) is the bestconnected foreign minister, following 100 peers and world leaders. Interestingly, in second place is the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has made a conscious effort to connect with peers on their English-language account @MFA_Russia.

While both President Obama and the White House accounts are followed by a record number of world leaders, they don’t often return the courtesy; the only three leaders Obama follows are Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg and Estonian Foreign Minister Keit Pentus-Rosimannus. Both Solberg (@ Erna_Solberg) and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves (@IlvesToomas) are two of the few heads of state who manage their own accounts. Incidentally, Solberg, who has dyslexia, also admits that she makes the occasional spelling mistake.

“It always amazes me how quickly governments adapt to the ever-changing social media landscape,” said Burson-Marsteller’s Matthias

46

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Lüfkens (@luefkens), author of the report, in a press release. “Some governments have become very professional at using Twitter’s six-second Vine videos and others are already going live on Persicope, Twitter’s latest livestreaming application.”

OTHER FUN FINDINGS • Barack Obama was the first world leader to sign up to Twitter on March 5, 2007 (at the time as a senator), as user number 813,286.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (@ PMHarper) and the U.S. State Department (@ StateDept) are among the early adopters, all having joined later in 2007.

• As of March 24, 2015, all world leaders combined have sent 2,653,876 tweets, posting on average four tweets each day. The Venezuelan presidency (@PresidencialVen) has sent close to 60,000 tweets, averaging more than 41 tweets each day.

• Among the foreign ministries, the State Department is the most followed with 1.7 million followers, ahead of the Turkish (@TC_ Disisleri), the Russian (@MID_RF) and the French (@FranceDiplo) foreign ministries, all with less than a million followers.

PHOTO: BURSON-MARSTELLER

• Quite a few politicians use Twitter only during election campaigns: Indonesia’s Joko Widodo (@Jokowi_do2) abandoned his 2.7 million Twitter followers once he was elected president in 2014, as did Chile’s Michelle Bachelet (@PrensaMichelle) that same year.

That last tidbit is a great lesson for any political candidate: craft Twitter campaigns and messaging for the long haul, connect with peers early and often, and treat their platforms more as a two-way form of communications,

with images, videos and texts, rather than as a one-way broadcasting channel aimed only at promoting a message. Twitter users, be they heads of state, diplomats or ordinary citizens, can either opt to engage in meaningful, purpose-driven conversation, or stand on the precipice and yell into the void. Doing the latter may earn a place on a list, but the former will create a lasting effect.

Molly McCluskey (@MollyEMcCluskey) is contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

June 2015

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WFPG As recently as the 1970s, according to Bloch, women made up only 4.8 percent of U.S. Foreign Service officers.

The first woman to serve as an American ambassador anywhere was Eugenie Anderson, sent

by President Harry Truman to Denmark in 1949. By comparison, 116 of the 367 ambassadors nominated by President Barack Obama since taking office — 31.6 percent of the total — have been women.

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With their ranks growing every day, a PHOTO: WOMEN’S FOREIGN POLICY GROUP few ambassadors offered some words of wisdom for other women hoping to crack the diplomatic glass ceiling.

Hunaina al-Mughairy, who’s represented the Sultanate of Oman here since 2005, said she’s not a career diplomat but rather has a background in business.That’s why the sultan sent her to Washington. At the time, Oman was negotiating a freetrade agreement with the United States.

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lot of prestige.”

Mitifu, Congo’s envoy here since 1999, clearly remembers the day she arrived in the United States to start her new job, because the airline’s protocol staff mistakenly assumed the only other passenger sitting in business class — an older gentleman — was the new Congolese ambassador instead of herself.

“About two hours before landing, people were coming up constantly to talk to the man. Finally, when we landed, they told me to go with the other passengers,” the African diplomat recalled. “So I turned my back and went the other way. Then I heard the lady from protocol shouting, ‘Ambassador Mitifu!

Ambassador Mitifu!’ So I returned and said, ‘That’s me.’ You should have seen her face. They kept apologizing, and the gentleman was confused, but very kind.”

In the years since that embarrassing snafu, Mitifu said she’s learned that “just being able to assert yourself as the ambassador or head of your diplomatic mission is always a challenge. If a man has to work 100 percent, then you have to work 150 percent. But once you reach that point, then you can be much more comfortable with yourself and everyone around you. Just do your job, be curious, explore all avenues and try to learn as much as possible — because you never know who will open doors for you.”

Larry Luxner is news editor of The Washington Diplomat.

The Washington Diplomat Page 47

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June 2015