NED Donates Founding Papers to the Library of Congress
Congressional Leaders Praise NED

On Thursday, June 7, NED officially donated its early papers to the Library of Congress and marked the occasion with a panel discussion and reception that included a wide range of speakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. The event also commemorated the 25th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's Westminster Address to the British Parliament, in which he called upon the world's democracies to launch "a global campaign for freedom" and proposed an initiative that led to the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy.

The opening panel discussion, titled The Legacy of Westminster: Democracy Assistance Since the Founding of NED and the Challenges Ahead, featured leading thinkers and practitioners in the global democracy movement including, Zainab Hawa Bangura, a prominent civil society leader from Sierra Leone who currently serves as chief civil affairs officer to the U.N. Mission in Liberia; Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Larry Diamond, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; NED Board Member Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago; and, finally, Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia whose vocal demand for reform resulted in his arrest and six year imprisonment.

Reflcting on the impact of democracy assistance over the past 25 years, Tom Carothers remarked that "probably hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been directly touched by democracy assistance programs in ways that have given them knowledge, understanding, moral support, inspiration, and solidarity." However, in an age of new threats to democracy and freedom, Larry Diamond argued that "heeding the spirit of Reagan's Westminster message requires a new resolve and a redoubled effort." Speaking last, Zainab Bangura put the importance of democracy assistance into wonderfully concrete terms when she told the group assembled, "The most amazing thing when people always refer to me as the one who led the campaign against the military in Sierra Leone after three decades of one party and military dictatorship, I did it with $25,000 from the U.S. government," referring to a grant she received from NED, which is funded by an annual congressional appropriation.

In addition to Pelosi, Hoyer and Abrams, NED was joined by a bipartisan group of well-wishers that included US Representatives David Dreier (R-CA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and Donald Payne (D-NJ), former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Bill Brock (R-MD), who has formerly served as US Senator, Labor Secretary and NED Chairman, and US Archivist Allen Weinstein, who led the study group that preceded the founding of the Endowment. John Earl Haynes and James Hutson represented the Library of Congress for the evening, and NED President Carl Gershman accepted the formal agreement for the Endowment's papers.

Speakers at the reception paid generous tribute to the work of NED and its grantees worldwide. Speaker Pelosi remarked that "I've seen close up NED working in China…and it is very important to us in the Congress…. because of its mission, the talents of its leaders, and the impact it has had." Majority Leader Hoyer reflected, "it's been and extraordinary period of time in which this organization has been active and, frankly, there is not a period of time in which the work, the focus and the mission of this organization has been more important."

The NED papers constitute a rich historical record chronicling the bipartisan effort to create the flagship institution of America's democracy assistance work, with a focus on its early years of supporting grassroots democratic initiatives abroad. The materials comprise thousands of documents, speeches, correspondence and photos from the first decade of NED's operations, as well as from the American Political Foundation, whose study "The Democracy Program" led to the establishment of the NED. Access to the papers will require permission from NED for 20 years (until 2027).

The Library of Congress is an agency of the legislative branch and the largest library in the world. The Library houses more than 134 million items, from the papers of noted Americans and prominent organizations, to books in 460 different languages, to films and sound recordings.

PANELISTS

Zainab Hawa Bangura, a human rights activist in her native Sierra Leone, serves as chief civil affairs officer to the U.N. Mission in Liberia. In 1995, she founded the Women Organized for a Morally Enlightened Nation (W.O.M.E.N), Sierra Leone's first nonpartisan women's political rights organization. In 1996, she co-founded the Campaign for Good Governance, and in 2001 she founded the National Accountability Group. In 2002, she co-founded the Movement for Progress, a political party promoting good governance and the empowerment of women, youth and the disabled in Sierra Leone. Nominated as the party's chairperson, Bangura ran as the only female candidate in Sierra Leone's May 2002 presidential elections. A former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED, Bangura serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy.

Thomas Carothers is the vice president for studies–international politics and governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In this capacity, he oversees the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, which he founded, and the Middle East Program. A leading authority on democratization worldwide as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy, Carothers is the author or editor of eight critically acclaimed books and many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. He is an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and serves on the board of various organizations devoted to democracy promotion. Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Larry Diamond is co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has written extensively on democracy in the developing world, especially in Africa and Asia. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development, helping to devise a new strategy for U.S. foreign assistance by giving more emphasis to democracy and good governance. In 2004, he was a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Diamond is the author of "Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation" (1999) and "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq" (2005).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, is a political philosopher who focuses on the connections between political and ethical convictions. She serves as co-chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and chair of the Council on Families in America. She is also a member of the Scholars' Council of the John W. Kluge Center, a body of distinguished international scholars convened by the Librarian of Congress to advise on matters related to the Kluge Center and the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity. Elshtain has written extensively on the themes of the survival of democracies; marriage, families and feminism; and state sovereignty in international relations.

Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia and vice president of the United Malays National Organization, is currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University. In 1971, he started the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, the country's first nongovernmental organization dedicated to raising social and political awareness and emphasizing social justice and human rights. In 1981, he co-founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought and later set up the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Ashburn, Va. His criticism of corruption and abuse of power within the Malaysian government and his vocal demand for reform resulted in his arrest and imprisonment in September 1998. Ibrahim, who led a new democratic movement in Malaysia from his prison cell, was released in September 2004.