Bill Clinton
First of all, I want to thank my long time friend, President Havel and Elie, thank you for hosting this Forum and for not canceling it. It is more important than ever that people who have tried to be the conscience of the world on these issues meet in the aftermath of what happened on September 11th. I have many friends and former colleagues here, I thank my former Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck and President De Klerk, it is good to see you and Foreign Minister Ramos-Horta, thank you, it is good to see you; it is good to see you in office instead of in my office, it is good. And I would like to thank Ambassador Stapleton for meeting me this morning and for his service here.
Let me first of all say that anything I say today should be viewed in the context of my most important position now which is that I am just a citizen of my country who strongly supports the united efforts of the American people with their allies under the leadership of President Bush to deal with the present terrorist threat. And I have been in that position, I know what it is like to be second guest, so I did not come here to give public advice today but to give public support to the present efforts.
What I would like to do is to let behind that and to try to answer the questions that Elie asked about what happened and why. And I think I would like to begin with a story. On September 11th, the terrorists that targeted New York, Mr. Bin Laden and his people, they doubtlessly thought that it was a great thing that they can bring down the World Trade Center Towers, for it is what they saw as symbols of corrupt materialism. But I live there. And my wife represents the people of New York and the city and also had the honor of appearing at this Forum a couple of years ago. To me, the New York I know represents a big step towards the world most of us are trying to create, which advances human rights and global responsibility. There are people there from a 150 different racial and ethnic groups, from every conceivable religious tradition in the world, living and working together. There were firemen and policemen who died in hundreds to save the lives of people that the terrorists were trying to kill. I do not think they are symbols of corrupt Western materialism. There was a man who came all the way to New York from Oklahoma City because his wife was murdered in Oklahoma City by an American terrorist who blew up a federal building there. And he told me he had no one to talk to when it happened to him so he drove himself to New York and sat there, day after day, talking to the victims. Another man, who was on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center Tower, when the plane hit on the 85th floor, he immediately got everyone off his floor and then, with a friend, carried a woman who was disabled, down 84 flights of stairs to safety, before the building collapsed. I met a woman who was a school principal who lost her sister in the World Trade Center and lost her school because it was next door and terribly damaged. She immediately held school again, as soon as she could find a place for the children to meet.
I met victims' families from Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Mexico, South America, Australia, and, yes, from the Middle East. We have lost a lot of Muslims in the World Trade Center on September 11th, people who came to America to build their lives, not lose their lives.
So the New York I know represents a future that is very different from the future that the people who blew their lives apart want. And I think we should begin with that.
The United States, to be sure, has not had a perfect record in the world, and we can be criticized. But I think it is important to know we are dealing here with a basic struggle for the fundamental character of the 21st century. And that most of us have a very different notion than Mr. Bin Laden and the Taliban do about the nature of Truth, the value of life, and the content of community.
Most of us come out of traditions that teach us that we should value the truth and seek it but no one will ever have the whole Truth because we are limited, finite and imperfect human beings.
They believe they have the Truth. And the world is divided into those who agree with them, and therefore have the Truth, and those who do not. Fanatics throughout history have believed that. That leads us to very different conclusions about the value of life: We believe that - no matter what your racial, or religious, or ethnic background and your political views - your life has value. And we have something to learn from you.
They believe that the world is divided into three categories: the Muslims who agree with them, the Muslims who do not agree with them - who are heretics, and the non-Muslims - who are infidels. And everybody in the latter two categories are their legitimate targets, even a six year old girl who went to work with her mother on the morning of September 11th in the World Trade Center.
We believe that anybody can be a part of our community who accepts the rule of engagement: that everybody counts, everyone deserves a chance, we all to better if we work together. We are free to celebrate our diversity because we know our common humanity is more important.
They believe community is a group of people who think alike, dress alike, act alike and whose rules are enforced, as we have all seen now from the excerpts of that courageous movie Behind the Veil where people who have beaten them in public, paint their windows black and sometimes shoot them for doing what they are not supposed to do.
Now, I think it is important to get the basic facts out because in America, when I go to the schools the children want to know: why do they hate us so much? Children in New York in lower Manhattan, just in lower Manhattan, come from eighty or more different ethnic and racial groups and they live together every day. They want to know: Why do they hate us so much? And the second think I get asked by nine-year-old children, the kinds of things you hope your children were never asking: How did bin Laden get these people to commit suicide? And so I answer these questions as best I can. But it all starts from our very different views of the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. Therefore, I will say again, I think it is absolutely imperative that we win that particular fight we are now engaged in Afghanistan.
However, beyond that it seems to me that there are deeper sets of questions. If we want a world which has more human rights and more global responsibility, the world has to have people who are free to exercise those rights, who have a genuine opportunity to realize them, who recognize their responsibility to make the most of them, and there must be a global community that supports the development of those rights, a community that does not make exclusive claims to the truth, but instead is rooted in our common humanity and the obligations that flow from that. Now, let me say what I think that means. I think it means that we have an obligation, those of us who come form wealthier countries, to increase the benefits and reduce the burdens of the 21st century world. And I would like to just ask you briefly to go through an exercise that I try to take my American audiences through every time when I speak about this and I will do it quite briefly.
If we were meeting on September 10th, the day before the terrorist incident, and I had asked you this question, what would your answer be? If I asked you on September 10th: What is the dominant force of the 21st century world?
If you live in a wealthy country and you are an optimist, you might have answered: It seems to me one of four things. You might have said: the global economy. It has made my country rich and it has lifted more people out of poverty than any in the last twenty years and ever before. You might have answered, secondly, no, it is the revolution and information technology. All of us are on TV all over the world today. When I became President in January 1993, there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web. When I left office eight years later, there were 350 million. In eight years? Or, thirdly, you might have said, no, it is the scientific revolution. We are about to find out what is in the black holes in outer space; the sequencing of the human genome has raised a real prospect that in countries with good health systems babies will soon be born with life expectancies over 90 years. Or you might have said, the most important factor of the early 21st century is the explosion of democracy and diversity. In last few years when I was president, I had great honor of serving at the first time in history when more than half the world's people lived under governments of their own choosing and when in the wealthier countries, there was greater and greater religious, racial and ethnic diversity than ever before - people reaching out across the lines that have divided us since the dawn of time.
On the other hand, if I had asked you this question and you were a more pessimistic person, what Hillary refers to 'if you and your family is a designated warrior', or you live in a developing country whose times are tough, you might have given the following answers: you might have said, the global economy is one of the problems because half the people live on less than two dollars a day; a billion people live on less than a dollar a day; a billion and half people never get a clean glass of water; a woman dies every minute in child birth; one in four deaths every year comes from AIDS, TBC, malaria and infections related to diarrhea; a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Or you might have said, no, it's the environmental crisis of the globe. If the world warms for the next 50 years as much as it did the last ten, we will lose whole nations in the Pacific; we will lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island; we will lose the Florida everglades in America, one of our most precious resources. There will be literally tens of millions of food refugees and a lot more violence and terrorism ? unless we do something about it. Or you might have said, no, long before global warming gets us, the health epidemics will. Public health systems all across the world have broken down; we have 36 million AIDS cases but if we do not change direction, we will have a hundred million in four years. The fastest growing rates of AIDS are not in Africa, where most of the cases are, but they are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's back door; the second fastest growing rate in the Caribbean on our front door; the third fastest growing rate in India, the world's biggest democracy; and the Chinese just admitted that they have twice as many AIDS cases as they thought, and only four percent of the people know how the disease is contracted and spread. If we do not do something about this, this soon will be the worst plague since the 14th century, when the bubonic plague killed one in every four people in Europe. Or you might have said, even on September 10th, no, I think the biggest problem would be terrorism, driven by the explosion of population in poor countries, and ancient racial and religious and tribal and ethnic conflicts married with modern means of death; because a lot of people were thinking about it, even before September 10th.
Here is the point I want to make: if you take the four positive things - the economy, the medical advances, the technology advances, democracy and diversity; and the four negative things - poverty, climate change, the health crisis and the conflicts rooted in racial and religious tensions with modern means of death, they all reflect the same thing: the most stunning degree of interdependence in the history of humanity. If you take down walls and collapse distances, and spread information, you will give people more benefits than ever before. But - even if you live in the United States - you will also give them more vulnerability than ever before because the distance and the walls are not there and analogies in the hands of people who did not have it before. So what happened on September 11th is the dark underside of many of the good things that have been unfolding in the world over the last 10 or 15 years.
It is therefore necessary, in my view, if we want the world of unprecedented inter-dependency to be positive rather than negative for most people, to develop a far higher level of consciousness among our leaders and among our people than has ever existed. We have to get the people in the developing world to turn away from primitive hatreds; we have to get people in the developed world to turn away from shortsighted selfishness. So, yes, in the moment we have to win the fight we are in. But over the long run, we have got to figure out how to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens of this new age. Which means, for countries like the United States, we have to do more to combat global poverty; last years debt relief for the poorest countries was a good beginning. We funded two million micro enterprise loans when I was President. We should do more of that, much more. We have to do more to get all of our children to school. Brazil is the only developing country that I know of to have 97 % of its primary-school kids in schools because they paid their mothers who have their kids go to school. We should just fund that program everywhere in the world. We have to finance better health systems; the Secretary General of the UN who just won the Nobel Prize along with the organization, deservedly so, has asked us, the wealthy countries, to give seven to ten billion dollars a year for a trust fund to fight AIDS and other health problems. We ought to do it. You are going to cut that AIDS death rate in half in five years with no medicine if we could have those kinds of prevention programs and get the medicine out, there does not have to be a million cases in five years. We should be involved seriously in avoiding the kind of climate change catastrophes that will come to every country, and America should do its part.
This is the ultimate problem: interdependence. Today, America puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than anybody else. But it has just as bad an impact in East Timor as it does in America. In 30 years, if we do not set a good example, India and China will be putting more greenhouse gases in the air than we are, and it will have just as bad an impact in America as it does in India and China. This is serious business, and there is a lot of work there, lot of jobs for otherwise unemployed people if we do it right.
And finally, I think we have to deal with the challenges presented by the frustrated people of the world which means that we have to do much more to support democracy and human rights explicitly: the work of responsible NGOs, the work of peace and reconciliation. And we should recognize that it is hard. I was just thinking about what has happened in my lifetime. Martin Luther King killed by people who opposed him, Mandela imprisoned for almost 30 years by people who opposed him. Let's think of this - Gandhi killed by a Hindu who did not want to make India available to people of other faiths; Sadat killed by an Egyptian Muslim who thought he was not a good enough Muslim; Rabin killed by an Israeli Jew who thought he was not a good enough Israeli because he wanted to give the Palestinians a homeland.
These things are not easy to do. And, as I said before, I am quite well aware that we are not blameless. But, I would say again, we have to recognize some basic things: the world will be interdependent; the question is whether it will be good or bad for people, poor people in the developing world, and the people in the developed countries. We in the rich countries have to recognize that we can no longer claim for ourselves what we deny for others, and they agree that the world have to realize that they cannot redeem their suffering by our destruction. Like it or not, we will have to finally reach across the human divide in a way that no people ever have in all of human history. But if we do, we can give our children the future of our dreams.
Thank you.
Let me first of all say that anything I say today should be viewed in the context of my most important position now which is that I am just a citizen of my country who strongly supports the united efforts of the American people with their allies under the leadership of President Bush to deal with the present terrorist threat. And I have been in that position, I know what it is like to be second guest, so I did not come here to give public advice today but to give public support to the present efforts.
What I would like to do is to let behind that and to try to answer the questions that Elie asked about what happened and why. And I think I would like to begin with a story. On September 11th, the terrorists that targeted New York, Mr. Bin Laden and his people, they doubtlessly thought that it was a great thing that they can bring down the World Trade Center Towers, for it is what they saw as symbols of corrupt materialism. But I live there. And my wife represents the people of New York and the city and also had the honor of appearing at this Forum a couple of years ago. To me, the New York I know represents a big step towards the world most of us are trying to create, which advances human rights and global responsibility. There are people there from a 150 different racial and ethnic groups, from every conceivable religious tradition in the world, living and working together. There were firemen and policemen who died in hundreds to save the lives of people that the terrorists were trying to kill. I do not think they are symbols of corrupt Western materialism. There was a man who came all the way to New York from Oklahoma City because his wife was murdered in Oklahoma City by an American terrorist who blew up a federal building there. And he told me he had no one to talk to when it happened to him so he drove himself to New York and sat there, day after day, talking to the victims. Another man, who was on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center Tower, when the plane hit on the 85th floor, he immediately got everyone off his floor and then, with a friend, carried a woman who was disabled, down 84 flights of stairs to safety, before the building collapsed. I met a woman who was a school principal who lost her sister in the World Trade Center and lost her school because it was next door and terribly damaged. She immediately held school again, as soon as she could find a place for the children to meet.
I met victims' families from Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Mexico, South America, Australia, and, yes, from the Middle East. We have lost a lot of Muslims in the World Trade Center on September 11th, people who came to America to build their lives, not lose their lives.
So the New York I know represents a future that is very different from the future that the people who blew their lives apart want. And I think we should begin with that.
The United States, to be sure, has not had a perfect record in the world, and we can be criticized. But I think it is important to know we are dealing here with a basic struggle for the fundamental character of the 21st century. And that most of us have a very different notion than Mr. Bin Laden and the Taliban do about the nature of Truth, the value of life, and the content of community.
Most of us come out of traditions that teach us that we should value the truth and seek it but no one will ever have the whole Truth because we are limited, finite and imperfect human beings.
They believe they have the Truth. And the world is divided into those who agree with them, and therefore have the Truth, and those who do not. Fanatics throughout history have believed that. That leads us to very different conclusions about the value of life: We believe that - no matter what your racial, or religious, or ethnic background and your political views - your life has value. And we have something to learn from you.
They believe that the world is divided into three categories: the Muslims who agree with them, the Muslims who do not agree with them - who are heretics, and the non-Muslims - who are infidels. And everybody in the latter two categories are their legitimate targets, even a six year old girl who went to work with her mother on the morning of September 11th in the World Trade Center.
We believe that anybody can be a part of our community who accepts the rule of engagement: that everybody counts, everyone deserves a chance, we all to better if we work together. We are free to celebrate our diversity because we know our common humanity is more important.
They believe community is a group of people who think alike, dress alike, act alike and whose rules are enforced, as we have all seen now from the excerpts of that courageous movie Behind the Veil where people who have beaten them in public, paint their windows black and sometimes shoot them for doing what they are not supposed to do.
Now, I think it is important to get the basic facts out because in America, when I go to the schools the children want to know: why do they hate us so much? Children in New York in lower Manhattan, just in lower Manhattan, come from eighty or more different ethnic and racial groups and they live together every day. They want to know: Why do they hate us so much? And the second think I get asked by nine-year-old children, the kinds of things you hope your children were never asking: How did bin Laden get these people to commit suicide? And so I answer these questions as best I can. But it all starts from our very different views of the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. Therefore, I will say again, I think it is absolutely imperative that we win that particular fight we are now engaged in Afghanistan.
However, beyond that it seems to me that there are deeper sets of questions. If we want a world which has more human rights and more global responsibility, the world has to have people who are free to exercise those rights, who have a genuine opportunity to realize them, who recognize their responsibility to make the most of them, and there must be a global community that supports the development of those rights, a community that does not make exclusive claims to the truth, but instead is rooted in our common humanity and the obligations that flow from that. Now, let me say what I think that means. I think it means that we have an obligation, those of us who come form wealthier countries, to increase the benefits and reduce the burdens of the 21st century world. And I would like to just ask you briefly to go through an exercise that I try to take my American audiences through every time when I speak about this and I will do it quite briefly.
If we were meeting on September 10th, the day before the terrorist incident, and I had asked you this question, what would your answer be? If I asked you on September 10th: What is the dominant force of the 21st century world?
If you live in a wealthy country and you are an optimist, you might have answered: It seems to me one of four things. You might have said: the global economy. It has made my country rich and it has lifted more people out of poverty than any in the last twenty years and ever before. You might have answered, secondly, no, it is the revolution and information technology. All of us are on TV all over the world today. When I became President in January 1993, there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web. When I left office eight years later, there were 350 million. In eight years? Or, thirdly, you might have said, no, it is the scientific revolution. We are about to find out what is in the black holes in outer space; the sequencing of the human genome has raised a real prospect that in countries with good health systems babies will soon be born with life expectancies over 90 years. Or you might have said, the most important factor of the early 21st century is the explosion of democracy and diversity. In last few years when I was president, I had great honor of serving at the first time in history when more than half the world's people lived under governments of their own choosing and when in the wealthier countries, there was greater and greater religious, racial and ethnic diversity than ever before - people reaching out across the lines that have divided us since the dawn of time.
On the other hand, if I had asked you this question and you were a more pessimistic person, what Hillary refers to 'if you and your family is a designated warrior', or you live in a developing country whose times are tough, you might have given the following answers: you might have said, the global economy is one of the problems because half the people live on less than two dollars a day; a billion people live on less than a dollar a day; a billion and half people never get a clean glass of water; a woman dies every minute in child birth; one in four deaths every year comes from AIDS, TBC, malaria and infections related to diarrhea; a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Or you might have said, no, it's the environmental crisis of the globe. If the world warms for the next 50 years as much as it did the last ten, we will lose whole nations in the Pacific; we will lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island; we will lose the Florida everglades in America, one of our most precious resources. There will be literally tens of millions of food refugees and a lot more violence and terrorism ? unless we do something about it. Or you might have said, no, long before global warming gets us, the health epidemics will. Public health systems all across the world have broken down; we have 36 million AIDS cases but if we do not change direction, we will have a hundred million in four years. The fastest growing rates of AIDS are not in Africa, where most of the cases are, but they are in the former Soviet Union, on Europe's back door; the second fastest growing rate in the Caribbean on our front door; the third fastest growing rate in India, the world's biggest democracy; and the Chinese just admitted that they have twice as many AIDS cases as they thought, and only four percent of the people know how the disease is contracted and spread. If we do not do something about this, this soon will be the worst plague since the 14th century, when the bubonic plague killed one in every four people in Europe. Or you might have said, even on September 10th, no, I think the biggest problem would be terrorism, driven by the explosion of population in poor countries, and ancient racial and religious and tribal and ethnic conflicts married with modern means of death; because a lot of people were thinking about it, even before September 10th.
Here is the point I want to make: if you take the four positive things - the economy, the medical advances, the technology advances, democracy and diversity; and the four negative things - poverty, climate change, the health crisis and the conflicts rooted in racial and religious tensions with modern means of death, they all reflect the same thing: the most stunning degree of interdependence in the history of humanity. If you take down walls and collapse distances, and spread information, you will give people more benefits than ever before. But - even if you live in the United States - you will also give them more vulnerability than ever before because the distance and the walls are not there and analogies in the hands of people who did not have it before. So what happened on September 11th is the dark underside of many of the good things that have been unfolding in the world over the last 10 or 15 years.
It is therefore necessary, in my view, if we want the world of unprecedented inter-dependency to be positive rather than negative for most people, to develop a far higher level of consciousness among our leaders and among our people than has ever existed. We have to get the people in the developing world to turn away from primitive hatreds; we have to get people in the developed world to turn away from shortsighted selfishness. So, yes, in the moment we have to win the fight we are in. But over the long run, we have got to figure out how to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens of this new age. Which means, for countries like the United States, we have to do more to combat global poverty; last years debt relief for the poorest countries was a good beginning. We funded two million micro enterprise loans when I was President. We should do more of that, much more. We have to do more to get all of our children to school. Brazil is the only developing country that I know of to have 97 % of its primary-school kids in schools because they paid their mothers who have their kids go to school. We should just fund that program everywhere in the world. We have to finance better health systems; the Secretary General of the UN who just won the Nobel Prize along with the organization, deservedly so, has asked us, the wealthy countries, to give seven to ten billion dollars a year for a trust fund to fight AIDS and other health problems. We ought to do it. You are going to cut that AIDS death rate in half in five years with no medicine if we could have those kinds of prevention programs and get the medicine out, there does not have to be a million cases in five years. We should be involved seriously in avoiding the kind of climate change catastrophes that will come to every country, and America should do its part.
This is the ultimate problem: interdependence. Today, America puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than anybody else. But it has just as bad an impact in East Timor as it does in America. In 30 years, if we do not set a good example, India and China will be putting more greenhouse gases in the air than we are, and it will have just as bad an impact in America as it does in India and China. This is serious business, and there is a lot of work there, lot of jobs for otherwise unemployed people if we do it right.
And finally, I think we have to deal with the challenges presented by the frustrated people of the world which means that we have to do much more to support democracy and human rights explicitly: the work of responsible NGOs, the work of peace and reconciliation. And we should recognize that it is hard. I was just thinking about what has happened in my lifetime. Martin Luther King killed by people who opposed him, Mandela imprisoned for almost 30 years by people who opposed him. Let's think of this - Gandhi killed by a Hindu who did not want to make India available to people of other faiths; Sadat killed by an Egyptian Muslim who thought he was not a good enough Muslim; Rabin killed by an Israeli Jew who thought he was not a good enough Israeli because he wanted to give the Palestinians a homeland.
These things are not easy to do. And, as I said before, I am quite well aware that we are not blameless. But, I would say again, we have to recognize some basic things: the world will be interdependent; the question is whether it will be good or bad for people, poor people in the developing world, and the people in the developed countries. We in the rich countries have to recognize that we can no longer claim for ourselves what we deny for others, and they agree that the world have to realize that they cannot redeem their suffering by our destruction. Like it or not, we will have to finally reach across the human divide in a way that no people ever have in all of human history. But if we do, we can give our children the future of our dreams.
Thank you.
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