[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[January 16, 1994]
[Pages 85-91]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Interview With Reporters Aboard Air Force One 
January 16, 1994

President's Trip

    The President. Are you all exhausted?
    Q. Yes.
    Q. Aren't you?
    The President. Yes. I really just wanted to say that I think we had 
a good trip, and I'm sorry I put you through so much. You must be tired. 
I know I am. But I think it was really a good trip. And I appreciate how 
much work was done on it.
    I thought we might just talk for a few minutes about it, kind of in 
a wrap-up fashion. But before we do, I wanted to say that after I got 
back on the plane, I called Prime Minister Rabin and President Mubarak 
to report on my meeting with Asad, and I attempted to call but was 
unsuccessful in reaching King Fahd--I'm going to talk to him probably 
tomorrow morning--just to tell them what had gone on in the meeting and 
what the statement was and get their sense of what was going to happen. 
Rabin had watched it live.
    Q. What?

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    The President. Rabin had watched it live. And I couldn't tell 
whether Mubarak did or not. I think he did, but we had kind of a staticy 
connection, so I couldn't be sure. But everybody seemed to be pretty 
positive about it.
    Anyway, looking back over the trip, I can say without any hesitation 
that it certainly met all of our objectives when we went on the trip. 
Everything that we hoped would happen did. And I think there were 
basically three big elements to it.
    The first was the prospect of really uniting Europe for the first 
time since nations have been on the landscape there. I'm very encouraged 
by the initial reaction to the Partnership For Peace. All the Central 
and Eastern European countries and the Visegrad nations have said they 
want to join. Russia, Ukraine expressed an interest. We've now heard 
some interest from Romania. So I'm feeling quite good about that. Even 
the Swiss said they wanted to think about whether there was some way 
they could support it even if they didn't join, given their historic 
neutrality. I feel very good about it.
    The second important thing, of course, was the nuclear breakthrough, 
the agreement with Ukraine following the agreement that had been reached 
earlier in the year with Belarus and Kazakhstan, not having our nuclear 
weapons targeted at anybody, not having their nuclear weapons targeted 
at us. It's a really important next step. And we also had some important 
discussions with the Russians about going in and making sure that START 
I is completely ratified and implemented and that START II is ratified 
and implemented and that we keep thinking about what further steps there 
ought to be. So this was a very good meeting--trip in that respect.
    And then the third aspect of the trip was the whole movement toward 
not only uniting Europe economically and politically but kind of getting 
growth back into the system. I met with the leaders of the European 
Union. We talked about how to implement the GATT agreement, how to 
follow up on it, how important it was to get the growth rates up in 
Europe again, how important it was to open new markets to Eastern Europe 
and the states of the former Soviet Union. And then, of course, I talked 
about economics in Prague and then spent a lot of time dealing with it 
in Russia. And I must say, even though they've had a really tough time, 
I think they're on the verge of having some good things happen 
economically.
    For all the criticism of the pace of reform in Russia, one of the 
little-known facts about it is that in terms of privatizing companies, 
Russia's actually running ahead of the pace of the other former 
Communist economies. There's some other problems they have to deal with, 
their inflation problems and just having a legal framework that will 
attract more investment, but I feel quite good about that. Just from my 
experience in Moscow, I really think that while there are, as you would 
imagine, uncertainties among the people there because of all the 
hardships and the difficulty of sort of visualizing the future, I think 
there's a lot of emotion to the idea that the people ought to rule the 
country. I didn't get much sense in anybody that they wanted a more 
authoritarian government. I think they like the fact that the voters are 
in the driver's seat, even though they're still trying to come to grips 
with exactly what that means and how to translate it into policies.
    So I would say on grounds of building a united Europe in terms of 
security, where all the neighbors agree to respect one another's 
borders, moving to continually reduce the nuclear threat to the world, 
and supporting economic and political reform in Europe and the former 
Communist countries, this was a very, very successful trip.
    And that's before we did the Middle East thing today. I went to this 
meeting hoping that we could get a signal from President Asad that was 
clear and unmistakable that he was ready to make a complete peace. Today 
was the first time he had ever explicitly said he wanted an end to the 
hostilities with Israel, willing to make peace with Israel as opposed to 
saying something like ``peace in the Middle East,'' and that peace to 
him meant normal peaceful relations, which is a general term that 
encompasses trade, tourism and travel, and embassies. So that was very 
significant. That sends a very clear signal now back to the Israelis.
    He also said that he didn't want just Syria alone to be resolved, he 
wanted to see the Jordanian peace completed, and he wanted to see the 
Lebanese peace completed. And he said something that everybody wanted to 
hear in the Middle East, which is that he wanted Lebanon to be an 
independent country with a peace with Israel. So I was quite pleased 
with that.

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    So from now on, the question of the differences between Syria and 
the United States, which we spent about an hour on today, spent a 
significant portion of our meeting on it, because I thought it was 
important that neither one of us be under any illusions about the 
differences that are still there and because I think it's important in 
this peace negotiation that we both have absolute credibility with each 
other. So we thought we had to spend some time on it.
    We agreed to try to get beyond sort of a general and accusatory 
level by letting the Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of 
Syria develop a process to specifically identify these things that 
trouble the United States so much and to give them a chance to 
specifically identify things about our policy toward them or the Middle 
East in general that trouble them and to try to set in motion a process 
for working through it. Because every report I've gotten over the years 
of the encounters--and you know, Asad's spent a lot of time talking to 
Westerners because of the Middle East issue--things always stop, in my 
judgment, at a level that is too general, where people are charging and 
countercharging and there's no real effort to lay the kind of factual 
basis that has to be laid if you're going to really argue that people 
should change their policies. So I feel pretty good about it.

Pan Am 103 Bombing

    Q. Were you satisfied, sir, that there was no Syrian involvement or 
complicity in the Pan Am 103 bombing?
    The President. First I raised that, and he raised it again. I can 
tell you that we have absolutely no evidence of it and that he flatly 
denied it. And he reminded us and me that a Syrian was killed on Pan Am 
103 who was the only son of a woman from his home area. And he said it 
was a--he characterized it as a cruel and senseless thing--had no point, 
killing all those students. And he said, ``This is an issue I will never 
close or never consider closed. If you ever have any evidence that any 
Syrian is involved, you just let me know, and we will take the 
appropriate action.''

Russia

    Q. Back on Russia, when were you told about that Mr. Gaydar was 
going to resign? Who told you that, and how serious do you think it is?
    The President. All the days kind of run together. Yeltsin told me 
that--here's how he characterized it. I wasn't quite sure exactly how 
to--he told me that he thought there was a strong possibility that 
Gaydar would decide that he needed to devote all of his time to leading 
the party that he took into the Duma and building his political strength 
both in the Parliament and out in the country and that he was concerned 
about building it up politically and making it effective in the Duma.
    He said--the reason, you see--you say ``when''--I'm trying to 
remember. I think it was sometime during the first day as opposed to the 
second day's conversations that he said it. But I'm sorry I can't 
remember when.
    Q. What are your impressions of Asad?
    The President. Let me answer the question. He also went out of his 
way to tell me, though, he said, ``We are not going to reverse our 
reform course, and we don't want to slow it down, but we do want to 
cushion the impact of it better. We want to have a better sense of how 
it affects people.'' And he said, ``We also want to try to demonstrate 
the successes more clearly. We want to be able to show people that this 
has been done.'' And in that connection--and you know what he asked? He 
was very pleased with a lot of the initiatives that I told him we worked 
on, like we were working to get the G-7 to make sure that the countries 
that buy oil from Russia, for example, that buy energy from Russia, 
could pay for it in a timely fashion so they can use that money to help 
them build their country. That's a big deal to them. He was interested 
in getting his next IMF money in a timely fashion. He was interested in 
making sure that the accumulated debt, once he's making payments on it, 
can be rescheduled. In other words, he didn't want to slow down reform. 
He wanted to make it work better, and he wanted to make sure that they 
had some strategies for cushioning the impact on ordinary people. He 
also said that he would keep a team that was reform oriented, and it 
would be a good, competent team.
    Gaydar left the government once before, and the reforms didn't stop. 
So the only thing I encouraged him to do was, I said, ``You proved 
you're committed to democracy. You've stayed with this reform. You've 
still got some tough decisions to make.'' I told him, I said, ``I 
contacted the G-7 before I came up here. We want to help cushion the 
impact of reform, and

[[Page 88]]

we want to help make sure the people of Russia know what you're doing to 
help the economy. And if you're going to keep on the reform path, it'll 
be easier for us to do that, because then we'll be able to make sure 
that the IMF and the World Bank support you as well as these individual 
countries.''
    I found it to be a satisfactory conversation. You know he's in 
some--the political situation over there is not free of difficulty. I 
mean, you just only have to look at the makeup of the lower House of the 
Parliament to draw that conclusion. But I think he'll try to hang in 
there, mostly because if you look at the go-slower approach, you look at 
Ukraine and you see they're in worse shape than Russia.
    And one of the things--and let me just say that this is something I 
didn't even talk about on the trip--but one of the things I want to 
spend a lot more time doing when I get back, and have our people try to 
be helpful on, is trying to dissect what we mean by reform, because 
there are at least three big elements to it. There's the privatization 
of government-owned companies, which Russia is doing very, very well, 
better than anybody else. There's the management of fiscal and monetary 
policy, which means you've got to keep inflation down at a reasonable 
level to get private investment, which means you can't just keep on 
printing money to pay for subsidies in a dying industry. They're having 
trouble with that, although they're doing better than they were last 
year. Then the third area is making sure you've got the infrastructure, 
if I can use that much-maligned word, that will attract investment from 
outside the country and will permit the markets to work. That means 
you've got to have a system of laws relating to private property, 
contracts, bankruptcy, clear, unambiguous taxation laws, that sort of 
stuff. If you look at Czechoslovakia, which is the most--I mean, the 
Czech Republic, which is the most successful of the former Communist 
countries, they're behind Russia on privatization but ahead on the 
infrastructure.
    So the one thing that I think we need to focus on is now that 
they've got a constitutional democracy, and all of them, even the ones 
who want to slow down reform, want more investment, which is 
interesting--they all want more investment, even the ones that think, 
``Well, reform has gone too fast''--they might be for the first time in 
a real position now to write some of the laws in such a way that will 
attract a lot more investment. For example, if you want to make an 
energy investment in Russia, you may not care what the rate of 
privatization of small companies is, but you do want to know if you put 
the money in there and who you're investing with, is your investment 
good, what do you do in case of breach of contract, what are your tax 
obligations if you make money? Just clear, simple, straightforward stuff 
that we take for granted, that I think they now have to do a little more 
work on.
    Q. How concerned was Yeltsin about the rise of ultranationalist 
sentiment? And did you give him any counsel on how to alleviate those 
feelings of humiliation?
    The President. Well, let me see how I should answer that. I don't 
want to talk in great detail about our conversation, because I think he 
should be able to answer that. I don't want to read his mind for you. I 
think that he believes that the more the voters know about some of the 
positions taken by the ultranationalists, including Zhirinovsky, the 
more likely they will be to pull away from them. And he believes that 
the promises which were made by the ultranationalists could not 
reasonably be expected to be kept. So I think that his view is that what 
he needs to do is try to do the best he can with his job, turn things 
around, show some successes, and that that's the best way to dampen them 
down.
    One thing I did say to him was that just following the campaign from 
afar, as we all did, that the ultranationalists seemed in some ways--in 
some ways the Communists did, too--to lay too much of an uncontested 
claim to the feelings of national pride. That is, the reformers, we all 
know, didn't run in a coherent bloc and didn't present a coherent 
message. And as the Democrats know in the United States--I kicked him on 
purpose because he's talked about this--it's sort of like the problems 
that the Democrats had for the last 20 years winning the Presidency. You 
could say, here's a problem and here's my four-point solution to the 
problem, but if all you get is the good government vote, that's never 
going to be a majority, especially when people are hurting.
    So the only counsel I gave him was that--Yeltsin cut through all the 
traditional barriers when he stood up on that tank, or even earlier when 
he became Gorbachev's successor. He embodied the change and the pride of 
Russia. You didn't have to choose. You saw the pride of

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Russia and the change in a person. And by his actions he did that.
    And what I suggested to him was that his group, they needed to find 
spokespersons, and they needed to find ways of saying what they were 
about that also says, ``We're pro-worker, we're pro-family, we're 
anticrime, and we're for bringing the pride of this nation back. And our 
plan will make the--[inaudible].'' Because I think to be fair to them, 
their task has been so daunting that they would naturally become 
absorbed in the overwhelming burdens of just doing the details of it. 
These other guys were never in government, you know; they had the 
freedom of just going out and making speeches. And the only thing I 
cautioned to Yeltsin, I said, ``Look, I saw the Democrats in America get 
killed for years because they go out there and they talk about problem 
X, Y, and Z and have a four-point program for every one. And they might 
be right, but if it didn't resonate with a larger concern to the voters, 
it could never be translated into a national mandate.'' And I think we 
had a great conversation about it, and I think he was interested in it, 
because he understands that that's how he got to be President in the 
first place, change and pride.
    Q. You don't think he's emotional enough?
    The President. Oh, no, I think he's deeply emotional enough. But in 
the last election, keep in mind, he put all of his prestige and effort 
into passing the Constitution. And he prevailed. So a lot of people 
voted for Boris Yeltsin and his constitution and also voted for the 
Communist candidate, the agrarian candidate, Zhirinovsky and his crowd. 
That's the point I'm trying to make. And he needs to win the overlap. He 
can't let them win the overlap if he's going to govern the country and 
move it forward.

President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria

    Q. How about Asad, what are your impressions?
    The President. Smart. Very tough.
    Q. What is that?
    The President. He's very smart and very tough and has a very clear 
view of what he thinks has happened in the Middle East in the last 25 
years and what he thinks ought to happen. On the other hand, I think 
that he has reached the conclusion that it is in the interest of his 
people, his administration, and his legacy to make a meaningful and 
lasting peace. I believe that.
    Q. [Inaudible]--talk about moving his troops out of Lebanon at all?
    The President. Well, he said, first of all, that he thought that--he 
agreed with me that there ought to be a peace in Lebanon--agreement that 
operated and was developed in parallel with the Syrian track and that 
the end of it ought to be a fully independent Lebanon, an accord 
consistent with the Taif accords, which then--therefore, the inevitable 
answer is yes.
    Q. Did he ask you, if there was peace between Israel and Syria, we 
would follow through on our commitment to commit U.S. troops to the 
Golan Heights in order to keep the peace?
    The President. He did not ask it just like that. He said that there 
needed to be mutual security guarantees, that Israel's security was not 
all that was at stake, that Damascus was closer to the Golan than Tel 
Aviv or Jerusalem, and that artillery would go up the hill quite nicely. 
That's what he said. He said, ``We're not talking about rifles here.'' 
He said, ``Rifles--all the advantage goes to the people on top of the 
Golan. When you're talking about artillery, it's a mixed bag.'' He did 
not breach that. What he said was that both sides would need security 
assurances.
    Q. We would be willing to commit our troops if there was a serious 
peace agreement?
    The President. What I said to him and what our country has said 
repeatedly for years now is that, obviously, if both sides made an 
agreement and both sides wanted this, we would have to give it serious 
consideration; that's something I would have to talk to the Congress 
about, do other things, that I couldn't make any kind of commitment, 
particularly in the absence of an expressed decision by Israel and 
Syria, but we would certainly give it consideration.
    Q. You certainly think you pushed the momentum on this.
    The President. Oh, yes, I think it's forward now. We've pushed it 
forward. It's clearly the biggest step forward since September 13th. 
Maybe in some ways a bigger one because we all knew on September 13th 
that in the end the only way to hold this thing together was to get the 
rest of it done.
    Q. Did you bring up the issue of the Syrian control of Hezbollah and 
other terrorist groups that are operating through Syrian-controlled 
Lebanon in attacks upon Israel?

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    The President. I brought up Hezbollah, the Jibril group, and the PKK 
specifically, as I said in my press conference that I did. I did. And he 
gave his view that he's stated many times. He stated his position; I 
restated mine. I said, ``Look, we're not going to resolve this today,'' 
but that we can't have normal relations between the two of us, as 
opposed to what's going on in the Middle East, until they are resolved. 
And so I suggested that we give the Secretary of State and the Syrian 
Foreign Minister the opportunity to develop a mechanism to try to 
honestly and openly deal with these issues and let us bring our concerns 
in real specificity to them, let them respond, and see if we can work 
through it.

Trip Highlights

    Q. What was the real highlight of your trip? What will be the thing 
that you truly remember, sentimentally, emotionally, spiritually?
    The President. Well, the sentimental highlight was walking across 
the bridge in Prague for the first time in 24 years with Havel with this 
enormous sense of pride I had at the freedom that he had brought to the 
country and what I remembered from all the young people when I was there 
in Czechoslovakia 24 years ago, how deeply anti-Communist they were 24 
years ago, how desperately they wanted to be free. And just walking 
across the bridge with me, this guy who had gone to prison for his 
beliefs and who so completely represented the best of his culture, you 
know, was the President of the country. And then we walked across the 
bridge, and then had dinner in that little pub with the couple that I 
stayed with 24 years ago. That was the sentimental highlight. The 
emotional highlight was going into that cathedral that has just been 
resanctified--that Stalin tore down and turned into a public restroom--
and being invited by the priest to light a candle for my mother. Those 
are just personal things, you know.
    Q. Any disappointments?
    The President. No. I still think we've got to--I wouldn't call it a 
disappointment because to be disappointed it has to fall short of your 
expectations--but I think we've got some work to do within NATO in 
defining this whole area of out-of-area missions. Is NATO going to have 
a military mission beyond protecting the security of its members and the 
Partnership For Peace?
    I'm more convinced than I was when I went there that the Partnership 
For Peace is the right idea at this time and that we're giving Europe a 
chance to have a different history than its past, and it's enormously 
significant. But we don't have--the NATO--NATO was never organized or 
set up for out-of-area missions. They've done a terrific job with the 
airlift. I talked to some of our personnel today in Switzerland who were 
working with the airlift. They've done a great job with the mechanics of 
the embargo. It was never conceived that NATO would use force in any 
way, even in a very limited way, outside guaranteeing the security of 
its members. And I just think that, not only in terms of Bosnia but just 
generally, that whole thing has to really be thought through.

Partnership For Peace

    Q. Just a last question. Did you expect it to take off, the whole 
question of partnership, like it did? And, two, who thought of the idea 
first? Was this an NSC--saying we've got to go there with something 
positive?
    The President. The answer to the first question is, I didn't know 
what to expect. But it's taken off; it's exceeded my expectations. I 
mean, I just knew how passionately I felt that it was the right 
approach. And I knew that I had to work through in my own mind, sort of; 
it was one of those things that the more I thought about it, the 
stronger I felt about it. It's not something, as you all know, that just 
knocks you off your feet once you hear about it; we all know that. But 
the more I thought about it, the stronger I felt about it. And I think 
what's happened was there began to be a consensus in Europe that this 
was what made sense; that we had to try for a better future, not just a 
better division than we had before the cold war but a future without 
division; and that if we could do it in a way that would permit us--if 
circumstances turned against that dream--to still do the responsible 
thing by those that clearly were part of the West that wanted to be part 
of it, then we ought to do it.
    Tony would have to answer the other question in terms of the label 
and all that, but it was an American idea. We started by consulting all 
the allies; we realized that there were a whole range of reasons for 
reservations for immediately expanding membership. And then there were 
some who had some question about whether NATO had any role at all. And 
we talked

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through what our objectives were independent of NATO: What would you 
like to have happen in Europe in 10 years? What is it we're trying to 
get done? And then all of our folks went back together and came back 
with that idea. I have no idea who thought of it, who labeled it or 
who--I got it through the NSC and State and Defense. We all talked it 
through before I got there, because it was essentially a military 
training and planning concept. And I'm sure somebody knows the answer to 
your question, but I don't.
    Q. I'm sure that it was a synthesis.
    The President. Yes. I think it's something they just sort of came 
to. Our process worked.

Note: The interview began at 2:58 p.m. e.s.t. In his remarks, the 
President referred to Yegor Gaydar, former First Deputy Prime Minister 
of Russia; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party 
in Russia; and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.