If given the opportunity to be heard and to fully and freely participate in their government, I truly believe that the people of Eritrea can do great things for their country.

We are encouraged by the small steps toward progress I have outlined above and we would urge the government to take much larger strides forward by ending indefinite national service and releasing political prisoners.

They have come to that very strong realization that they have to partner with their neighbors.

The more we can uplift the African people, the better fight we can have against terrorism.

I would not designate Nigeria as a country because we have huge, huge and very active Christian populations in Nigeria throughout the southern parts of Nigeria into the middle belt and even in northern Nigeria, and we have a huge Muslim…

If I were an appropriator, I would be giving more money to democracy and governance.

We are having a human rights dialogue being led by our Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, Tom Malinowski.

We do. I was in China about 4 weeks ago for our annual consultation with the Chinese.

We cannot draw a line and say we are not going to work with you on terrorism because of human rights violations.

We condemn human rights abuses. We regularly condemn those abuses by security forces and by governments.

I think we have to work with governments to fight terrorism, but we also have to continue to work with these governments to address human rights deficiencies in their countries.

I hope that AFRICOM is not folded back into EUCOM because what AFRICOM has meant for us is that we have a military that is more focused on Africa.