Transcript: Remarks of President Clinton at the American Jewish Committee's 99th Annual Meeting

May 6, 2005
Washington, D.C.

First, thank you for the wonderful welcome. I thank my friend Al Moses and the leaders of the American Jewish Committee, my fellow Americans and our guests from all over the world who are here.

That moving, eloquent introduction was an example of one of my unbending laws of politics. Whenever possible, be introduced by someone whom you have appointed to an important position. (Laughter, applause.) They will lie about you shamelessly -- (laughter) -- with no limits and no remorse. (Laughter.)

So let me return the favor, Al Moses. Thank you for the wonderful job you did as the American ambassador to Romania. I'm very grateful to you for that. Thank you. (Applause.)

I am -- I'm gratified to be here today and thankful for your recognition, grateful that the children of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin are here, my friends Yuval, Dalia. Thank you for being here. (Applause.)

When I left the White House, I had to decide what to do. I didn't play my saxophone well enough to become a professional musician. (Laughter.) I didn't play golf well enough to go on the professional tour, even for older people like me. (Laughter.) I was too much of a Calvinist to lay down and just kind of while away my time.

So I looked at what all my predecessors had done, and eventually I decided that what I should do is to try to work in areas where I had labored as president but where I could still have an influence, as a former president. There many things I cared about as president where I have no more influence and no power. That's most things, I think. (Laughter.) The great thing about being out of office is I can say whatever I wish. (Laughter.) The sad thing is, no one has to pay attention anymore. (Laughter.)

But I decided to work on the economic empowerment of poor communities in the United States and around the world; on trying to increase education and citizen service among young people, in the United States and around the world; on health security, primarily the problem of AIDS, in the poor countries of the world, where, shamefully, there are over 40 million people who are infected with HIV, over 6 million people with full-blown AIDS at death's door.

Everyone with the disease gets the antiretroviral medicine here and in Europe and anyplace else where it's a significant problem, but in the developing world, when I started this project two years ago, only 300,000 people were getting the medicine, out of over 6 million who needed it. And the cost in the United States was over $10,000. The cheapest price in the rest of the world was 500 (dollars), and a lot of countries couldn't even pay that.

And I decided to work on my continuing efforts at the reconciliation of people across religious and ethnic and racial lines. I have a peace center in Northern Ireland, and I work still a little bit in the Balkans and elsewhere. Once in a while I even dabble around in secret in your business. You'd like it, what I do. (Chuckles.)

(Laughter.)

What I wanted to say today is that the work that the American Jewish Committee does, the work that IsraAID's doing now in the tsunami-affected areas, the work that I do with my foundation is representative of one of the two most important things that happened when I was president that I had nothing to do with, so I can brag about it.

In the 1990s, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's people lived under governments they elected. Stunning statistic, when you consider that a quarter of the world's people still live in China. And even there, they have genuine elections in over 900,000 villages. Only the larger cities still have mayors appointed by the government.

And that's a very important thing. So when the election was held in Iraq, when the halting movements towards elections were made in Saudi Arabia, and a lot of the things that are happening to spawn democracy in some of the Middle Eastern countries that have long resisted it -- it's basically the last bastion of anti-democracy in the world being shaken, because the whole world has been moving toward elections. That's a profoundly important thing.

A less noticed development, perhaps of equal importance to the way real people live their lives, is the explosion of nongovernmental organizations. People like you, now commonly called in the parlance all over the world as NGOs.

Whenever I went to new countries, newly democratized countries, or countries where there was an improvement in the democratic climate, I often tried to meet with NGO leaders -- and sometimes to the consternation of the elected officials of the country, who found them pesky.

And I met with them, I think, on every continent. I have seen whole African villages and Latin American hillside towns transformed by microcredit loans given by the United States government to local community leaders and to NGOs, and to self-employed women's association (sic) in India. I have seen them empower women to run their own businesses and change the course of not only their families' lives, but their community's lives. And many, many other things.

It's a truly astonishing thing. And sometimes this nongovernmental organization is an ad hoc thing; it just happens overnight. And the internet has made that even more possible. The SARS epidemic, which started in Hong Kong and quickly spread to -- actually started in rural China, but was -- took hold in Hong Kong and quickly spread to Canada, was stopped dead in its tracks by a spontaneously organized nongovernmental uprising of Chinese citizens on the internet, who demanded that their country stop denying the existence and severity of the SARS virus and immediately take steps to stop it.

And we could have had an epidemic in the world that rivaled the great influenza at the end of World War I. But instead, what happened is the Chinese government heard the voices of all these citizens screaming over the internet, turned on a dime, immediately said what had happened, immediately set to work with the Canadians, with the Centers for Disease Control in America and other places, and shut down an epidemic in its tracks that could've spread to every country represented in this room, with fatal consequences to people.

So, people like you and me and my foundation, we now have more power to do good than ever before, within and across national lines, because of the explosion of information, because of the greater openness of societies, because there are more and more people all across the world willing to contribute their funds to pursue these objectives.

Jewish groups all around the world, and specifically in Israel, have understood this for decades; indeed, since the founding of the country when a lot of work had to be done by private citizens supporting public works through private organizations. But you should take heart that this movement has literally now swept the world. And in every country that I visit, you see this sort of thing happening.

I met two people from Colombia over there. I wear this Colombian welcome bracelet every day. I have worn it now almost three years. It was given to me by children in Colombia who have come their own movement; they sing and dance against the narcotraffickers and their terrorist supporters. And these children have become my friends. They were sponsored by the Culture minister of Colombia. I brought them to the White House during the holiday season in December of 2000 -- the only non-American group I ever asked to sing there -- because I thought they were so brave. And the Culture minister was brave too. Because the narcotraffickers and the terrorists hated the children but couldn't kill them, they murdered the Culture minister. She was a great friend of mine and a great friend of humanity everywhere. And they took her up in the mountains in the Colombian rain forest and murdered her. Her memorial service was held in the Bogata soccer stadium, and they filled it. And I spoke by satellite to it.

And now, when I went back to Colombia on June the 27th, 2002, I met the new Culture minister, and the children were singing at the Cartagena airport. The new minister was the niece of the murdered woman. They're very brave people, the Colombians. And -- but their symbol is not a government program, but these children and the people who support the children in singing around the country and around the world, prove that even little children can stand against terror and greed and madness.

So, all I have done with this tsunami relief, or with the AIDS project, is basically learn from what I saw as president. I'll never forget the day, one day up in New York I was -- I got up one morning and I was shaving, and I was looking in the mirror and I said, "My God, I have become an NGO." (Laughter.) I didn't really -- you know, I'd never objectified myself in such a fashion before. We all have these little ways of self-definition.

But I say that -- I want to talk about -- a little more about what I'm doing, but I say that to thank you for what you do; to encourage you on the way. If we ever get through the thicket of problems, political and otherwise, to the end of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, I'm convinced that a lot of it will come because of efforts of Israelis and others working in their private capacity, as well as from government policy. And at the end of my remarks, I'd like to say just one or two things about that.

But I ask you to consider this. I mean, every year in the world one in four people die from only four things. One in four of all deaths. AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to diarrhea. Most of them are little children who never get a clean glass of water, which 25 percent of the world's people never get.

So when I started this AIDS project and there were only 300,000 people getting medicine out of over 6 million who needed it, and 170,000 of them were in Brazil --because they have a pharmaceutical industry and the government gives it to people who needed it -- so there were basically in the whole rest of the poor world 130,000 people. Two and a half years later we have, just in our little foundation, we're providing medicine at $140 a person a year, all the testing at $60 a year instead of the $400 to $600 the rich countries pay, and we're serving 110,000 more people, working in over 20 countries, with another 30 countries approved by the World Health Organization to buy medicine off our contract. We think we'll be at 2 million people just with our efforts in a couple of years.

That sounds good, but it's not good when you think about 6 million people facing death only because they can't get medicine and care that Americans take for granted, that Europeans take for granted, that people in other parts of the world take for granted. But it shows you what you can do apart from the government. We take no money from any government. All the funds that I have were given to me by generous individuals. The governments of Ireland and Canada and France and Britain, Norway and Sweden have appropriated money which they give to the countries I'm helping when I say they're ready to receive it, but it's really -- I was stunned that we could essentially start from nothing and do this. Such is the power of the NGO, such is our power, such is the power of all the other organizations you're with.

And when the tsunami came up, really I got involved in it because former President Bush and I were asked by the president to help increase the rate of giving in America. And it was an unbelievable thing. We have anywhere between a quarter of a million and 300,000 people dead. There are so many unaccounted for. And the numbers aren't really good, but it's a staggering loss. Over a million people lost their homes. Over a million people lost their livelihood. The damage was most concentrated in Indonesia, in the province of Aceh, in Sri Lanka, in Thailand, in the Maldives, then India, but several other countries were damaged quite severely, including Somalia and Myanmar and others in Southeast Asia.

So we set about raising funds. We did two things, former President Bush and I did. We created two separate accounts and then we just tried to get people to give to existing charitable efforts that were active over there. Then we tried to set up a water and sanitation fund because that's not a very sexy subject and people don't think about it, but it's really one of the biggest problems. After you have this kind of flood, it takes out all the wells, it puts salt -- sea water salt into the freshwater wells, and the absence of water and sanitation can lead to later outbreaks of dysentery, diarrhea, cholera and other problems which can cause severe, severe, losses. So we did that. And we also set up another fund which was sort of -- which was unrestricted. We asked people to trust us to figure out what countries needed most immediately that we could do in the short run.

I just went to Houston yesterday, and President Bush and I announced that we were going to build about 200 new fishing boats in the village we had visited in Thailand, and we were -- and put people to work there. We were going to build a hundred playgrounds in Sri Lanka for children who'd lost all their parents and all their means of, you know, enjoying life.

One of the biggest challenges we're facing in these tsunami affected countries is the staggering number of orphans. It was also interesting enough, a bunch of parents who lost their children. There's one visit -- one village we visited in Aceh where there were 6,500 people living and only 700 survived. And every single building collapsed, except, interestingly enough, the mosque, which survived only because in hot countries they often don't have walls in the mosque, so the water could fall through. But they do have decorative roofs, which means you have to have heavier columns and foundations below the ground. So it was the only building in the village with any foundations below the ground, plus open walls, so it survived. Otherwise, it looked like a bomb had been dropped there.

So, anyway, we're doing the playgrounds in Sri Lanka, because we saw in Sri Lanka and Thailand the kind of therapy that people were doing in these villages. Instead of asking the children to talk about how they felt about their losses and their lives, they asked them to draw pictures of how they were feeling. And it's fascinating to watch these pictures go through various incarnations. The first round of pictures were very dark from almost all the children. Then, the second time, some of the children drew pictures of the relief workers coming to their aid, the helicopters dropping supplies. Then, by the third or fourth time, some of the children were drawing children's pictures, just things that you'd expect children in any country in the world to draw. But some countries -- some children were still drawing the dark pictures. And it's been very instructive to me to see how these people over there, working with none of the resources we take for granted here in the United States, are doing marvelous work on therapy with these kids and bringing them out. But anyway, a lot of them asked us to provide playground equipment for them, so we're doing that.

And in Indonesia, we're going to try to rebuild the little village we visited -- the houses, the health centers, the schools, the whole thing, just with this small fund. And so, I got myself into this and then Kofi Annan asked me to be the U.N. coordinator for the long-term tsunami assistance. And it's -- I'm used to this. I have no money and no power -- (laughter) -- and the only staff I have is people that other U.N. agencies give me. And I don't know how much you know about the way the U.N.'s organized, but a lot of the United Nations agencies are agencies over which the secretary-general himself as no control directly. (Laughter.) They're completely independent financially and in terms of governance. So I'm -- I'm once removed from that.

So my job has now been reduced to what Harry Truman once said of the United States presidency. He said most of what he did was to try to talk people into doing things they should have done without his asking them in the first place. (Laughter.) But -- and when I leave you, I'm flying to New York to the U.N. to meet with some of the NGOs. But essentially, let me tell you, for those of you who are interested in this, what we're trying to do.

We are trying to get every country to come up with a plan for their reconstruction, which breaks down by category and place everything they're going to do in housing, education, health care, livelihoods, disaster mitigation -- all the things they're going to do, and then, by category, what the cost is, so that we can fill in the blanks.

The Maldives is the only country that's done this. It's amazing. They're just a small country. If I told you the dollar loss, it wouldn't seem like much to you, but they lost two-thirds of their annual GDP. And they're heavily dependent on tourism, and a lot of people are scared to go back now, even though there's nothing to worry about. And 70 percent of their islands were not damaged, and a lot of the tourism is open for business now. Same in Thailand, same in Sri Lanka. But a lot of people are afraid to go back.

So, what the Maldives has done, is for every single island, they have categories. And you can read it, it says: German Red Cross, French Red Cross, Japanese government, Chinese government -- and all the blank spaces. But it makes it very easy for a -- if you think about the nature of my job now, that's what I need from everybody because then I can -- you know, I can meet with people and show it to them and they can say, "Okay, I can afford that." And it's got a price tag by everything. And Maldives has the cost now broken down in units as low as $100,000.

And so we're trying to get that for all these other countries. India did not want or need any assistance in the immediate aftermath. But I have met with the Indian ambassador and been told that we should be working on some of the longer-term reconstruction needs, and maybe some help for some of the temporary housing in the Tamilnadu area, where some of it had to be built with tin roofs, and it's summertime -- or getting summertime now, and you know, it's hot. And the monsoon season is coming, so we're concerned about that.

Anyway, I say that to say to all of you, I thank you for this award, but I think I'm doing what I should be doing. After all, I was given the most fortunate of lives. I got to live my dreams. I never thought I'd be able to do this. I lived -- it's an almost accidental life I've had. And so I'm doing this because I should and because I like it. And the same reason you do a lot of the things that you do.

But I would like to make one final point. A lot of what we're doing in these tsunami-affected countries could be done for poor people everywhere in the world. And the whole goal is to help them -- we can't replace the lives they've lost, but we can honor the sacrifices they've made by helping them to build their areas back better; to have better housing, better education, better health care, stronger communities, and a more diversified economy. And so we're bringing in people all around trying to figure out how we make sure we do that, so that when we're done, they have a chance to participate in the world's prosperity.

This is a big challenge everywhere, and one that I think the members of the American Jewish community, and the members of the Jewish community worldwide, are uniquely qualified to help people meet because of how well you've done in all the countries in which you live, and because of the remarkable story of Israel's rise.

So I intend to spend a lot of time trying to help poor countries throughout the world meet the Millennium Development Goals, and to try to get the private sector involved in it. There are a lot of strategies for not only funding microenterprises, but having other debenture capital development, other direct investment.

And I think if you look at where we are in the Middle East now -- I'll only venture this, because I try to stay out of this since I have one member of my family in the Senate and somebody else should be speaking about most contemporary political issues -- although I did like what you said about the surplus -- (laughter, applause.)

I still can't figure out why it's a good thing for us to be at war with Iraq and have all these middle class people over there sacrificing, and I get four tax cuts which my government pays for by going to the Chinese every day and borrowing money to cover Bill Clinton's tax cuts. You know, maybe that's -- (applause) -- it might be good economic policy and it might be moral, but I can't figure it out to save my life. But anyway -- (laughter).

On this other issue, it is obvious, if I could be candid, that we got a new chance at peace in the Middle East because Yasser Arafat died and because the new -- because Abu Mazen wants to do it and has been more forthright in renouncing terror than anyone else. Yes, there are difficulties daily which he faces and the Israeli government faces.

It is also obvious that the Palestinians are younger and poorer than they were on the day that Prime Minister Rabin and Arafat signed the peace agreement on the White House lawn in September of '93.

So -- and it's obvious that even if the Israeli people settle on a peace plan that they would vote for that the Palestinians would also accept, embrace and honor, it might be difficult, A, for the Palestinians to have the capacity to do what they're supposed to do, and B, for the Israelis to produce a government that would support what the people do, because as all of you know, people get elected to the Knesset for all different kinds of reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the peace process. So -- which is the way politics is everywhere. That's just -- that's normal.

But it means that this is complicated. It's not as simple as saying, well, now we got a genuinely elected leader in the Palestinian territories, and now he's rejected terror, and oh, let's go make peace and live happily ever after. As all of you know, it's going to be still a very tough slog and it won't happen overnight. Therefore, having economic opportunity in the areas where the Palestinians are concentrated, where the authority is now in control of their people, is, I think, critical to buying the time necessary to allow the conditions to mature to make peace possible.

And I tried to do this -- some people in this room were there, a few of you. The day after we had the peace signing in September '93, there were 600 Jewish American and Arab American business people that I called into the White House. We met in the Old Executive Office Building. Everybody wanted to go invest in the Palestinian areas. We were much more hopeful, and maybe naive, then than we are now.

And it never happened, by and large -- it happened in a handful of instances -- because every time we got close, a bomb would blow up and it would look like a bad investment. And the Arab Americans were no more willing than the Jewish Americans were to put their money down a rat hole that would disappear in the ashes of a bomb.

But the bottom line was, they got younger and poorer, presenting far more political problems to anybody governing them in terms of making the compromises and imposing the discipline and asking people to look ahead to the future in a way that will be necessary to work out any kind of peace.

So I think you should really think about that. We need to buy both sides some time here and recognize that while it's way too simple to say terror is caused by poverty, neglect and distress -- because a lot of terrorists are well educated, from rather well-to-do families. That's too simple. On the other hand, in order to sustain a movement, you have to have a field of support of people who feel dispossessed.

In order to sustain it over the long run, you have to have that.

So the more people in your region who feel they've got something to look forward to when they get up in the morning, the more likely it is that we will be able to buy the time necessary for the politics to catch up with the possibilities here. And I say that because I think it's very important. The strategies we're employing in these tsunami areas can be employed in every African country and every poor Southeast Asian country and every poor country in Latin America, anywhere in the world, and a lot of them will work in the Middle East.

Since we're in Washington, D.C., I always say I know no poor Palestinians outside the territories. Every Palestinian I know in America is a millionaire or a college professor. (Laughter.) And they control the flower trade in Chile. They have the highest per- capita income in Ecuador. Surely there's some way we can find, in this new moment of hope, to generate a little more opportunity there. I think President Bush has asked the Congress for $350 million, which I heartily endorse.

But a lot of that money is going to be spent on security-related measures. That's a good thing. It's good for Israel, and doubtless the representatives of the Israeli Defense Forces who are here will support that. But we also have to have some investment in areas that make tomorrow better than today, to buy some time for this thing to get in alignment.

So anyway, I thank you for what you do. I ask you to recognize that this really is a unique moment in history. Groups like yours that helped to make modern Israel now have a global power never before enjoyed by citizen groups. Whether it's the biggest foundation in the world, like Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the work they're doing in India and Africa on AIDS, or tiny ones that work in a few villages with the poorest women on Earth, giving them loans so they can make a living, to all the ones in between, which includes you and me, we have the capacity to change the future for the better to an extent never before known. I'm going to do that as much as I can on the AIDS problem, on the economic problem and on the tsunami problem. And any of you want to help in any of those countries, I would be very grateful for it.

But think about how we can give the 21st century the cast that we dream of for our children and realize that whether you like the government that's in your country or my country, whether you consider yourself on the left or the right, whatever you consider yourself, for the first time in history, your disappointment at the last election is no longer an excuse not to act -- (soft laughter) -- because whether we like how the elections come out or not, we can change the future.

Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause.)

ANNOUNCER: And now, a special presentation from President Clinton and President George Bush.

MR. : We're going to have a film taken yesterday in Houston.

(Film concerning tsunami relief efforts is shown.)

(Applause.)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. I know we're at the end of the morning's events, but I thank you for -- first of all -- giving what you gave to the tsunamis. I didn't want to talk much about it in my remarks, because I knew former President Bush and I cut that spot yesterday; we were in Houston. Thank you.

So Bob, thank you, and David, thank you.

I was looking at David thinking, you know, I might be the second- best speaker in Chappaqua. (Applause).

I was --

(Extended applause.)

Or should -- or should --

Given our relative positions at home, maybe I should say the third.

(Laughter, applause.)

I just want to say one other thing. You know I just went with former President Bush and the present Mrs. Bush to the pope's funeral, and I was thinking about how many people -- when we were talking about all this -- and you mentioned it, Al, in your introduction -- what my beloved pastor said to me about Israel.

I was thinking about how many people don't know much about comparative religion, and learn about people's faith through their deeds. And I had -- I really had a great admiration for this pope, partly because he reached out to Jews and Muslims and people -- Orthodox Christians, and others around the world. But when he was installed, back in the '70s, I was a young man starting out in politics, and I -- Arkansas, my home state, still had the largest percentage of people living in the state who were born there. In other words, it was the most insular state in America, right? (Laughter.) And everybody was a Southern Baptist.

So this story made the rounds that these two old men, sitting up in the mountains of the Arkansas Ozarks on their porch, rocking in their chairs, saying, well, they're going to pick a new pope.

The other one says, they are? And he says, yeah. He says, well, have you got a candidate?

And the guy says, no, but I kinda hope the Catholics don't get it. They've had it long enough. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

And -- and -- (laughs). They -- so, and you can tell several jokes about Judaism. And I could -- you know, when I was a boy there were all kinds of jokes about Baptists, which are -- you know, I have to wait until after 5:00 to tell. (Laughter.)

But the point I want to make is, sometimes they know us only by our works, what we believe, who we are, whether the spirit of God is within us.

So, I thank you for this award, but I thank you for giving people a chance to know you by your works. Thank you.