Washington, DC — The following is a transcript of William Jefferson Clinton's Acceptance Speech for the 2006 Africare Humanitarian Award.
October 18
2006
Washington DC
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you very, very much.
First of all, let me say how grateful I am for the recognition, but more importantly for the work of Africare. Chairman Fountain [W. Frank Fountain, President, DaimlerChrysler Corporation fund and Chair of the Africare Board of Directors], I thank you with all your colleagues. Thank you, Rodney Slater, and Thomas McLarty, and Marian Edelman for your remarks and your service.
I have had interesting few days here. I began in the morning, actually, at my alma mater, at Georgetown University with a group from the Center for American Progress talking about the common good. And I have been doing first one thing and then another all day. I am delighted to be here. I went by and thanked the mayor of Washington D.C… and visited him because he is leaving office, and appeared before a group of Jewish Democrats. I am especially honored to be here. I've been looking forward to this.
Ever since this morning, I started thinking about the common good. There is nothing that exemplifies it more than Africare, than your understanding of how bound up we are in our present and in our tomorrow.
There are many people here who work with me on African issues and I would like to thank all of them. I tried to make Gayle Smith [former special assistant to the president and senior director for African Affairs at the National Security Council] my indentured servant who works on African issues, even if I do not pay her anymore. I would like to thank Joe Wilson, Susan Rice, and all the others who have worked with me over the years.
I want to say that I think I should be paying tribute to you, but especially I want to thank C. Payne Lucas [co-founder and 31-year Africare president...]. I want to thank Julius Coles for having the courage to succeed C. Payne Lucas (applause) and for making Africare a member of my global initiative and the work we are doing around the world to alleviate poverty and disease, to fight climate change, and to bridge the religious, racial, and tribal divides that still trouble so many people. I would like to thank Leonard Robinson who is no longer with us but is here in spirit. Leonard Robinson, President and CEO of the Africa Society passed away in July, but he tried to keep the focus of politicians in Washington from both parties on Africa, and for that I am very grateful.
I want to say just a few words tonight about Africa policy, in general, and then where we are going. It is too late for me, possibly, to give a serious speech, but I think I will try to make it work.
It was obvious to me when I became president that our Africa policy had been sporadic and often destructive, and during the Cold War, we often picked our allies based on Cold War considerations of the United States, without any considerations of what the long-term interests of the human beings in all those African countries were, and what the long-term interests in our common bonds were. Then after the Cold War we had a tendency just to forget about Africa.
At the beginning of my presidency, we tried to organize ourselves in a different way to take Africa seriously, to realize that it was a continent, not a country, and that there were many variations of what was going on there. Eventually, I believe that every member of my cabinet went to Africa at one time or another and worked with counterparts on various things. The vice-president went on more than one occasion and set up a remarkable commission with the then- deputy president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki [now South African president], which worked through a whole series of issues we had with South Africa. And, of course, Hillary went on many occasions, often with our daughter, to work on micro-enterprise, issues affecting women and children – and gave me, when we went there together, one of the most astonishing experiences we had ever seen. The men and women that she had worked with, dealing with female genital mutilation, came together in a celebration of their change in culture. So I thank all of them for what they did.
An example of how we tried to change things: when they had the election in Nigeria, and President Obasanjo was elected, we wanted to be helpful, and instead of having just the State Department, USAID, and maybe the intelligence agencies at the table, we had a meeting with 23 government agencies to figure out what every one of us could do to build a comprehensive partnership.
We tried to broaden that scope of our involvement across the board. In addition to the remarkable trip I had to Africa in 1998, which I was finally able to be on African soil, to issue on behalf of the American people our apologies for the slave trade, we passed, with total bipartisan support, the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which led to tens of thousands of jobs being created all across the continent; the Millennium Debt Relief initiative in 2000, which created many more jobs and provided funds previously unavailable for education and healthcare; and, after the terrible problems in Rwanda, we began to train African troops – something called the African Crisis Response Initiative – so that they could move quickly in the event of future problems and we could help them.
Finally, at the end of my term, I remember President Mandela called me one day, and he started a conversation: "My President", he said.
And I said, "Madiba, one thing I have learned is, whenever you start a conversation with 'My President', you are about to ask me to do something I don't want to do, but we will have to do anyway!"
He said, "This will be easy for you. We are going to fly to Arusha, in Tanzania, to the peace center for the closing of the Burundi peace talks. We don't want another Rwanda". And he said, "I just about got them all in line, but this time, you will be the good guy and I will be the bad guy. You come in and give one of your high-flung speeches you always give about hope … and make it really nice, and then I will get up and bludgeon them into submission, and then we won't have another Rwanda".
I told him I would be there, so we did, and I was the straight man for Nelson Mandela.
I would like to also say that I am grateful – with all my well-publicized differences with the Bush administration – I am very grateful that this administration has continued to support the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. I hope they will make some adjustments in the legislation affecting the so-called Multi-fiber Agreement, which has cost some African jobs in the last couple of years. I am grateful to them for supporting another round of debt relief for the poorest countries in the world.
I am grateful for all that money that has gone into the Aids program. Even though I may differ with it around the edges, the truth is that it is saving a lot of lives, and my Aids project is working hand and glove with the American government in many countries in Africa, and we are saving lives together, so I am grateful for that.
Finally, since I left office, I have continued to have had an astonishing opportunity to continue to go to Africa every year and work on any number of things, beginning with our Aids project. Just to give you kind of a brief update, since 2003, approximately 1.5 million people have been added to the ranks of those getting treatment in poor countries. Four hundred thousand of those people are getting medicine under contracts that we negotiated for the lowest cost in the world, and I am very happy about that – especially for the work we have done for the children.
Last year, 500,000 kids died of Aids, and only 10,000 were getting medicine, and that is outside of Brazil and Thailand that the government paid for. So we doubled that number last year and we are adding 50,000 or 60,000 this year, and, thanks to the French, who have imposed a tiny airline tax to pay for it, and the British, the South Koreans, the Argentines, and the Chileans, they joined together and asked us to take their money and provide Aids medicine to every child in the world who needs it to stay alive. I am really grateful.
One big problem we have in Africa – that some of you will be very familiar with and you could actually help us with – has nothing to do with the Aids medicine and nothing to do with the availability of money, and that is, in many, many African countries, even in South Africa, once you get outside the cities, there is no health infrastructure. And you can't just go and drop that medicine out there; it is not that simple. So we have been working in many in many nations – we work in 25 countries including many in Africa – to try to help build the health infrastructure.
I was recently in Rwanda, and we reopened a hospital in a rural area that had been closed since the genocide. I was in Lesotho, and we opened a hospital and a clinic way up in the mountains, and they now are trying to, along with Botswana, to have universal testing. It is easy to say and hard to do.
Our foundation has gotten spokespeople to go out to village after village to say you need to be tested. One man was the boxing coach of the national Lesotho team, and he is quite small but still has a fine physique. He's an older man; his CD4 count got down to four. It is now 700. And he goes and sees people and tells them that if he can tell them that he is HIV positive, that he has Aids, they don't need to be ashamed. The most powerful witness we have, someone who could maybe be one of Marian's [Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense fund] poster children, is a young women who is one of our workers, who became infected with the HIV virus by being raped. And, as in so many rural tribal societies, that can become quickly a mark of shame, almost as if you're damaged goods, it is your fault. This woman, standing in the high altitude in the mountains of Lesotho, goes into these villages and says, "Look, I am HIV positive, and I got it when I was raped. I am not ashamed of being HIV positive; I am not ashamed of being raped; neither one was my fault. I am trying to get over it, and if I can live with that, the least you can do is get tested, because it is wrong for you not to know."
So we are trying to do what we can. In Rwanda, we are working on a training model I hope we can take to other places, being developed by Dr. Paul Farmer, who many of you know from his work in Haiti with Partners in Health. Now that my five-year crusade is over to get Muhammad Yunis a Nobel Prize, my next target is Paul Farmer (applause). Someone should give him a Nobel Prize. In Haiti, he lives in a hut half a year on the mountaintop, with his wife, and with medical personnel [who] under our standards would be able to treat about 20,000 people. He serves an area of more than a million. So we are trying to replicate this and help the health workers in these concentric circles of care being established in Haiti and rural Rwanda, and if we do, I think we have a model that we could take throughout Africa.
In addition to that, we have development projects in Rwanda and Malawi, where we are trying to double per-capita income in a short amount of time, by improving sustainable, environmentally responsible agriculture, improving water, improving education, improving healthcare, bringing decentralized clean energy – and that's proving to be immensely exciting.
One thing that I did not intend to do in Africa – but, the last time I was there, I was asked to – is to take on my global-warming, clean-energy crusade, apart from what we are doing in Rwanda and Malawi. But I was in Ethiopia – and I am saying this to make a very important point – with Prime Minister Meles, and we worked on their on Aids work. We trained nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers, and I was saying that we ought to be able to do some things on the economy, too, because it is a very large country with a per capita income of barely over U.S. $2 a day. Meles looks at me and says, "We should make Africa the first oil-free continent when it comes to transportation." I knew he was a smart guy but that is not what you expect him to talk to you about in Africa today.
I said, "talk to me about this".
He said, "Oh I have studied all this. If you Americans get serious about bio-fuels and use cellulosic material to make ethanol, you can get four gallons or five gallons of ethanol for every one gallon of oil you put in. The Brazilians grow sugar cane, and they get a conversion ratio of eight to one, the best in the world. So they save huge amounts on their fuel, and they really don't have to import any oil. I have checked the soil and potential, we can grow cane as well in Ethiopia as they can in Brazil. We can become the Brazil of Africa. And then if we could produce a lot of oil, we could sell you the oil, and you would not be dependent on all these unstable places to get it."
He then said, "We would be doing our part to fight global warming, we would be improving your national security, and we would be doubling our foreign income." And so, believe it or not, I've got somebody going in there to do a study on this.
But whether it is the President of Ethiopia talking about a futuristic energy policy or all those fabulous people that got micro-credit loans through the work that AID did when I was president, one of the things that I learned when I was in Africa, as well as in South Asia or Latin America or any other places – intelligence, ability, and enterprise are pretty well evenly distributed all across the planet. What is not evenly distributed? Investments are not evenly distributed all across the planet. Investments are not evenly distributed; opportunities are not evenly distributed; perhaps, most of all, functioning systems that work in native cultures are not evenly distributed.
If you think about it, there are a lot of people in this room tonight that have come a long way. Maybe you were born in a poor family, sharecroppers, maybe you were born in a family with eight or 10 kids, but if you grew up here, some way or another, you found systems that got you from where you were as a little kid to sitting in this chair now.
Think about your life. You got from where you were as a little child to sitting in this chair tonight because at critical junctures in your life, you were involved in activities where you thought there was a reasonable connection between the efforts you put out and the results you achieved. The ultimate tragedy for poor people in Africa and across the globe is that those connections have been broken, so they are turned into economic guerillas, and very often, social guerrillas, almost as if they were fighting a war of attrition against chaos. But their intelligence abounds.
That is why Muhammad Yunis won the Noble Prize. He won the Noble Prize by figuring out you don't have to patronize poor people; you just have to empower them (applause). That is how he won the Noble Prize.
I ask all of you to continue your support for Africa and for their empowerment. I said the first time I went there, I do not want to talk anymore about what we are going to do for Africa, but I want to talk about what we can do with Africa. I want to talk about a partnership.
At the recent Clinton Global Initiative, the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, made a very impressive presentation. I desperately wanted her to come, because I am immensely impressed with her, and I have signed a contract to do a lot of the Aids work there. But the thing that really moved me – when I went to Monrovia, I said, "Madam President, what else do you want me to do," and she said, "I want you to talk to my college students, and just getting these schools back open. So we drive into Monrovia, after a long day in Nigeria, we go to the airport and drive into town and even yet, after that long14 years of hideous war, abuse, and mis-governance – most of the buildings don't have lights anymore, even in the capital. So we go into the main government building, and the president and I sign our Aids agreement and we make an announcement to the press, and then we go to meet her college students. They were as well dressed as you are. I have no idea, given the absence of power, how they even prepared themselves to look as wonderful as they did, but they did. And their questions were every bit as intelligent and penetrating as any I would get anywhere in the world. They deserve better than they have, but they were willing to work to get it. It had a profound impact on me.
So, when I came back home, I wanted Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to come to our Global Initiative, because I knew someone would be impressed by the leadership she was trying to give and the fact that we could turn Liberia around with them, because there are only three million people. This is not the heaviest lifting in the world.
So, after she gave her speech, Bob Johnson came up to me, and he said, "You know that Liberia was established by freed American slaves, the reverse Diaspora. Looks to me that freed African-American millionaires should help to turn the economy around. He promised to get some of his business people together and raise at least U.S. $30 million to do work there! Thirty million dollars might not go very far in Washington DC, but in Monrovia, Liberia it can go a long way.
I say that to point out that all the years that you have worked on getting people to care about Africa have been fruitful. People now understand several things. They understand that we have to have partnerships. They understand that this has to be about empowerment. They understand that without good governance in African countries, there is very little we can do to have a long-term impact. I don't even go into a country unless the government invites me, and then we have a plan they sign off on that is strictly honored.
But we can do this now. The whole continent is going to have a growth rate of 5% or 6% this year. Some of those countries are going to grow in double digits because they are well-governed, they do know what they are doing and they are preparing for the future.
Those people deserve our support. Yes, it is important that we have good government policies. But, as I have learned since I have been a private citizen, the ability of private citizens to do public good is far greater than I ever imagined. Marian Edelman has done more public good in her life as a private citizen than most of the officeholders that ever held any job in this country. We can all make a difference!
So I ask you to find your own commitment. And to realize that where they have good governance and where there is an opportunity, there is an amazing chance we have now to move quickly, quickly, to change things for the better.
Let me say one final thing about Darfur, and I would be remiss if I didn't discuss it. On this, the Bush administration and the president himself have had a very solid position. I have no quarrel with it. They have also been in a very serious political and logistical pickle – for this reason: everybody knows that those people in Darfur have been killed with the tacit acceptance, if not the outright support of, as someone testified to today here in Washington, of the Sudanese government.
Normally, when the United Nations goes in to something like that, they do it with a Security Council vote and without a veto. When there are unforeseen consequences and you do it without that, it can go south in a hurry. Witness Iraq, right?
Now, the problem with getting the UN resolution is that, for different reasons, the Chinese and Russians have not been willing to sanction the introduction of a multilateral force in hostile territory. Now that was the case for the Russians when President Yeltsin was there, when it came to Bosnia and Kosovo, but the difference was, Yeltsin would not veto. So we had a deal that they did not veto in Bosnia and Kosovo, and we didn't bring it to a vote, because we had all the votes on the Security Council but one. And for local, religious, political, cultural reasons he couldn't vote for it, but they knew he had to do it. So we went into Kosovo and stopped the slaughter of the Kosovo Albanian Muslims. The only deal we had is that when we went into Kosovo to make peace in the country, the Russians would be a part of it just as they had been in Bosnia. In other words, we made a patchwork deal.
No such deal has emerged, partly because the Chinese would like to have first call on the Sudanese oil. But it is an unconscionable situation, and all the people getting killed and all the people doing the killing are Muslims. Most of the Christians in the African south are not involved in this fight.
So what are our options? I think there are only two, practically. One is, we can come up with enough money to train, equip, and ship even more African troops there. The problem is that they are otherwise needed in various parts of Africa. It would take at least 20,000 troops to secure the people there in broad enough areas so that they can get up and walk around and get some breathing space. They also have no inter-operable equipment, so they can't communicate with each other. They also have a very weak mandate.
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Now the President of Rwanda, who knows something about this, is very much involved. Rwanda has the second biggest military contingent there next to Nigerians. Again, to say that our government has been pretty good on this, the Rwandans were flown to Darfur by the United States military. We went there, got them and took them. It's not like we've got all of our assets tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? So we could do that and it would be something better.
The best outcome would be if NATO forces could provide logistical support for a much broader based military operation. And they could be Muslim troops. For example, you could bring large amounts of Bangladeshis in there. They are quite good; they went to Haiti when I was president. I think you could even get Indian Muslim troops to join Pakistanis and come together, if the UN would bless it. It is not a religious issue here.
But somehow we need 20,000 or 25,000 troops with a broad mandate, and some way of communicating with each other and the capacity to enforce that. Otherwise, these people are just going to keep dying.
The real problem is that we have not yet been able to persuade the Chinese either to muscle the Sudanese or at least to say that they will not veto a Security Council Resolution. And because we don't have enough soldiers to go in on our own, and our NATO allies won't go in without us, we are in a real pickle here.
I would just say to all of you two things. One is, to keep pushing for action, and know that your government is not the main culprit here. They have actually been quite good – in a rhetorical way, in a logistical way, given the political and institutional limits on them.
The second thing we need to do is to do something I tried to do in 1993 and got no support, even from my own military then, but I think we could do. Every country with a substantial military, in my opinion, should set aside a quota every year, and tell the UN how many people they could call on from America, from Europe, from any place else for peacekeeping. Then we should setup training programs, the same way we do with NATO and all of our partners. We have over 40 partners now, with NATO, with Partnership for Peace, and we should train together. We should have inter-operable equipment for communication, so that when something like this happens, they know we can go right away.
The Sudanese have been able to slow-walk this thing, in part because there was no UN force right there at the ready. I believe, over the long run, we are going to have to do that. There should be African participation; there should be South Asian participation. We could change the mix of troops based on the religious and cultural affiliation of the people in the affected area. But if we don't do something like this, then one government will be in a position, whenever they have something somebody else wants, like oil, to allow its people to be killed and thumb their nose at the United Nations.
So, that is the best I can say. I think you keep pushing for it. I still think that the Chinese want to be world leaders enough that they may relent. They may decide to pivot on this. You know, there is a story in the paper today that they have one trillion dollars in cash reserves. They are going to become the most powerful financial force on earth, but they will not be a respected global political force if they stand aside and let genocide continue in Darfur and they don't take a stronger stance against North Korea.
So you are going to have to do these kinds of things. Anything you can do to facilitate that happy day you should. Meanwhile, we should support the president on this but ask him to do more. And work for a time when the UN will have an allocation from every country so when something like this happens we can go right away without delaying.
Lastly, I hope I live long enough to see as many countries in Africa as possible reach the promise that I see in the eyes of the children in every African country. Life has dealt many of those folks a tough hand. In the Congo, the most hideous of all colonial legacies, and many other places, where the burden of diamonds has turned out not to be a blessing. In many other places, either bloodthirsty leaders have turned children into killers or chopped the arms off of people who just wanted to vote. Other places, there are still landmines in the ground.
But beneath it all, there is still a spirit unique on all the earth in tribe after tribe after tribe, in country after country after country, and there are all these brave good people who are governing and trying to build a better tomorrow. Nobody owes Africa more than America because no country has been blessed more by Africans than America.
I hope that everything that you have from here on in, instead of being only trying to raise the visibility of Africa, trying to put it higher on Americans' radar screen – I hope, instead, you will just be bathed in the abundance of riches of everything that is going on and all the good things that are happening. If anything ever comes up that we can do together, you won't have to ask. I hope Africare stays involved in our Global Initiative. I do believe that it is quite likely that we will live to see the day that it will be impossible for even the blindest and deafest among us to pretend that things are hopeless in the cradle of human kind.
Thank you.
