Ladies and gentlemen, let me echo the President's warm welcome, and thank you all very much for your presence here today. One year and one week ago today, a worldwide coalition launched a successful battle against naked aggression. Today, we join together to form a new coalition to fight a new battle, but one with an equally worthy and important cause.

We meet today to form a coalition to support freedom and democracy, a coalition to help newly independent peoples to overcome a real human emergency, a coalition to support them as they work to free themselves from the fears and the shadows of their totalitarian past.

Operation Provide Hope

If this were a war, I suppose we would call it Operation Provide Hope. Yet this is not a war to defeat aggression but a peacetime battle to support freedom. For while the peoples of Russian and the other independent states desperately need food and fuel, and medicine and shelter; even more, I think, they need hope. Hope that they can live their normal lives with bread on their shelves and medicine in their hospitals; hope that there are ways out of this emergency; hope, above all, that comes from knowing that the world cares about their plight and is really ready to help--that is the message that this conference must send.

Here in Washington today, 54 nations and international organizations have joined together and have committed with one another in freedom's fight.

For all of us know that the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Byelarus, Kyrgyzstan, and the other independent states are asking for our helping hand so that democracy and free markets can take firm root in their lands.

These newly liberated peoples know that the ultimate responsibility for their success really lies in their own hands. They are not trying to evade what President Bush has referred to as "the hard work of freedom." Nor are they seeking charity or welfare.

But these peoples do know that we all have a stake in their success, as the President has just said. And they know too, I think, that we all have something to offer. They are only now learning the ways of democracy and the ways of free markets. They look to us--they look strongly to us--for guidance, to show them how to make our democratic values work in their lands. They want to draw on our years, and decades, and even centuries of experience with free markets and democracy so that they, too, can take their rightful place in the global community of free nations.

For the collapse of the Soviet Union has left the rubble of communism everywhere and we need to help lift communism's dead weight so that these new democracies have a chance to take hold. We need to help them deal with the legacy of command economies, of excessive militarization, and societal deterioration. They need our help, and they need it in all sectors.

In the nuclear area, for example, the United States and others ar working hard to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. President Bush has sent a team of experts to Moscow, to Minsk, to Kiev, and to Alma-Ata to discuss how the United States can support the secure control and the swift disablement and destruction of nuclear weapons. This is a mission in which we all have a great interest and in which we all have as well a great stake.

This mission includes "brain gain" proposals--that is, ways that American scientist from our weapons laboratories might work jointly with their counterparts in Russia and elsewhere to advance scientific knowledge instead of designing weapons. We hope that others will contribute to this effort.

But the nuclear arena is only an example. Across the board, the peoples of the New Independent States want the world's advice--especially through on-the-ground experts who can show them the way to a better future. Most of use are doing that in one way or another, and we need to redouble our efforts.

But as the international financial institutions work with the Russians and others to devise credible long-term reform plans, and while individual nations support political and economic reform through technical assistance, the world now needs to focus on the very real emergency that the peoples of Russia and the other independent states face today.

A Global Emergency

In the last few months, life in Russia and the other independent states has deteriorated at a dangerously accelerating pace. We have seen Uzbeks die in bloody riots, Russians shiver in bread lines, hospitals without vaccines, Aeroflot planes grounded by a fuel shortage, and military officers continuing to protest the lack of adequate housing.

This humanitarian emergency encompasses lands that cross 11 time zones and occupy one-sixth of the world's land mass. This emergency affects close to 300 million people.

So it is, without a doubt, a global emergency. And it will require global collective engagement to forestall further deterioration and to support conditions for the success of democratic and market reform.

Our response, as the President has said, must be global because no other approach is going to work. The problems of the New Independent States are far too large for any one region or any one nation to try to solve alone. The EC [European Community] Commission and EC member states, and especially Germany, have taken a leading role in supporting reform and in offering help.

The nations of Central and Eastern Europe--struggling themselves with building democracy and economic freedom--have joined us here today because they know that democracy in Russian, Ukraine, Byelarus, Moldova, and elsewhere will support their democracies, too. They know, too, that our commitment to their future is unshakable, and that we do not intend to lessen our assistance to them.

But this emergency in the New Independent States has profound repercussion beyond Europe that are obvious to all. As a global emergency, it has global effects and, again, demands a global effort.

The Global Response

Our response must be collective because that is how we can best use our resources. We need to divide our labors to help meet their needs. Working together, we can multiply our individual strengths to better coordinate and thereby accelerate and expand the emergency assistance that we can provide. For example, in the last month, German milk powder was shipped via Canadian planes to Russia. Working together, we can target our emergency assistance where it is needed most and where it can have the most impact. And, in this way, we can avoid duplication of effort.

Our response must embrace the people, the people there and here. Our collective effort must invoke the invaluable spirit and experience of our private sector and our voluntary organizations. Those who need our help are making a revolution from the grassroots to the highest councils of government, and we need to help them from the grassroots to the highest councils of governments. Public-private partnerships--as we have learned through President Bush's medical initiative--can leverage contributions, multiplying the value of our efforts. That is why we have asked our Citizens Democracy Corps to hold a parallel conference today and tomorrow to energize our non-governmental and voluntary organizations.

Above all, our collective response must aim to engage the Russians and Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, Armenians and Byelorussians, and all of the others to carry the crucial message of hope that I discussed earlier. As Maxim Gorky wrote to Herbert Hoover in 1923, "It is not only the physical help which is valuable but also the spiritual succor to the minds of mankind." In short, ladies and gentlemen, we must send spiritual support along with the food and medicine.

We have called this conference to coordinate, to accelerate, and expand our efforts. In our view, this conference is just one step along a path of continuing commitment to supporting these new states. It is not intended to overtake or to replicate the efforts of others. It is intended to bring together those most capable of contributing to this emergency effort and to improve the coordination among us.

Throughout the conference, we will be presenting--all of us, I hope--new ideas about how together we can best meet emergency needs and how, through technical assistance, we can build a "bridge" to long-term democracy and free markets. We encourage everyone to propose their ideas.

What should matter to everyone in this room is what we get done, not who gets the credit for it, because too much is at stake for us to follow any other course. Results are what matter. Providing emergency assistance to the peoples in need can give them hope in the future. It can give them faith in the democratic leaders who have embarked on this courageous path, leading them to that new future, and that is what is at stake here today and tomorrow.

As we focus on these next two day,s I think two goals are paramount.

First, the working groups should produce "work plans." By "plan," we do not mean a fixed blueprint or a static document. Rather, we expect working documents that the working group co-chairs and the other participants can use as guides for action.

Second, we must identify appropriate follow-up mechanisms. However organized, we need to ensure that coordination will continue into the immediate future.

Let me close with the following. To the peoples of Russia and the other independent states, we say: Stay the course, because freedom does work. Democracy and economic freedom are not experiments but your only path to a better future. History calls on your heroism once again to steel you against new adversity. Working together with each other and the world, democracy, freedom, and a better life can be yours.

To the peoples of Europe and the Americas, Asia and the Persian Gulf, we say: Together, we can achieve what individually we cannot achieve.

To the American people, Republicans and Democrats alike, we say: Together, we can be a source of hope. Let us avoid the isolationist slumber that threatens to allow history to repeat itself. Let us pledge instead to tackle the challenges both at home and abroad.

As Martin Luther King, a great American leader whose birth we remember here in this country this week, once said: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life."

We are all neighbors to the peoples of Russia and the New Independent States. So, ladies and gentlemen, let us all get to work, because it can be done. Thank you very much.

(Released by the Office of the White House Press Secretary, January 28, 1992.)