Remarks at The Opening The 16Th Assembly of The Inter-Parliamentary Union

TRANSCRIPT
REMARKS
BY PRESIDENT REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA
AT THE OPENING
THE 116TH ASSEMBLY OF THE INTER-PARLIAMENTARY UNION
BALI INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION CENTER, HOTEL WESTIN
NUSA DUA-BALI
29 APRIL 2007



Bismillahirrahmanirrahiim
Assalamu’alaikum warahmatulahi wabarakatuh

The honorable Bapak Agung Laksono, Speaker of the Indonesian House of Representative,
The honorable Mr. Cassini, President of the IPU,
The honorable Mr. Anders B. Johnsson, Secretary General of the IPU,
Excellency Mr. Shafqat Kakakhel, United State Nation Representative,
The Governor of Bali,
Honorable Speakers of Parliament and Head of the Delegates,

Excellencies, Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen,
This evening I have the great honor, on behalf of the government and people of Indonesia to welcome you to the island of Bali. Indonesia is honored to host the 116th Assembly of the IPU. You have come from all parts of the world, from different political system, representing different constituencies from different historical backgrounds and cultures and no doubt with different perspectives.

And yet you are one because we share a common goal and work together as equals to address the critical issue of our time. What you say and do and accomplish here therefore is of great interest to international community. The IPU has existed much longer than the United Nation. It was already at work even before the League of Nation was created. It is order than most of its member states. It has also been transformed into a truly international organization comprising the legislatures of 140 states.

The IPU certainly has come in long way. It has kept abreast of a world that has also radically changed. When the IPU has established in 1889, it took four months for a letter mailed in London to reach Tokyo. It took over a month to travel by ship from Rotterdam to Jakarta. The wonder of the day was communication by telegraph and banks kept track of deposits and transactions by hand- written records.

Today, you can send an em ail to someone on the other side of the planet in seconds. You can book for a flight to the moon, tourist class. And you can transfer billons of dollars from one continent to another at the click of mouse.

The world has also changed in more profound way. The IPU was born at a time when modern nationalism was rapidly spreading in Europe and Latin America. Soon after, the fire of modern nationalism would engulf Asia and Africa, dramatically altering the global political landscape.

Today, the United Nation has over 192 member states. This is implementing of the legacy of modern nationalism that defined at 20th and 21st centuries. It is my hope however, that in the 21st century we can make the quantum leap into an era of the internationalism. In era of the internationalism when all nations are much more strongly connected with one another, each of them becoming more integrated into the global system as they strive for cooperative security and common prosperity.

Such internationalism is not the anti-thesis of nationalism. In fact, it is the logical consequence of the enlightened nationalism. Internationalism complements, strengthens and makes our nationalism more fruitful because it ensures that our expected our international interests will be served by international cooperation.

We must nurture this kind of internationalism if we are to overcome the enormously complex global issues of our time. And I am deeply pleased to see that this internationalism is very much alive among members of the IPU.

We believe plenty of that internationalism if we are to craft a new just, democratic, and durable international order. 17 years after the Berlin wall crumbled, an international order is elusive. We call it the “post Cold War” world, the “post-911” world, the multipolar world, the globalized world, reflecting the fact that we do not have a name it yet.

The fact is we can not have stable and durable international peace so long as they are still hotspots around the world, the permanent peaces is yet to be attained in Iraq, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka, in Sudan, in Haiti, among others.

In the peace of Iraq, I would like to join my colleague, Mr. Agung Laksono, the Speaker of the House of Representative of Indonesia to state that human tragedy and violence in Iraq must end and must be ended by Iraqi people. I thank you, thank you very much. Iraqi people must be saved respected and empowered.

In my meeting with President Bush of the United State last year, I submitted a proposal, the so called triple track solutions for Iraq. Track one is national reconciliation and the empowerment of Iraqi government. Track two is withdrawal of the coalition forces and replace by light the other countries to conduct peace keeping missions. And track three, post country reconstruction for Iraq.

We cannot have durable international peace so large pockets of poverty, deprivation and desperation persist in our midst. We cannot have durable international peace so long as extremism, injustice, hatred, racism, prejudice, still prevails. And we cannot achieve durable international peace unless the international community work together effectively to address emerging threats to our common security: terrorism, natural disasters, diseases, trans-national crimes, financial crisis, and so on.

These are indeed enormous challenge and they call for a new internationalism among nations. But this internationalism can only work if it is supported by a comprehensive network of partnership.

The world has seen many attempts to forge global partnership: the North-South Dialogue, South-South Cooperation, and now the Doha Development Round. Regional and international cooperation is flourishing in EU, ASEAN, APEC, ASEM, VEALAC and the GCC.

However, for any global partnership to work, both developed and developing nations have to play complementary roles. Partnership, after all, it is a two-way street.

To begin with, the countries of the developed world can do more to open up their market to the product the developing world especially agricultural products.

The developed world can help the developing countries that are strangled by chronic debt through innovative debt relief programs. Developed can increase financial flows, especially foreign direct investments to the developing world. And they can share their technology and know-how with the developing countries in ways that strike a balance between social responsibility and respect for intellectual property rights.

On the other hand, the country of the developing world must also do their homework. One of the most important thing, they can do is practice good governance. There is already an abundance of empirical evidence that no matter what your political system is, unless you employ good governance, you will not achieve progress. Many democracies fail due to poor governance and mismanagement. Hence, we in the developing world must ensure transparency and accountability in our system, and banish corrupt practices from our public and private sectors.

We in the developing world mush also enhance our human capital. We have to invest in our own people by ensuring that they have access to quality education and health services, that they have a conducive environment to grow their creative potential and they are freed from the bondage of poverty and conflict.

We must provide a climate hospitable to foreign direct investments. Nothing can make a foreign investor come in, unless he is assured of the safety of his capital and of a level playing field. And finally, we must ensure the sustainability of our environment. We must use our resources with wisdom so that these are not depleted, leaving nothing for future generations.

Our ability to evolve this partnership between the developed and the developing world will be critical to our efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which is only eight years from now.

The MDGs, in my view, is the greatest and most promising project, the human race has ever undertaken. It is at once the noblest war for human dignity and the fiercest assault on poverty and degradation.

And if we achieve there crucial goals, the world will change for the better. The number of people worldwide living on less than a dollar a day will be reduced by half. Universal primary education will become a reality. There will be a gender equality in the schools and in the workplace. Women will be empowered. Infant mortality will be reduced by two third and maternal death will fall by 75%, and the spread of HIV will be reversed.

These are not pipe dreams. The MDGs are entirely achievable because they set realistic targets, taking into account our capacity to achieve them. For example the cost of ensuring safer child birth for mothers would be about US$ 12 billion per year, which is equal to what Americans and Europeans spend on perfumes per year.

The cost of achieving universal primary education by the year 2015 is estimated at US$ 10 billon per year. That is what Americans spend on ice cream per year.

And remember the world did successfully eradicate small pox from our planet on a price tag of only US$ 17 billion. I dare for humbly appeal to the Parliamentarian in the IPU to work hard with one another and with government to realize the Millennium Development Goals that will be a victory for the human race.

Excellencies, Honorable, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Internationalism that we envision will also require intensified dialogue and outreach. The renowned political scientist Samuel Huntington was right about at least one thing: that in post-Cold War world, ethic and religious issues-the so called “identity” issues- would become prominent in the affairs within and between nations. They would aggravate old conflicts and stimulate new conflicts. But a clash of civilization is not inevitable.

As the world community tries to build a new international order, we must make certain that the world’s civilizations, religions and cultures not only co-exist but also connect harmoniously. Dialogue and outreach are necessary because too many of our problems are rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding. We see pockets of extremism in many nations. We see symptoms of tension between the world of Islam and the West. And we see a worrying division within the Islamic world.

To deal with these problems, we have to promote more inter-faith and inter-civilization dialogues as an essential element of world peace. There is certainly no shortage of tolerance and moderation in our time. But we need to do more to help the forces of moderation inter-connect with one another. The UN has convened a High-level Group on Alliance of Civilizations. The Asia-Europe Meeting has held three inter-faith dialogues in recent years-in Indonesia, Cyprus, and China. APEC has held a symposium on inter-faith and inter-cultural cooperation. And Turkey and Spain have co-sponsored the Dialogue of Civilizations.

We in Indonesia have wholeheartedly contributed to this endeavor. In cooperation with Australia, we have sponsored a series of inter-faith dialogues. And when international crisis broke up due to unfortunate publication of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, we co-sponsored with Norway the Global Inter-media Dialogue. That dialogue was launched here in Bali, last year and will be resumed in June this year in Oslo, gathering journalist from different cultures to discuss issues relating to freedom of speech.

Indonesia also recently organized an international conference on Islamic scholars that brought together Sunni and Shiite Ulemas in a forum where they discussed the need for unity and brotherhood in Iraq. I have also formed with Prime Minister Tony Blair, a UK-Indonesia Islamic Advisory Board.

These initiatives are only the beginning of a long term program to build bridges of mutual understanding, mutual appreciation, and cooperation between faiths, cultures, and civilizations.

Excellency, Honorable, Ladies and Gentleman,
There is also another issues, there is looming large before us: global warming. We have learning so many new things about how global climate is changing but the best scientific knowledge today is only the tip of the iceberg. The impact of global warming will be fundamental, severe and very costly. It will change not only geography but also the distribution of human population. Tragically, poor countries will bear the brunt of that impact.

There are therefore two fundamental questions that you may wish to raise in this forum. The first is what can we do collectively and globally to control global warming? The second question is what can each of us, each nation do to control global warming?

As to the first question, clearly we have to develop an international regime that will help control and ultimately reverse the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

This means we have to faithfully implement the Kyoto Protocol. But more importantly, we also have to start thinking of how to go beyond the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire by 2012.

Here, we must make sure that the developing countries would be part of those global efforts. We must also make sure that the United States, which produces one fourth of global greenhouse emissions, will take part in post-Kyoto arrangements.

We must firmly establish an ambitious yet attainable practical target for reducing greenhouse emission worldwide. And we must make sure that there is an efficient and fair global carbon trading scheme that matches the resources of developed countries with the need of developing countries.

As to what each nation can do, I strongly believe that we do not have to wait until a new global warming regime is in place to start action.

The rain forest countries-like Indonesia, Brazil, Congo, Costa Rica, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea-must do everything possible to preserve there resources that are called the lungs of the world because of their capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We must do our best to stop illegal logging, to prevent forest fires.

That is why I am keen to ensure the success of our Heart of Borneo project in Kalimantan which will create a conservatory of 220.000 square meters of equatorial forests and numerous wildlife species.

Developed countries must do their utmost to reduce greenhouse emissions from their industries, cars, buildings and homes. The developed countries must also invest more heavily in technology for clean energy and to share this knowledge with developing world. After all, we have learned since Kyoto that we can cut greenhouse emission without cutting jobs or competitiveness.

Companies are well placed to play a critical role. There is a positive trend now of companies setting their own targets for reduction of greenhouse emissions, which exceed Kyoto targets.

As legislators, you can use the moral and political authority of your office to lead and persuade your constituencies to do something about global warming.

I do believe that humanity in on the verge of embarking on another journey. I like to thing of this as the “fourth wave of civilization”. The first wave as we know was the agricultural revolution. The second was the industrial revolution. The third wave was the information revolution. The fourth wave could be the global efforts to adapt to climate change.

There is no other time in history when one single issue-the issue of climate change – binds the fate of all humanity. In planet earth’s 4,5 billion years of existence, there has been only one species, homo sapiens, who can change the climate of the planet. It is only the same species that can set it right again.

The fourth wave will be driven by the moral obligation and efforts of the world’s nations to control and adapt to global warming. We will need to draw as much as possible from the lessons of agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions. Like the previous waves, it will require economic, social and technological innovations that fundamentally reshape how we live, produce, work, play, and think.

Are we up to the task Ladies and Gentleman? Absolutely. If we continue to nurture our internationalism, if we focus our minds, pool our resources, and coordinate our strategies, I am convinced that the nations of the world will have a better chance of controlling and reversing climate change.

I wish you all the best in your deliberations.

Finally, by saying ”Bismillahirrahmanirrahim”, I am pleased to declare the 116th Assembly of IPU open.

Thank you.
Wassalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.


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Presidential Household