May I begin these concluding remarks by expressing my deep thanks to every single one of you for making what, in many instances, has been a long journey here to the United States to join together in helping to make a difference in the future of your countries and the future of our world.

It takes an urgent issue to bring together high level representatives from almost 90 nations, representing most of the people of this Earth. We've traveled collectively more a million miles. We've done so for two reasons: one, official corruption imposes a painful cost on the quality of the lives of the people we represent; second, we believe that if we come together to fight corruption, we can reduce its costs in our countries and communities.

On the cost of corruption, we have heard a great deal during these three days. If our presence here were not proof enough, the presentations that we have all heard here have left no doubt whatsoever that corruption accelerates crime, hurts investments, stalls growth, bleeds the national budget, causes our peoples to suffer and undermines our faith in freedom.

Corruption is an enemy of democracy, for democracy lives on trust, and corruption destroys our trust. But the costs of corruption have not paralyzed us, they have energized us. The most important lesson of this global forum is hope. We are here because we believe that by coming together, we can gain a firmer foothold in the fight against corruption. We have all seen and heard the success stories, and we are inspired by them.

One of the striking stories I've heard comes from a police force in Colombia. The head of the force inherited a corrupt department. He began with survey work and background checks and then fired a large number of corrupt officers. Then he vetted a special group of candidates for their ethical values, and enrolled those who passed the test into an elite force to deal with drug traffickers. That elite force is reasonably well-paid. But of course, no government salary can compete or compare with the bribes of a drug trafficker. It is the officers' values that keep them loyal. They regularly report back to the chief on the value of the bribe offers they reject.

Of course, that chief is wise enough to know that he cannot build an enduring new culture on the leadership of one person; so he has created an outside review board, made up of the most prominent members of society to monitor the honesty and effectiveness of the force. He has admitted that the force has a long way to go, but it is perhaps not as long away as they have already come. We could all, especially after these three days, tell many such success stories from every continent; and they inspire us.

We have seen what some countries that used to be very corrupt have done to virtually eliminate corruption. We have all studied the methods they have used to achieve their success. We have been moved by the candor and honesty of those delegates who have told of the terrible problems of corruption that they are fighting in their own countries. This candor and honesty is the essential first step.

Over the last three days, we have discussed many of the principles and themes that underlie the success stories. First, to get honesty from our governments, we must first get honesty from our justice and security officials. As our conference special advisor, Charlie Moskos, has said, you can't arrest crooked officials unless you first have honest cops. So this is the place to begin -- with security officials and with judiciaries.

We also know that to have honest cops, we must pay them an honest wage. One nation, unfortunately not unique, is widely known to pay its police officers about half the wage of an average worker. No fight against corruption can succeed if it requires police officers to be consistently moral superheroes. It is simply unwise and unfair to force a father or a mother to choose between doing their jobs honestly and raising their children and their families comfortably.

Of course, we have also talked about what the first President of my country, George Washington, called that little spark of celestial fire called conscience. He had it in his heart. Simon Bolivar, who we heard about in the session just concluded, carried a picture of Washington, in turn, next to his heart during all of his journeys across South America. That little spark of celestial fire called conscience can spread from one heart to another, from one nation to another, from one group to another.

Conscience is essential to honest public service. We can set government salaries to meet need, but no government salary will ever satisfy greed. To withstand the astonishing sums offered by drug traffickers, for example, a person needs a stout heart and a strong conscience. That is why personnel in our justice and security positions need to be thoroughly vetted for their ethical values.

At the same time, I also believe that the representatives of our respective religious traditions can help our anti-corruption efforts immensely if they were to make their voices heard more loudly and clearly around the world through an inter-faith statement on fighting corruption -- explaining why it is essential, and why it is consistent with all of the great religious traditions everywhere on our planet. They serve as our public conscience, and I'm convinced that their support would strengthen the hands of those who are fighting for more ethical governments.

We have also talked about the importance of government reinvention and reform, including fewer, clearer laws; more measurable results with an increased focus on results instead of process; disinterested economic decision-making, that is, decision-making not informed by corruption; strong and independent judiciaries; and strong ethics and financial disclosure rules.

We have talked about the fact that as military forces move to non-traditional defense roles such as counter-drug efforts and border protection, the vulnerability of military's corruption increases -- and so must our vigilance. We need to respond decisively with strong and clean leadership, appropriate training and keen emphasis on the principles of military professionalism.

We have talked, also, about the importance of openness and transparency. We've emphasized the value of information. Indeed, I've heard from many who are convinced, as I am, that the number one force in our favor -- tilting the scales in the favor of anti-corruption forces -- is our ever expanding access to information.

Information, after all, is now transforming the economies of the world. The Internet is making available to average citizens on every continent the entire universe of knowledge that is stored by nations around the world. Information about the state of corruption in every country can also empower individuals to speak with and elevate the force of conscience in every nation. As many nations in every region have said, the values of our people are clear. No matter what nation you go to, no matter what their religious tradition, no matter what their political history, the average people in all of our nations have strong values. The information revolution can allow us to establish a stronger connection between their hearts and the governance of the nations in which they live.

But information alone is not enough. The core of accountability is the fusion of information and action -- action on the part of public officials, private citizens, businesses and non-governmental organizations. The crucial role of NGOs is far too often overlooked. But their importance is more than apparent to host governments. Any government who wants to throw a dark cloak over its activities immediately tries to tie the hands and bind the feet of its NGOs.

NGOs are a core component of civil society, and they bear a great share of the 24-hour watchdog work of holding governments accountable. Can they be frustrating, at times even infuriating? Yes. Are they essential to our success? Yes. Let us open up to an increased role for NGOs in our common effort to assess and monitor and combat corruption.

All of these themes represent international norms for fighting corruption. If we are committed to these norms, then governments should ratify and implement the international conventions that embody these norms, such as the OECD and OAS conventions. On this last point, I am delighted to announce that on the opening day of our conference, the Inter-American Development Bank and the OAS formally agreed to fund efforts to promote ratification and implementation of the OAS accord.

I would also like to again recognize the fact that the day before the formal start of our conference here, ministers from 11 African nations who came to Washington for this conference drafted a set of 25 principles on anti-corruption, good governance and accountability. They are now taking these principles back to their governments for consideration. As you have heard, several have already announced that they will ratify them.

As we seek to ratify and then implement these anti-corruption conventions in the various regions and groupings that make up our world, we should take advantage of known anti-corruption principles and effective practices. We have distributed here at the conference just such a set of guiding principles. This is entitled, "An International Strategy Against Corruption," which has come out of the work that all of you have done here during this three-day conference.

These principles have been compiled, reviewed, written and edited by a broad cross-section of experts. They represent the first major effort in our world to articulate a set of comprehensive global principles for fighting official corruption. We urge you to take these principles back home. Talk about them; test them; see if you can use them effectively. They represent the basis for the anti-corruption principles that I will present to President Clinton for discussion of the G8 at the Koln Summit this summer. We hope they will make a difference in the efforts of all nations eagerly undertaking any anti-corruption effort.

In addition to discussing general principles of fighting corruption, we were fortunate at the conference to hear about several new tools that can help countries gather data, identify priorities, and apply the principles necessary to get a start in a successful fight against corruption. As I announced on Wednesday, the United States plans to work closely with the World Bank, local organizations, civil society and other international donors and NGOs to actively support the use of diagnostic surveys.

Let me emphasize that countries that have adopted this approach have seen the dynamic impact of information. When overwhelming evidence of a problem is presented to the public in an open forum, inaction by their government is simply no longer an option. The force of collective conscience in any nation can be impossible to resist, as it should be. But information about the nature of the problem in individual countries, presented by governments who have worked in concert with citizens and NGOs and other nations that they have invited to assist them, can empower that force of collective conscience.

Will that transition be difficult in some nations? Of course. Will it be worthwhile? Always.

In the past three days, we have also had enthusiastic discussions about the promise of what is called mutual evaluations. In particular, I have been pleased to hear from those who are eager to pursue the Internet-based reporting device that I proposed on Wednesday; and from those who support the possibility of offering individual citizens and businesses the opportunity to serve as evaluators.

Let me say, before I conclude, that I am immensely proud of the work of this conference and grateful to all of you for making that work possible. I know from my discussions with many of you individually that I am not alone in the view that this conference would not have been possible ten years ago. Perhaps it would not even have been possible two years ago.

But certainly a decade ago, if the nations of the world had been able to overcome the implicit self-criticism and convene on the subject of corruption, I'm afraid there might have been so much discussion on the source of the problems, there would have been little time left for discussion of the solutions. Many times during our discussions, I have been truly in awe of the courage individual delegates have had in speaking openly in ways that would have been unthinkable such a short time ago.

In my own faith tradition, there is a scripture passage: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." The truth about corruption is difficult to hear and difficult to speak. But once the truth is spoken and heard and known, the truth itself acquires a power that can transform nations and our world. If we had attempted this some years ago, very possibly lines would have divided north from south, east from west, rich from poor.

Countries might well have fought over who was worse, the bribe maker or the bribe taker. Yes, much has changed in ten years. The feeling of goodwill that we have built together has become almost a physical feature of this room. Our conversations have been marked by the kind of honesty that both expresses trust and, in the process, builds trust. We know even more than we did when we began how much we have in common.

You'll remember the delegate who spoke about the child on the airplane putting together the puzzle pieces which make up our world by concentrating on the man and the woman on the other side of the puzzle. That said a great deal. As men and women, our hearts are the same. Our values, as we have discovered, are strikingly similar; especially when it comes to our reactions to the truth about official corruption. Our vision about what our world should be and can be in the 21st Century is strikingly similar.

This commonality has transformed the depth of our dialogue. Just one hour ago, the chief delegate from The Netherlands proposed that we follow this event with a second global forum on fighting corruption, to be held in The Netherlands sometime in the next calendar year a year or a year and a half from now.

Again, I second his proposal and on behalf of the United States, I thank The Netherlands for its creative initiative and its hospitality. I am honored to offer the services of the United States as co-sponsor and co-convener.

The Korean delegation has proposed an annual global ministerial forum on fighting corruption, which will be organized and chartered at the second global forum to meet in The Netherlands. The heads of delegations have agreed to this idea; indeed, our action was unanimous. We hope to see it come to fruition.

One of our delegates from Kenya was so enthusiastic about the spirit and accomplishments of the conference, he implored us to sign a declaration expressing our common sense of urgency about the problem of corruption and our commitment to continue the dialogue begun in this forum. And we did adopt a statement, again, unanimously.

So in closing, I would like to read to you a short but poignant passage from a noted African novel entitled, "The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born," by Ayi Kwei Armah. It is the story of an honest and idealistic young man who goes against the grain, resists bribes and is rewarded not with respect but with the scorn of his friends and colleagues.

During one scene, the protagonist in this African novel -- deep in thought -- was finding it, in the words of the author and I quote "more and more difficult to justify his own honesty when the whole world said there were only two types of men who took refuge in honesty: the cowards and the fools."

That upright young man, in a story published 30 years ago, was alone in his moral struggle. How ironic it is that in the midst of corruption, values can be so turned on their heads that the honest person is made to feel a form of shame by those who are dishonest.

Today that young man and that young woman in every nation must have our help. More and more of us must be there with them, battling for the minds and hearts of the majority; working to change the culture and customs; working to express and embody in our governance the values of our people's hearts; to turn the corrupt into outcasts; to expose them as criminals who slice into the veins and arteries of the nation's economy and slowly bleed it dry.

As we uncover the corruption, expose the crimes and expel the criminals, our people will sense their own growing power to chase out corruption, and they will quicken their efforts. More and more people will see that official corruption is theft from the nation, and theft from the nation is always theft from the weakest in the nation: the poor, the old, the disabled, the sick, the children, the newborns.

It is for them that we gather here. It is for them that we take up this fight. It is for them that we pledge our common commitment to honest government.

As a beloved President of my nation, Abraham Lincoln, reminded us in one of his most famous sayings, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Corruption has so frequently triumphed in our world because good men and women did nothing; because the obstacles were too large; because the connection to others who felt as they did were too frayed or non-existent. Let us not leave here today before we make an enduring personal pledge to this cause. For if we do take the lead, we can prevail. If we do not, no one else will because no one else can. We can and we will.

Thank you. May God bless you and may God bless your efforts.