Address by First Lady Clinton at American University in Cairo
Egypt-USA, Culture, 3/28/2000

On the occasion of the visit of Egypt's President Mubarak to the USA accompanied by First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, we take advantage of this time to publish the speech that somehow was not published at the time of USA's First Lady Hillary Clinton visit to Egypt on March 25, 1999. Here follows is the speech.

Thank you so much, Dr. Gerhart, for that very kind introduction. I must say I have never heard anyone receive an ovation for the acknowledgment of the audience before, but it was well deserved and it introduced me to this distinguished gathering.

Ambassador Kurtzer, thank you for being with us today and for your service. And, thank all of you, your excellencies, distinguished guests,one and all. I also want to thank Mrs. Shoeb, who helped prepare the events today.

It gives me great pleasure to be at this University, which for 80 years has been devoted to education and service not only in Egypt but throughout this region. And, of course, to be in this vibrant and historic city is something that I have looked forward to for many years. I have made very short stops and stays in Cairo before, usually on my way somewhere else. Once my husband and I arrived in the middle of the night, spent the evening with the great hospitality of President and Mrs. Mubarak and left at the crack of dawn without seeing anything. When I spoke with the President this morning, he reminded me that he has yet to even see the Pyramids except from the window of an airplane.

I assured him that he could return, perhaps when he no longer travels with eight or nine hundred people, and see the city and the sights and meet the people in a more informal way. Because, for anyone who comes here, we know we are not only looking backward but we are looking forward at the same time. And in the past few days, I've had the great pleasure of seeing some of the sites and meeting some of the people --on a very superficial level, I admit -- and beginning to get a feeling for the breadth and beauty of this historic place.

I want especially to thank President and Mrs. Mubarak for their gracious hospitality and also the ministers of the government and the people of Egypt for receiving me and my daughter so warmly. It is a great pleasure to begin this visit to North Africa here in Egypt -- a true partner and friend of the United States. And this university certainly symbolizes that remarkable relationship as well.

In just a few days, the people of both our countries will mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Camp David accords -- peace accords that enabled this country and Israel to live in peace for twenty years,peace accords that clearly laid the groundwork for what came later with Jordan and what we hope will occur in the future with the Palestinian people and Israel. We will never and must never give up on the dream of peace that was really ignited with the Camp David accords. And the leadership and the example of Egypt is one that we will look to, not only for what can be done and must be done here in the Middle East but around the world as well.

Egypt has a special place in the imagination of people throughout the globe. Certainly Americans are reminded of our ties to Egypt every single day. Just look at the back of our dollar bill. It carries two symbols -- symbols that have their roots in the symbolism of ancient Egypt. We have an eagle that could look, if you squint, like a falcon,like a descendant of the kind of symbolism that one sees in the Egyptian Museum and that I'm looking forward to seeing in Luxor. Certainly, the idea of soaring high, as high as one can go, looking down on the earth arrayed below is one that has special meaning for people everywhere. But we also have on the back of that dollar bill the pyramid, representing man's triumph over death, not with physical life but with the ideas, the values, and the history that one leaves behind.

As I walked through the museum the other day, with the wonderful guidance of some experts who were with my daughter and me, I saw the kinds of things that a pharaoh or a noble person would want to bring with him or her into the next world -- everything that was essential as we embark on the final journey of this life. They believe that they were preserving what was necessary so that they could live in the future and the next life to come.

And I thought to myself, what would we take with us? We know so well that we will not, we believe, have use for food or clothing, so what tangible things would we take? Probably, none now. But what of the intangibles, what of the values, what of those things that we cannot necessarily hold in our hand but we leave to our children and our grandchildren?

I was reminded of that as I visited some of the sights here in Cairo. The mosques that I have seen -- mosques that have survived earthquakes,water damage, hot desert winds -- and are still standing because they have been lovingly cared for and are now being restored by successive generations. They, too, symbolize, not in a material way, but in a very deep and profound way, what we want to carry with us, what we may not be able to pack in a box, but which may mean more than anything we could pack -- a priceless material value passed on.

What would we bring with us today? While we stand at a pivotal, and some might even say paradoxical moment in history, an end of a century, an end of a millennium, a time of great promise and opportunity, we can also see as we look around us, a time of anxiety and even of fear at the pace of change that is engulfing us. We would want to bring with us those values, those institutions that can really stand the test of time. We would want to bring with us our human awareness, our knowledge of the past, so that we could be better prepared to navigate through the future.

My husband often says that there is no constant in the world anymore,except the constant of change. And that our challenge as human beings --Egyptians, Americans -- is to make change our friend, to understand how to harness and deal with the forces that have been unleashed primarily by technology, but also by changing political and economic forces.

So we would want, I believe, to bring with us institutions that would permit us to make this journey into the future, one that we could navigate with some sense of certainty about the direction we are taking. We'd want to bring an economy that provides opportunities for all people-- not only those lucky enough to be in this beautiful and historic hall-- but everyone, everyone who could in his or her way be prepared for that journey. We'd want to bring with us a society in which we not only are consumers, but also citizens, where we recognize the role of spirituality in our lives, not just materialism; in which we would be equipped as best we can, as imperfect beings to be prepared to imagine a better world, not to retreat inward to the past as is the temptation in a time of change.

At the White House, we are attempting to mark the passage of this time by trying to think of ways that we can honor the past and imagine the future. How can we honor this past that is with us, that we have survived in this century? And how can we take from the past what we need? How do we challenge ourselves to address the top questions that have always been with human beings but which today because of the conditions around the world, seem even more pressing?

I often think of society with a very simple metaphor: a three-legged stool. One leg is the government, one leg is the economy, and one leg is what we call civil society. Now, obviously, we could not sit on that stool if there were only two legs or even just one. We could not sit on it if one leg was much more powerful and longer than the other two. Creating that balance in society among these principal institutions that govern and in many ways define our lives together is something we are constantly striving to achieve.

We know we need governments -- effective, competent, functioning governments that can do what individuals cannot do for themselves and can do what market economies cannot do or produce, governments that protect our freedoms and defend our lives, respect human rights and the rules of democracy.

But even a government, no matter how well functioning, cannot in and of itself create citizens. The free market economy can create jobs and wealth and consumers and it needs to unleash the potential that is within so many people to have a better economic life for themselves. But the market economy, which can do many things, cannot create citizens. Only civil society, that third leg of the stool, can fulfill that important challenge.

So I want for just a few minutes to concentrate this morning on that third leg of civil society, of citizenship. Because if we are imagining this journey, a journey that the pharaohs took into the next world, a journey which we take while living into the world being created around us, we need to bring with us functioning, effective, competent governments that know their limits, but can produce the kinds of services that citizens need and we need to bring with us the unleashed power and energy of a free market economy that can take someone selling in the bazaar and give him as good a chance for the future just as the head of the largest corporation.

But when it comes to civil society, that is a constant act of creation. Because creating citizens who understand democracy, who protect democracy, who appreciate the human rights of themselves and others, can only be done in the space that exists between the government and the economy, the space that, after all, really makes life worth-living, the space we create in our families, the space that we fill with the associations we freely choose, the space that is the quality of life as we measure it.

We know what we mean sometimes by civil society, but we can't always describe it. We know that it is that element of human association and existence that really defies description because, at the end of the day,it is what makes life worth living.

So how do we nurture this civil society? In our religious associations,with the freedom of the expression of our religious beliefs, with the spirituality that we choose to follow, with the voluntary associations,even the soccer clubs we support, we are creating civil society.

It has never been more essential because we have never had more people living in democracies than we have now at this point in human history. And living in democracies forces us to confront some issues that in the past we didn't have to think about. Government made those decisions for us, a planned economy made those decisions for us, or in the case of some societies, anarchy basically abdicated the space that both government and an organized economy should fill.

And so here we are at the end of this century, thinking about how we will make this journey and wondering to ourselves how we create more,stronger civil societies. I think that there are several lessons that we have been learning around the world as we look to see how we better prepare for the future. First, we know now we have to invest in all people, in their education, in their health care, in providing the credit and economic opportunity to them that allow individuals, both alone and together, to live up to their God-given potential.

It was five years ago that thousands of people gathered here in Cairo for the International Conference on Population and Development. The further in time we move from that conference, the more remarkable it seems, because for the very first time I've been able to find in history, there was a world gathering which reached the conclusion that we must do more to develop the potential of all people, particularly women, if we expect to live in a prosperous, peaceful, stable world.

So instead of mechanistically focusing on just one aspect of our life,with respect to population control, a broader view was taken, a more human view that said: "No, we need to look at the entire person, we need to respect the entire woman, we need to educate the minds as well as care for the bodies, we need to provide opportunities so that people feel that they have a future that they can invest in."

With the entire world listening, the results of that conference sent a clear, clarion call. No nation can move forward if half of its citizens are fed last or least, uneducated, undereducated, overworked, denied credit and health cares, subjected to violence inside or outside of the home or are otherwise left behind.

We agreed to a set of goals. We agreed to make family planning a right. We agreed to reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality. We agreed to make education a right for all, not a privilege for the few. And I want to congratulate Egypt publicly, as I congratulated President Mubarak yesterday morning, on the progress that has been made in this country in meeting those fundamental goals. I have been privileged to see just a few of the examples of that progress over the last day and a half, and I expect to see more in the days to come.

Yesterday, I met with three entrepreneurs whose businesses and fortunes have risen because of small, micro-credit loans. As they showed me their shops and the bazaar, as they pointed with pride to the products which they have produced with their own hands and the hands of employees, they could tell me clearly that what they are doing now is giving them a sense of dignity and pride that they expect to be able to use with great effect in they years to come.

One was crafting metal by hand. He had learned his trade from his father who in turn learned it from his father and father's father. And the women that I spoke with said that they had been able to expand their operation, that they now had money to invest in improving their housing and the educational opportunities for their children. Just a small amount of money given to people with the spark of enterprise and the willingness to move forward enables them not only to have dignity but also to support themselves and their families. And all of that at a repayment rate of 97-99%. Now that is the kind of repayment rate that most commercial banks have never seen. But in micro-credit, which is a civil society function, you enable people to move into the larger economy -- out of the informal economy into the formal economy -- which benefits them and the larger society.

I also visited a brand new health center where women and children were receiving their prenatal care, their immunizations, their family planning, and the other services that they need. The room that we met in at the new health center was filled with university professors,physicians, nurses, and staff members who were committed to ensuring that poor women had the same access to health care as rich women. That is a change throughout the world that I have observed.

As I walked around the state-of-the-art surgery and intensive care units, the Minister of Health explained how Egypt is attempting to make sure that women in every part of the country have access to quality health care. And the results are there to be seen. The rates for infant mortality, maternal mortality and population are all going down. That is the right direction.

At a youth center, I met with a remarkable group of girls and women who are taking part in a program appropriately called "New Horizons." They are seeing beyond the more limited horizon that had only been available to their mothers and their grandmothers and they're seeing new roles for themselves. I told them that I don't know I've ever been in a group of more lively and dynamic girls and women. They showed me some of the videos that they're making that they use to teach community members about education or nutrition, female circumcision and health care. They were eager to talk about what these programs had meant in their own lives. There was even a woman of 65 who was there who had taken literacy classes and now she can read the street signs and read any newspaper and her children, she told me with pride, are proud of her.

I saw these kinds of important lessons being passed on from one generation to the next. There were three women, the mother, the daughter, and the grandmother, who have each learned how to improve their own options in life.

Time and time again, we have learned around the world that the single best investment any country can make is the investment in education and particularly, in girls' education. I know that Mrs. Mubarak has been a great champion of girls' education and the results are there to be seen. There and more girls going to and staying in school in Egypt, and that is creating a higher level of education, which is one of the principal ways we will be able to navigate into the future. It is hard to create and maintain civil society, it is hard to create citizenship, if we do not have educated people.

Secondly, if we want to create and strengthen civil society then we have to help people understand and ultimately exercise their rights and responsibilities. I will be traveling to Luxor and tomorrow I will visit a democracy school where I will see at first hand how citizens are helping their children learn the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

From what I've heard, they've begun to put those lessons to work. They've been collecting clothes and donating to the victims of a recent flood. They've even petitioned public officials to clean the city streets. Being married to a public official, I know that sometimes those of you who are in government wish that people would not exercise their rights and responsibilities, because it can become quite a burden when people demand services, when they argue with you, when they claim that they know how to do something better than all those people who are in public life. But that is the way democracy operates. And to have people who before did not understand citizenship all of a sudden realizing they have rights and responsibilities is the way we move ourselves forward both in civil society and ultimately in democracy itself.

That is what each of us does when we are involved in our child's education, when we cast our vote in an election, we participate in an organization or help ourselves or help others. I've heard of so many groups like that throughout Egypt. The burgeoning of NGOs(non-governmental organizations) in Egypt is one of the ways that I can see that civil society is vibrant and that the entire society is moving forward. Groups like the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, which reaches out to poor and illiterate women and teaches them about their legal rights. I have seen similar groups operating in countries as faraway as China or back in my own country where women are given the tools,the legal tools they need to protect themselves and to understand that they are people with rights. They are therefore, citizens.

I've met some of the leaders of the NGO groups here in Egypt, leaders and human rights activists, who have worked very hard on all kinds of issues that really are at the heart of how we empower people and particularly women. And I'm grateful that among the leadership roles that Mrs. Mubarak has taken on is an NGO, the Integrated Care Society,that has given girls in some of the poorest neighborhoods the chance to open up books and therefore open up their minds.

The Egyptian Red Crescent Society supports low cost medical services and I want to salute Mrs. Mubarak for her tireless leadership and support for NGOs for which she is known and admired around the world. But it isn't only those who are in positions of leadership or high-visibility that are expected to and must do the work of creating civil society. That work has to be done at all levels of our societies wherever we might live. I know that there are many people in this hall today who have touched lives and, literally, transformed them because of the services that you have provided. I read about the services provided atone NGO-run health clinic where one girl wrote about how she envisioned the new life she felt she was creating and the right to claim. She decid ed she would not get married before 18, but when I do, she wrote, my husband and I must decide together on the size of our family, that girls are as valuable as boys and have a right to education and work just as boys.

Her letter was posted on the wall of the community center but I would like to see it posted on the global Internet because it is not only relevant to girls in Egypt, it is relevant to girls everywhere.

No words could better describe the aspirations dreamed and the progress being made. At the grass roots level, in individual lives, with the millions and millions of decisions that are made every day here in this country, I remain personally convinced and become even more convinced when I see NGOs in action, like the ones I've briefly referred to, thatare a critical and necessary component in building open, democratic societies. We have to do more to make sure that they can perform their work. We also, though, have to make sure that NGOs understand they have to be held accountable as well, that if they are going to be players in the civil society, partners with the government and the economy as one of those legs of the stool, they have to also exercise transparency and be willing to have their accountability held and measured as well. We cannot permit any group in any democratic society to have unchecked,unaccountable power.

Third, we have to treat our diversity as a source of strength, not division -- a force that binds us together instead of tearing us apart. History is replete with instances of people who believe they could build themselves up by knocking others down, who peddled hatred as an antidote to fear.

We can look around our world today and know that history is repeating itself. There are leaders, there are governments, there are peoples who decide on a daily basis, unfortunately, that they have a right to push others back instead of understanding how we can come together to harness the power that we each bring to any endeavor in order to make life better for all.

It is understandable that when societies face rapid change, when so much of what has been familiar becomes different, new, that we have fertile ground for those differences to serve as a pretext for hatred or violence or inhumanity. Hatred may take the shape of terrorism. It maybe called ethnic cleansing. It may result, as it did for a few years recently in my own country, in church burnings or racial discrimination and crimes of hatred. But in each case when someone is diminished like that, it takes a toll on all of us. It causes each of us to wonder what is it that we are as human beings that permits us to violate the human rights and selfhood of others.

There are many freedoms and rights that we have to protect in a democracy: freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. All of those are fundamental and cannot be plucked out and held up as only one. They have to work in concert. When we look around the world today, we can see how ethnic and religious and racial differences are fueling violent encounters.

Just yesterday though, I stood on a small and sacred patch of land herein Cairo surrounded by what is believed to be the oldest synagogue in the world, the oldest Coptic church, a Greek Orthodox church and, in the background, the city's many mosques. It gave me a vivid sense of the diversity that exists in this great country. Now that can either be a source of division or a blessing.

That is certainly how I view it in my own country. We are home to countless ethnic groups, religions, and nationalities. We have struggled for more than 220 years to end racial intolerance and discrimination, to provide equal rights under the law to men and women, to welcome our successive waves of immigrants, and we've made a lot of progress. But I could not stand here before you or any audience and say that we are perfect, that we understand how to deal with this wide diversity of humanity. It is a daily struggle. Democracy is never perfected. It takes constant work and I think our founders knew that when they talked about creating a more perfect union that it would be something that every generation would have to confront. Well, I don't think it is any diffe rent in any country. We must look to our history and honor it, but we cannot be imprisoned by it. We have to bring forward those lessons of tolerance and understanding that truly do stand the test of time and we have to reject the calls to violence and prejudice and discrimination.

Here in Egypt, I know that throughout the ages, Muslims and Copts have lived and prospered together. The Coptic Church has hosted annual Iftars for Muslim colleagues, Muslims have attended church to share in the joys of the weddings of Coptic friends and each community has reached out to help in times of trouble, as during the terrible flood of 1994.

But we also know that in every religion there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort its most sacred teachings, preaching intolerance and resorting to violence against believers of other faiths. We know that that kind of enmity that can exist between peoples, stirred up by those who have an advantage to be gained, can rip apart the fabric of communities.

I remember so well visiting Bosnia after the peace accords were signed. I met with a group of Bosnians, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats -- I couldn't tell by looking who was who -- and they began talking to me about how they had lived peacefully together for many years and then, all of a sudden, neighbor turned against neighbor. Now, it didn't happen just by accident. It happened because there were those who stirred up that religious and ethnic intolerance, who used the media to deliver messages of hate instead of unity. And so people who had been friends, who had visited in each other's homes, who had attended the weddings and funerals of loved ones, saw their neighbors going in and pulling out neighbors out of houses, burning homes, burning crops, and they couldn't understand how that inhumanity had been once again sparked after years of knowing one another.

One of the women who was there said to me, "You know, I said to one of my neighbors, we know each other, we've lived with each other, we've practiced our faiths side by side. Why have you joined these people?"And the neighbor responded, "Because of what I saw in television,because of what I read in the newspaper. They told me that you were going to come after me and that we had to come after you first." So we not only have the age-old problems of inhumanity, we now have new tools of communication that can stir up divisiveness in the blink of an eye. Someone can go on the Internet and put out a message of hate that with the press of a button can be everywhere in the world. And that is why leaders and citizens together have to work even harder at tolerance and to prevent discrimination so that we seed the bed of citizenship with those values.

And so when the leader or the advocate or the fanatic tries to stir up hatred, it will not fall on the ears of receiving people but it will be rejected, as it should be. Egypt has long been a symbol of tolerance,and I applaud you for that. And I applaud you for continuing to stand against it in every way possible. We've been working on that in my own country as well. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States, but until my husband and I came to the White House, we had never celebrated or recognized the great celebration of Ramadan. We'd had all kinds of celebrations for Christmas and Hanukkah and we'd had people bringing their children to the White House to see the Christmas decorations or the menorah that was displayed. And so starting a few y ears ago, we began holding Eid celebrations at the White House, bringing in hundreds of Muslim women and men and children to celebrate the Eid and to share with us the stories and values embodied in Islam: love of family and community; mutual respect; the power of education. These three great monotheistic religions that come from this part of the world have so much to give one another as well as to people everywhere. But that can only happen if we respect and we listen and we care about the traditions and values that each of us hold dear.

Think if you will, about the values you would take to the next world. What would you pack if you were to go? If a tomb were to be built for you today and you didn't bring any of the seed that you needed or the clothes that you would wear, what would you take with you?

I hope that all of us think about that as we approach the end of this century. I hope among the values we take and the lessons that we've learned are to respect the dignity of all individuals, and particularly,to give women and girls the rights and responsibilities of citizenship,to work to make sure that our societies are balanced with functioning,effective governments, strong and vibrant economies and civil societies that bring people together, not drive them apart.

I hope we will bring with us our respective religious beliefs and faiths and we will also bring with us the tolerance and respect we should have for others. As we move into that uncharted terrain of the next century,navigating our small boats, I hope we will recognize that we are blessed indeed, to live at the end of this century -- the most violent in human history -- because I hope we will have learned how to honor the past,rejecting the lessons of history we do not need to take with us anymore,and carrying the ones we should value and hold dear as we work to create a better present and future for ourselves and our children.

When Dr. Gerhart introduced me, he referred to Um Kalthoum. I was told of a line in one of her famous songs, "I am the people, I am the people," she sang. "I do not know an impossible." Those are words that we should think about as well.

This extraordinary country and its citizens have proven over thousands of years that the impossible can be rendered possible and I look to you to continue to demonstrate that, not only here at home, but abroad as well. It would be a tragedy of great dimension were we to lose this opportunity in human history to do more to realize our own humanity and to create the conditions that will enable us, well into the next century, to look back and say, "I lived my life as well as I could, I made my contributions. And when I left on my final journey, I hope I left behind those values and ideals that will enable people to live more peacefully, with prosperity, respect, dignity, and tolerance well into the future."

Thank you very much.

Previous Stories:
  US donation to save Luxor temples   (4/15/1999)
  US First Lady Clinton visits Luxor   (3/24/1999)
  Suzanne Mubarak, Hillary Clinton to visit Luxor tomorrow after meeting President Mubarak   (3/23/1999)

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