Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
October 12, 2010
MS. DAGUDA: Ladies and gentlemen. Good morning and welcome to this special event. Let me introduce myself. My name is Aida Daguda and I am director of Civil Society Promotion Center, Bosnian organization existing since 1996. I’m honored to open this great event today and to welcome U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who set aside the majority of her time available during visit to Bosnia to talk to representatives of civil society, youth activists, youth entrepreneurs, and students from the following institutions: American University in Bosnia-Herzegovina; First, Second, and Third Gymnasium; Sarajevo School of Science and Technology; faculties of political science, law, philosophy, and economics at the University of Sarajevo; University of East Sarajevo; International University of Sarajevo; Medressas in Tuzla, Travnik, Sarajevo, and Veliko Cajno; Catholic faculty of theology; and Sarajevo Graduate School of Business.
This great audience can for sure contribute in forging a future together, which is a theme of today’s event. Therefore, we are eager to hear messages of our honored guest in that regard, how we can unleash hidden potential of our society and bring some much needed positive changes. Madam Secretary has proven that women have the right and the power to make a difference and change the world. She is also a 21st century diplomat connecting directly with people, especially young people around the world. We would like to see from our politicians more of that political wisdom. Please join me in welcoming the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Applause.)
Hillary takes an Obama question:
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is (inaudible) and I am the student of the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I have a question about what advice can you give to young Bosnians here who suffered through the past war about segregations in our rural educational system? It’s really a bad issue. What advice can you give to young Bosnians how to make our country more stronger and how to integrate our country without having those segregations in our educational system? Thank you.
SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s a question that I think really deserves a lot of thought from your educational leaders and others as well. If you are so segregated during your school years that you do not have any interaction with people from another community, it’s very hard to get the country as integrated as it needs to be.
Now, people can not only do a better job of creating educational experiences, particularly at the university level, but additional extracurricular experiences like what I was just referring to. Look for ways for young people to interact across these lines and come up with organizations that bring people together around their interests, bring people together around some goal that is set. And we’ve seen where this can be very helpful.
I’ll give you another example from Northern Ireland. We brought people together around something very simple, building a playground in an area between two communities that were literally walled off from each other, getting people from the Irish Catholic and the Protestant (inaudible) community to work together to build this playground. It sounds very simple, but it’s those little things that can begin to break down barriers. So then when mothers and fathers brought their children to play, they had to interact with each other.
I think that there is a long list of ideas that we can work with you on that we can offer to you. But again, it has to be done by you. I mean, the United States can hope for your future, but we cannot make it. That is up to you. But we can share with you ideas of what we’ve seen work, in fact, what we’ve seen work in my own country. You know the history of the United States. We had slavery, we fought a civil war, then we had many decades where black people were not given their rights, where if they moved into a neighborhood people would burn crosses on their lawn, or would move out so that they wouldn’t have to live next door to a person who was black.
So we know how hard this is, but I can only tell you that steady, relentless effort works. So now we have an African American president. We have someone who could never have been elected in my country just a short while ago. And I ran against him, as you know. I tried to beat him. (Laughter.) And he won, and then when he won, he asked me to work with him. Now, in many countries, that would still seem like such a strange idea. If you’re in a political contest, it should be a zero-sum game, winner takes all. But that’s not how we see it, and I’m often asked how could I go to work for President Obama after trying to defeat him. And the answer is simple: we both love our country. And at some point, that has to be the mindset that develops here. And it comes from small steps, not just big ones but small, many hundreds of thousands of small steps. And I hope that you will think about this and I hope you will let our ambassador know how we can help you, because we have lots of ideas from our own experience in our own country. Read the entire transcript
