Return to Transcripts main page

Amanpour

E.U. Plans Controversial Migrant Quotas; Creating Hope for the Next Generation; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired May 11, 2015 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: targeting the traffickers. The E.U.'s controversial call for military action in the

Mediterranean. Italy's foreign minister tells me they must destroy the smugglers' boats before they set out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAOLO GENTILONI, ITALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Obviously we will not intervene destroying boats at sea with migrants on the boats. It would be

crazy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR (voice-over): Plus she is her parents' daughter. Chelsea Clinton on handing the keys to the next generation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHELSEA CLINTON, VICE CHAIR, THE CLINTON FOUNDATION: . when did we kind of mistake progress for success?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

Europe at a crossroads now that it is clear British Prime Minister David Cameron will be staying at Number 10, he's making good on promises to

extract new terms in order to stay in the E.U. Immigration is top of the agenda.

As Europe plans a controversial quota system to force member states to take in their fair share of migrants, Britain takes in a negligible number

while Germany, Sweden and France have taken in the most.

Italy, however, has taken on the lion's share of the Mediterranean migrant crisis, rescuing tens of thousands. Now Europe is also trying to

get U.N. approval for military action that could prevent thousands more from drowning as they try to reach safety. As the E.U. high representative

Federica Mogherini told the Security Council today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FEDERICA MOGHERINI, E.U. HIGH REPRESENTATIVE: Let me say that the European Union is finally ready to take its own responsibilities, saving

lives, welcoming refugees, addressing the root causes of the phenomenon, dismantling criminal organizations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Earlier I asked the Italian foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, just how that would work.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Foreign Minister, welcome to the program. Thank you for joining me from a very stormy Rome. I wonder if that's a metaphor for the

really serious and stormy issues you face regarding this migrant issue.

Do you think the United Nations will sign off on military intervention?

PAOLO GENTILONI, ITALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Well, in fact, here is really only a good climate that we have in Rome. I really hope that United

Nations will decide to help in a struggle against smugglers and traffickers.

The discussion will go on, I think, in the next 5-8 days and at the end we hope to have a resolution based on Chapter 7, allowing us to have

actions against the traffickers and the smugglers, which is very -- it's not a silver bullet because we have many issues on the migration problem.

But it will help.

AMANPOUR: What kind of military intervention do you foresee?

What is it?

How is it that you're going to stop these smugglers?

GENTILONI: Well, what the European Union summit decided in the -- in April 23rd was to have an action to destroy the boats that traffickers and

smugglers are using. Obviously before that the boats are used by the migrants. And we need an international legal framework and the United

Nations is the international legal framework.

AMANPOUR: But what about Libya? I mean who in Libya can sign off on that? They're already saying, the various different groups, that no, not

in my name. Surely it would also hamper the U.N.'s efforts to broker some kind of solution between these various different Libyan factions.

GENTILONI: Well, what the United Nations are trying to do is going on since several months and there is a special envoy of Secretary-General

Bernardino Leon. In fact we have already asked to Mr. Leon to be the one asking the recognized government of Tobruk but also other Libyan

authorities to cooperate in this fight against traffickers and smugglers. So this is a contribution that Bernardino Leon can give to a success of

this U.N. resolution.

AMANPOUR: Do you think, Foreign Minister, that blowing up boats, whether they be on the Mediterranean or in the ports or on the shores of

Libya is going to work? Is that going to stop what we see on the high seas?

GENTILONI: Obviously we will not intervene, destroying boats at sea with migrants on the boats. It would be crazy. We will try to destroy

them before they are starting with the migrants.

Will this be the solution? No, I don't think we have a one solution. We need 3-4-5 different tools to regulate the phenomenon. And we have to

take in account that the phenomenon will be there in the next years. So the issue is not to imagine to stop migration but to have a better

management and regulation of migration.

In this field, giving -- attacking the traffickers and smugglers is one of the issues.

AMANPOUR: Italy obviously has shouldered a huge burden when it comes to rescues at sea. But now the E.U. is talking about having a quota system

for migrants, those who are coming by sea and elsewhere.

And Italy does not take in as many as migrants as, say, Germany or Sweden.

Do you think this is fair, this E.U. quota system?

And are you ready to shoulder more of a burden, make it more safe and legal for these migrants to find somewhere to seek political asylum?

GENTILONI: Well, from our part, from one side we are receiving only in our coasts two-thirds of the irregular migration coming towards Europe.

And on the other side, as far as asylum seekers are concerned, we are the third ranking country in Europe after Germany and Sweden.

So we are doing our part and we believe that a principle of quotas and mandatory distribution is a good principle. It's fair and correct. But

obviously we don't have an illusion that with this principle will be applied for the whole number of migrants reaching our country. We are

talking of numbers very little respect the enormous amount of migration that we receive in our coasts.

AMANPOUR: Let me just switch gears for a moment and ask you about Britain, the U.K. election, the victory of David Cameron's government.

What is it that David Cameron and the British government has said to you and other E.U. partners that they would like to renegotiate in order to

keep Britain in Europe?

Do you have a clear sense of what Cameron wants?

GENTILONI: Well, I think that we are -- we can cooperate with the U.K. government on several issues. For example, U.K. is interested in a

Eurozone more pro-growth oriented because it's in the interests of the U.K. economy. We are both, Italy and U.K., interested on a less bureaucratic

European Union.

But I also think that the U.K. government is aware that you can't imagine a sort of cherry picking within the European Union pillars. So I

choose the freedom of trade, but I don't want the freedom of movement.

This is practically impossible. We have some pillars of European Union and we have to share all of them.

AMANPOUR: So do you think that there will be a successful renegotiation that keeps Britain in the E.U.?

GENTILONI: Frankly speaking, I think that an exit from U.K. would be very bad news for European Union. But really terrible news for U.K.

because U.K. has more than 50 percent of its trade with European Union. The ECB is the ECB because U.K. is in the European Union.

So we have a mutual interest and I'm confident that the new government will understand this mutual interest. We can change something; we can't

change the pillars of the European Union.

AMANPOUR: Foreign Minister Gentiloni, thank you very much for joining us on a very windy Rome evening.

GENTILONI: Thank you. Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: So trying to head off a Brexit and a migrant crisis. And migrants from the Middle East and Africa are not alone making these

perilous journeys for better lives. Over the weekend, 2,000 Rohingya, the persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar, crossed the sea to Malaysia and

Indonesia. And here you can see them, exhausted, starving and resting in an Indonesian shelter.

But as many as 8,000 Rohingya remain stranded at sea, according to the International Migration Organization. And after a break, we return to

Africa, where we asked what can be done to ensure a stable continent that would change the minds of those who attempt to flee? Panel discussion with

Chelsea Clinton in Morocco after this.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

With scenes of desperate migration never far from our screens, the question surely must be how to create jobs, opportunity and hope for the

next generation. Thirty percent of North Africa and the Arab world is 14 years old or younger. That's 41 percent in Africa. Bill Clinton has

devoted his post-presidency to solving this very question as he told me at his foundation's conference in Morocco.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think the most important thing we can do is to give the young people in the Middle East

and elsewhere an alternative vision of the future that is more inclusive and more positive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So how does that happen when it comes to the programs his foundation sponsors? I asked his daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who's now vice

chair of the NGO, as well as Kennedy Odede, whose girls' school in a Nairobi slum is sponsored by the foundation and Asma Mansour, a Tunisian

activist who's trying to spur social entrepreneurship in her country.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Welcome, welcome to you all.

Let me start with you, Chelsea, because you are vice chair now of The Clinton Foundation.

What about your current trip has really staggered you or stood out for you?

CHELSEA CLINTON, VICE CHAIR OF THE CLINTON FOUNDATION: I saw Kennedy a few days ago in Nairobi at Farasi Lane School, which is one of our

partners in the Clinton Global Initiative commitment to really try to close the secondary education gap that still exists not only across the continent

of Africa but really around the world.

So there are now almost as many as girls as there are boys in primary school everywhere but almost nowhere are there as many as girls as there

are boys in secondary school.

And so Kennedy and I were at Farasi Lane and I was really staggered by how much progress is already being made. We just have to keep making that

progress.

AMANPOUR: And I have to ask you, because you are a new mother. This obviously takes on a much bigger urgency.

Does it?

CHELSEA CLINTON: Completely. And I didn't know that I could care any more about the enfranchisement, the equality and the empowerment of women

and girls until I became a mother and until I had a daughter.

And somehow I do care, just even more intensely and emphatically, about all the work that we're doing.

AMANPOUR: And I've been to Kibera, so I really know that slum.

What is it that forced you really to look at your own situation and say, no, I'm not going to allow this to happen for the next generation of

boys, but mostly girls, because you've made a school for girls there.

KENNEDY ODEDE, CO-FOUNDER, SHINING HOPE FOR COMMUNITIES: There was no hope.

Nairobi is a city whereby there is a lot of wealth at the same time there's a lot of poverty. I grew up on the street, when I was the age of

10, because I can see how much was -- I can see how much my mom was trying and other women in the community. It was so, so hard.

AMANPOUR: Asma, you came of age politically, socially during the Arab Spring. Tunisia has been the example to all of us.

How did you, growing up in a conservative and traditional family, burst onto the scene?

ASMA MANSOUR, PRESIDENT AND CO-FOUNDER, TUNISIAN CENTER FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A lot of people say that we did a revolution in Tunisia

but I think I personally -- I made my own revolution. I came from a conservative family and I was raised with -- it's clear for me that I had

to get married at a certain age, before the 30.

As everyone else, you know, it's like this is how we grew up, with these kind of ideas. So I think that the challenge for us is -- and the

main point is that we don't really dream. And our society don't allow us to dream.

AMANPOUR: So in the end what did you end up doing?

MANSOUR: I discovered social work and NGO life.

AMANPOUR: Kennedy, you alluded to the violence that your family had gone through.

Two of your sisters were raped and they were made pregnant. They had no hope and no future.

What are you trying to do now with this school?

How are you protecting the girls?

ODEDE: First of all, I grew up a very, very angry man, very, very angry in the society, no job; no matter how much you tried to look for a

job, it's so difficult.

So what I wanted to be in a community was to have this school be a symbol, OK, of how to -- of changing way of people thinking, you know. So

we have this school that is now providing free school for girls but we don't have any for women. At the same time men were not happy with me for

that.

So I came up with an idea. The idea was that to link the school to social services like health care, that male also love, libraries, all those

kind of things. That's when men became part of the school.

And now in the community there's a lot of hope. Rape cases have gone down. And you can see what happen when people see the light.

AMANPOUR: How important is it, Chelsea and Asma, to actually bring the men into the equation that then empowers the women and girls?

CHELSEA CLINTON: Well, I think it's hugely important. It is partly a resource challenge. There aren't enough schools, aren't enough teachers,

aren't enough materials. But there are many other barriers or ceilings. There are more than 700 million women around the world who were married

before the age of 18.

Because we know that for every additional year of secondary school that a girl has she earns 10 percent per year more in income. That's money

that she can not only invest in her family but in her community. That's also good for her country because then she's paying taxes on that increased

income.

So we have to be able to make this argument calmly but persuasively.

AMANPOUR: So how important is it for you and do you see a change in getting men on board to understand that the future of Tunisia, for

instance, is equally in the hands of women as it is in the hands of men?

MANSOUR: We should not just focus on men but I think we should focus on families and parents and how to get into them, it's through the media,

it's because if we think in Tunisia the main entertainment for a lot of people in the countryside and the rural area is the TV and the radios and

so on.

AMANPOUR: So you've mentioned a couple of things, role models, media and also employment.

I know for you, equal pay for equal play is very important. Maybe people are surprised to know that, in the United States, the greatest

democracy, women are still earning something like 78 cents to every man's $1.

CHELSEA CLINTON: Yes, absolutely. And I just want to echo what Asma said. I think it's hugely important that we help people close the

imagination gap. I mean, even in the United States, female characters in G-rated movies, so those most consumed by children, are often only, you

know, 10 percent of male characters in terms of kind of how often they speak, how prominent they are.

So this is a challenge again, even in our own country.

But to answer your question about equal pay for equal work, there's no country in the world where women are paid equally to men. Belgium is the

closest. So in Belgium, it's 94 cents to every dollar and although that is tremendous, that's still not parity.

So we know we need to be doing more to ensure that women are paid equally for equal work and also enabled to participate in work equally.

AMANPOUR: So let me follow that up because, you know, there's also, as we all know, have been a terrible spate of violence in Kenya. There was

the attack on hundreds of schoolchildren, university, college students at Garissa and before that the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. And you wrote a lot

about it, particularly you said that the only way to stop this kind of terrorism is to bring an end to urban poverty.

If that doesn't end, what do you think is going to happen; more kids are going to get radicalized?

ODEDE: Yes. That's because they are taking advantage of these hopeless young people, you know, who have been given hope, you know, are

being kind of being lied to, you know. If you talk about Kenya, this is now in the Al-Shabaab, for example, in Somalia, they are coming to Kenya;

they are going to the slums in Mombasa, slums in Nairobi, because they know these people are hopeless. The only way to fight this is by investing in

the communities, giving these young people hope. What you are doing there, creating an entrepreneurial spirit.

MANSOUR: I think it's really generalized for a lot of Tunisian youth because even at university or at school, we have this system of we should

almost copy-paste what the teacher or the professor taught us; otherwise, we're punished.

AMANPOUR: That's right. I've heard that the education in most of the Arab world is, as you say, copy-paste, learn by rote, no critical thinking.

That's a revolution in education that has to happen in this part of the world --

(CROSSTALK)

MANSOUR: And it's not just at school, it's also at families.

AMANPOUR: So we are about out of time. I want to ask you a lightning round. That's means a very quick sort of few-word answers.

Chelsea, what was the most inspiring motivating thing in your life, what person, what event that's led you to where you are today?

CHELSEA CLINTON: My grandmother, my mother's mother, who had a life that I couldn't even imagine because of the choices that she made in her

life. She was born to teenage parents who weren't married. They abandoned her twice by the age of 8. She got shipped out to live with her

grandparents.

She had to start to support herself when she was 13. But she still managed to finish high school while she was still working.

And she had no model of a loving family in her own life. But she created a loving family for my mother and imbued in her a sense that she

could be anything she wanted to be in her life. And so she had this mantra that life is not about what happens to you; it's about what you do with

what happens to you.

And I think about that every day. And one of my great regrets is that my daughter won't know my grandmother except for the stories that I'll tell

her.

AMANPOUR: And Kennedy?

ODEDE: I found love in books and I also read books of Martin Luther King Jr. and the books of Nelson Mandela, President Clinton. It kind of

gave me a dream, kind of gave me hope in life because I remember growing up, I used to smash people's car because I was an angry man, you know?

That's what's happening. But when I saw those people, I was like, I want to be like them. So that for me really changed my life a lot.

AMANPOUR: Asma Mansour, Kennedy Odede, Chelsea Clinton, thank you.

CHELSEA CLINTON: Thank you very much.

AMANPOUR: Thank you very much.

And thank you all.

(APPLAUSE)

AMANPOUR: That was in Morocco in front of an audience there in the capital, Marrakesh. Now Cuba's president, Raul Castro, visited Pope

Francis this weekend, thanking him for helping broker a new phase in U.S.- Cuban relations. The Communist leader gave the Catholic pope a painting of a crucifix made from wooden barges. He said it was inspired by the pope's

trip to Lampedusa and the washed-up migrant barges.

It may be a case of art imitating life as we imagine a world next where the wrecks of that port are transformed by the migrants who once

landed there. That's when we come back.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, imagine a world where the worst experience of your life becomes the inspiration for a brighter and better

future. In a small corner of Berlin, one workshop is doing just that, building furniture from the remains of migrant shipwrecks off the island of

Lampedusa in Italy.

The company's called Kukula (ph). It means "to take care of each other" in Hausa, one of Africa's many dialects. It's mainly made up of

five refugees from Mali and Niger, who fled their homelands trying to find work first in Libya and now across the sea in Europe.

There were discovered after years in Berlin by an architect who helped them set up shop where they build chairs now and tables, bed frames and

closets, simple designs but with deep meanings since the wood is from the wrecks lying off Lampedusa. And today they're using the workshop to help

other migrants in Berlin learn new skills and the German language. In this small corner at least, the harrowing journey of a few is being transformed

into skills and hope for the many.

That is it for our program tonight. And remember you can always see our whole show online at amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook and

Twitter. Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

END