Ladies and Gentlemen!

Let me congratulate all of you on this wonderful occasion – the 20th anniversary of the US-Baltic foundation.

Dear friends!

Because we are celebrating the historic anniversary let me first of all tell some words about the history and than I shall talk about the future.

On history: I am still a young person, though I was born 53 years ago.

I was born 3 years after the bloody suppression of the military resistance of freedom fighters against the occupation in Lithuania.

6 years before my birth, Schuman declaration had been published, which laid foundations for the United Europe.

I was born in the year, when Nikita Khrushchev in his secret speech to the soviet congress first time condemned Stalinist crimes and Gulag regime. Tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners and deportees, who managed to survive in Siberia, started to return.

I was born 5 years before the real Berlin Wall was built in the city of Berlin, back in 1961.
That is what I can say about the time around my early years.

When I grew up, and became a school boy, I learned from my dad how to listen to the “Voice of America” on the radio.

And I learned a simple truth, quite different from what we had been taught in our soviet school.
First of all, I learned that the socialism perhaps is not the best system in the world. I learned also that there are people in my own country, and neighbouring Baltic countries, who are brave enough to oppose openly the soviet regime, not being afraid of a brutal persecution.

I learned also that there were thousands and thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, who lived here in the USA, in other countries of the free world, and who permanently, loudly and with a strong power of love to their motherlands were demanding non-recognition and freedom for our countries.

And of course I learned that your Presidents, your Government always were strong enough to continue this policy of non-recognition and were smart enough in building strong nuke capacity, which soviets at the end were not able to match and collapsed.

When I grew up a little bit older and was in my thirties, just 20 years ago, still being a serious physicist with a young family and kids, I saw how the Berlin Wall collapsed. I was part of our Independence movement. For me it was clear that the Soviet Union collapsed first of all because of what you were able to achieve here in the USA. We in Lithuania were brave and clever enough to use that momentum of soviet bankruptcy, just to get rid of the occupation. With the songs of “singing revolution” we destroyed the last Empire.

That is my story. I hope that the day will come, when in Lithuania we shall have a special monument to the “Voice of America”. It will be a monument to all of you. The monument could be a very large copy of a radio receiver “VEF SPIDOLA", the only one of its kind in the soviet time, produced in Riga, which was good enough to give us a possibility of hearing the “Voice of America” despite the soviet jamming.

20 years ago, the radio “Voice of America” transformed itself into a real voice of American people. And first of all the US-Baltic foundation became a new voice of America in the Baltic states, and a new voice of the Baltic states in America.

This is the voice of solidarity, the voice of the most important human value, the value which allows us today to have this brilliant celebration. Today we can celebrate not only the 20-years anniversary of the US-Baltic foundation activities, but we can also celebrate the 65 anniversary of the world without a new global war waged. There were, and there still are different and painful wars in Korea and Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we stand together, but for 65 years we have been living in a global peace. Power and solidarity of American people is the main reason for this global success.

Today, we can also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Lithuanian Independence, which we happily celebrated on 11th of March this year in Vilnius, feeling also your solidarity.

And also we can celebrate the sixth anniversary when in 2004, in April und May we became members both of NATO and the European Union.

So there are a lot of very important occasions for us today to enjoy very cheerfully what all of us have managed to achieve: we have become members of the same community – community of solidarity.

I congratulate all of you personally and also organizations which you represent and especially the most important and powerful organization: the US-Baltic Foundation.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today, when we are celebrating the glorious results of the victory of solidarity during the last 20 years, we need to ask ourselves: what is next on our agenda of solidarity.

Dear friends, as I told you at the very beginning, I am still very young. This morning we made 30 km cycling tour “Go green”, and last year I became a very proud grandfather. Our granddaughter Elzė, Elisabeth, at the end of May will celebrate her first birthday. It will be a big and noisy celebration also, believe me.

And I have a dream. I have a dream that Elzė lives through the whole XXI century, and she will be able to see how the next XXII century comes.

I have a dream that she lives through a globally peaceful period of time, the time of very rapid changes, absolutely unbelievable new technologies, which will make life quite different, but it will make it even more interesting.

I am sure that such a dream will come true, but there is one very important condition: solidarity should remain the main value, and our main obligation and responsibility: for the future of our kids and grandchildren, for the future of my little Elzė.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s clear that there are a lot of serious jobs and tasks to be done. There is no time for long celebration and fun. Dreams will become reality, if on the both sides of the Atlantic we learn very simple words, which you know very well here in the US. Those words are:“Yes, we can.”

This is an invitation to a new agenda of solidarity. What major points we can have on this new agenda of solidarity? I would like to mention just 6 of them, though there are many more.

1) solidarity in basketball: in 2012, Lithuania needs to win gold in basketball during the Olympic games in London. That will show the real solidarity from the American side.

2) solidarity for progress

We know that stability and peace will stay if we have solidarity in prosperity. Let’s have goal No 1 – modern, dynamic and prosperous economies of the Baltic States.

In Lithuania we have a vision, we have an ambition and we have a political will: within the next 20 years to become a leading hub of high-tech service industries in a broad Nordic-Baltic region.

Over the last year we have demonstrated our ability to cope with the most painful challenge of a very deep recession.

We have gone through painful but necessary cuts; we started major reforms to create a modern, smart, knowledge-based economy in Lithuania. And here we see new opportunities and areas for the solidarity agenda. It`s been the second time for me in the USA in three months. I have had many fruitful meetings, and the result is that the IBM is opening their research centre in Vilnius, Barclay has already opened their ICT engineering centre, CSC has also been expanding their service facilities. Three days ago Vilnius University signed a cooperation agreement with MIT, and we are going to open our office in the Silicon Valley. And I promise you that you will see much more of that in the near future. Large multinational companies are smart and their decisions are smart, and they know where the future lies. And the future lies in Lithuania being smart and solidarious.

3) Solidarity for a smart Lithuania calls for solidarity of knowledge and solidarity of education. I have a dream that thousands of Lithuanian students will have a possibility of enjoying student life in universities here in the US, and thousands of American students will learn what it means to study in a university which has a 450 years history, as it happens in case of my University – Vilnius University.

4) Solidarity in energy security – we know what it means for the people of the Baltic States. And solidarity in this field can change a lot.

5) Solidarity of economic and financial stability, soundness and transparency. In the world which is going from Lehman Brothers to Greek (or even Portuguese or Spanish) bailouts as well as other turbulences in the global financial world, there is much more of the need for solidarity of those who were able to cope with the challenges, who were brave and smart enough to take painful but inevitable decisions very effectively.

I have a dream that from this global crisis we emerge much stronger and consolidated, particularly as regards the three Baltic States pushing ahead the idea of becoming a role model and the driving force for the whole Baltic region.

I have a dream that this smart Baltic Region integrates with the Nordic Region to form the strongest partner for North America, first of all for the USA and Canada; and we shall have a Nordic Solidarity Ring as an area for economic transparency, soundness, responsibility and dynamism.

Can we do it? Yes, we can. Let’s work on it.

6) And the last point on the agenda for our solidarity is solidarity for democracy. Especially solidarity for those who 20 years ago were like us, but just now they are very different in their conditions.

Solidarity with the people of Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, even Russia is our debt. There is an absolute need not to forget that we are indebted in this respect. And the people of those nations, they deserve our solidarity, not only the solidarity of diplomatic and bureaucratic language. The US “reset” policy and the EU Eastern Neighbourhood policy can have a real impact. Even now we see some positive developments, but those policies need the same strength of our solidarity that we have felt during the last 20 years.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me conclude by saying very simple words. Thank a lot for your solidarity. Solidarity of the people is much more important than solidarity of governments. That is why I would like to use very famous words of Abraham Lincoln from his Gettysburg address, by slightly changing them:
“Let`s make sure that solidarity of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”

That is how the dreams will become true. And that is why I am saying:
Long live solidarity of the people
Long live the US-Baltic foundation of a real solidarity.