The Associated Press reported last night that former US Congressman and, later, Great Lakes Special Envoy Howard Wolpe died on Tuesday.
Congressman Wolpe had a long and distinguished career before his work in the Great Lakes. Then he served as Special Envoy from 1996-2001, under President Clinton, and again in 2009, at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
I knew of him from the Burundi Leadership Training Program, an initiative he led at the Woodrow Wilson Center to transform leadership in post-conflict Burundi. I interviewed him a few years ago, at the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide, and I met some of the leaders he worked with in Burundi before its troublesome 2010 presidential election. The Training Program didn’t “solve” post-conflict Burundi, but it stands out to me as a quintessential example of dedicated, sustained post-conflict engagement, from the grassroots to the political elite, driven by listening to local needs. I might be wrong. It’s worth your digging through the impressive library of the initiative to tell me so. (If you’d like to cheat, NPR ran a documentary about the importance of this program several years ago.)
H/T, for this news that has me totally down, to @hofrench.
