Obama delivers powerful speeches during Belgium visit

US president Barack Obama’s visit to Belgium yesterday went according to plan, with a visit to the Flanders Fields American Cemetery and Memorial in Waregem, West Flanders, an EU-US summit and meetings with the staff of Nato in Brussels and a speech at Bozar with 2,000 invited guests.

In the morning, prime minister Elio De Rupo, King Filip and Obama were met by Waregem mayor Kurt Vanryckeghem and placed wreaths on the monument in the cemetery, where 368 American soldiers from the First World War are buried.

“To the staff of this Flanders Fields cemetery and the people of Belgium, thank you for your devotion,” said Obama in a speech after a tour of the cemetery, “watching over those who rest here and preserving these hallowed grounds for all of us who live in their debt.

“We just spent some quiet moment among the final resting places of young men who fell nearly a century ago,” he continued, “and it is impossible not to be awed by the profound sacrifice they made so that we might stand here today. In this place, we remember the courage of brave little Belgium.”

Obama went on to remark on chemical weapons that were used “to such devastating effect on these very fields” and how they are still being used in conflicts today. “We thought we had banished their use to history, and our efforts send a powerful message that these weapons have no place in a civilized world,” he said. “This is one of the ways that we can honor those who fell here. This visit, this hallowed ground, reminds us that we must never, ever take our progress for granted.”

US president Barack Obama ended his visit to Belgium yesterday with another powerful speech in Bozar in front of 2,000 invited guests, many of them young people from immigrant backgrounds. After he was introduced by a young woman called Laura, Obama began his speech by joking: “I have to admit, it is easy to love a country famous for chocolate and beer.”

No intervention in Ukraine

But that was the only moment of lightness in a speech that was drafted to inspire the young people in the audience. “Do not think for a moment that your own freedom, your own prosperity, that your own moral imagination is bound by the limits of your community, your ethnicity or even your country,” he told them. “You’re bigger than that. You can help us to choose a better history. That’s what Europe tells us. That’s what the American experience is all about.”

Obama referred to his visit to West Flanders. “This morning at Flanders Field, I was reminded of how war between peoples sent a generation to their deaths in the trenches and gas of the First World War,” he said.

He went on to remind his audience of the European values that had helped shape American ideals. “It was here in Europe, through centuries of struggle, through war and enlightenment, repression and revolution, that a particular set of ideals began to  emerge – the belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose, the belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding.”

He reminded the audience – most of them too young to have experienced the Cold War – how the conflict had ended in 1989, “not by tanks or missiles but because our ideals stirred the hearts of Hungarians, who sparked a revolution, Poles in their shipyards who stood in solidarity, Czechs who waged a Velvet Revolution without firing a shot and East Berliners who marched past the guards and finally tore down that wall”.

Then he moved on to the issue that had come to overshadow his visit to Europe. “Just look at the young people of Ukraine, who were determined to take back their future from a government rotted by corruption,” he said. “None of us can know for certain what the coming days will bring in Ukraine, but I am confident that eventually those voices for human dignity and opportunity and individual rights and rule of law, those voices ultimately will triumph.”

He ended by insisting that the US had no intention to intervene in Ukraine. “We have sent no troops there. What we want is for the Ukrainian people to make their own decisions, just like other free people around the world.”

Once the speech was over, Obama was rushed to Brussels Airport. He gave one final wave to the press cameras from the steps of Air Force One before heading off to a meeting with Pope Francis in Rome.

Photo, from left: US president Barack Obama and Belgium’s King Filip and prime minister Elio Di Rupo visit the Flanders Fields American Cemetery and Memorial in Waregem, West Flanders, yesterday (Reuters)