Bill Clinton: “Let me just observe, I don't think it is an insurmountable problem, and I think it would be certainly not grounds for…”

“Let me just observe, I don't think it is an insurmountable problem, and I think it would be certainly not grounds for withdrawal of foreign investment. But let me tell you a story about a different society. I went to Riga, Latvia--Hillary and I did--a few years ago, and the last of the Russian troops--the former Soviet Union--Russian troops withdrew from the Baltics. And Riga is the largest northernmost port in the world, I think. There are about a million people there. So the Baltic States are finally free of Communist domination after decades. And we sit there, and we're having this conversation like you and I are. We're having-- these three Baltic Presidents--and I ask them, what would they like me to do--is to open an FBI office in Riga. One of the most popular things we did was to open an FBI office in Moscow. Why? Because they had this totalitarian, control-oriented society, and when they ripped it away and substituted a democracy for it, nature abhors a vacuum. And then besides that, there were a lot of unemployed people who had positions in the apparatus. And they were dealing with huge amounts of transnational crime, the kind of thing you talked about earlier. Same thing happens at the local level; one of you mentioned this. There is a pretty even distribution of international--and energy and ambition in this world, whether it's out there on that play yard or in the wealthiest neighborhood in the United States. And nature abhors a vacuum. And we found--I'll never forget, once I was in Los Angeles when the gang problem there was particularly intense several years ago, and there was a three-page interview with a 17-year-old gang leader. And I read this; I said, ``My God, this guy is a genius. Why did we lose this young man? He's a genius.'' And when he was asked, ``Well, what are you going to do when you're 25,'' he said, ``I don't expect to be alive.'' I think all this goes back to what you were saying at first, those of you who worked in the NGO community, those of you that are worried about the institutions of civil society. I think that for so long it was obvious what the big problem was here, and you had to deal with the big problem first. I mean, if you hadn't done that, you couldn't go on to other things. And it was easy to organize the emotions and the energies and the gifts of people toward that, whether they were young or older. But then after that, you're left with a freer government, a more open system, a more open society, but you still don't have all this infrastructure. And there is no simple answer, but I think that basically you have to have both more leaders and more structures. I think about--for example, in the United States, I just got a report right before I left here attempting to analyze the reasons for the big drop in crime in America in the last 5 years. And I may miss the numbers, but this is roughly accurate, because I read it in a hurry. Roughly, the people who did this research concluded that about 35 percent of the drop was due to an improving economy: more people had jobs, and the gains of property crime and the risk of getting caught were not so important. And a little less than that was due to improved policing--more police officers and rooting them more closely in the community, so that they worked with children and with families and with block leaders to keep things from happening in the first place--and the rest of it due to a whole amalgam of factors related to keeping mostly young people out of trouble in the first place, giving them other things to do. The best example of structure I've seen since I got up this morning is all those kids in their uniforms out there singing the song to me when I got out. But in America we have the Boys Clubs, the Girls Clubs, the YMCA, and all of those organizations, the scouting movement. Those of us in government sometimes tend to be very almost egocentric, and we forget what real people do with their time all day every day, from the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night. And most real people don't have all that much contact with us. We fund the schools and the police officers driving around and other things. So I think that our aid programs and a lot of our partnerships ought to be focused on helping you develop more leaders and more structures. Hillary took me the first day we were in South Africa--we got in in the middle of the night, and she made me get up early the next day because she said, ``You've got to go back to this housing project that I visited that's outside of Cape Town''-- about, I don't know, 30 kilometers outside of Cape Town, to meet this woman who was in charge of this community-based self-help housing project where poor people were building their own homes. And you have to contribute to the membership of the organization, so there was a remarkable amount of organization in this very poor community and a lot of leadership. And I didn't ask anybody, but I bet there is lower crime. So my own view is, I look around here and I think, if you believe that there is an even distribution of talent, intelligence, and ability in more or less every place, then we have to have more people who have the chance to go to Oxford and Georgetown, or Witwatersrand or wherever, and whatever it takes. You made some very specific suggestions that I thought were good. I'll see what I can do to help get more American athletes and entertainers to come here and relate to all sectors of the society. We agree that the aid programs should be extended, that it should not be replaced by trade but instead supplemented for it. I will see what I can do to do some more leadership training initiatives. And I'll see what I can do with the business community. I'm going to dedicate a Ron Brown Commercial Center here today, and I'll alter my remarks a little bit to reflect the advice you just gave me. But I just want to make the point that--I drive down these streets-- I wanted to come to this neighborhood so badly, and I admire you all so much. But I can only say, when you get discouraged, just remember, nature abhors a vacuum. There is an equal distribution of intelligence, energy, leadership, and organizing ability. Bad things will happen when you don't have good leaders, good structures, and a good mission; good things will happen when you do. And the government--Mr. Mandela, Mr. Mbeki-- no one can be expected to run a free government of free people and organize every minute of every day. That's why the media is important in a free society. That's why all these NGO's are important. That's why the private sector is important. And I don't mean to oversimplify this, but I just think that--we visited one of these microcredit projects in Uganda in a little village. The village is getting organized around village women borrowing small amounts of money, starting their businesses. They all of a sudden become leaders; they become role models. People see that life can be different than it is. We're now, with our aid programs, funding over $2 million of those loans a year around the world. If every government giving foreign aid had that kind of priority, you could literally revolutionize the economic structure of villages in developing countries on all continents. So I want to encourage you. I'm just so impressed by what you said, but there is no simple answer. You've got to have more leaders, more structure, and the right mission. And we have to organize our aid program, our partnerships, everything else trying to sort of work toward that goal. I'm sitting here listening to you talk and I just wish that there were--I don't know, however many it would take--200,000 just like you out there with the same background and training. But I hope you'll be encouraged. And I think that the real trick is going to be--what you said, I thought, was very important about after the freedom was achieved and after Mr. Mandela was elected and the victory, there must have been a lot of people who said, ``I'm just tired of it; I just want to go back to my life.'' You want to quit the public space. But if you do, you create a vacuum before the structures are there that would get people in that are tired. You know, in our country people get tired of politics. It's not particularly terrible. Twelve people go line up and run for office. You see what I mean? You'll get there. You'll reach a time when people can make--you'll have the luxuries of making these kind of choices. You don't have that luxury yet because you don't have the critical mass of organized life and a leadership funnel that will take care of all the children that are like those kids that are in the uniforms out there singing. What were you going to say? I'm sorry. [A participant stressed the importance of learning from people such as the teachers and educators who have done extraordinary things under extremely difficult circumstances to rebuild civil society structures. Mrs. Clinton stressed the importance of finding specific areas that work, such as schools, microenterprises, or citizen participation institutions, and replicating them or creating that capacity in other communities and on a broader scale.]”