[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.