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Emerging Democracies Forum
Managing the Twin Transitions
Closing Plenaries
(2 of 25 pages)
Speaker: …guests participating in the Emerging Democracies Forum. We start
our activities. At the outset may I call on His Excellency Alpha Oumar Konare, President of Mali, and His Excellency
President Ali Abdullah Saleh, President of Yemen, and Al Hage Geingob of Namibia to proceed to the hall to start
our session.
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada: I would like to have your permission to start the meeting and the round of participation
from the different delegations, country groups that have been at this conference. I know that it's been very fruitful
two and a half days; we've worked intensely, we have developed friendships and had the possibility to exchange
ideas with countries which many times are very far away from our realities but which are very close to us as emerging
democracies. We are unified by this great idea, by the fact that our people are poor and that we want to give them
peace and growth and stability, and I think it would be very interesting if we could hear from each of the country
group, each of the country delegations, although we're not official country representatives, to have your opinions
of how this meeting has gone and I'm sure it would be interesting for everybody to participate in what has been
the consensus that have grown out of these intensive days of work. I give the floor to who may request it.
Dr. Abdul Karim Al-Eryani: I would like to join you in welcoming His Excellency, Oumar Konare, the President
of Mali. We are grateful to him, and to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Prime Minister of Namibia who has
given this forum great significance by their presence.
Dear Colleagues, I hope you share my feeling that we have had three wonderful days of inspiring presentations and
fruitful discussions. Each one of us has spoken his mind freely and analyzed the achievements of his own country,
as well as the many problems to be surmounted and listened to a multitude of achievements and problems to be overcome
by other participating countries.
I think that three themes have dominated our discussions during the approximately 15 hours of five small groups
making a total of 45 hours, excluding about three and a half hours of plenary sessions on Monday morning. But we
all think that much more still to be said.
The first theme was the integral linkage between economic development and sustainable growth with promoting and
fostering the evolution from emerging democracies to mature or full-fledged democracies. I think that we must make
the international community and international development agencies fully aware of this integral linkage. The second
theme was the extremely important role of women and their right of attaining universal rights and universal equality
before we become mature democracies. The third theme was not so clear in the four topics of our small group discussions.
It was in fact an offshoot but it became paramount. That is the role of mass media in an emerging democracy. Clearly
not all participating countries have opened up but what struck me in this theme was that it was debated in the
context of knowing the truth in an emerging democracy while the mass media is controlled exclusively by the State.
And here I would like to say that the truth could still be obscure even if the mass media was a hundred percent
private. Remember that the Freedom of Information Act in the United States of America was ratified almost 200 years
since it was then in today's terms an emerging democracy. That's why a colleague of mine said that an unemerging
democracy, or for that matter in any democracy, knowing the truth starts by telling the truth. Therefore, I hope
that we will continue to debate these unfinished businesses in future forum.
Dear [inaudible], allow me to conclude by saying that we the states attending the First Forum of Emerging Democracies
in Sana'a still have unfinished business to be done and that we must not lose our contacts and exchange of experiences,
and that we must continue to sensitize the international community and the regional and the international development
institutions to our commitment,
as well as our needs to achieve a full fledged and mature democratic systems. This could be done by making a joint
declaration emanating from the city of Sana'a on this august occasion of our first forum. I thank you.
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