Remarks at a Reception for Representative Cynthia A. McKinney in Atlanta - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 17, 2000

I just came back from the Indian subcontinent. I went to Bangladesh and Pakistan and India. And I was in this--and in India, the per capita income is $450 a year. And I was in this little village--I mean, a little village--you may have seen the pictures on the television of me dancing with the village women, and they were pelting me with flowers. It's better than other things I could be pelted with. [Laughter] I was delighted. But anyway, let me say, so here I am in this little remote village. And in the sole public building in the village, I met with the city council, 11 men and 4 women, representing 10 different tribes and castes. And I saw the village's computer. And this new mother comes in to the village computer. And it was in Hindi, although they have these in all the various languages spoken in India. So she calls up the health department's webpage. And she's just had a baby, and she runs it out to the instructions for what the best care for a newborn is for the first 3 months of his life. And then s he hits the print button, and they have this fabulous software, and this beautiful program printed right out on a world-class printer. And she took home information as good as you could take home from any obstetrician in Atlanta. So it's wonderful. This is a very modem world.

I went to another city where they give 18 government services on the Internet--nobody buys a driver's license in a revenue office anymore. I told Governor Barnes if he did that here, there would be no term limits and he could stay until he was 95. [Laughter]

So that's the sort of picture we imagine for these children. And it's all modern, it's about science and technology, and we're relating to each other and how interesting it is. Don't you think it's also interesting that the biggest problems the world faces are rooted in the oldest difficulties of human-kind? That we're still basically scared of people that aren't like us?

I mean, I see these Sikhs here, I thank them for coming here. The most heart-breaking thing that happened on my trip to the Indian subcontinent is that about 40 Sikhs were murdered in Kashmir. And I'm sure they were murdered because I was there. Those people lost their lives because I went to India and to Pakistan. And people who don't want their turmoil to be eased used my trip there as a pretext to highlight the difficulties. And somebody, we don't know who, killed 40 perfectly innocent people who, I might add, had never before been targeted in all the conflicts in Kashmir.

In Rwanda--Cynthia talked about Rwanda--Rwanda's not like a lot of other African countries that were formed in 1885 by European powers. It's basically been a coherent country for 500 years, with two dominant tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis--for 500 years. And they fought from now and then, but they basically worked it out to get along. And in 100 days, 800,000 people were killed, almost with no guns.

In the Middle East, we still are seeing these tensions between the Israelis and their neighbors. In the Balkans, a million Islamic Albanians were driven from their homes like cattle, driven from their countries, in a matter of weeks, until we stopped it and turned it around in Kosovo. Even in Northern Ireland, where the people voted overwhelmingly for peace, the leaders are still so in the grip of their problems they can't get along.