[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 33 (Monday, August 21, 2000)]
[Pages 1873-1876]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a National Democratic Institute Luncheon in Los Angeles

August 14, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just 
heard a stirring example of Clinton's first law of politics: Whenever 
possible, be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office. 
[Laughter]
    Secretary Albright, thank you for your great work as Secretary of 
State and, before that, as our Ambassador to the United Nations and for 
your constant friendship and support to Hillary and me.
    Gary, thank you for hosting this today and for what you said and for 
all the good work you do. Mr. Mayor, thank you for putting on a great 
convention and sitting through all these speeches by Democrats. 
[Laughter] There's been a lot of talk in this convention about religion 
because Joe Lieberman is our first Jewish candidate on the national 
ticket. But I want you to know I am still a confirmed Baptist. We 
believe in deathbed conversions, and I'd like to have you switch at any 
time--[laughter]--we love you very much. You too--[inaudible]. 
[Laughter]
    I want to thank Paul Kirk, my friend of many years, and Ken Wollack 
and all the members of the NDI. Thank you, Senator Feinstein. And I'd 
like to thank all the members of the diplomatic community who are here, 
parliamentarians from around the world, and the people who have been or 
are now part of our diplomatic efforts: Vice President Mondale, who did 
such a brilliant job in Japan; and Reverend Jackson, our Special Envoy 
to Africa; Ambassador Blinken; Ambassador Shearer; there are a lot of 
others here. But I thank them all for what they have done.
    I'd also like to say how much I appreciate the work of the NDI, how 
much I've tried to support it, how grateful I am that we have a nominee 
for President and Vice President in our party who will strongly support 
you for a long time in the future.
    Way back in the distant past of the last millennium, when I was 
first elected President, people were asking whether the end of the cold 
war would lead to a new birth of freedom or whether incipient 
democracies would be overcome by forces of hardship and hate. There were 
then perhaps as many reasons for fear as for hope.
    In Russia, people faced breadlines and hyperinflation. Many were 
resigned to an inevitable backlash that would lead back to

[[Page 1874]]

communism or ultranationalism. Southeast Europe was full of backward 
economies and battered people willing to be manipulated to wage war on 
their neighbors. In parts of Asia, leaders claimed democracy was an 
alien, Western imposition, that there was really no such thing as a 
universal conception of human rights or free people governing 
themselves. Never mind, of course, that people from Burma to the 
Philippines to Thailand were already struggling and sacrificing for 
freedom. Some still believed democracy only works for people of a 
certain culture or a certain stage of development.
    Well, since then we've learned a lot about human nature and 
humanity's desire for freedom and self-government. Looking back, I think 
we'll all say that the 1990's were democracy's decade. With our support 
and with your support, democracies flourished in central Europe. Despite 
all the difficulties, it has endured in Russia, persevered in Latin 
America, and truly triumphed in Mexico. In 1999, thanks to the 
democratic transformations in Nigeria and Indonesia, more people won the 
right to choose their leaders than in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall 
fell.
    In the Balkans, the cause of pluralism faced perhaps its greatest 
obstacles. Prime Minister Dodik and the head of Bosnia's leading 
multiethnic party, Zlatko Lagumdzija, are both here with us today. We 
welcome them, and we urge them to keep up their good work for freedom. 
Their success has proven that Bosnians of every ethnic background are 
turning to leaders delivering prosperity and hope, instead of exploiting 
human differences.
    Last week I met with the new President and the new Prime Minister of 
Croatia. They're taking their country on a breathtaking journey to 
democracy. Their success says to all the people of the Balkans, where 
popular will overcomes authoritarianism and hate, the road to Europe is 
open.
    With Kosovo holding the first free elections in its history later 
this year, the only vestige of the Balkans' undemocratic past is Serbia. 
We are encouraging the democratic opposition there to mount as unified a 
challenge to Mr. Milosevic as possible, so that even if he steals the 
coming Presidential election--he undoubtedly will try to do that--he 
will lose what legitimacy he has left with the Serbian people. But 
whatever may happen, he has utterly failed to build a greater Serbia 
based on ethnic cleansing and exclusion. All around him, instead, we are 
seeing the emergence of a greater Europe based on tolerance and 
democracy.
    We also learned some lessons in democracy's decade of the nineties. 
It used to be said that unelected leaders were easier for America to 
deal with because they were free to make hard and unpopular choices. 
Well, it turns out to be one of those big ideas that just isn't true.
    Consider the case of Prime Minister Barak. In pursuit of peace he 
has been able to make some of the hardest and most courageous decisions 
I, personally, have ever seen because he knows he draws his mandate from 
the people. Consider Kim Dae-jung of South Korea. He overcame his 
country's economic crisis because he had the legitimacy to push through 
wrenching change, and he made a brave, brave step in reaching out to 
North Korea.
    Ironically, unelected leaders tend to be more fearful of political 
opposition than elected leaders. That's a lesson I've had to learn the 
hard way. The first 3 or 4 years, when I heard that, I thought they were 
just making excuses for something they didn't want to do. And finally I 
realized that they really were afraid to take unpopular decisions, even 
if they might be able to sell a vast majority of their people on it 
because it was the right thing to do. Maybe it's because when dictators 
lose power, they lose everything; Democrats live to fight another day--
or build Presidential libraries. [Laughter]
    Another lesson that we learned is that democracy's success is in our 
interest. Our support can be critical to that success. Next week I'll be 
going to Nigeria, to a new, democratic Nigeria. [Applause] Thank you. A 
Nigeria that's a leader for peace and economic development in the 
struggle against AIDS. If democracy takes root in Nigeria, it will lift 
up an entire region. So we'll do our part to help with trade and 
investment, support for Nigeria's peacekeepers in its efforts to ensure 
that the vast wealth it has accumulated and

[[Page 1875]]

squandered in the past finally benefits its people.
    Now, a day after I come back from Nigeria, I'll be going to 
Colombia. There, people are struggling to keep one of the oldest 
democracies in our hemisphere alive in the face of terrible violence, 
fueled by a drug trade that threatens their children and ours. We have a 
national interest in supporting them, and now with strong bipartisan 
support from Congress--for which I am profoundly grateful--we have made 
a commitment to do just that.
    We care about democracy in countries like Nigeria and Colombia 
because the success of freedom is contagious, and so is freedom's 
failure. One reason we can tip the balance is because of the work NDI 
does. Just about every time I travel to an emerging democracy, whether 
it's Nigeria or Ghana or Bosnia or Russia or Nicaragua or Bangladesh, I 
find that NDI is there before I land and, most important, after I leave. 
Thanks to you, America not only has a Peace Corps; it has a democracy 
corps. If the 1990's were democracy's decade, you had a lot to do with 
it. And with your help, we can now start building democracy's century, a 
century that we can't stop working on until the most powerful, 
liberating, revolutionary idea in all human history touches every human 
community.
    Let me just say in closing something that's not in my notes, and 
I'll probably get in trouble with all my staff for saying--[laughter]--
but we have people here who devote your life to thinking about these 
things. I am gratified that in this very turbulent period, that we have 
been able to build in the United States a bipartisan commitment to 
democracy that has been manifested, for example, in Plan Colombia, 
manifested in the passage of PNTR with China, manifested in the passage 
of the African/Caribbean Basin bill, manifested in the common commitment 
both candidates for President have consistently made this year, to an 
expansive, embracive, farsighted trade policy.
    But there are still challenges out there that, if we want to 
maximize our impact on, we have to internalize debate and resolve as a 
people. Because we have seen over and over and over again, it is very 
difficult for America to do anything big, good, profoundly long-lasting 
unless we are agreed. And let me just give a few examples.
    I hope the commitment we have made to Africa will endure and be 
embraced in a bipartisan way. I hope those people who believe in the 
Congress and in the country that I honestly made a mistake--and they 
honestly believe this--those who believe that I made a mistake in 
committing our military resources and our diplomatic muscle, first in 
Bosnia, and then in Kosovo, will rethink, because I think if the cause 
of freedom had been lost in those countries and the principle of ethnic 
cleansing had been upheld, we would be paying for it along with free 
people across the world for a very, very long time.
    I hope the next administration will continue the commitment that we 
have begun to a new stage in our relationship with India and that we 
will continue to be involved in trying to resolve the tensions on the 
Indian subcontinent. If you think about the 200 or so ethnic groups that 
we have in the State of California and in the United States of America, 
Indians and Pakistanis both rank in the top five in per capita education 
and per capita income. There is no telling what could happen for the 
good on the Indian subcontinent in the 21st century that will open new 
vistas of possibilities, not only for people who are still desperately 
poor in those nations and in Bangladesh but, indeed, throughout the 
world, if they can just find a way to resolve their deep differences. So 
I hope that will happen, and I hope all of you will stay with us.
    The other day when we said--our administration--that we felt that 
the worldwide spread of AIDS had become a national security threat to 
the United States, some people ridiculed that. But I hope we will have a 
broader notion of our national security and a broader sense of what 
tools we need to bring to bear against them.
    I have done what I could in every year to support a strong defense 
budget, to support improvements in the quality of life for our men and 
women and families in the United States military, to modernize our 
weapon systems. But I think the work that we're trying to do this year 
in the Congress to fight AIDS, malaria, and TB is important.

[[Page 1876]]

I think we should be doing much more than we are to help countries deal 
with the breathtaking breakdown in public health systems in a lot of the 
former Communist world and in a lot of the developing countries, things 
which really could just eat the heart out of democracy over the next 10 
or 15 years unless people can at least find a way to keep babies alive 
and to stop children from dying prematurely.
    I hope we will be very creative in the ways we fight terrorism and 
chemical and biological warfare, cyberterrorism, and what I think will 
be the most likely threat to our security over the next 20 years, which 
is that the miniaturization process that we see, inevitably, part of 
technology that now allows you to have a little computer in your palm 
with a screen and a keyboard that people with big hands like me can't 
use anymore--will also--you will see this with weapons. And it is far 
more likely that we will deal with those kinds of weapons in the hands 
of terrorists, with enormous destructive potential, even than we will 
have to fend off hostile missiles coming in. And I hope we'll have a 
bipartisan consensus about how to imagine the new most likely security 
threats of the 21st century.
    I hope there will be even stronger support for relieving the debt of 
the poorest countries in the world. I hope there will be even stronger 
support for the initiative that Senator McGovern and Senator Dole 
brought to Secretary Glickman, who is here. We have--we really believe 
that for a relatively modest amount of money, a few billion dollars, we 
could guarantee one nutritious meal to every poor child in the entire 
world every day at school. If we did it, it would dramatically increase 
school enrollment, especially among young girls, and do a lot to reverse 
the tide of trafficking in young women and of the abuse of the rights of 
young women. And it would change the whole fabric of society all across 
the world in a way that would be very good for democracy. We need a real 
consensus on those kinds of things that there has not been nearly enough 
talk about. And we need to look at all these things in terms of our 
commitment to democracy, our commitment to national security.
    We have to have--and as I said, I don't think I have to take a back 
seat to anybody in my commitment to a strong national defense, but our 
national security and our advancement of democracy depends on far more 
than our military power. And as wealthy as we are now, as successful as 
we are, for a relatively modest increase in terms of the surpluses we're 
projecting, in the investments we make around the world in people 
problems and in building institutions and in giving people the capacity 
to fight off the demons of the 21st century, we will get a huge return 
in the advance of freedom.
    Thank you very much.

 Note:  The President spoke at 1:20 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler 
Pavilion. In his remarks, he referred to Gary Winnick, founder and 
chairman, Global Crossing, Ltd.; Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles; 
Paul G. Kirk, Jr., chairman of the board, and Ken Wollack, president, 
National Democratic Institute; former Vice President and former U.S. 
Ambassador to Japan Walter F. Mondale; Rev. Jesse Jackson, Special Envoy 
to Africa; Alan J. Blinken, former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium; Derek 
Shearer, former U.S. Ambassador to Finland; Prime Minister Milorad Dodik 
of the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) of Bosnia-Herzegovina; Zlatko 
Lagumdzija, president, Social Democratic Party in Bosnia; President 
Stjepan Mesic and Prime Minister Ivica Racan of Croatia; President 
Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and 
Montenegro); Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel; President Kim Dae-jung 
of South Korea; Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush; 
and former Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole.