• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

15 April 1998

TRANSCRIPT: ALBRIGHT REMARKS AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY APRIL 14, 1998

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
REMARKS BY SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY
April 14, 1998
Washington, D.C.
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Thank you all. Thank you very much, President
Swaggert, for that very kind introduction. Ambassador Dawson,
officials of the university, members of the faculty and the
(inaudible) center, thank you for your invitation to deliver the
Patricia Roberts Harris lecture, although I must assure you that I
came here as much to listen as to lecture.
Most of all, I want to thank the students for coming out and for
giving this former professor a chance to be back in a classroom and
get a little bit away from my day job and spend some time with you.
This is a great pleasure.
I am very pleased how, President Swaggert, that you introduced Susan
Rice, who indeed is a star and has just come back from the President's
trip to Africa. And so I am very glad that she was here and I'm even
more pleased since she is part of our department.
I also want to introduce Diedre Davis, Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights. Ms. Davis was a 1980
graduate of Howard Law School and is among the third members of her
family, beginning with her grandmother and grandfather, who were
Howard graduates.
Now, there is one thing that I did learn as a professor; that is,
addressing a big group of students just before lunch is a bit like
being a gladiator in the lion's den, and it is very, very important to
keep the audience entertained. So I will try to be brief and spend as
much time, I think, listening to your questions and answering them and
having a good chance to have an exchange.
Let me begin by mentioning a very obvious point, which is that the
world that you all are about to take over is quite different from the
one that my generation inherited and is trying to do something about.
When I was a professor, and even more when I was a student, I spent my
entire time studying the Cold War. I was an international relations
major, a political science major, and basically spent a great deal of
time studying how the Cold War was carried out, how it affected the
rest of our foreign policy, how regional alliances were set up in
order to deal with the Cold War. And the more that I taught about it,
the more I realized that all our foreign policies, in some form or
another, were somehow constructed with the Cold War model.
I remember giving a lecture at a university across town at a certain
stage after the Berlin Wall fell, and said this to the students of
that stage: The Cold War is over but I think, to a great extent, the
role that we now have now is much more complicated and, arguably,
could be said to be more dangerous.
Now, there were a lot of students who disagreed with me, and maybe
some of you will today. But as dangerous as the Cold War was when
there were missiles pointed at the United States and we had missiles
pointed at the Soviet Union, to a certain extent there was some
rationality to it. We talked a lot about mutual assured destruction,
various forms of deterrence, and it was a regularized way that we
tried to get countries to be on our side and get them away from the
other side, and the same thing that went on with the Soviet Union and
its satellites.
And so now what we've done is kind of open the whole system up, and
thereby created a whole host of challenges and fascinating problems
and, mostly I would say, opportunities. But I think the argument could
be made is that what we have out there is basically a much more
complicated world.
When I got to my first Clinton administration job, which was to be
Ambassador to the United Nations and I was surrounded 183 -- 182 other
countries because there were 183 at that time and now 185 -- being a
professor, I tried to make some sense out of what I was seeing and to
try to group the countries in some way.
So I saw it basically as a room that was divided into four kinds of
national groups. The first group is the largest group, and the one
composed of countries that see a value in a functioning international
system, who obey the laws, conventions, and treaties; who try to
establish various regimes, arms control regimes, nuclear
non-proliferation treaties, the Vienna Convention, a whole host of
issues that we are trying to work on together and benefit from.
Now, we do not necessarily agree with the kind of governments within
that group but, on the whole, this group does have a sense of being a
part of an international system from which there is some benefit to
them.
The second group -- and there are also a lot more of these countries,
I think, recently with the end of the Cold War and obviously with
newly developed countries -- that are what I would call societies in
transition, countries that very much want to be a part of the
international system but may no have all the institutional
infrastructure to be a part of it, and have the desire to be part of
that group.
The third group are the ones that are the outsiders. We have called
them the rogue states at certain stages, but basically what they are
are states that feel that they not only have no stake in the system
but, on the contrary, that their very being revolves around the fact
that they want to undo the system, literally throw hand grenades into
it to destroy it.
The fourth group are countries that are basically -- the only way to
describe them are basket cases that have no structure at all, that may
not have a government, that may not know what the size of their
territory is, and they are genuinely just there having eaten their
seed grain, figuratively and literally.
Now, as being there as the American ambassador, it occurred to me that
our long-term goal of moving into the 21st Century is, frankly, to try
to get everybody into that first group. So what that means is
supporting as we can the societies in transition, trying to reform the
rogues in some way, and trying to do what we can to help the basket
cases be able to stand on their own feet. That, I think, is a good
long-term goal for the United States because -- and for the rest of
those that are within the international system, because that makes a
more stable world.
The United States believes, as our foreign policy, that we are more
comfortable living in a world that has countries in it that are
democratic and have free market systems because that allows all people
the greatest hope of peace and prosperity and the ability to become
people that can travel and learn and invest in a global economy and
feel that our interests are being pursued. And we believe that
democracies do not go to war with each other.
So that has come as a long-term goal for us. The question is how we
get from here to there, and that is the problem of the moment because
what is clear is that the United States is the sole remaining
superpower. There are those who resent it and there are those who
depend on it, and there are those that actually fit into both groups,
that because they depend on it they resent it.
And there is no doubt in my mind that however one states it, at this
stage the United States is kind of the organizing principal of the
international system. And we very much don't want to be out there by
ourselves as the organizer and as the only superpower. People don't
believe that. They think we just want to be king of the hill, but we
do not. Our desire is to develop a whole host of regional and other
alliances, other groupings, ad hoc groupings, partnerships, that would
allow us to have other countries that share in the same rules that we
do and have shared goals. And I think people wonder where is it we
want to go in the 21st Century, and where we want to go is into an
international system that allows the United States and our citizens to
prosper and, at the same time, bring the others along in some form or
another.
Now, when I was teaching Poly Sci 101 or International Relations or,
as they called it in Georgetown, "Mo-Fo-Go," Modern Foreign
Governments, we talked a lot about what is foreign policy about. The
very basis of foreign policy, which I am sure you all have in your
textbooks, is it is the duty of the elected officials and appointed
officials of any country, this country, to protect our citizens, our
territory, and our way of life.
Now, in a different era, that was a different set of objectives
because, remember, our territory was much more protected. While the
United States, the last time I looked, was still behind two oceans and
we have two friendly neighbors to the north and the south, our
territory now needs to be protected from top and bottom, from a
variety of environmental problems. And so protecting our territory is
a more complex issue than before.
Protecting our citizens is more complicated. We are a peripatetic
people. There are Americans all over the place. They are traveling
everywhere, they are investing everywhere, and we want to be out
there, and; therefore, protecting American citizens as they invest and
travel through the various problems that they are faced with is a part
of the responsibility of foreign policy.
And then our way of life. Our way of life is extremely complicated and
depends on a global economy, depends on not having drugs, depends on
not having more refugees than this country can handle, disease coming
in. So it is a much more complex issue than it was at the beginning of
this century.
Now, I see the greatest threat to our society at the moment the
weapons of mass destruction. Well, that is kind of a phony word, I've
decided, because we ought to call it what it is. It's nuclear weapons,
it's poison gas, and it's biological warfare. Those are weapons that
know no boundaries and they are a huge threat to us.
Other things that threaten us also know no boundaries. Drugs know no
boundaries, refugees know no boundaries, and El Nino knows no
boundaries. Disease knows no boundaries. And, therefore, as we look at
what we need to do in the 21st Century, we need to be proud of being a
part of the biggest multicultural society in the world and proud of
our sovereignty but, at the same time, prepared to understand that we
gain as a nation when we participate in organizations that actually
multiply our power and our sovereignty by allowing us to deal with
whatever problems of these 21st Century threats.
21st Century threats know no boundaries, and I think that if I were
here on a daily basis and giving 50 minute lectures and quizzes, that
would be what I would want to know is what do you see as the 21st
Century threats.
Now, I do want to spend a few minutes talking about one organization
that I do think helps us a great deal and that is much misunderstood
in the United States, and that is the United Nations. There are those
in this country who believe that the United Nations is some kind of
alien organization, literally alien; that is, it will swoop down and
has a fleet of black helicopters that would swoop down at any minute
to steal your lawn furniture, that they are trying to take over
various states, and that they basically are a corruption of American
sovereignty.
The problem with that is it's just dead wrong. We invented the United
Nations. The United Nations was born in the United States and created
by American Presidents, Roosevelt and Truman, and by Eleanor
Roosevelt. We are the United Nations, and for us to see it as an alien
organization is contrary to our national interests. We can do a great
deal of business through the United Nations and, therefore, what I am
calling for, and I hope that as all of you begin to see our role in
world, you will also agree with me that the United Nations is good for
the United States and that then it goes through the specialized
agencies as well as its central focus, that it helps Americans in
every way and, therefore, that we ought to pay our bills at the United
Nations.
This is one of our largest issues that we're dealing with in Congress
now and I hope very much that as you look at the strategic structure
that I've presented for you, that you will understand how important
the role of the UN really is. If you want, I'm happy that we can talk
about some of the other issues involved with that.
Let me just close this part of my formal remarks to say the following.
That is, that I think that we have -- I have in my office three
portraits, actually, of Thomas Jefferson for all the obvious reasons
-- because he was the first Secretary of State, and I have to tell you
that on a daily basis it blows my mind to think that I have the job
that Thomas Jefferson had.
Second, I have Ed Muskie, because he was kind of my patron saint. I
worked for him in the Senate and he was what I hope everybody has in
life, is somebody that is a mentor and a friend and a guide and
somebody that you look up to.
And then I have Dean Atchison, and I have Dean Atchison there because
he was there, wrote a book called Presidential Creation, and he wrote
about what it was like to be Secretary of State at the end of the
second World War and how various organizations were created in order
to help the free world that existed in that Cold War period.
I don't want to be presumptuous, but I do think that women have begun
an era now in the post-Cold War period where we have the same
opportunity to create a variety of structures that will take us into
the next half century. And what I have asked to be done in my office
now is I ask people to compile all the various ad hoc organizations
that exist in all the various parts of the world that have just kind
of blossomed, because organizations often blossom in response to a
specific problem and they are there for functional reasons to deal
economic issues in the Balkans or they may be there in Asia to deal
with some of their regional security issues.
And I'm putting these charts together because I think that what we
have there is the beginning of the new post-Cold War structure and
various organizations that will be the underpinnings of that
international group of all the countries being in the first group of
countries in order for Americans to feel comfortable and for all of us
to be able to prosper because, when we prosper, we think that is a way
that the rest of the world can prosper with us and be our partners in
it.
On that note, let me conclude this part and I'll just be open to your
questions.
Q: Madame Secretary, I would like to know if you feel the meeting was
successful in your interviews in requesting a stay of execution for
Mr. Breard from Paraguay and how do you think this will affect
relations between our two countries?
ALBRIGHT: Thank you very much for asking that because I think that
question has been on people's minds today and yesterday and for some
time.
I think, let me put it into the context of the remarks that I made,
and that is, that we are part of an international system in which it
is important to respect the various rules and conventions and laws
that have been created to make that system work, that first group of
countries. And among those rules that are there are ways that foreign
nationals are treated in another country, how diplomats are treated,
how we deal with issues when they have committed a crime -- something
as simple as a parking ticket or as dreadful as what happened in
Virginia.
So there are rules, and the reason that there are rules, and we have
been the creators of many of them, is because we benefit from them. As
I said, there are a lot of Americans who travel abroad who sometimes
get into trouble and who need to have the availability of our consular
officers to be able to visit them if they have them jailed unjustly,
or even if they've been jailed justly, or if they find themselves in
some kind of a difficult situation that they, in other words, are able
to call home.
And it's something that is very important to us and, as Secretary of
State, to me in protecting Americans. As I said, it's not an accident
that I state what I talked about what the role of foreign policy is --
to protect the lives of American citizens. So that is part of my
responsibility.
Now, what happened here is that Mr. Breard committed a heinous crime
of rape and murder and was sentenced to death by the State of
Virginia. He then alleged that he had not been given proper consular
advice and it turns out, apparently, that he had not. But the decision
has been made that even if he had, that it would not have in any way
changed the sentence or in any way changed the situation, which is why
we are not asking in a specific way that the Solicitor General, in
terms of going to the Supreme Court, in terms of staying the execution
from that perspective. But from my perspective as Secretary of State,
I believe that I need to make clear that there are other aspects: the
foreign policy aspects.
Now, the foreign policy aspects have to do with the fact that Paraguay
took this to the International Court of Justice, and the International
Court of Justice one where many countries, as you know, do not believe
in the death penalty, plus our concerns the issue as to whether this
person actually was given due process, has the case in front of it now
and it has requested us, as a country, to have a stay of execution to
use whatever means possible.
And so what we have decided is that we have the discretion to ask for
a stay from the perspective of foreign policy, which I have done,
because we respect the International Court of Justice as a part of the
system that I described and because it is very important from a
perspective of Secretary of State to assure ourselves that our
citizens, were they to find themselves in any trouble whatsoever
abroad, that they also would be afforded their rights.
So we don't have a requirement to fulfill the International Court of
Justice, really almost a request. We have the discretion to do it,
which is why we have handled it the way we have and I don't want to
comment on whether the governor will respond or not. But in my writing
to him I made very clear that I understood the heinousness of the
crime and respected the State of Virginia and respected our laws but,
at the same time, as Secretary of State, that it is very important to
lay out some principles about how we behave within the international
community because we expect to have reciprocity on that.
It's a very tough issue and it's very interesting. I think it's going
to have some precedential values because there are some other cases
like this around. I do think, and the State Department is now under
orders in order to make very clear to state and local officials that
they have a responsibility to let a foreign national know that he or
she can, in fact, have consular advice. And that part, I think, is
very important because that protects American citizens.
Long answer, and I appreciate that fact that you asked it.
Q: I'm a senior here at Howard University. You talked about how the --
the protection of the American way of life and you listed refugees as
being one of the threats to the American way of life. I was wondering
if you could give me, if you could provide us with a definition of
what the State Department's definition of what a refugee is, and do
Haitians fall in that category? And also, how do refugees threaten the
American way of life?
ALBRIGHT: Let me clarify that. I think refugees, of which I am one,
frankly -- I came to this country as a refugee -- are a term that has
do with either a political refugee escaping from a particularly harsh
political system.
Now, what I think is a threat to our way of life is illegal
immigration. And I say this with some difficulty because as somebody
who came to this country as an immigrant and a refugee and grew up
thanks to the generosity of the American people, I find it very hard
to think that our borders are not the most open in the world, and they
are to legal immigrants.
I think that what we are concerned about are illegal immigrants who
have the largest -- as a country we take in more immigrants than any
other country in the world. We have the most generous immigration
policy. But what is a concern is when illegal immigrants come and
undermine a variety of the systems that work in order to make our
society function.
I can't answer you specifically. There are certain Haitians that are
obviously eligible to come, others who are not. But what we thought --
and if you talk about Haiti specifically -- and let me just also add
this. There, frankly, is nothing sadder than when people have to leave
the country of their birth. I think as great as this country is,
people actually probably prefer to live where they were born and be
able to make a living there and be able to exist within their own
societies. And when they are thrown out as a result of a political
situation or the threat of genocide or a variety of problems, it
disrupts their lives. And then as the Haitians have arrived by
boatloads or on rafts that were unsafe and many of them died, they
created a problem for the southern states, and they also were a human
tragedy, which was one reason why we worked so hard to change the
situation in Haiti and allow the possibility of people to stay once
they came and improved their lives there.
But I think that, generally, the whole issue of refugees across the
world is a great concern to the United States. There are just huge
numbers of people moving across Africa as refugees who are creating
problems in terms of how they settle down in the societies, whether
they are received properly, whether they then become victims of
genocide, whether they are kind of a moving group that has trouble
integrating into any part of the countries from which they have come
or where they are going. And boat people, generally I think, create a
certain kind of difficulty for the international system to absorb.
I don't think that any specific refugee is a threat to American life.
I'm just saying it is a disruptive element where America is the kind
of a country that believes that we are most comfortable in the world
and societies are at peace.
Q: In 1823, there was a Monroe document signed -- the United States
saying that they would not interfere in the domestic policy of other
countries. Today, America has decided that it's in its best interest
to interfere in order to secure the free world.
My problem is that the free world is being secured at the expense of
the people who are supposedly not living in the free world. We have
issues in -- I'm from Nigeria -- we have issues in Nigeria where Shell
Oil admitted to providing weapons that were used to kill -- that were
used to kill the Ogoni people in Nigeria. The United States said
nothing about that.
We had an issue in South Africa where weapons were siphoned through
the Israeli government into South Africa. And my question is what
would it take for America to have a consistent policy when African
countries are involved.
ALBRIGHT: Let me say that -- and if I could put again that into a
larger context -- I think that President Clinton has just come back
from what I think has been a remarkable trip to Africa in which it's
the first time that an American sitting president has really had a
comprehensive trip in Africa, being able to meet with a variety of
people at -- not only officials but average people within their
societies and really absorb a great deal about Africa.
I myself have the sense, again, especially when I was in New York at
the UN, that we all had a great deal to learn about Africa. And one of
the African diplomats there said to me, "You know the problem with
Americans is that they see Africa as just one continent." And he gave
one example. And I'm just picking a country at random. He'd say: You
know I'm from Ghana. And I'd meet an American. And he'd say, do you
know my friend who lives in Harare?
And just no sense about who was where, and you know, any relationship.
And I think that there are lots of Americans who also see Africa as
only a continent, in many ways, that is destitute, where there has
been genocide, where people -- where there have been droughts, where
Americans are basically very generous people. And I think that in
responding to starving children, there has been an outpouring, and
then people forget.
I took a trip to Africa -- several, but my most recent in December.
And then the president has just been there with an attempt to try to
change how we think about Africa and also how Africans think about the
United States, and to deal with issues where assistance is needed, to
talk about debt relief, to -- but also to talk to African leaders as
equals, as partners.
I said in my opening remarks that we wanted to have more partnerships,
that we wanted to deal with people on an equal basis, and to respect
them and have them respect us. And so the president has put forward a
whole bunch of initiatives that would in fact, help in terms of trade,
in terms of dealing with countries in Africa on a basis of mutual
respect.
At them same time, there's no question that assistance is needed in a
variety of places, refugees have to be dealt with, disease, et cetera.
The problems of arms has been a genuine problem, and to some extent, a
remnant of the Cold War. When I taught, I taught about Ethiopia. One
of the hardest things was to explain to students how many times
Ethiopia had gone back and forth between being a Soviet client and
being a U.S. recipient of assistance. And a lot of the arms have to do
with those kinds of trades back and forth.
I personally was critical of what happened with the Ogoni people and I
made a point of that in the UN when the Saro-wiwa murders happened. So
we have spoken about that, and we have dealt with a large part of some
of the South African issues. I think it is very important, frankly,
that their regimes of arms control be directed at Africa. We are
trying to create and African crisis response force so that Africans
themselves can deal with African problems with the assistance of some
of the countries in other parts of the world.
So it is very hard for the U.S. to have a consistent policy. I am sure
that somebody else in this audience is going to ask me why do we treat
X-country this way and another country the other way -- pick your
countries -- because the United States' policy is consistent in the
following ways, which is that human rights are central to our foreign
policy, support for democratic governments is central to our policy,
moving into free market systems is central to our policy.
Those are core principles. But each country is different. And we
cannot treat each country exactly the same. They are at different
stages in their development or they fall off the wagon. Nigeria is an
example, frankly. Nigeria was a country with a democratic tradition
that is not being run in any democratic shape or form now.
We are hoping that Nigeria can return to a democratic tradition. When
I was in Africa, I tried very hard to distinguish between what was
going on in Uganda and what was going on in Angola. The President did
the same thing. We have to treat the countries differently. So our
consistency comes with our basic core principles, but we cannot have a
cookie cutter approach to every country. Sorry, to take so long.
Q: I'm a freshman international business major from Seattle,
Washington. And I heard you refer the four different kinds of nations
in the beginning of your lecture. And my question was the nations --
you know, the threes and fours, how do we help them to develop a
profitable state in these multinational institutions so that they'll
be dedicated to supporting them?
ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that is a very good question. First of all,
let's go from the base. The basket case states have a long way to go
in terms of trying to develop a structure of any kind and
understanding that they have to have a certain set of central
institutions with local or federal ways of -- they have to create a
structure for themselves, that you cannot have just one group versus
another group, that there has to be some institutional structure.
And then what is important -- and I think that is very hard -- is to
get away from subsistence economies, where they somehow can plug into
the global system without being victims of it. And I think that this
is where there is a way for groups, be it the UN or the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank or a variety of international
institutions that do not have a stake in any way exploiting countries
but in order to help them to figure out a way to be part of the system
and not victims of the system. But it's very -- to be frank with you
-- very difficult for the countries that are down in that lowest
level.
The third group, the rogues, it is more difficult, because they need
to understand that by being outside of the system, they are the
losers. And for the most part, these are sanctioned systems. The way
that we try to deal with the rogues is to impose economic sanctions on
them so that they understand what they're losing and change their
behavior in a way that would put them -- they are very capable of
being part of the system.
Take Iraq. Iraq is a country that is not poor; that has oil revenues;
that can, could become a part of the international system if they
abided by the rules that the system put down, which is to come clean
on what they have in terms of weapons of mass destruction.
Another system that is being sanctioned is Yugoslavia. They cannot be
a part of the whole international system because they're not living up
to their obligations under the Dayton Accords. They were a functioning
economy that worked perfectly well that was a part of it, but they --
the way to get them to be a part of it is for them to understand what
they are losing by not being able to share in the global economy.
Q: Madame Secretary, you stated that human rights is one of our core
principles dealing with foreign policy. Recently, with the Pope's
visit to Cuba, President Clinton has, I guess, loosened the belt a bit
on the sanctions that the United States has set on that country. When
do you think it is that the United States will answer the call of the
international community to completely lift what is going on, the
barrier that we have with that country?
ALBRIGHT: I think Cuba, on which I have spent quite a lot of time, is
a very special problem for the United States -- because it is a
government that is repressing its people; that is close to the United
States; that has, at various stages, had hostile intent toward the
United States -- that recently shot down unarmed American planes,
civilian planes with Americans in them. These were Cuban-Americans.
They were Americans. And that is definitely a hostile act.
So, that is a serious problem for the United States government. We
have, we and administration prior to us, have tried a dual-track
policy vis-a-vis Cuba, which is to push as hard as we can on making
sure that there can be some opening up of the system so that people
can exercise their rights, and at the same time, kept an embargo,
because we do not think that they, given the way Castro runs this
country, that he should be a part of this international system that we
were talking about.
I told you before, I spent my life studying the Cold War. And I used
to be a Soviet expert, which basically makes me an archaeologist now,
but I tried to update myself. But there are certain aspect of what I
studied that I think are applicable now.
As communism ended in Central and Eastern Europe, there were a variety
of factors. But I would be willing to say, that one of the most
important things that gave it a push was a visit of the Pope to
Poland. Now, Poland is a very special country where the church is
identified with the nation, and the Pope is Polish. And Cuba and
Poland are different. Excuse me.
Cuba is in fact still run by its original revolutionary leader,
whereas the countries in Central and Eastern Europe didn't have real
revolutions. They were imposed on them. So there are lots of
differences. But the people does work in mysterious ways. And he has
just been in Cuba. And what is interesting, to take the Polish
analogy, when the Pope went to Poland, the government did not want to
talk, didn't want to handle the Pope's trip. And so they turned all
the logistics of it over to the parishes. And in the course of that,
the parishes discovered that they could organize a parade and could
basically get their act together, that they knew how to handle
logistics.
And even more importantly, the people that came out into the square to
see the Pope -- in a communist society, people are very isolated --
all of a sudden, they got in the square and they were able to see how
many of each other there were. It's not an English sentence, but
nevertheless it describes the feeling.
What happened in Cuba was that in getting ready for the Pope's trip,
Castro allowed something that the rest of the world has known for
2,000 years, which is that Christmas is a holiday. He also turned the
planning of it over to the churches, and the people came out to the
square and they saw how many of each other there were. And we were
watching very carefully the reaction to the papal visit and were
sorting -- (inaudible)
ALBRIGHT: (Inaudible) -- dissidents that the Pope wanted released. He
released a very small number. Many of them had to go into exile and so
they were not able to exist in their society as dissidents, which is
what we need to have a democratic system.
But we felt that there was some opportunity to follow up on what the
Pope had done. And so, as you pointed out, the President, under his
authority, was able to take some humanitarian acts, and so he has
allowed for more food and medicine to go to Cuba. He has said that
there could be humanitarian flights -- humanitarian, not tourists --
humanitarian flights, and he said that remittances could be restored
where Cuban-American families can send a certain amount of money to
their relatives. They were sending money anyway; it was just illegal
and the bureaucrats were skimming the money off, and this way they
will be able to send money.
And the reason that we did that was in order to allow the average
Cubans more space, their ability to be able to respond, to be able to
deal with, how to have more space between them and the government.
We'll have to see.
What is interesting is that Easter was celebrated. Now I'm waiting for
another holiday -- Election Day. And I think what has to happen is
that for Castro there are two embargoes that are really going there:
There is the US Government embargo against the Cuban Government, and
there is Castro's embargo against his own people. And our act of
trying to break that second embargo because we are on the side of
those in Cuba who want to live freely and not under Castro's regime.
It's a very long answer. I know that people are wondering about it.
It's where we are going, and we hope very much that there will be a
way that Castro does respond and that the Pope's visit really can
continue to have a historic effect somehow.
Q: I'm a sophomore here at Howard. In light of the President's recent
trip to Africa and his promises of economic partnerships, and also
looking after the crash of financial markets in Asia, where do you see
international economic policy heading in the future, especially with
growing protectionist sentiments here at home in the US?
ALBRIGHT: Among the various initiatives that the President presented
were ways to try to have an African trade initiative towards Africa
because we felt that it's very important to get Africa involved in the
entire global economy. I think what we need to do is to understand
what the problems in Asia were and that a lot of the financial
collapse had to do with loans that were unsecured and some amount of
corruption in some countries, subsidies systems, a whole host of
methods that are not the kind that help a free market prosper.
So I think we need to learn the lessons of what happened in Asia and
make sure that there's not an Asian flu that kind that spreads to
other parts of the world. In the IMF, we do think that the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have some good regimes
for trying to sort out how not to get into that particular mess.
But what I think is clear, and I hope that you all come away with
this, is that the President's trip, the initiatives that he has put
forward -- the trade initiatives, the reform of judicial systems or
attempts to try to get democratic institutions put in -- are a new
chapter in US-African relations, a way of not dealing with Africa as
only a recipient of assistance but as a partner in an international
global system and a partner in a system where everybody is in that
first group.
This is the part the President talked about a lot at this regional
meeting that they had in Entebee, Uganda -- was that it requires
actions by the national leaders in Africa. What we have found over and
over again, the United States can give advice and international bodies
can give advice and there can be a lot of technical expertise, but
until the leaders themselves make some hard decisions and share power
and understand that the people are their friends and not somebody they
need to separate themselves from -- and this is not just true in
Africa. It's throughout the world.
Our system is based on the trust of the government and its people, and
that is what has to happen throughout the world. And I think that
institutions are trying to allow that to happen and they have to sink
some roots there. And that is the role that we like to have to be
partners with African countries so that they can become a part of the
system.
I'd like to thank you all very much. I've enjoyed this a great deal.
(end transcript)