Secretary Powell, thanks so much for being with us.

SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you, Cheryl. It's a pleasure to be with you.

MS. MARTIN: What insights did you gain from this trip that would help you be a better advocate to the President and his Administration for being more engaging in Africa when you look at African issues?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, the four countries I visited are in various states of democratic development, so it gave me a chance to view that. South Africa is very far along. Mali is in pretty good shape. When you look at Kenya and Uganda, they are still run by people who have been there for many years, but they are in the process of determining how they will, I think, transfer power in due course, we hope, and I wanted to encourage them to do that and create more pluralistic political systems so that parties are allowed to participate.

I also wanted to have a chance to take a look at economic development and how our aid is being used so I had the new Administrator of the Agency for International Development with me, Mr. Andrew Natsios, to take a look. I especially wanted to take a look at the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa, which is a destroyer of families, a destroyer of cultures, and has the potential for being a destroyer of nations unless we get on top of this problem. It's more than a health care problem.

MS. MARTIN: But there was some concern as a result of what President Bush said when he was running for office that there would not be a commitment to the continent at all. How can you assure people that that is not the case, or is it the case?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, he said one thing during one of the debates -- I think it was the second debate -- where he and Vice President Gore were talking in security terms, and now President Bush said he didn't think it would be a security matter. I think he was saying he didn't think it would be a high likelihood we would find ourselves dealing with security issues involving US military force on a regular basis.

But he made it clear to me during the transition and when he was discussing with me the job that he wanted me to take on in his Administration, and ever since he became the President, that Africa is important. He not only sent me on this trip, he evidenced it in other ways -- by his support of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and the creation of a forum to further the AGOA this fall, 35 African Heads of State coming to Washington or representatives of Heads of State coming to Washington.

The President also, early on, commissioned me and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, to form a Joint Cabinet Task Force on HIV/AIDS, and then with Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN, to create a new global trust fund for health in principally sub-Saharan African countries, and found another $200 million in the federal budget this year to go on top of the $500 million already allocated in my Department to deal with the problem of HIV/AIDS.

In many ways, I think he is demonstrating to the communities of Africa, as well as to the African American community in the United States, that he is concerned about Africa. And the simple reason, you can't look away -- the problems are too great and the opportunities are too great.

MR. WICKHAM: Secretary Powell, you said during one of your interviews in Africa that help is on the way. The problem is really significant -- 25 million people infected, 17 million already dead. Seven hundred million dollars sounds like a lot of money in a lot of other areas, but it pales, it seems to me, in comparison to the size of the problem.

Will there be other assistance?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. I think in Secretary Thompson's budget there's lots of other money that won't go directly to Africa, but it is going to the development of vaccines, the development of cures, which ultimately will help.

Also, we have to remember that the world has to get mobilized for this, so that's why we called it a "global trust fund," and really working with the United Nations in order to get other nations to contribute to it, private people, private citizens, to contribute to it around the world, corporate leaders to contribute to it. The United States, I am quite confident, will be putting more money into that trust fund over time.

It is not the answer to the problem. Somebody asked me in South Africa, well, is that the answer -- more money? I said the answer begins with African leaders at every level, from village all the way up to the state house, standing up and starting to deal with this issue, talking about prevention, talking about young people protecting themselves, talking about sex habits that will get you into difficulty. That is what the president of Uganda did to bring his problem back under some control. President Museveni has been able to drop the rate from 30 to about 10 percent, mostly as a result of his taking a leadership position. We are also funding a lot of his programs because he's got a successful approach to it.

MR. WILLIAMS: It seems that most of the focus now in Africa is trying to mitigate the problem with AIDS and sort of identifying a type of national security crisis in the United States. But I think you said something early, which is important to many Africans in my opinion, this is just a band-aid approach to the larger problem, which is spurring trade investments in Africa, economic opportunities, because without that its still devastated.

How do you plan to move beyond this symbolism -- like the images that we saw of you while you were there and the images of our predecessor President Clinton -- and turn that into real dollars or whatever economic opportunities in businesses, from spurring development in Africa, to try to start making a significant difference?

SECRETARY POWELL: Two ways. One, by getting rid of trade barriers and opening up opportunities for trade between Africa and America and other countries in the world. That's what the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act does.

But what I said to every leader I met in Africa, "Don't sit back and say when are you going to send trade money and investment money from the private sector to help us?" The answer has to be, "When are you going create conditions in your countries, with a rule of law, with a reduction and elimination of corruption, and with an opportunity for people to get a return on their investment? You've got to work to create conditions that will draw investment money, real money and not just AID and debt relief money."

So it is a combination of things: one, reducing barriers, and two, exposing business people to Africa and the opportunity that exists in Africa -- a huge market. But at the same time, money is a coward, as I told them all; money does not go where it will not be safe, where it will not draw a return, and when people are ripping it off. Part of the responsibility has to be in African leadership to create the right investment climate for money to be drawn into those countries.

MR. PAGE: Secretary Powell, there were news reports here of you getting an unfriendly reception, or a heckling, at the Witwatersrand University in South Africa, and demonstrators outside blocking your car and pounding on the hood. What was that all about?

SECRETARY POWELL: I'm not entirely clear, but within the audience at Wits University -- shorthand -- there were some hecklers, about the equivalent -- I could name about seven institutions in the United States where I've had similar experience in recent years.

But most of the students were very respectful and they shouted down the hecklers. And the hecklers, once they gave me my razz at the beginning, sat quietly for the entire speech, but then afterwards they blocked my car for a brief period of time. And we decided let's let them block it rather than injure anybody trying to plow our way through a crowd. So they were unhappy with some of our Iraq policies, a variety of grievances against the United States, and globalism and things of that nature.

MR. PAGE: So fence-mending needs to be done there by the US?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I didn't really think it was all that significant an incident. It's the kind of protest one sees these days, people protesting as they should have the right to do.

MS. MARTIN: We must take a break, and then more of our discussion with Secretary Colin Powell. Stay with us.

(Commercial Break.)

MS. MARTIN: Welcome back. Our guest, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who just returned from a week-long, four-nation tour of Africa.

The war in Sudan has been basically the forgotten war, civil unrest there for ten years. What role will the US Government play in it? There has been some pressure for the US to step up its involvement with Sudan, when you look at the oppression of Christians, slavery, and so forth.

Any action there?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. Just about any bad problem you can think of, you can find in the Sudan, whether it is poverty, whether it is famine, whether it is slavery, whether it is trafficking in people, religious differences, the north versus the south. The whole international community has failed to solve this problem over the last ten years.

I have appointed, with the President's approval and his direction, Andrew Natsios, the AID Administrator, to be the humanitarian coordinator for US efforts in all of Sudan, north and south. We have a ship on the way now into the region with 40,000 tons of additional food supplies for the people of Sudan. In the near future, the very near future, I will be appointing, with the approval of the President, a special envoy to Sudan to try to get the political reconciliation process started again.

What this country needs is an end to conflict, then you can start to deal with very, very difficult issues that have been there for generations -- the north versus south, Arabs versus Christians, light-skinned versus dark-skinned. Everything -- you name it -- it's all there. A lot of countries on the margins of Sudan playing the role that is sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

So the United States is prepared to do more. We have completed our review and now we are taking action with the appointment of envoys, getting our humanitarian efforts straightened out. I hope we can do a better job in helping the international community to resolve the conflict within the Sudan.

MR. WILLIAMS: The United States believes that US troops are required in Bosnia and Kosovo for human rights purposes, but in Africa they say troops are not required in places like Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Congo; in fact, they say that African nations should provide those troops themselves.

If the African nations are asked to provide those troops, why can't the Europeans provide their troops? Isn't there some contradiction here in the policy?

SECRETARY POWELL: The issue really is what is the military's response that you need for the situation that is existing, and how best to handle that. We believe that African nations have the capability to put troops in the field that are perhaps better suited for the kinds of challenges that are going to be faced there than sending in US troops.

Frankly, there is a limit to how many places you can send US troops whenever a problem arises, so we have tried to be helpful in the provision of those troops. We have been training battalions. We currently are getting ready to train two more Nigerian battalions. We have trained three already. We have trained a Ghanaian battalion. We are providing some $300 million the coming year to support the 17,500 UN troops that will be in Sierra Leone.

So we have to be careful where we commit our troops and under what sort of circumstances. It's not because it's in Africa we won't go. We went. I committed troops to Somalia. And it's not just the Somalia experience that suggests we should never do that again; it's that you have to make sure it is a mission that really does require US combat troops and you can't handle it with other kinds of units from within the region.

I see nothing wrong with having a regional -- within Africa -- response to these peacekeeping and peacemaking efforts, and I don't think you always have to have a US or American response to get something done. We can provide money, training, equipment, and help African nations deal with their problems on a regional basis.

MR. WILLIAMS: Secretary Powell, let's talk about another African hot spot, the Congo. More than 2 million people dead in that civil war, which has all the trappings of a regional conflict -- the involvement of troops from Rwanda and Uganda. What message did you take to that region?

SECRETARY POWELL: I have met with the president of the Congo and the president of Rwanda several months ago when the conflict was really at its height and in one of its most tense moments -- President Kabila and President Kagame -- and since then they have started to find a way back to the Lusaka process and bring the conflict down. Armies are leaving, I spoke with the president of Uganda, President Museveni, when I was there and encouraged him to get his troops out quickly. And he said he is in the process of doing that, and also to bring out the troops belonging to Mr. Bemba, which is having something of a destabilizing impact there.

So we are hard at work trying to get foreign armies out of the Congo and UN monitors and peacekeepers in, and we are supporting the deployment of those UN monitors and peacekeepers. So this is another area where I think we can be helpful with diplomatic efforts, political efforts, aid efforts, support efforts, without necessarily sending in US troops to solve the problem and be the peacekeeping force.

MR. PAGE: Secretary Powell, hopping over to Zimbabwe, you while in South Africa castigated or, if I may say so, criticized Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe for the last 20 years, formerly Rhodesia. Of late, he has supported policies that call for taking of land away from white farmers, et cetera.

What role can the US and South Africa play in persuading Mr. Mugabe to stand for a fair election in the upcoming campaign?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, I tried to play a role by speaking out rather forcefully that the problems in Zimbabwe is a political problem of a leader who doesn't know when the time has come to let the people decide how they will be governed in the future in a fair, open way. And in my conversations with President Mbeki and Foreign Minister Zuma in South Africa, I wanted to let them know that I was going to make this point in a very powerful way, and I did so. And Mr. Mugabe is not terribly pleased that I did so, but I did it because it is necessary for him to move in the right direction.

You also have an economic catastrophe occurring in Zimbabwe as a result of the political turmoil that has been created by his actions. As I said to my South African friends when I was there, this is going to spill over into South Africa. There is a crisis emerging now that's going to spill over into South Africa when the Zimbabweans start moving to someplace where they can get food and safety, and that's going to be in South Africa.

MS. MARTIN: Secretary Powell, in closing, in the press reports there were accounts of the Africans having a great sense of pride with you being the first black Secretary of State and also visiting them early on. What was the response on your end when you were there for a week in your role as Secretary of State, the first black Secretary of State?

SECRETARY POWELL: It was very moving. I went to a medical school in Mali and the students were just swarming. My security agents were getting nervous, not out of any danger but because the crowds might hurt themselves or hurt somebody in my delegation because they were anxious to say hello. So I was very heartened by that.

And I made the case to them, I'm here as the American Secretary of State, not the American black Secretary of State, but I'm proud that I'm black -- always have been and always will be, and I always will be black. At one point in my discussions I said to them, you know, I always want to be known as the African American who also happens to be Secretary of State because there are a lot of people who came before me who suffered and struggled in this country. I never could have become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Secretary of State or National Security Advisor. I made it because they were willing to do what they did in their time to give me these opportunities. I will never look away from that heritage or background, and I will always try to pass that legacy on to other black people in the world, whether they are here in America or in Africa.

MS. MARTIN: Secretary of State Colin Powell, thanks again.

SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you, Cheryl.