Transcript
Jalal Talabani: Thank you for this opportunity to meet with you here at the Saban Center. In particular, I want to thank my friends, Haim Saban, Martin Indyk and the sadly absent Ken Pollack, for this wonderful event and for our dear Andrew Apostolou for organizing this meeting.
Friends, in recent weeks our two nations have been touched by tragedy. The people of the United States have suffered because of Hurricane Katrina. In Iraq, the fear-created terrorist activities was behind an awful stampede on a bridge in Baghdad that killed more than a thousand innocent people—Iraqis, honest, pious people who sought only to celebrate their long repressed Shi'a faith. For all the talk of sectarian tensions in Iraq, a hero of that terrible event on the bridge was 19 year old Kurd, Othman al-Obaidi, from the Sunni Arab community, who drowned after saving six persons from the river. Through his courage and sacrifice, Othman demonstrated the fundamental humanity of the Iraqi majority that refuses to allow terrorists and fascists to speak in their name.
After these two tragedies, the reactions of Americans and Iraqis were the same: we mourn and we rebuild. We look to the future.
For Iraqis, the future cannot but be one of promise and hope, for the past has been one of tragedy and pain.
This year, with the assistance of your great country and your allies in the Coalition from Britain, Poland, Australia and many other countries, we sought to change the tragic course of history of modern Iraq from a past characterized by violence, brutality and instability into what we hope to be a democratic future. Like the citizens of the United States 220 years ago, Iraqis work to "form a more perfect union", not based on force and fear, but on mutual respect and understanding and common interest in our future.
Dictatorship in Iraq is at an end—for today Iraq is an emerging democracy. Moreover, Iraq will soon vote on a draft constitution that is supported by the democratically elected representatives of the majority of its people.
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