PRESIDENT MBEKI: Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. Let me say very briefly that I was very happy indeed to see Secretary of State Colin Powell. I�m very glad that he is here. We have had a short discussion. One thing to reaffirm, confirm, is the very strong and warm relations that exist between the United States and South Africa, and to look at some of the specific matters, like the Congo and the Middle East, as to what we might do to encourage the peace processes there. I must say that, indeed, on all of these matters, the two governments are very much of the same mind, so we will continue to cooperate to deal with these questions. The Secretary of State will have further meetings with our Minister of Foreign Affairs tomorrow morning and no doubt will go into more detail with regard to these questions. But I was indeed very, very glad to welcome the Secretary of State here. He is an old friend of our people.
SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT MBEKI: Thank you very much.
SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. President, for your warm welcome. It is a great pleasure to be back in South Africa and especially to be at the Union Building. It was seven years ago I was last here -- at that remarkable moment when President Mandela was inaugurated. Since then I have admired the progress that South Africa has made over those years: economic progress, dealing with the challenges of a new nation, a new kind of nation, a new kind of system, and entering a twenty-first century economy. I was so pleased to see the transfer of authority and power to President Mbeki, whom I�ve known for a number of years. I admire him for the leadership he has given to South Africa and also to the region.
Increasingly, we see that regional problems have to be dealt with, with regional organization and leaders acting in a regional fashion. For this particular reason I applaud his initiative for an African renaissance which will, in the first instance, have Africans coming together to analyze their problems, determine the solutions to those problems, and then seek help in implementing those solutions.
We had a good discussion on a number of regional issues -- Angola, Zimbabwe, Congo. We also had an extended discussion on the Middle East. We are both hoping that something can be made of the Mitchell Report that will bring an end to the violence, move immediately into confidence building measures, and then as quickly as possible to negotiations to ultimately bring peace to this troubled area.
And so it is a great pleasure to be back in South Africa, and I once again thank the President for his very gracious welcome.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, isn�t there resistance in the Pentagon and even in the White House to your enthusiasm for support for Africa?
SECRETARY POWELL: No way. Not from the White House, for openers. It is always best to start with the White House. The President has encouraged this trip. The President is very, very interested in what my report will be when I get back. The President was in the Rose Garden not too long ago to announce the forum later this year, where 35 nations from Africa will be represented, to continue moving down the path of implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. A few weeks ago, President Bush was in the Rose Garden on another occasion with Mr. Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, to announce our new global trust fund for HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. President Bush has designated me and Secretary of Health and Human Services Thompson to work together as a joint cabinet task force to deal with the problem of HIV/AIDS worldwide, but especially in sub-Saharan Africa. At the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld and I are of like mind. I have Pentagon representatives with me here on this trip. So the question I answer in a way that you may not have expected, but in a very positive way -- saying things are going quite well.
QUESTION: Secretary Powell, did you discuss your interest in having South Africa reduce its AIDS rate?
SECRETARY POWELL: I didn�t have to discuss that. The President is fully seized with the problem of doing everything possible to reduce the HIV/AIDS rate. He understands the nature of this problem and how it is affecting his country, how it is affecting the whole region. It is a particular problem here in South Africa, but it is a problem in the whole region. I think the leaders of the region are well aware of it. Certainly President Mbeki is well aware of it, and I look forward to discussing with officials tomorrow how we can be of greater assistance in attacking this problem. I also look forward to some of the things being done here tomorrow, as I visit different activities in the course of the day.
QUESTION: Mr. President, are you satisfied that the Bush Administration is as substantive in its dealings with Africa as the Clinton Administration was?
PRESIDENT MBEKI: Yes, I am. You will remember I visited the President in Austin, Texas, when he was Governor of Texas, in May when we were there. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the challenges facing the African continent and agreed, indeed, that if he became president, we would need to be in contact about those particular issues. And when I spoke to him after Al Gore had conceded defeat -- to congratulate him -- he indeed raised these questions again as we had discussed them in Texas, and said we must come back to those issues. After the cabinet was constituted, he phoned again to say the Cabinet had been constituted. One of the things discussed was the challenge of the African issues, and everybody is of one mind with regard to this. I shall be visiting him in Washington next month, and the central matter of that discussion will be the African challenge. No, I know it as a matter of fact. The point is that President Bush is indeed very concerned that the U.S. must lend its strength to helping us to find the solutions to these problems.
Thanks a lot.