Heads Of Government

"The Soviet Union is the only great power whose position has reflected the will and wishes of our people. Therefore the Soviet Union proves to be the only great power that has supported the Congolese people in their struggle from the beginning."

"We know, that some Congolese are well off, but they are in the minority; meanwhile we are concerned with the majority of the population."

"No one is perfect in this imperfect world."

"I have never doubted for a single instant that the sacred cause to which my comrades and I have dedicated our entire lives would triumph in the end. But what we wanted for our country—its right to an honorable life, to perfect dignity, to independence with no restrictions—was never wanted by Belgian colonialism and its Western allies."

"The European powers, want to enlist the sympathies of those African leaders who follow their lead and deceive their own people. Some of these powers see the meaning of their presence in the Congo and in Africa in exploiting their riches as much as possible, availing themselves of the services of the corrupt leaders."

"What we’ve been hearing from the panelists is how the global food system works right now... It’s based on large multinational companies, private profits, and very low international transfers to help poor people (sometimes no transfers at all). It’s based on the extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment. And it’s based on a radical denial of the economic rights of poor people... We’ve just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty. Yet we don’t seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years. In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC’s first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years. And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC’s cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes. We simply don’t reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you govern yourselves properly?”"

"We have known the atrocious sufferings of those who were imprisoned for their political opinions or religious beliefs and of those exiled in their own country. Their fate was worse than death itself. Who will forget the rifle-fire from which so many of our brothers perished, or the gaols in to which were brutally thrown those who did not want to submit to a regime of justice, oppression and exploitation which were the means the colonialists employed to dominate us?"

"in this sphere even Belgium who, understanding in the end the sense of history, did not try any harder to oppose our independence, is prepared to give us her help and friendship."

"Our wounds are too fresh and too smarting for us to be able to have known ironies, insults, and blows which we had to undergo morning, noon and night because we were Negroes. We have seen our lands spoiled in the name of laws which only recognised the right of the strongest. We have known laws which differed according to whether it dealt with a black man or a white."

"We had then made our views felt to the world. We had stopped Adlai Stevenson from speaking at the United Nations while protesting about the death of Lumumba. New York was seething. Everyone who had any consciousness was out in the streets."

"We became the target of attacks because we no longer want to submit ... and reject corruption. They tried to bribe us and millions were promised to me, but I refused, I did not take a single centime."

"My dear countrymen! In joy and in sorrow I will always be with you. It is together with you that I fought to free my country from foreign rule. Together with you I am fighting to strengthen our national independence. Together with you, I will fight to preserve the integrity and national unity of the Republic of the Congo."

"Those who expect from it an exposition of the dynamic nationalism for which he is now the symbol will be disappointed. Lumumba at that time was a self-conscious évolué and an exponent of gradualism, much more concerned to mediate between the Belgian colonial system and the mass of Congolese peasants than to demand immediate independence."

"Neither cruelty, nor violence, nor torture will make me beg for mercy, because I prefer to die with my head raised high, with unshakeable faith... In my country’s predestination rather than live in submission forsaking my sacred principles."

"I know that an overwhelming majority of the Belgian people are against the oppression of Africans. They disapprove of a colonial status for the Congo under which 14 million Congolese are exposed to the diktat of a tiny economic oligarchy. If the Belgian people were to have their say, the Congo would never have experienced the misfortunes which are affecting it now."

"Tensions in the relations between the Congo and Belgium are being exacerbated only by the groups interested in exploiting the Congo’s wealth and who egg the authorities on to extend the colonial regime, as well as by some officials who are pursuing their private interests."

"We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over."

"History attests, that independence is never brought to you on a silver platter. It must be won. To that end we must organise ourselves and mobilise all the healthy forces in the country. The Congolese have responded to our appeal and thanks to this united strength we have dealt a mortal blow to rotten colonialism."

"Kamina, is the first enterprise we are going to nationalise in Congo."

"Like the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the murder of Malcolm X deprived the world of a potentially great leader. I could not agree with either of these men, but I could see in them a capacity for leadership which I could respect and which was only beginning to mature in judgment and statesmanship."

"Videla will be remembered as the man who headed the cruelest dictatorship in Argentine history. Fortunately, the Argentine judicial system did its job and held him accountable, allowing victims of his atrocities to have access to justice."

"Videla presided over a government that engaged in one of the most cruel repressions that we have seen in Latin America in modern times... He was arrogant to the end and unwilling to acknowledge his responsibility for the massive atrocities committed in Argentina... Many of the secrets of the repression will die with him."

"[I take] full military responsibility for the actions of the army in the war against terrorism."

"Let's say there were 7,000 or 8,000 people who had to die to win the war against subversion... We couldn't execute them by firing squad. Neither could we take them to court... For that reason, so as not to provoke protests inside and outside the country, the decision was reached that these people should be disappeared."

"The women giving birth, who I respect as mothers, were militants who were active in the machine of terror... Many used their unborn children as human shields."

"I possess a picture of [my] encounter [with Videla] that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush."

"… yesterday’s enemies are in power and from there, they are trying to establish a Marxist regime."

"Videla … is a manifestation of state terrorism."

"There was no other alternative [to the disappearances]... [Military leaders] were in agreement that it was the price that must be paid to win the war against subversion and we needed that it not be obvious so society would not realize it. It was necessary to eliminate a large group of people who could not be brought to justice nor [openly] shot either."

"As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure."

"I want to clarify that Argentine citizens are not victims of the repression. The repression is against a minority that we do not consider Argentine."

"We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger."

"This murder of Hariri was deliberately planned and executed precisely to implicate Syria and to set in train the events which have unfolded."

"Yet his political fortunes were always hostage to his up-and-down relations with Syria's presidents, now Bashar al-Assad and before him his father, Hafez al-Assad. For the most part, he appeared to steer an even course. Unlike some of the more impetuous Lebanese clan and religious leaders, Mr. Hariri carefully avoided direct criticism of Syria's role as Lebanon's overlord."

"Rafik [Hariri], a former prime minister and a prominent Sunni businessman, was assassinated in 2005, along with twenty-two others, when explosives hidden in a van were detonated as his motorcade drove near the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut. After a painful inquiry, the UN determined that the assassination was likely committed by members of Hezbollah with Syrian planning and logistical support. Hezbollah is the Shia political party and militant organization funded by Iran and Syria. Hariri's death was followed by a series of sectarian murders of other anti-Syrian politicians, compounding the long-standing frustration with Lebanon's failure to bring his killers to justice."

"It's not a problem to put it up, It's a problem to take it down."

"He (Yasser Arafat) was telling me about the situation he is living in. He said that all the buildings around his residence have been destroyed and they are -- they are on fire. And he told me that there is five people have been killed and they cannot move them. And about 40 persons were injured, and they cannot transfer them to the hospital."

"Yeah. Everybody has the right to defend himself, but by attacking headquarter of President Arafat, this will lead to -- to the security of Israel? I doubt that."

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"Had Brandt not taken the lead in ‘normalisation’, other powers would probably have done so. At the same time, West German governmental and, to some degree, public complicity in the East German regime increased alongside engagement with it. This complicity was displayed both by Brandt’s SPD successor, Helmut Schmidt, the Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, and by the latter’s CDU replacement from 1982, Helmut Kohl. Complicity, however, may be an inappropriate as well as harsh judgment, as little would have been achieved by upholding the Hallstein Doctrine and continuing to refuse to enter into dialogue with East Germany. Moreover, the change in policy brought real relief in the form of visiting rights and family reunifications, not to mention buying ‘regime opponents’ out of jail."

"Science and future, that is a contradiction."

"The era of Schmidt and of his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, Party Chief from 1971 and Chairman of the Council of State from 1976 to 1989, led to a sober, measured rapprochement and a resolution of relations between the two states. The West Germans sought to foster a German-German community of responsibility against the background of a reduction in international tension. Uneasiness in the early 1980s about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany was a product of these attitudes. Nevertheless, as part of this community of responsibility, concern within West Germany about the plight of East Germans, let alone support for reunification, markedly declined, reflecting the extent to which the Germans had also been major players in creating the reality of two separate nations. There was no real West German support for the citizens’ rights movements in East Germany. Instead, stabilisation was more significant as a goal. The easing of relations thus entailed an acceptance of the governing system in Eastern Europe, for example of the suppression of the Czech Spring in 1968. East Germany, recognised for the first time as a state by much of the world in 1973, was admitted to the United Nations and other international bodies."

"Helmut Schmidt continues to speak of a sense of duty, predictability, feasibility, firmness [...] These are secondary virtues. Simply put precise:.. So you can also run a concentration camp with them."

"It seems to me that the German people can - pointedly - tolerate 5 percent price increase better than 5 percent unemployment."

"In the basic questions, one have to be naive. And I think that the problems of the world and of humanity cannot be solved without idealism. However, I also believe that one should be realistic and pragmatic at the same time."

"Today, the most important is to learn to understand other people. And not only their music, but also their philosophy, their attitude, their behavior. Only then will nations can get along with each other."

"Do we want also to be world champion in moaning?"

"It is true that the politician at the moment of his actions or if he explains his actions and justifies them cannot provide at the same time also great philosophy. But if he acts without philosophical and ethical foundations, he is in danger of making mistakes. He is in danger to sink into opportunism. He is even in danger of being a charlatan."

"What troubles me is that we will see in Germany no approximation of the East German income to the West German income anymore, because productivity stays so far behind."

"The multicultural society is an illusion of intellectuals."