[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 45 (Thursday, April 21, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 21, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             MORE ON BOSNIA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Unsoeld). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of February 11, 1994, the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. 
Olver] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.
  Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, I am here tonight to speak again about the 
ongoing tragedy, the ongoing disaster in Bosnia. It was only a couple 
of days ago that I spoke on this issue. At that time I pointed out and 
read from an editorial from the Washington Post which was entitled, 
``The Bosnia Disaster.''
  In the intervening additional 72 hours since that time, I have to say 
that in 20 years of public life I have never seen the kind of universal 
condemnation by reporters and editorialists and columnists and 
humanists and ex-diplomats and historians of a foreign policy as has 
been heaped on the disaster in Bosnia.
  The consensus is absolutely overwhelming. By all odds, as one sees 
what in fact has happened in Bosnia, the condemnation is well 
justified.
  I think it is worthwhile going back and looking at how we got to that 
point, because it is really 3 years of Western policy on the part of 
the European community and the United Nations and the United States 
involvement with the United Nations through the United Nations which 
has been an absolutely spectacular failure leading to this overwhelming 
human and political disaster that is going to have repercussions for 
the world for decades.
  For 20 months prior to the 20th of January, 1993, when this 
administration took office, this developing disaster was managed by the 
former President George Bush. Nothing was done in 1991 to stop the 
destruction of Vukovar, that beautiful old city of nearly 100,000 
people on the Danube River in eastern Croatia, which is from its 
brutality, though it is actually a good deal shorter in its denouement, 
from its brutality the equivalent of what has been happening in the 
last few days in Gorazde, another city along the Drina River in Bosnia. 
The city of Gorazde, a city considerably smaller with a population of 
nearly equal numbers before this whole disastrous war started, had 
roughly equal numbers of Serb Orthodox and of Moslem Slovs as the two 
major components.
  Vukovar, on the other hand, had very nearly equal numbers of Croatian 
Roman Catholic and Serb Orthodox living in that city. But for that 
period of time in 1991, the destruction of Vukovar, the European 
Community and the United Nations and the United States could not take 
sides because this was a civil war, a civil war in quotes, where in 
fact the weapons and the direct units of the Yugoslav army were what 
destroyed Vukovar, not the Serbian rebels, not the insurgent Serbs 
within Croatia.
  And then during that 20 months prior to the 20th of January of 1993, 
the U.N. resolutions were passed by the basketfull, ignored by Serbia, 
ignored by Yugoslavia and the cease-fire agreements again by the 
basketfull, again and again were not enforced and were ignored and 
broken by the Serb insurgents, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia, as 
quickly as those cease-fire agreements were made.
  Not one of the agreements was enforced. Not one of the basketfull of 
resolutions was enforced on the part of the United Nations.
  Every time a United Nations resolution, either for safe havens or for 
no-fly zones or calling for cease-fires and whatever and for sanctions, 
every time those were not enforced, every time they emboldened the Serb 
insurgents, the nationalist rebels in Bosnia to intensity the genocide.
  So with that we see concentration camps, concentration camps of the 
same sort of significance that one saw in the Second World War, mass 
rape of women used as a measure of terror, as an instrument of terror, 
as an instrument of genocide, slaughter of whole villages and 
destruction of those villages, destruction of religious centers, both 
of the Roman Catholic faith and of the Moslem faith, and point-blank 
bombardment of schools and hospitals and people standing in lines to 
get water and people standing in lines to bury their dead, the 
bombardment as we saw in Sarajevo.
  The purpose of all this was purely and simply territorial expansion 
on the part of the Milosevic government in Belgrade, territorial 
expansion by removal of population or by extermination of population. 
And they did not care which. And in this instance it was not even a 
minority. It was a territorial expansion, an extermination and a 
removal of the majority of the population.
  We have not seen this kind of thing in Europe at least for 50 years. 
Things like this may have been seen in other places, but not in Europe. 
So it was perhaps far too surprising for Americans and others in Europe 
and the European community and the U.N. to contemplate what was going 
on during that 20-month period when every one of the problems that we 
are now seeing come home to roost was laid out.

                              {time}  1740

  It was in that period, as well, that the arms embargo was passed by 
the United Nations, voted on by the United Nations with the vote, the 
positive vote, of the United States, the U.N. delegation under then-
President George Bush.
  That motion, that arms embargo passed by the United Nations, 
contributed to the genocide, directly contributed to the genocide. That 
I believe was an utterly immoral act by the United Nations. That vote, 
which we supported and voted for, allowed the genocide to occur; the 
lack of enforcement of resolutions, the lack of enforcement of cease-
fires, encouraged after the arms embargo was in place.
  The reason for that is that the minority of Serb insurgents, both in 
Croatia and in Bosnia--that minority, which was never more than a third 
of the population of Bosnia and never more than 15 percent of the 
population of Croatia--the insurgent minority was able to get heavy 
weaponry, tanks, modern artillery, antiaircraft weapons, from 
Yugoslavia, from the former Yugoslavia, the rump Yugoslavia, the 
remaining Serbia and Montenegro, and resupply, and the flow of military 
commanders and the flow of men and units across the borders from 
Yugoslavia into first Croatia and then Bosnia occurred for all that 
period of time.

  Bosnia, on the other hand, a United Nations member, recognized by the 
United Nations, admitted to the United Nations, and a member with all 
the rights of United Nations membership, a multi-ethnic state, a multi-
religious state--a state where, at the beginning of this horrible 
tragedy, roughly 44 percent or 45 percent of the population was Moslem, 
30 or 31 percent was Serb Orthodox, 16 or 17 percent was Croatian, 
Roman Catholic, and there were populations of Albanians and Jews and 
Hungarians and Slovaks, and a few others, quite a multi-ethnic state, 
where people had lived in peace for many, many years, perhaps grudging 
peace, but in peace, held together and sustaining life, and with a 
great deal of intermarriage--however, Bosnia, Bosnia could not get 
weapons.
  The legitimate government, the elected government, the United Nations 
member, was not allowed to get weapons equivalent to what the 
minority--the minority, and really a minority within the minority, 
because a very substantial number of orthodox Serbs within Bosnia 
remained loyal and have remained loyal to this day to the Bosnian ideal 
of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state which has been so destroyed 
through the actions of the Serb nationalists and through what has been 
allowed by the United Nations and the European Community.
  That lack of availability of weapons has made it impossible for the 
Bosnian people to maintain their independence, and the fact that those 
weapons were fully available to the insurgents, the small minority, 
always less than one-third of the population of Bosnia, which were Serb 
Orthodox, that group always had the advantage on the weaponry.
  What we have seen is the greatest nation in the history of the world, 
the greatest power in the history of the world, and the most powerful 
military allies in the history of the world, NATO, and the most 
universal legislative body in world history, namely the United Nations, 
in their collective impotence, has watched while 200,000 people have 
been killed, while religious institutions have been destroyed, while 2 
million refugees have been created, while resolutions for safe havens 
have simply been ignored, while that embargo left the Bosnian people 
unable to protect themselves. Neither, then, has the United Nations 
been willing to protect those safe havens, the very places where 
hundreds of thousands of people had moved into six designated safe 
havens in order to seek protection because they were led to believe 
that there would be no attack upon those safe havens.
  The European Community and the United Nations and the United States 
could not take sides, because this, after all, was a civil war going 
on, when in fact the continuous resupply of arms and weaponry and units 
and men and arms and more weapons and more units of destruction passed 
freely over the border from Yugoslavia into Bosnia, while the Bosnians 
could not, could not obtain the arms to protect themselves.
  Every single person in the world knows who the aggressor is. Everyone 
knows exactly who has been grabbing territory of another U.N. member. 
Everyone knows who has committed the most vicious acts of genocide seen 
in Europe since 1945.
  In that period of time, the Yugoslav Government, under the leadership 
of Milosevic, has always been able to see that they were able to get 
more land toward their goal of greater Serbia, and to have fewer 
problem people in that land that they took by moving out two-thirds of 
the population, by eliminating that population, either exterminating, 
or requiring them to move, removing them by ethnic cleansing away from 
areas where often, as many as two-thirds of the population of a city 
was of one religious group. In cases, there have been as many as 90 
percent of one of the religious groups that has been driven out, and 
large numbers have been killed.
  Throughout that period, the instruments of this horrendous disaster 
have been people like General Vladov, who was in charge of committing 
these atrocities at Sarajevo and at Prijedor and at Magli and most 
recently at Gorazde; and behind him was the political arm, the so-
called leader of the Serb nationalists, Karadzic, whose job it was, 
every time an atrocity was committed, to deny that those acts had been 
committed, and as it happened, time and time again, every time one of 
the atrocities occurred, whether it was a concentration camp that was 
found, ``We did not do it,'' whether it has been bombing of civilian 
centers, bombardment of hospitals, ``We did not do it,'' and so on.
  His other job always, after denial of what they had been doing, was 
to then threaten the West with dire consequences if the European 
Community or the United Nations or the United States or NATO or anyone 
else were to try to stop them from this absolutely single-minded effort 
on the part of Yugoslavia to grab land from a neighboring country, from 
two neighboring countries, Croatia and Bosnia, both members of the 
United Nations, to grab land and drive people, the substantial majority 
of people, out of territories that they had been in for many years.
  However, in all of this I have managed to pass over what started, and 
much of which happened in the 20 months prior to January 20 of 1993, 
but now in fact for at least the last 15 months the evolution of this 
disaster has been managed by the present administration. President 
Clinton came to the scene criticizing the disastrous policy of the 
previous President, quite justifiably, because it was already a 
disastrous policy, and laid down every one of the errors that went on.
  But the continuing genocide is now on President Clinton's watch. The 
destruction of Gorazde, a safe haven, we have been watching with horror 
the technicolor views of what has happened in Gorazde, and my good 
friend, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McCloskey] is here, and he can 
report to us a good deal more on what it is that has been happening in 
Gorazde. I would be happy to yield to him on that point.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] 
for his very generous invitation to participate in this special order, 
and though we had not talked about this, I am pleased that you make 
that specific request as to report on the Gorazde conditions, because I 
am fairly up to date on that.
  Within the last half-hour, about 30 or 40 minutes ago, I was directly 
talking to Ismet Briga, through translators, of course, the mayor of 
Gorazde, which is still under siege, and as the gentleman very well 
knows, when we talked yesterday and you and I addressed the House 
yesterday, the siege of Gorazde was of tremendous proportions.

                              {time}  1750

  I could hear shells and all sorts of fire immediately surrounding the 
mayor and his ravaged persona, if you will, I think quite sincerely on 
one hand crying out for Western help and in the next voice or gasp, he 
would say, ``If only President Clinton and the West would come bomb us, 
we will forgive you. But we cannot take another hour of this. Please 
put us out of our misery.''
  At that time last night, yesterday afternoon, the mayor was saying 
his community, his people only had hours left. Since then I have had 
the opportunity to talk briefly last night in person with President 
Clinton who obviously is continuing to work on this issue in 
consultation with allies as to air strikes and so forth, but my 
greatest fear is that come Saturday, Sunday, Monday, whenever this 
possibly could get resolved through the North Atlantic Council and the 
United Nations. That no living non-Serb would be left in Gorazde and I 
think time is of the essence, particularly what I hear from the mayor 
an hour ago, to act immediately. Mayor Briga says tonight that the 
fighting is house to house still, apartment to apartment. The hospital 
has been repeatedly hit and there are many dead. Particularly he said 
that many medical personnel today, many doctors have been killed.
  In essence, I guess from all implications and previous reports, it is 
a case that there is no functional hospital there, and as we know and 
we have talked about this already today, when we came to work this 
morning, the word was that it was not a NATO ultimatum, it was not a 
U.N. ultimatum, but, of all things, and I am pleased to see we have 
been joined by the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer], the Serbs put 
out their own ultimatum today telling the people of Bosniad and the 
people of Gorazde that they had to be out of this city by 4 p.m. This 
afternoon their time, 10 o'clock this morning our time, or they would 
be leveled, as Haris Silajdzic, the Prime Minister of Bosnia told me 
today, or they would be rolled over.
  So with that context, Mayor Briga told me tonight that, yes, at 10 
o'clock this morning our time, 4 o'clock this afternoon their time, the 
shells started to rain down twice as much as yesterday for 5 hours 
continuously. And today as far as what they can count, and this is a 
minimum, it is somewhere here in my notes, but I recall that it is 97 
dead today that they can count so far and scores wounded, and still the 
cries go out for help, the messages to the United Nations. And to the 
United States.

  President Clinton has promised me he would talk to me today about 
this, and I know he has been in meetings all day, but I would hope he 
would do so. But, more importantly, I believe the United Nations 
Authorizing resolutions as to the safe havens and what is a safe haven 
says that all necessary force can be used to protect the people of a 
safe haven. Otherwise, what are we talking about?
  As I say, this needs no more reviews or clearances or high-level 
discussional meetings. The threat is that one ``no'' can veto the 
entire operation.
  The mayor goes on to say that many of the wounded cannot get to the 
hospital, I guess the hospital is essentially nonexistent, and Serb 
shells today could not miss in Gorazde. ``They are using weapons we 
have never seen before,'' whatever that means, I do not know, but 
``rockets of a kind we do not recognize.''
  He said, in some ways the defenses are still holding, although as he 
told me in a conversation yesterday, that hand to hand, house to house, 
street by street, yard by yard, the fighting goes on tonight in 
Gorazde.
  The mayor said tonight that they have tried to break through the 
entrances to the city center but so far the Serbs have not broken 
through the city center but heavy fighting goes on. Again he says that 
some of the people in Gorazde can be saved.
  He said, ``At the moment the Serb ultimatum passed at 9 o'clock,'' I 
guess that is after 5 hours of shelling, ``the earth started to shake 
with so many shells coming in.''
  As I alluded to earlier, it is the heaviest shelling yet. It lasted 
until 9 p.m. their time, 3 p.m. our time, 97 people killed. The numbers 
of wounded the mayor gave me tonight were 260, but he very much says 
that that is a minimum, that it is going to be worse than that.
  The gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer], asked me to comment on the 
report from Gorazde. I might have a few other things to observe or say 
in a while, but I thank him for his generosity and concern and that is 
about as up-to-date a report from Gorazde as we can get right now with 
no journalists in the area.
  Mr. OLVER. I appreciate very much the gentleman from Indiana taking 
part in this and giving that update.
  The most remarkable thing to me is that the Serb insurgents have 
issued an ultimatum within Gorazde that without a surrender and people 
leaving by 10 o'clock our time this morning, then in their view 
everyone is subject to be slaughtered.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. Yes. And I do not want to go on about this, but in 
many ways, as we know, we have put them there defenseless.
  Mr. OLVER. This was a safe haven. This was a United Nations safe 
haven.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. We designated it as a safe haven. And, in essence, the 
West, all of us together, have set them up like ducks.
  As we all know, not to be too corn ball, but this is not in our 
vision of United States leadership in any sense. In all the western 
movies that we grew up on and are still kind of a first run favorite 
throughout the Balkans, John Wayne tried to help the besieged settlers 
when he could. This borders on being a strange perversion of values. I 
just hope we wake up tonight before they are all gone.
  Mr. OLVER. The tragedy to me is that the President's initiative at 
Sarajevo, which so many of us saw as being so very hopeful, that 
finally the United Nations and the European Community and we understood 
and understand that only force, or at least a credible threat of force, 
a credible threat of force at the very least, would stop the expansion, 
stop this effort at creating a greater Serbia on the basis of driving 
out and exterminating whole populations in the neighboring United 
Nations community states of Croatia and Bosnia. But the Serb insurgents 
have really shown how little respect they have for even the initiative 
in Sarajevo. They have held United Nations troops and United Nations 
peacekeepers hostages there, they have taken back weapons willy-nilly, 
in essence, as if they were the ones who had control and maybe indeed 
that is the fact, that they do have control of this situation.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. On the point of the gentleman from Massachusetts, they 
do have control The United Nations is talking about getting out. In 
many ways I wish they would, if we would follow up with bombing, but 
they have killed British peacekeepers, they have taken British and 
French peacekeepers hostage and we have made much of the fact as to 
these two or three dozen pieces of heavy equipment that they took back 
the other day, that it has been returned.
  But at least as of last report that I saw about 24 hours ago, at 
least six of those pieces have not been returned and as I know from my 
Easter Sunday and Monday in Sarajevo, the people of Sarajevo at the 
time were thankful for the stopping of the shelling but the men are 
still in the hills, they cannot live normal lives at all still, even in 
Sarajevo, and they are justly afraid, and look at what is happening now 
in Gorazde, that before too long the shells will be coming down on 
Sarajevo again. So your points are most correct.

                              {time}  1800

  Mr. OLVER. I believe that all of us believe that this was a very 
hopeful effort going on at Sarajevo, and yet we all knew that on the 
weapons counts that not all the weapons were being turned over to the 
United Nations, not all of them were being by any means turned over. 
Now we do know the reports come after the fact that our military people 
and the United Nations military people knew those weapons were being 
moved to the Gorazde area for the assault, the attack on Gorazde.
  So the tragedy in part is what is happening to the President's 
initiative on Sarajevo on trying to build the system for stopping this 
war. The tragedy is, it seems to me, also that there is a great 
potential for losing that other initiative that the President has 
started of getting the Croats and the Moslem populations to a 
reconciliation point which also was so hopeful. So each side now can 
see that the United Nations has no intention of enforcing or protecting 
the safe havens and that hundreds of thousands of refugees in those 
areas which had been driven into refugee situations, into safe havens 
where they thought they might be safe, are subject to the same kind of 
situation.
  I am very pleased to have the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer] 
join us here also.
  You have, in your position as chairman of the Commission on European 
Security, taken so many leadership positions over such a long time on 
this one, and to add your thoughts to this would be very much 
appreciated.
  I yield to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer].
  Mr. HOYER. I want to thank my friend from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] 
who himself has been a voice strongly raised to stop the killing, 
strongly raised to enforce international law, and to say how pleased I 
am to join him and the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McCloskey].
  There is no person in the United States or perhaps in any place 
outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina who has raised more consistently a 
strong voice for humanitarian concerns in that beleaguered nation than 
the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McCloskey].
  I have been in international meetings with the gentleman from Indiana 
[Mr. McCloskey], and he has sponsored resolutions which I have 
supported strongly calling out to the international community to come 
to its senses and confront international disorder, international 
lawlessness.
  We passed today on this floor a crime bill, essentially saying 
``enough'' to those domestically who would attack others, who would 
steal from others, who would rape others, who would break the law in an 
ordered civil society. The statute that we passed today is tough, 
because we think it is appropriate to be tough. It imposed the death 
penalty for the taking of lives. It imposes for 3-time offenders of 
serious crimes life forever segregated from the rest of us to ensure 
the safety of our communities and our spouses and our children.

  I have mentioned many times in conjunction with this discussion and 
this tragedy President Bush's comment in 1989 about the establishment 
of a new world order. I raise it in this context because to me if the 
new world order is to mean anything, it is to mean that the 
international community has the will and the courage and the conviction 
to join together to confront international criminals.
  We have said in document after document adopted by international 
organizations that we hold as a premise of international relations that 
borders and peoples cannot be assaulted by armed force, that the future 
must be a future of negotiated resolution of disputes.
  We are confronted today with a regime that clearly rejects out of 
hand any of the moral, ethical and legal principles that the 
international community has enunciated in the United Nations Charter, 
in the Helsinki Final Act, and in countless other international 
agreements.
  I say to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] that I want to 
rise today and state my clear support with the gentleman for taking 
decisive action to end the aggression and the genocide committed by 
Serb militants in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to commend and urge 
President Clinton forward in engaging this issue directly in the hours 
that lie before us.
  We acted in Sarajevo. We referred to the market massacre, 68 people 
lost their lives in that incident. I have just heard, as you have, that 
the report of the mayor of Gorazde is that 97 people this day have lost 
their lives, 50 percent more. The United States, in my opinion, does 
not have to stand alone in facing the Bosnian conflict. But it does 
have to stand in front, quite obviously, to take the lead and to rally 
the international community to ensure that the resolutions to which the 
gentleman from Massachusetts has referred, and its peace initiatives, 
which are being this day and have continuously been, mocked by the 
Bosnian Serbs and the Serbs in Belgrade, are actually implemented.
  And the international principles for civilized behavior, which have 
been ignored, are, once and for all, respected in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina.

  There is debate as to whether or not the United States has any 
critical interest at risk in this country. President Bush talked about 
a new world order in which the international community would be more 
secure. Uniquely, the United States stands as the Nation in the free 
world to which each of the constituents in the free world looks at time 
of international law breaking. We are the world's strongest power. We 
have been, and hopefully will continue to be, also the Nation in the 
international community that raises the moral questions. That is not to 
say we ought to ignore the strategic questions, but we have been the 
leader on those issues.
  Let us be clear as to what has happened. The Bosnian Serb militants, 
aided by the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic, decided to create a 
Greater Serbia, while Serbs may have had legitimate complaints 
regarding their situation in the former Yugoslavia, they used those 
complaints--as some criminals domestically use complaints to excuse 
their actions--and they made up new ones as well to justify what they 
were prepared to do, and then they did it.
  As I have said, like our domestic criminals, they raped, they 
tortured, they slaughtered tens and tens of thousands of human beings, 
human beings who just so happened not to be ethnic Serbs. They took 
control of territory by force.
  Every international principle says that that ought not to be done. 
They have now taken, notwithstanding that, about 70 percent of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, and pound with shell after shell what was still not 
theirs.
  The gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McCloskey] has spoken dramatically of 
what is occurring right now. We have called it ethnic cleansing. 
Perhaps that is a prettier word for what it really is: genocide, plain 
and simple.

                              {time}  1810

  Let us be clear as to what we have done so far in response to this. 
Yes, frankly, we have done a lot in some respects, including the 
massive airlift of food and humanitarian aid to Sarajevo, larger than 
the Berlin airlift. We have placed sanctions on the party principally 
responsible for the conflict, namely Serbia. The international 
community is not confused by the fact that this is a civil war between 
Bosnians.
  If it were solely a civil war, why place sanctions on an adjoining 
country? We do not have sanctions on Slovenia, we do not have sanctions 
on Hungary, we have not placed sanctions on Greece or Macedonia. We 
placed them on Serbia. Why? Because we and the international community 
perceive Serbia as a party directly at fault. In fact, the former 
Secretary of State, Larry Eagleburger, branded the leader of Serbia as 
a war criminal
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. I was going to say, and I am glad the gentleman 
brought it up, Mr. Eagleburger was before Tom Lantos' subcommittee. We 
know Larry's concern and previous policy, if you will, as to the total 
irrelevancy or nonutility, whatever, of military action.
  Well, today he is saying, in essence, ``Bomb the Serbs, but if you do 
it, don't mess around with pinprick, so-called, airstrikes or whatever. 
Take out the resources, military resources, logistics and so forth, 
everywhere.'' Not that I am saying he says that is the total and great 
solution, but he is now talking about air power, a person who has been 
most reluctant to face up to that. He is a man of great intellect and 
learning, as the gentleman knows.
  Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for that observation. All of us have 
been reluctant. No one in this body, no one in this country wants to 
undertake the bombing of people in Bosnia or any place else. But if we 
continue to say that these are ``safe havens,'' if we continue to say 
that you cannot break international law, if we continue to adhere to 
treaties that say that you cannot take territory by force, if we 
continue to pretend that a nation recognized by the United States and 
by the United Nations as an independent, free nation, cannot defend 
itself even though as I said, we impose sanctions on Serbia for its 
complicity in the ravaging of that nation, then we have no longer 
either moral credibility or, I suggest, credibility as a state that 
means what it says.
  I support the efforts that have gone on that I was speaking of, 
humanitarian relief, and all of us want that to happen. But it has been 
clear to many of us ever since August of 1992, when the war was only a 
few months old, that the Bosnian Serbs would understand only a credible 
threat of force, which is exactly what the gentleman from Massachusetts 
[Mr. Olver] referred to.
  It was at that time that we learned of the existence of the detention 
camps and the systemic raping of women and young girls. We learned 
about them in hearings that we have had in the Helsinki Commission, 
which the gentleman from Massachusetts has attended. It was then that 
the words ``Never again, never again, never again,'' echoed grimly in 
our minds. I am sure that there were debates in the late 1930's that we 
ought to be reserved about what was going on in Europe, that we did not 
want to expose ourselves to risks. Certainly, none of us wants to see 
any American placed at risk.
  On the other hand, history has taught us, over and over and over 
again, that not to confront tyranny at the beginning always costs more 
at the end.
  Instead, we have mediated, we gave a good effort to get people to 
negotiate in good faith, and this includes President Clinton's recent 
peace initiatives regarding the creation of a Bosnian federation, which 
did effectively end the fighting between Bosnians and Croats.
  This is not an impossible task, if you have a partner who will act in 
good faith. We were patient with the Serbs, much more patient than we 
should have ever been, in my opinion. All the time, the Bosnian Serb 
leaders sat at the table being cajoled, and responded with demands and 
threats just as they have done today, ``Get out by 4:00 or we are going 
to level the city.'' What barbarianism that reflects.
  When they did promise something in the past, in London or Geneva, we 
never saw the promise kept in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mediation turned out 
to be a mere smokescreen which the Serb militants have used to preclude 
a real effort to stop their criminal activity.
  Let us be clear, now, on what we need to do. That is what we are here 
to talk about, and that is what we will talk about in the next few 
days. We need to engage, in my opinion, in NATO airstrikes. It is 
incredible that a NATO plane was shot down without a response.
  What credibility can the greatest alliance on the face of the Earth, 
composed of the greatest military powers on Earth, what credibility can 
it have if it has all the weapons systems but no will to defend those 
whom we put at risk? We need to hit not only the heavy weapons being 
used, but all those that we can get. We need to hit the Serb militant 
supply lines and their political headquarters as well. We need to let 
the Serbs know that their senseless pounding of Gorazde and other 
designated safe havens will not be tolerated a day longer.
  We need to let them know that their only choice now is to come to the 
negotiating table, stop in their tracks any military action, stop 
efforts, any efforts that would destroy property and take lives.
  We need to let them know that if they choose to continue their 
aggression, they have decided their own fate; not us, them.
  We must make them know that there is a consequence to actions deemed 
criminal by the international community.
  Beyond airstrikes, I also strongly support lifting the arms embargo 
on Bosnia-Herzegovina and the forces under the control of the 
legitimate Bosnia authorities.
  Jeane Kirkpatrick, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, pointed 
out either today or yesterday that Bosnia is a recognized nation, 
recognized by the United Nations. There is an arms embargo on 
Yugoslavia, but----
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. But not from Serbia into the Serb militants in Bosnia, 
as the gentleman knows.
  Mr. HOYER. The gentleman is correct. Arms are clearly going there. In 
fact, we all know the reason for that, Serbia became the successor 
state, in effect, and it has the Yugoslav arms, the Yugoslav armed 
forces under its control.
  So we have an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, but subsequently we have 
recognized Bosnia as an independent nation. And under the United 
Nations charter, Bosnians have an inherent right, recognized by the 
United Nations charter, to defend themselves.
  Mr. OLVER. If I may, that is a right which we as Americans cherish, 
the right of self-defense, defending yourself against attack, as 
individuals, as families. That is written into the United Nations 
charter, the right of nations to their own self defense.
  This is what I have said again and again is the most--the starting 
act which allowed this genocide to go forward, in fact, the arms 
embargo, in such a way that the insurgent Serb nationalists, that 
minority of the population, always had the possibility of supply and 
resupply from Yugoslavia; whereas the Croatians first and much more 
critically over the longer period of time the Bosnians, simply did not 
have the opportunity to get arms. That is the most immoral kind of act 
on an international level that you could apply to people and then to 
also propose that you have safe havens. And the United Nations 
resolutions for safe havens, and then we, acting with the United 
Nations and the U.N. as a whole, does not have the guts to enforce its 
own safe haven resolutions, which then leave a city like Gorzade being 
destroyed, destroyed before the very eyes of the world.
  And a city like Srebrenica being simply strangled and starved. And so 
it goes.
  That represents really the most abject moral abdication of moral 
responsibility, it seems to me.

                              {time}  1820

  I was very interested. The statement is so eloquent that I had to 
break in there. In its total I wanted to stop on several occasions. The 
gentleman mentioned that just today we in the House of Representatives 
have passed a very strong, a tough, but smart, crime bill, and under 
that bill and under all of our understandings, I say to my colleagues, 
``If you kill somebody, you are committing murder, and if you kill 10 
people, you're a serial killer. But at least over there, in 
international terms, if you kill 200,000 people, which is what has 
happened by the Serb nationalists in that attack on 2 United Nations 
members, Croatia first, and then Bosnia, and I mentioned earlier that 
the attack on Vukovar was at least as vicious, as brutal, as the kind 
of result that is happening in Gorazde, the whole world watching day 
after day after day did absolutely nothing. But that attack, 200,000 
killed, and what we're suggesting is `Please be nice, please stop,' you 
know, something along those lines where every agreement previously has 
been broken, every cease-fire has been violated, every imaginable 
atrocity has been committed and then instantly denied along the way.''
  One wonders whether, if they kill a hundred thousand more people, we 
will dismantle NATO, and whether if they kill another 200,000, there 
will be a ticker tape parade in London or whatever. As my colleagues 
know, it really boggles the mind to try to imagine what it is that the 
world----
  And the other irony here: This is the very anniversary of the 79th 
year of the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the 
Armenian minority in eastern Turkey, and, when we talk about ``never 
again'' as it relates to a statement that we will not allow that kind 
of thing to happen, here we are within the Western context, and there 
are other contexts around the world, where this sort of genocide has 
occurred, and maybe we have just become inured to it.
  But appeasement, as the gentleman has so clearly pointed out, simply 
never pays. Appeasement leads to small, worse things later, and the 
ultimate tragedy here in the former Yugoslavia comes in several points, 
one of which is that now, at least as things stand, Milosevic in 
Belgrade knows perfectly well that he can do anything he wants in 
Kosovo because no one is going to do anything. He thinks:
  ``If you can't do anything in Bosnia, clearly you can't do anything 
in Kosovo.''
  There is an area where 90 percent of the population is Albanian, and 
that group of people has been reduced essentially to servitude. Their 
schools have been closed. They are not allowed to learn through schools 
the Albanian language. Albanians have been driven out of their jobs. 
Every imaginable kind of atrocity is occurring in the nighttime in an 
effort to drive those people out, and the only time that there seems to 
have been a credible force, a threat of credible force, was when the 
President issued the ultimatum: ``Withdraw from Sarajevo or you're 
going to get hit.'' They apparently thought that was the case. I think 
that probably the Serb nationalists are fairly convinced now that that 
is not the case. The credible threat of force has now been lost, and so 
we are going into a situation where the tragedy leads on by the other 
things that that lack of doing anything will lead to.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. If my colleagues would just yield for a moment on that 
point, I have a bulletin here that Secretary Christopher testified in a 
Senate committee today that the Serbs are looking forward to expanded 
aggression in Kosovo. Quoting the secretary:
  ``The aggression of the Serbs is transparent. They have in mind a 
Greater Serbia. They are looking to the south in Kosovo, possibly to 
Macedonia where we have troops. They are moving to Bosnia and perhaps, 
again, into Croatia. Meanwhile tonight the people of Gorazde are the 
most abandoned people on the planet. Imagine how they feel. Imagine how 
the Bosnian, and Sanjac, and Serbian Moslem, and Sanjac politicians 
feel in the Serb prisons tonight with Amnesty International,'' as the 
gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer] knows, a fighter in this area more 
than anybody, ``are under torture.''
  What an abandonment, and we have this illusion that it is somehow 
going to go away by treating war criminals, Karadzic, and Mladic, and 
now we hear people saying, ``By God there is a divergence between 
Mladic and Karadzic, and poor Mr. Karadzic, he really wants peace. It's 
that wacko guy, Mladic, running around----
  Mr. OLVER. It is all a game.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. In a criminal dock----
  Mr. OLVER. Facing life 
imprisonment----
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. He is the one that is supposed to commit the acts, the 
terrorist acts, commit the atrocities and commit the genocide, and 
Karadzic is the one, his political arm, who is supposed to deny it, 
deny it, and then threaten the West.

  Mr. McCLOSKEY. That is right.
  Mr. OLVER. The political arm denies the atrocities that have been 
committed time after time and then threatens the West with the 
consequences, threatens NATO, threatens the United Nation, threatens 
the United States, with the consequences.
  But the gentleman has just indicated that Secretary Christopher today 
testified before the Senator Foreign Relations Committee to that.
  Mr. McCLOSKEY. Right, absolutely.
  Mr. HOYER. Let me, if I can, intervene. We are of one mind 
essentially.
  History has shown us that nationalist tyrants do not stop, that if 
they are fed one geographic area, that want another.
  Mr. OLVER. It is an addiction.
  Mr. HOYER. It is an insatiable hunger for expansionism and 
aggrandizement, and it is a political compulsion to say to one's 
electorate that we are going to expand even further until all of 
Yugoslavia will be called Serbia, and then, perhaps, a further 
aggression will occur. But whether it is Kosovo, whether it is Croatia, 
whether it is other areas of the former Yugoslavia--Macedonia, 
Slovenia--they will not stop, in my opinion.
  But let met say in concluding my remarks and in supporting the 
remarks of the gentleman from Massachusetts and the gentleman from 
Indiana, that we mentioned the military leader and we mentioned two 
political leaders. There are others who have been branded by Secretary 
Eagleburger, and our Government and the international community as war 
criminals. Beyond our action to stop this conflict, which we must do, 
we need to take efforts to prevent similar conflicts--ones based on 
hate--from happening again. To do that, we need to eliminate the sense 
of populations aggrieved by aggression that they have not had redress, 
so that generations in the future, as we know happens in the Balkans 
and in other places, resort to violence to address old grievances 
sometimes centuries old. To do that, we need to prosecute those who 
have committed war crimes. While principally committed by Serb 
militants, this applies equally across the board.

                              {time}  1830

  If the innocent are to be vindicated, the guilty must be punished. 
New generations in Bosnia and elsewhere need to see the satisfaction 
and the deterring example of international justice. If we go back on 
this, just as we have gone back on our other threats about taking 
action to save Bosnia and Herzegovina, we will be living in a 
significantly more dangerous world.
  I want to thank my friend from Massachusetts for allowing me to 
participate with him in this special order. As he and Mr. McCloskey 
know, and as the American people know, in the next few days we will be 
considering what actions we can take. I am hopeful, Mr. Olver, that our 
President and Boris Yeltsin, the leader of one of the great, powerful 
nations in this world, and that has a significant relationship with 
Serbia, can join together with the other members of the international 
community in bringing a halt to the killing, and in holding accountable 
the killers.
  Mr. OLVER. I think what you have said, Mr. Hoyer, is very important. 
And indeed, if we do not apply what you have said in this situation, 
from this day forward, in this situation, to save what can be saved of 
an otherwise absolutely tragic and disastrous situation, then we are 
going to see what I described in Kosovo of the impression on the part 
of Milosevic in Belgrade, that he can act totally with impunity in 
Kosovo.
  And that message, if that were to get out, that undermines as a 
further part of the growing ripples of this overall tragedy that I had 
mentioned earlier, could go on for decades, that undermines secular 
Moslem states, many of them our allies like Egypt and Turkey and 
Pakistan, who are already seeing the rise of fundamentalism, in part 
because of what has been happening to secular Moslem populations in 
Bosnia and Kosovo. And then you have no credible way of saying to 
people, you are beyond the pale of international law, when any other 
small dictator somewhere, in Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa, decides, 
gee, look at what they did in Bosnia. Look at what they did. I have a 
minority I can scapegoat.
  We will have this, I would predict, time and time again. I think you 
can argue easily there has been some of that already happening, just 
watching what has happened in the last 3 years in the former 
Yugoslavia, and the unwillingness of the United Nations to enforce its 
own resolutions in that state, what has been happening in other places. 
And there could be many, many others of those.
  So I thank you very much for taking part, both Mr. McCloskey from 
Indiana and Mr. Hoyer, for taking part in this tonight.

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