International Women’s Leadership Forum
Message from Ms Benazir Bhutto
San Francisco, California September 25, 1997
Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is an honour for me to be able to communicate with you today, on tape.
I had very much wanted to be with you in person in San Francisco, but due to the continuing physical and legal harassment of my family, myself and my political party by the Islamabad regime, it was impossible for me to leave the country at this critical moment.
Distinguished friends,
I have great empathy for that amazing leader of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, who of course could not be with you today, because she would not be allowed to return to her country if she left. Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Burma is in constant danger, under constant threat, a vulnerable yet brave inspiration to us all.
I had wished to be with the International Leadership Forum because it would have given me the opportunity to talk, exchange information and network with a truly extraordinary group of women who have overcome all obstacles and succeeded in politics, government, business, the academy and the arts.
Women like Kim Campbell, the former Prime Minister of the great western country of Canada, who overcame barriers and obstacles and bigots to lead her Party and her nation through a most difficult period of Canadian history. Knowing all odds were against her did not stop her from assuming leadership. She is a model of determination and grace.
I wanted to be with the extraordinary group of renaissance women assembled in San Francisco today, who have broken ceilings and broken ground — often at considerable personal cost, so that my daughters Baktawar and Asifa, and billions like them across the planet, will someday have limitless opportunities for growth, development and productivity.
All of us gathered together today have a dream. We who sacrificed much, suffered much but struggled on to achieve success dream that our daughters and grand daughters will not have to face, the discriminatory barriers that have been put in our paths — yours and mine — by those entrenched forces who even today cling to the shreds of the status quo, immobilized by fear of social, economic, cultural and political change.
As we cross into a new century and new millennium, we should take stock of where we were, where we are, and where we are going.
The twentieth century was a century which witnessed two world wars the rise of Communism, the holocaust, the dominance of dictatorial regimes of oppression and tyranny. A century where states often sought to crush the dignity of men and women. But in the twilight of this century the indomitable spirit of humankind rose to arrest itself. From the ashes of the cold war arose an era marked by universal demands for freedom, for democracy, for dignity for men and yes, more important, for woman. A world dawned which witnessed the emergence of a global value system based on human rights. All of us gathered here today believe that any denial of human rights — the right to life, to liberty, to self-determination, liberty, to gender equality… the right to equal opportunity to education, to jobs, to health care, to housing — any abridgment of these fundamental human rights is unconscionably and inexcusably inhumane.
Those who are gathered believe and justice and modernity.
These were the principles that guided me in my two terms as Prime Minister of Pakistan.
The team I led propelled Pakistan into the modern era, where our children would be trained in the technologies of the 21st century for the jobs of the third millennium. Where our country would become a heaven for investment, a crossroads between the ancient silk routes and the west.
Our restoration of macroeconomic stability was the centerpiece to our modernization program. It was the impetus for insuring the confidence of businessmen and businesswomen throughout the world in the economic potential of Pakistan.
As a measure of our success, foreign investment in Pakistan during my second term as Prime Minster was 5 times larger than the foreign investment in Pakistan in the previous 25 years combined!
Our priority was nation building. Our goal was to rebuild the infrastructure of our nation to make Pakistan an economic leader in our region and in the world of the new century. And in large measure, we succeeded:
We tackled the problem of power shut downs which had crippled our economy by providing incentives to the energy sector. The World Bank called our energy program a role model to the entire developing world.
We brought our energy revolution directly to the people of Pakistan. In 3 years we successfully electrified over 21,000 villages in our rural areas with the aim of electrifying every village in Pakistan.
We built 30,000 primary schools to bring the light of knowledge to our children. We recruited 53,000 teachers, 70 per cent of them women for these new schools.
When I became Prime Minister one in five children born with polio in the world was a Pakistani. As a mother, that was not a statistic I was prepared to live with. So we launched an anti-polio campaign which international bodies called the most successful in the world.
As one of the nine most populated countries in the world, population control remained a priority for us. I traveled to Cairo to attend the UN sponsored conference on Population Welfare. Our government introduced programs to reduce Pakistan’s population growth rate from 3.1% to 2.6%. And for this we recruited 50,000 Lady Health Workers who went from home to home educating women on how to take charge of their lives, their families and their destiny.
As a modern woman, I sought to make Pakistan a modern state. Our government introduced the information revolution, bringing fax machines into every office, cellular telephones into every business and CNN into every home with a television. We opened up our society by opening up minds.
It was, my friends, a miraculous transformation of a society, a transformation that cannot be negated by personal attacks upon me. What we accomplished — concretely and specifically — is my legacy to the 130 million people of Pakistan.
Distinguished friends,
Soon we shall be entering a new millennium.
It is more than a millennium that we are crossing. It is a fundamental charge in the way people live, in how nations conduct themselves.
With the explosion of information and technology that has taken place over the last two decades, the world has changed dramatically. It is nothing short of a revolution brought about not by guns and bullets, but by Pentium chips and megabytes of information.
Because of open communication, people all over the world were exposed in a very real sense to freedom — freedom to chose political leaders, freedom to pursue education and careers, freedom for consumers, freedom of the press and religion.
Access to information, the real key to social, political and economic change, is now within reach of almost everyone on earth, in huts as well as cities, in villages as well as villas, to the daughters of beggars as well as the sons of barons.
The internet is the great equalizer. The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California, has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution.
With the globalization of information and technology, has come a remarkable globalization of relations between states.
The most recent political and economic manifestation of this trend is the creation of the World Trade Organization, which is the first institutional step, to the demise of the closed nation-state as we have known it for a thousand years.
Open trade, open communications, open borders and a universal international culture are creating an emerging class of new citizens of a new world, a global citizen with a global outlook for a world of global values.
A global culture is emerging with global values. A culture and a value system which recognizes no territorial boundaries.
The way we dress, speak, eat is becoming increasingly similar. What we see, what we hear from news on CNN, to computers from IBM is also becoming similar. Our demands are also similar — democracy, freedom, equality.
The successor generation of young people have the greatest opportunity for insuring a pluralistic and tolerant and global 21st century. Today’s young, your children and mine, are the children of the future, of the new century, the new world, the new information state.
They are the ones who will move from the trees of the past to the forests of the future.
They are the ones who will leave behind a past, a past of their mothers, where mothers had to prove we could and would succeed. They will enter a future where a woman’s right to work, to achieve, to succeed will be taken for granted.
I pray that my daughters, and your, will enter a future where women are not mocked at, scoffed at or scandalized simply because we are women.
I pray for a future for our daughters and grand daughters where women are respected for their talent, education, their work, and their intelligence.
In that future lies are vindication.
God bless you, and Godspeed.