There is no public schedule available at the moment, but this
background briefing, held on the plane en route to Cairo provides a
pretty thorough picture of what Mme. Secretary's visit to Egypt will
involve. She has already had a meeting with President Morsi.
Background Briefing En Route to Cairo
Remarks
Senior Official, Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
July 14, 2012
... So
we are headed into Cairo a couple of weeks after President Morsi took
the oath of office because Secretary Clinton thought it was very
important to have early engagement with him and with all the
stakeholders in Egypt. She wants to underscore how important this relationship – U.S.-Egypt relationship – is to us and how the United States would like to support Egypt as it moves forward with its transition to democratic, civilian rule.
And she intends to engage with President Morsi, with civil society,
with Field Marshal Tantawi on this question of what the United States
can do to support a complete transition.
She also intends to
speak with the President and the other stakeholders about how the
United States and Egypt can work together on a range of shared interests
that are important to both Egypt and to the United States. And she
believes that taking this opportunity early on provides the chance to
begin a serious engagement and dialogue with a new president and to
carry on a dialogue with all of the other stakeholders there at a very
important time of change and transition in Egypt.
She’s going to be focused on three areas. The first is economic
and how the United States can bring a variety of economic tools to bear
to help Egypt deal with two sets of problems – short-term problems
related to the need for economic stabilization, to help them deal with
their finance gap, to help them contend with some of the economic
challenges that have been created over the past year or so as a result
of the transition, including a loss of growth, a loss of tourism, and
other economic dislocations, and then long-term challenges chiefly
related to unemployment and underemployment as a very large cadre of
young Egyptians come of age and come into the workforce with education
but not necessarily with skills that are matched to the jobs that are
actually available. That and other structural questions about the
modernization of Egypt’s economy will be very much on the agenda.
And
so many of you will recall that a year ago the President said that we
would provide a billion dollars to support the new Egyptian Government
as it began its work. And now that we have a new President, she will be
speaking with him and with other stakeholders in Egypt about the
component elements of that billion dollar package, which will include
budget support to help with Egypt’s financing gap and help them deal
with the support (inaudible) and then a debt swap, which essentially
translates into relieving some of Egypt’s debt over the coming period
and taking that money to put it into job-creating programs in
innovation, in technology, in technical and relational training,
especially focused on Egypt’s young people.
She’ll be announcing
that we have named a chair of the board of the U.S-Egypt Enterprise Fund
that the President also announced. His name is Jim Harman. We’ll get
you more information on him. He’s a well-known quantity in the region,
and he’s somebody who is familiar with how effective these enterprise
funds can be in emerging democracies. We have had very positive
experiences with him elsewhere in the world. We are doing an initial
capitalization of $60 million with the expectation that, over the course
of the next few years, we will be adding to that endowment to grow the
size of the fund. And Jim Harman will be out in the region soon to begin
the process of actually making investments and doing deals.
She
will speak with the Egyptian leadership about an OPIC fund of $250
million focused on small-and-medium-sized enterprises and about the
steps that the Egyptian Government needs to just complete in order to
begin to have access to that fund. And then she will tell President
Morsi that she’s being responsive to the requests of the Egyptian
Government by sending out Tom Nides, her deputy, with a large delegation
of American businesses in September to try to deepen and extend ties
and to generate American investment in Egypt.
In the course of
those conversations, she will also talk about how the United States can
support Egypt as it works with international and financial institutions
and with other donors and how we can support Egypt with technical
assistance as it makes the reforms and takes the modernization steps to
bring its economy kind of fully up to sort of 21st century standards, something that President Morsi himself has talked a lot about. So that’s on the economy.
On
the political transition, the Secretary will be eager to hear from
President Morsi, from civil society, from Field Marshal Tantawi, from
across this spectrum about the steps that the Egyptians are planning to
take and how they are intending to answer the questions that are
confronting them right now on the constitution, on the parliament, and
on the other aspects of institutions that will ultimately result in a
full transition to democratic, civilian rule. These are
questions that only the Egyptians can answer. She’s not coming with
prescriptions or with a specific set of proposals, but rather is going
to seek to understand better from them how they intend to proceed and is
going to underscore her view that dialogue among the stakeholders to
develop consensus on a way forward is crucial to avoid the kind of
confrontation and instability that could derail the transition.
So
that will be her message both in private and in public, and she will be
focused not so much on what these specific elements are, which are
things the Egyptians need to work out, as on the principles that have
guided the U.S. approach to the transition all along – a fully
representative parliament, a constitutional process that is inclusive
and produces a document that protects the rights of all Egyptians, and
all of the other attributes, from an independent judiciary to a thriving
civil society, that make up a sustainable democracy over time.
She,
in the context of this, will also stress her deep belief that Egypt’s
democracy can only be successful and that the aspirations of the
revolution can only be redeemed if the rights of all Egyptians are
protected, including the rights of minorities, including religious
minorities, and the rights of women. And that’s also a message
that she will carry both publicly and privately. And in that regard, she
will welcome President Morsi’s commitments and his public statements
and be eager to hear from him on how – what he plans to do to carry out
those commitments and to follow through on them.
The third area --
MODERATOR: What about the meetings?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Oh, right. Yeah. So just to give you a quick run of play, today
she’s going to see President Morsi in a small meeting, and then she
will see Foreign Minister Amr, where she’ll have an opportunity to talk
about the next areas here, regional security, regional issues.
And
then tomorrow, in addition to having a meeting with Field Marshall
Tantawi, she will be meeting with women civil society activists from a
range of walks of life, some who work on democracy and education and
health, some who work in the business sector, so a cross-section of
women who also reflect the kind of deep diversity of Egypt’s civil
society. And then she’ll be meeting with more than a dozen Christian
leaders from across Egypt, who represent a variety of denominations –
Coptic Christians, but other Christians as well – to hear from them
about their concerns and to talk to them about what they plan to do to
contribute to the democratic transition and to a new Egypt over time.
And
then she will visit a sort of business incubator, a technology
incubator, where young entrepreneurs are looking to grow new businesses
and are getting seed money and technical assistance to do so. And this
is, in part, financed and supported by a U.S.-Egypt partnership. So this
is a way in which we’re trying to help contribute to opportunities for
young people to become entrepreneurs and the engine of economic growth
in the new Egypt.
So from entrepreneurs to civil society
to women to religious minorities, her business kind of reflects the
breadth of engagement across all of the main constituent groups and
stakeholders in Egypt.
Then we’ll go up to
Alexandria, which is the economic hub of Egypt. Eighty percent of
Egypt’s trade comes in through Alexandria’s port. It is the economic
engine of the country. And while she’s there, she’ll have an
opportunity both to open – reopen the American consulate, which was
closed in 1993, and to give remarks on that occasion, where she
continues to talk about how the United States can play a positive role
in supporting Egypt’s transition and in supporting the future of Egypt’s
economy. It’s appropriate to be in Alexandria because of its role as a
business and economic hub, and it’s a place where she can get out of
Cairo and speak to another kind of different audience of Egyptians than
the one that you find in the capital city.
So taking us to
the third major area, which is regional security, again here she has
heard very positive statements from President Morsi in terms of his
commitment to upholding the peace treaty and his desire for Egypt to
remain an important source – a cornerstone of regional peace and
security. And she will stress her view that Egypt’s leadership
is crucial to the future of the region, to its peace and security, and
to the future of Egypt itself, that over the course of the last 30 years
you had a generation of Egyptians grow up without war or conflict and
that that has been a boon to Egypt and to the Egyptian people, and the
new Egyptian President should have the vision and the leadership to be
able to carry that forward.
She’ll talk about some of our shared
security interests, including counterterrorism and counter-piracy and
also concerns about developments in the Sinai, which she recognizes
ultimately a matter that the Egyptian Government itself has to work out
as it’s obviously Egyptian territory. But the United States is prepared
to support Egypt in this with resources, equipment, technical capacity,
training, and other things. So she’ll want to speak with the President
and other stakeholders in Egypt about that subject.
But above
all, her message is really going to be about Egypt’s historic role and
about the ways in which the U.S.-Egypt partnership has provided great
benefits to both our countries and that during the period of transition
and after the period of transition we should maintain that partnership
and continue a lot of the good work that has been done to secure better
futures for the Egyptian people, for the American people, and for all of
the people of the region.
I think it would be fair to
say that she will be very much eager to listen and to hear from
President Morsi. This is the first opportunity she’ll have to meet him,
and so part of it will be an opportunity for the two of them to
understand each other better at a personal level and for each of them to
understand the perspective that they bring – she on behalf of the
United States, he on behalf of a changing Egypt – to what the future of
this partnership will look like. And I think you will also find that in
her public comments, both later tonight and tomorrow, she will sound a
lot of the themes that I just talked about, but ultimately will sound a
note of optimism about her view both of what Egypt can achieve and what
the U.S.-Egyptian partnership can achieve as we move forward, and that
note of optimism comes even in the context of challenges that exist
today and will continue to exist and that we are very much mindful of.
So that’s all I’ve got....
