Bill Clinton: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have all been moved by one more profound example of Elie Wiesel's lifetime of bearing witness.…”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have all been moved by one more profound example of Elie Wiesel's lifetime of bearing witness. Before we open the floor for questions, and especially because of the current events in Kosovo, I would like to ask you to think about what he has just said in terms of what it means to the United States, in particular, and to the world in which we would like our children to live in the new century. How do we avoid indifference to human suffering? How do we muster both the wisdom and the strength to know when to act and whether there are circumstances in which we should not? Why are we in Kosovo? The history of our country for quite a long while had been dominated by a principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations. Indeed, for most of our history we have worn that principle as a badge of honor, for our Founders knew intervention as a fundamentally destructive force. George Washington warned us against those ``entangling alliances.'' The 20th century, with its two World Wars, the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Panama, Lebanon, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, it changed all that. For good or ill, it changed all that. Our steadily increasing involvement in the rest of the world, not for territorial gain but for peace and freedom and security, is a fact of recent history. In the cold war, it might be argued that on occasion we made a wrong judgment, because we saw the world through communist and noncommunist lenses. But no one doubts that we never sought territorial advantage. No one doubts that when we did get involved, we were doing what at least we thought was right for humanity. Now, at the end of the 20th century, it seems to me we face a great battle of the forces of integration against the forces of disintegration, of globalism versus tribalism, of oppression against empowerment. And this phenomenal explosion of technology might be the servant of either side or both. The central irony of our time, it seems to me, is this: Most of us have this vision of a 21st century world with the triumph of peace and prosperity and personal freedom; with the respect for the integrity of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities within a framework of shared values, shared power, shared plenty; making common cause against disease and environmental degradation across national lines, against terror, organized crime, weapons of mass destruction. This vision, ironically, is threatened by the oldest demon of human society, our vulnerability to hatred of the other. In the face of that, we cannot be indifferent, at home or abroad. That is why we are in Kosovo. We first have to set an example, as best we can, standing against hate crimes against racial minorities or gays, standing for respect, for diversity. Second, we have to act responsibly, recognizing this unique and, if history is any guide, fleeting position the United States now enjoys of remarkable military, political, and economic influence. We have to do what we can to protect the circle of humanity against those who would divide it by dehumanizing the other. Lord knows we have had enough of that in this century, and Elie talked about it. I think it is well to point out that Henry Luce coined the term ``the American Century'' way back in 1941. A lot of terrible things have happened since then, but a lot of good things have happened as well. And we should be grateful that, for most of the time since, our Nation has had both the power and the willingness to stand up against the horrors of the century, not every time, not every place, not even always with success, but we've done enough good to say that America has made a positive difference. From our successes and from our failures, we know there are hard questions that have to be asked when you move beyond the values and the principles to the murky circumstances of daily life. We can't, perhaps, intervene everywhere, but we must always be alive to the possibility of preventing death and oppression and forging and strengthening institutions and alliances to make a good outcome more likely. Elie has said that Kosovo is not the Holocaust but that the distinction should not deter us from doing what is right. I agree on both counts. When we see people forced from their homes at gunpoint, loaded onto train cars, their identity papers confiscated, their very presence blotted from the historical record, it is only natural that we would think of the events which Elie has chronicled tonight in his own life. We must always remain awake to the warning signs of evil. And now, we know that it is possible to act before it is too late. The efforts of Holocaust survivors to make us remember and help us understand, therefore, have not been in vain. The people who fought those battles and lived those tragedies, however, will not be around forever. More than 1,000 World War II veterans pass away every day. But they can live on in our determination to preserve what they gave us and to stand against the modern incarnations of the evil they defeated. Some say--and perhaps there will be some discussion about it tonight--that evil is an active presence, always seeking new opportunities to manifest itself. As a boy growing up in my Baptist church, I heard quite a lot of sermons about that. Other theologians, like Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, argued that evil was more the absence of something, a lack of knowledge, a failure of will, a poverty of the imagination, or a condition of indifference. None of this answers any of the difficult questions that a Kosovo, a Bosnia, a Rwanda present. But Kosovo is at the doorstep or the underbelly of NATO and its wide number of allies. We have military assets and allies willing to do their part. President Milosevic clearly has established a pattern of perfidy, earlier in Bosnia and elsewhere. And so we act. I would say there are two caveats that we ought to observe. First of all, any military action, any subsequent peacekeeping force cannot cause ancient grudges and freshly opened wounds to heal overnight. But we can make it more likely that people will resolve their differences by force of argument rather than force of arms and, in so doing, learn to live together. That is what Romania and Hungary have done recently, with their differences. It is what many Bosnian Croats, Serbs, and Muslims are struggling to do every day. Second, we should not fall victim to the easy tendency to demonize the Serbian people. They were our allies in World War II; they have their own legitimate concerns. Any international force going into Kosovo to maintain the peace must be dedicated also to protecting the Serbian minority from those who may wish to take their vengeance. But we cannot be indifferent to the fact that the Serbian leader has defined destiny as a license to kill. Destiny, instead, is what people make for themselves, with a decent respect for the legitimate interests and rights of others. In his first lecture here, the first Millennium Lecture, the distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn argued how much we are still shaped by the ideals of our Founding Fathers and by their realism, their deeply practical understanding of human nature, their understanding of the possibility of evil. They understood difficult moral judgments. They understood that to be indifferent is to be numb. They knew, too, that our people would never be immune to those who seek power by playing on our own hatreds and fears and that we had more to learn about the true meaning of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Here in this house, we have tried to advance those ideals with our initiative against hate crime, the race initiative, AmeriCorps, the stand against the hatred that brought us Oklahoma City and paramilitary groups, the efforts to forge peace from Northern Ireland to the Middle East. But our challenge now, and the world's, is to harmonize diversity and integration, to build a richly textured fabric of civilization that will make the most of God's various gifts, and that will resist those who would tear that fabric apart by appealing to the dark recesses that often seem to lurk in even the strongest souls. To succeed, we must heed the wisdom of our Founders about power and ambition. We must have the compassion and determination of Abraham Lincoln to always give birth to new freedom. We must have the vision of President Roosevelt, who proclaimed four freedoms for all human beings and invited the United States to defend them at home and around the world. Now, we close out this chapter of our history determined not to turn away from the horrors we leave behind but to act on their lessons with principle and purpose. If that is what we are, in fact, doing, Kosovo could be a very good place to begin a new century. Thank you very much. [Applause] Thank you. We have hundreds of questions, I know. Ellen, do you want to describe what we're going to do? White House Millennium Council Director Ellen Lovell. Well, I think, Mr. President, you have a question for Mr. Wiesel. And then I'm going to begin the questioning from the room, and Mrs. Clinton will take the questions from the Internet.”