From NatoAir On Condi Remarks

[Annie]

From Our Friend NATOAIR, who is feeling much better.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has praised the women of Iraq and
Afghanistan as the "founding mothers" of their countries, facing down
terrorism and terrorists to point the way to a more democratic future.

In remarks at a March 8 reception at the U.S. Agency for International

Development commemorating International Women’s Day, Rice compared the

bravery of the Iraqi and Afghan women to that of other ordinary citizens

who became famous fighting for democracy and equal rights – Lech Walesa,

the Polish political leader, and Rosa Parks, the U.S. civil-rights

activist.



“These are the stories of individual common people, one by one, who say,

‘Enough, enough of the humiliation of dictatorship, enough of taking away

my human dignity to say what I wish, to worship as I please, to educate my

children, both boys and girls,’" Rice said. “These are the sounds of those

people and the actions of those people that lead to freedom for us all.”


Rice said that ensuring equality among all people is an ongoing struggle

that even the United States continues to face, and she pledged that the

United States would always be a friend and partner to Iraq and Afghanistan

in their journeys toward democracy.


“As you go through the struggles, remember that while democracy is a

difficult and long journey, it is a journey worth making,” she said. “It

is the only system of liberty and freedom that gives the full _expression

to human creativity, to human pride and to human dignity.”



Following is the transcript of Secretary Rice’s remarks:

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Office of the Spokesman

March 9, 2005


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

At the U.S. Agency for International Development Reception

On the Occasion of International Women's Day



March 8, 2005



Ronald Reagan Building

Washington, D.C.



SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very, very much. I would first like to say

to my good friend, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who has arrived, to

Ministers Jalal and Othman, with whom I met earlier, to the distinguished

guests here, the members of the diplomatic corps, the members of USAID who

do so much good work every day, and to you, Andrew, thank you very much

for what you do for USAID and what USAID does for the world in the name of

the United States of America.



This is an exciting time. It's an extraordinary time. I spent some

time today with women from the Middle East and North Africa, part of our

broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, I'll just say founding

mothers of their countries, women who have gone through struggle, women

who have gone through difficult times, women who have faced down terrorism

and terrorists to vote and to show the way to a better and more democratic

future.



And it is really an honor to be in the presence of women like you who

have taken the challenge of giving to their fellow country people the

opportunity for democracy and liberty and for freedom. It is not easy to

struggle for freedom. In fact, when I think about the founding fathers of

America, I think about wonderful, insightful men, but indeed, flawed men

like Thomas Jefferson, a man who wrote the wonderful words, "The God that

gave us life gave us liberty at the same time," but still owned slaves.



These were flawed men, but they were men who gave us institutions that

were capable of correcting those flaws. And so, throughout the two-plus

centuries of America's history, it has been a history of people struggling

to correct those flaws, to correct America's birth defect of slavery, a

birth defect that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man at America's

birth, to correct the defect that women were not full citizens and not

allowed to vote until early in the last century, to correct these many

defects that led even to a time when I was a child growing up in

Birmingham, Alabama where there was separation of the races, so that I did

not go to school with white children until my parents and I moved to

Denver, Colorado when I was in tenth grade.



That's what the struggle has been like in America. But do you know what

we've learned from that struggle? We've learned that the walls and the

difficulties and the imperfections break down piece by piece at the hand

of individuals who are willing to take a risk. And so, it was an

individual woman, a woman named Rosa Parks in Birmingham, Alabama, who,

just one day, as she said, was sick and tired of being sick and tired and

she refused to move to the back of the bus. And there are many stories

like that in the history of countries, like Lech Walesa, an electrician in

Poland who was just tired of being told lies by the system and climbed

over a fence to start a revolution in Poland.



And there are stories in Afghanistan of the first woman voter, a

19-year-old woman -- a first voter, a 19-year-old woman, or in Iraq where

a policeman threw himself on a bomb so that people could vote. These are

not the stories of the founding fathers and of people with magnificent

degrees and magnificent titles. These are the stories of individual common

people, one by one, who say, "Enough, enough of the humiliation of

dictatorship, enough of taking away my human dignity to say what I wish,

to worship as I please, to educate my children, both boys and girls."

These are the sounds of those people and the actions of those people that

lead to freedom for us all.



And so, I have been greatly honored to be in the presence of some of

those people who are taking that leadership role for their countries.

Now, we know that the road ahead is hard, that the road ahead is

difficult, that democracy is never won without sacrifice and that nothing

of value is ever won without sacrifice. But whether it is the sacrifice

that is needed to return a country to civility and to democracy in places

like Afghanistan or in Iraq or to return a country to the ability to work

again and function again after the natural disasters of the tsunami, it is

the human spirit that triumphs in all of these. And as I was walking by

and I was looking at the faces in this exhibition, what you see is the

face of the human spirit.



And so, I say to everyone who is gathered here, thank you for what you

do every day to express that human spirit. You can always know that in

the United States of America, you will have a friend; you will have a

partner in that journey toward democracy because it is a journey that we

ourselves have made in the United States. You will never have, in the

United States, those who are somehow haughty about what we have achieved

or arrogant about what we have achieved, because we know that it took

America a long time to achieve what we have. And you know what? We're

still struggling. We're still struggling every day for equality of our

races and equality of men and women.



So, as you go through the struggles, remember that while democracy is a

difficult and long journey, it is a journey worth making. It is the only

system of liberty and freedom that gives the full _expression to human

creativity, to human pride and to human dignity. Thank you very much.



(end transcript)



(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S.

Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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