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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release April 5, 1995

                     REMARKS BY PRESIDENT CLINTON, 
               PRESIDENT MUBARAK AND VICE PRESIDENT GORE 
                   AT U.S.-EGYPT PRESIDENTS' COUNCIL

The Roosevelt Room

1:00 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Let me begin by welcoming you all to the White House and here to the Roosevelt Room, and thanking you for your willingness to participate in this council.

I think all of you know that the United States and Egypt have had and continue to have a very close relationship, and we believe that our future interests are very much bound up together. We believe we have to do more in the economic area. We need more partnerships and more success stories. And, for my part, I am very, very committed to trying to further the work of increased economic interaction, bringing about more prosperity, more opportunity.

So I want to thank both the Americans who are here and the Egyptians who are here for your willingness to serve and commit the resources and the efforts of this government to the success of this endeavor. And I know I speak for the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and, of course, our Trade Ambassador and Secretary of Commerce. We are convinced that this is an important part of our common future.

Mr. President.

PRESIDENT MUBARAK: Thank you, Mr. President. I am really very pleased that we could manage to form such consultative groups for their Presidents. And I thank the President and Vice President Al Gore for initiating this. I am so pleased for much more cooperation in the fields of investment and trade, and different issues which we can tackle with our fellow Americans here. Thank you very much, and I'm very glad to see this group working closely, consulting us, asking us for any new projects to be done, new ideas for cementing the relation between Egypt and the United States in all fields.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: Mr. President and Mr. President, I wanted to say very briefly how much all of us appreciate the work of Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Youssef Boutros-Ghali on the Egyptian side. Together the two of them have worked very hard to make this Presidents' Council a reality. And when those of us in the United States saw the list of the Egyptian CEOs that you selected, Mr. President, we knew you were very serious about making this a high-quality undertaking. And we're very pleased to get the same reaction from our Egyptian colleagues to the list of American CEOs that President Clinton chose.

And I want to say on behalf of those of us who have worked on this partnership, of which the council and the joint committee and the Science and Technology Agreement are working components, we really have high hopes that this will indeed be the beginning of a whole new phase in the deepening of this bilateral relationship. And so, I just want to thank the two people who have done the most work on this council and express great hope and confidence in what's going to take place. (Applause.)

END12:07 P.M. EDT