    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 23, 1999]
    [Pages 1582-1583]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1582]]

    Remarks at a National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
    Dinner
    September 23, 1999

        Thank you very much. If you've been following the news, you probably
    know I'm a little hoarse, and I know you're a little tired, so you won't
    have to put up with me for very long here.
        But I'm grateful for the chance to be here. I strongly support the
    NDI. I thank Ken Wollack and Paul Kirk and all the rest of you for the work you do. I thank my
    friend Senator Kennedy for being the
    embodiment of the commitment to democracy and freedom and human rights.
    Mrs. Kirkland, we're glad to see you here
    tonight, and I was honored to be at the service at Georgetown today.
        I want to thank you for giving this award to President
    Shevardnadze. He has been a friend of
    the United States and a friend of ours. He has stood for democracy. You
    heard him tell the story tonight. He's like anybody who has converted;
    once he converted, he was really stuck as a true believer. He has
    endured assassination attempts, illegal coup attempts. He has been
    through ethnic difficulties in his own country. He has been through
    pressures from the outside and problems from the inside. He has watched
    the economy go down and things come apart and come back together again.
    But once he decided he believed, he stayed hitched, and he embodies
    something that I think we don't think about enough.
        We talk a lot about what it takes to establish democracy. But once
    having established it, there are always people who will try to twist it
    to their own end, because we may eliminate communism from the world, but
    we have not eliminated lust for power or greed that leads to corruption
    or the hatreds and fears in the human heart that lead to the oppression
    of those who are different from us in race or religion or belong to some
    other minority group. This man has
    stayed the course when the price was high, and I thank you for awarding
    this to him tonight.
        I thank you for giving Hillary
    this award tonight. I'm sorry Monica McWilliams couldn't be here. That's the only problem--a ruptured
    appendix--I have seen those Irish women unable to overcome almost
    instantaneously. [Laughter]
        I was hoping--Hillary just got in
    today from out of town, and I didn't have a chance to talk to her about
    what she was going to say tonight. And I was sitting there in my chair,
    saying, ``Gosh, I hope you're going to tell them about those people in
    that African village.'' And I hope all my fellow Americans were
    listening tonight.
        I'll tell you, when we walked in that room in Senegal and all those
    women came with their token men supporters--[laughter]--a role with
    which I am becoming increasingly familiar--[laughter]--I'm telling you,
    it made chills run up and down my spine. And I wish, too, that every
    American could have seen it because then we would understand what a
    precious thing a vote is, and we would understand what a precious
    responsibility the public trust is.
        We, in our country, we want democracy for everybody else, but
    sometimes we forget that it carries responsibilities of citizenship and
    responsibilities for those of us in representative positions to keep it
    going. We think we're so strong, nothing can happen to our democracy.
    But when a man like Yitzhak Rabin is killed, when we see our friends in
    Northern Ireland in both communities vote for a clear path to the future
    of peace and reconciliation and then vote for representatives to get the
    job done and they still can't seem to get it done--we're nowhere near
    giving up, by the way; George Mitchell is
    over there working on it right now--but when you see that, it is an
    agony because you're always afraid somehow, something will happen to
    twist it awry.
        But what Hillary has done with
    this Vital Voices movement is simply to give voice and power to
    practical and compassionate women who find real human answers to human
    problems and who don't let lust for political power in and of itself or
    fear of those who are different from them or the desire for personal
    recognition get in the way of their desire to perfect democracy.
        What I would like to say to all of you tonight is, when we go to
    Bosnia or we go to Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing or we help to train
    Africans so they can prevent another Rwanda

    [[Page 1583]]

    or Burundi from occurring again, when we labor in America for peace in
    the Middle East and try to empower ordinary people everywhere, we should
    remember with humility that we are supposed to behave in our respective
    positions of citizenship and authority the way those village women did
    in Senegal, the way the Irish women do in the Vital Voices conference,
    the way the women did who had the microcredit loans that I have seen my
    wife visit on the Indian subcontinent
    or in Southeast Asia or in countless African and Latin American
    villages. People who have never had it before, you see, when they get
    it, they know what they want to do.
        And we in the United States have a serious responsibility to the
    rest of the world and to our own people to stand for peace and freedom
    and democracy and human rights, and to stand for it at home as well as
    abroad and to never forget that the purpose of power is to liberate the
    human spirit, not to grasp onto yesterday's arrangements in a fleeting
    life that no matter how long we hold onto power, will be over all too
    soon, anyway.
        Lane Kirkland was over 75 years
    old; to me, he was a very young man. We are all just here for a little
    while. The premise of democracy is, if people are truly empowered to
    live out their dreams and help other people solve their problems, that
    will bring more happiness and self-fulfillment than picking a few of us
    to increase our wealth and power or the power of our crowd to oppress
    another. And we need a little humility here along with our devotion to
    democracy.
        We need to remember the travails of a man like President
    Shevardnadze who puts his life on the
    line when he shows up for work. And we need to remember the courage of
    people like those Irish women or those Senegalese women and their hardy
    male supporters who believe they could change the world if they only had
    a voice.
        I am grateful to you for honoring this President and my wife, who
    has done more than anyone I know to give those kind of people a voice.
    But when you leave here, remember that all of us can do that every day,
    right here.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10 p.m. in the ballroom at the Washington
    Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Kenneth Wollack, president,
    and Paul Kirk, chairman, National Democratic Institute for International
    Affairs; Irena Kirkland, widow of Lane Kirkland; President Eduard
    Shevardnadze of Georgia, winner of the 1999 W. Averell Harriman
    Democracy Award; Monica McWilliams, cofounder, Northern Ireland Women's
    Coalition, and winner of the 1998 award, who was scheduled to present
    the 1999 award to Hillary Clinton; and former Senator George J.
    Mitchell, who chaired the multiparty talks in Northern Ireland.