Mary Carlin Yates witnessed Nelson Mandela’s approach to peacemaking and learned about military power from four-star generals.
She saw how eyedroppers of food were the difference between life and death for some of Africa’s most vulnerable people.
Those chapters in her resume show different aspects of a diplomatic career that started in 1980. Yates recently served as special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council.
During Monday’s downtown meeting of the Rotary Club of Vancouver, Yates, an Oregonian, explained how the ABC’s of her profession were actually the three Ds: diplomacy, defense and development.
Putting them all together can be difficult, she said, but recent leaders such as Colin Powell and Robert Gates have been advocates of interagency initiatives. Gates, former defense secretary, observed that it’s cheaper to send diplomats and development staff than soldiers, Yates said.
After working in Zaire during the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, Yates was named U.S. ambassador to war-ravaged Burundi from 1999 to 2002. During the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis, “700,000 people were killed in 10 years,” Yates said.
She saw the power of diplomacy during the peace process led by Mandela, the former South African president. She had some doubts going in, Yates acknowledged: “How is he going to bring the Hutus and Tutsis together?” And, what she called a tedious bunch of talkers didn’t improve her outlook.
However, “No one on the continent had the moral authority of (Mandela),” she said. Under his leadership, “It was the small groups of people getting to know each other” that made it a success.
International development is not always a compelling discussion tropic. It’s the least understood of the three D’s, she said. But, “I witnessed what money for food can do” during one of Africa’s recent humanitarian disasters.
Women and children who fled the violence didn’t always have the resources to survive. Italian nuns would find them, often living in banana-leaf huts, and bring food.
“The nuns would feed most of them with droppers because they couldn’t absorb much food,” Yates said.
The third D — defense — did not come naturally to Yates, a self-described kid of the ’60s who had protested the Vietnam War. She developed an enormous respect for the American military, she said.
A couple of her later assignments put Yates in the middle of a military-civilian chain of command. As deputy to the commander for civil-military activities of the U.S. Africa Command, Yates worked for a four-star general. Her civilian rank was the equivalent of a three-star general; two-star generals reported to her.
“I had many lessons to learn about defense,” Yates said.
“I’d have been a better ambassador if I’d know more about the defense aspect” earlier in her career.
That respect goes both ways, Yates said: “Many former defense secretaries have said that diplomacy is our first line of defense.”
