Assistant Secretary of Masachusetts Nam Pham’s Speech at the Conference “Remaking Ukraine – Toward an Age of Global Enlightenment”

by Editor | May 22, 2022 | AIWS City and Rebuilding Ukraine, Global Alliance for Digital Governance, News

Our AIWS innovations and Massachusetts is the number one place number one place in the world for innovation. Previous speakers are talking about the need to help refugees, the need to deal with medical needs, the need to help the people. Just to give you one example, after wars many people and soldiers had been injured, lost limbs, lost legs. At the University of Massachusetts, there was one startup company that makes prosthetic (fake) legs and arms. It costs only less than twenty dollars. Think about that; it’s not a hundred, few hundred or a thousand dollars, but you could walk again. You could function normally again for less than 20. It was invented in Massachusetts, so I think Massachusetts can play a very significant role.

So what are we proposing? We proposed to build an AI World Society city or country for Ukraine. We would apply more concepts of AIWS to rebuild everything. We would try to connect historical traditional cities in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Rome, Athens, basically all famous cities, to help to build smart cities for Ukraine. We will build a digital platform. This is a home for everything that Ukraine would need. I’m sure you all have heard of Airbnb, all right. I would like to suggest we could build “Air p2p”, people to people. We have refugees scattered all over the place. When they come back, they need resources. We have seen the destruction of Ukraine’s social infrastructure. If, I think, we can build an “Air p2p”, that would help people who wanted to help Ukrainians to connect with them. We could have initial sponsors of degrading families who may be trying to make a new life in fact or in digital. We could connect universities to universities. We could connect hospital to hospital. Basically it’s really people to people platforms, so we could save money, and it was really really an effort of people around the world actually trying to do very good routines to help Ukrainians.

So there are a few programs. It’s not just a concept, but we have suggested and volunteered a few programs to do things. Number one, we have Michael Dukakis leadership fellow for Ukraine, so right here we can do it. We could have Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation to educate leaders, the future leaders, the current leaders, to help lead Ukraine. Harvard University and many other universities could support Ukrainian students. And this effort, we also assigned some of our members to do this. This effort will be led by former Japanese state minister Yasuhide Nakayama, and MIT professor Nazli Choucri will be the coordinator (you saw her this morning.)

We will create or help to build a global brand name for Ukraine. Everybody will now know Ukraine. I used to manage the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. We tried to team up with some names, some brand names, but we can never match the name of New York, the Big Apple, right? When you think of New York, you think about a big apple, but I think now if we can help people to think of Ukraine as a big, beautiful sunflower, I think that would help us to look through the future with more positive energy. And this effort will be led by Professor John Quelch and our “watch” over here, Anh Tuấn.

We will also build a digital and AI platform for Ukraine cities. We mentioned about that, but some details, for example, every citizen, who will have one digital home, bring the gem cities of the world to Ukraine. And in many of these efforts, Governor Michael Dukakis will personally get involved, as well as former Prime Minister Zlatko Lagumdžija.

From my personal experience, any companies or country can do better by doing what they do best, and more. I also try to connect what we have in Massachusetts to support Ukraine. We know that Ukraine supplies a lot of food to the world: wheat and many other things. In Massachusetts there’s a very innovative company called Indigo Agricultural Operation. It has invented many new seeds of wheat, of rice, that can fight disease and drought and flow much better. We can bring those to help out the Ukrainian farmer. Tourism! I did mention the big bright beautiful sunflower. After the war, I’m sure that many of us, if not all of us, would love to visit Ukraine, right? I had one more with it: basically, many of these will be presented, but there’s one thing I’d like to share with you last, is that I hope someday, soon, very soon, we could have a very special toast in Ukraine, with a very special vodka, and this the vodka that we should all be drinking towards the future of Ukraine, with peace and security and prosperity. It’s called “Zelenskyy Vodka.”

Thank you so much.

President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga’s Speech at the Conference “Remaking Ukraine – Toward an Age of Global Enlightenment”

by Editor | May 20, 2022 | AIWS City and Rebuilding Ukraine, Global Alliance for Digital Governance, News

Thank you, Governor Dukakis, Chair of BGF. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I shall be as brief as I can, because it’s been a long session. To start with, may I really congratulate the Boston Global Forum and the Michael Dukakis Institute, and all those who participate in presenting this prize, this recognition to president Zelensky and the Ukrainian people for their extraordinary, superhuman bravery in the face of an enormous aggression by a far superior military power.

The question of resisting was an existential one for Ukraine, because president Putin has had his delusional and paranoia imperialistic ideas, and his narrative about it, not quite openly but certainly in private, ever since he came to power in the year 2000. And when I had my farewell visit with the French president Jacques Chirac, and we had a friendly lunch together, towards the end of that lunch the president started telling me how—I don’t know how the question came up—but how Ukraine really was not a separate nation; they never had had a separate state of their own, so that they weren’t really a legitimate political entity, that they were sort of a second class sort of Russians who spoke something that pretended to be a different language but really wasn’t. And I think the president was already manifesting some symptoms of a brain disease that later became quite evident, but he had told me frankly and openly what president Putin had been telling to his friends, to the “Putin-Versteher” (Putin’s sympathizers), starting with chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder and many others, his vision of reconstructing a sort of Frankenstein monster where he himself, as the supreme leader of a monster race of Russians, with their special culture and their unique existence, would lead a heritage to history which would sort of be a collage of putting together of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, without the skirts of course, since he’s so macho, and Stalin, an absolute Frankenstein monster construction but with the idea of the greatness of Russia, which must be reconstructed, and with all these countries that became independent at the periphery of what is now the Russian federation really should not exist. The best thing that could happen to them and President Chirac, the late president actually—I’m revealing this now because it’s important at this juncture in history—the best thing that could happen to them is to be governed by the Russians, who would do a better job. Now this is very serious, and we have now come in 2022 with President Putin saying exactly the same things openly as an excuse for his war, and there are people in the world who have said what is happening now—the atrocities that’s being committed, and the crimes of war, and the destruction—it’s the fault of the Ukrainians who were existing. If they had just simply laid down and accepted this domination, they wouldn’t have to suffer. I think this is something that has to be acknowledged: the right of a nation to its existence, to its sovereignty, to its ability to take its own decisions not to be a vassal, a client state, or a colony, just because some neighbor happens to be larger and have more military power. And [Ukraine] had with full goodwill given up nuclear weapons way back in 1994, which now almost looks like a mistaken time.

So before Ukraine can be built back better, which absolutely needs to be done, it needs to establish control over its territory. It needs to resist. And thanks to everybody here present, who has expressed support to this important idea, because their right to existence, when it’s threatened or harmed, really the the same intent is directed to the other countries that had been under the dominion, either direct or indirect, of the Kremlin and its rulers, be their collectives or singular or whatever, a communist or otherwise or capitalist or oligarchic. So before building better, Ukraine needs arms. It needs heavy armament. It needs moral support. It needs support for all the things that we just heard, so well expressed by doctor Silbersweig, in terms of humanitarian needs. I myself is a former refugee child, a wartime refugee, and somebody who started her schooling in a very improvised, very primitive public school, in a refugee camp in the British occupied zone of Germany. May I emphasize that in this before we come to reconstruction, we have to think about the transition, what happens to the refugees right now, and here again thank you to Dr. Silbersweig for thinking about the many multiple needs that refugees have. May I from my personal experience emphasize the importance of having schools for these children, so many of whom now with their mothers and without their fathers, who have become exiles, that they should have the ability to have schooling in their native language, in addition to going to local schools where they could learn a new language. Children do that very easily. I can testify to that as well but for keeping their identity the children need the ability to have some instruction in their native language, and their parents or in this case their mothers, their grandmothers, and aunts, and the other fellow citizens around them. They need an ability to have a social media, to have an interaction. And here I think the Boston Global Forum, with its emphasis on the digital possibilities of the new world, I think this sort of connectivity is something that will have to be considered in building up, either real, which is always the best thing, but also virtual communities of exiles.

I’ve spent much of my life among Latvian communities in exile on practically every continent except Antarctica, and it obviously prepared me sufficiently well and helped me preserve my Latvian identity, that I was able to return when Latvia did become free, even if it did take half a century to wait for it. And I could take on being president, and there was no problem of transition because of that. And finally about rebuilding, when cities are getting rebuilt, hospitals and so on, I think the greatest advances in everywhere in the world in terms of hospitals certainly will have to be taken into account. And it is a great news to hear from Greece for instance that they have already a vision for concrete places where what kind of hospital they’re going to build back in Mariupol. But may I just add one note of caution, is that the people who leave their homes are those who do it reluctantly. They suffer for it. I remember the pain of losing everything that you love, not just the people you are with, your grandma, your aunts, and your uncles, and so on, but the street on which you live, the tree outside the window, and all that sort of thing. So when cities get to rebuild, please, city planners and those who will be offering international aid, do not forget to consult the former inhabitants who live there, because there they will have an emotional need for something that will remind them of the city that has been destroyed, and something that they held dear, and something that they can hang on to so that the continuity of their identity can be built on upon it.

But ladies and gentlemen, may I as a former refugee, thank you all, and as the former president of a country that waited 15 years to recover its independence, thank you all and everyone for the help you are giving to this country, which is under brutal, unmotivated, and completely irrational attack by a totally delusional man who has brings with him a delusional ideology and sadly seems to have influenced his nation as well. Thank you all.