[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 92 (Friday, July 15, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 15, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
      FOREIGN OPERATIONS, EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED AGENCIES 
                        APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 1995

  The Senate continued with the consideration of the bill.


                           amendment no. 2275

  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, what is the parliamentary situation?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Last evening when the Senate 
recessed it was considering amendment No. 2275, the Nickles amendment.
  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, am I correct in understanding the bill, 
the foreign operations bill, will be completed with the final vote, or 
any votes pending, no later than 2 p.m. today?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, am I also correct that a number of 
amendments that have been proposed have time agreements on them?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. That is correct.
  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, then I hope Senators who are watching 
this would realize that, even though they have time agreements on their 
amendments, if they do not come to the floor to bring them up that they 
could very well find themselves toward the end of time on the bill, on 
paper with a 50-minute or 30-minute time agreement and they might 
actually have only 2 or 3 minutes for their amendment.
  Another way of stating it, the first person who brings an amendment 
to the floor--say in the next few minutes--is guaranteed that he or she 
will have their whole time. But if you are the last person to bring it, 
you may not have any time whatsoever. Because if we are eating up the 
time with quorum calls or other matters and nobody is here offering an 
amendment, they may well be shut out. I mention that just so my 
colleagues will understand, the time that they have reserved for their 
amendments is not necessarily a guarantee. It is a guarantee only for 
those who first come over. It is not a guarantee for those who wait.
  I would use the early bird and all that kind of stuff but it is a tad 
corny. But this is one of those times when we will not go to one of 
those little-known Senate procedures known as the Dracula rule, where 
we vote after dark. All this voting has to be done before 2 o'clock.
  With that, I see the distinguished Senator from Arizona, my good, 
dear friend on the floor and I will yield the floor so he can take it 
in his own right.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Arizona is 
recognized.
  Mr. DeCONCINI. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Vermont and 
indeed compliment him on engineering what appears to be the passage of 
a Foreign Operations Subcommittee appropriations bill--no easy task. He 
has been through it many, many years. Once again, as I say, it appears 
it is going to happen this afternoon. I am amazed, and compliment him 
for once again being able to put it together.
  Madam President, within the last week President Clinton visited two 
important places in addition to attending the Naples G-7 summit. Those 
places are Riga and Berlin. I consider them important, because the 
success of his visit was directly tied to the results of a past 
American commitment to Europe which was based on principle and resolve.
  In Riga, the capital of Latvia, President Clinton spoke of the 
longstanding United States refusal to recognize the forcible 
incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union. This policy 
denied, as a matter of principle, what was for decades the apparent 
reality in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. For that reason, it was 
questioned by realists who saw our interests in compromise and 
accommodation. But, as President Clinton pointed out, we kept faith 
with the people of those countries, who were denied their freedom, 
their territorial integrity, and their independence, but are no longer 
denied them today; a new reality.
  Then, just a couple of days ago in Berlin, President Clinton walked 
through the Brandenburg Gate and, to the cheers of the crowds, said 
that all Berliners are free. He was able to make that dramatic gesture 
of America's commitment to Europe, in large part, because 31 years 
earlier President Kennedy visited a divided Berlin. President Kennedy, 
by proclaiming himself and all free people Berliners, committed us to 
take a stand against Communist domination. We took that stand and 
remained firm, again despite those who saw the apparent reality and 
argued on that basis for accommodating what was inherently wrong then 
and would still be wrong if it was a divided city today.
  I strongly welcome what President Clinton did and said in vindicating 
policies that were previously challenged as unrealistically principled. 
Those policies viewed the world not as the status quo, but as something 
we can change and improve if we are willing to make the commitment to 
do so. We made that commitment to Europe and, against all odds, changed 
it.
  The President also stated that this is more than a question of 
plurality. It is a question of U.S. interest. By changing the world, we 
made it not only freer, but we made it safer. We also gave our Nation a 
necessary sense of accomplishment.
  This commitment to Europe, however, is facing its severest test today 
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results of this test leave me and many 
others deeply concerned that the commitment is no longer really there 
as it was toward Berlin and the divided Europe. Our country 
consistently upheld the territorial integrity of the Baltic States 
against a menacing superpower.
  Today, however, we are engaged in negotiating a settlement in Bosnia 
and Herzegovina with war criminals responsible for committing genocide. 
While the settlement proposed by the international community last week 
respects Bosnia's borders--barely--it also may imperil them in the 
future with the internal division of Bosnia and Herzegovina along 
ethnic lines.
  I do not oppose the agreement. I do not like the agreement. In some 
respects, it may be the best that can be achieved at this point through 
a negotiated settlement. That is really the point. We lost the momentum 
a long time ago, and we lost a great deal of Bosnia. But there were 
more effective options to such a settlement, I believe, and ones that 
were based on principle, the same principle that our policy toward 
Berlin and a divided Europe and the Baltics was based on some years 
ago.
  Of course, some risks are associated with NATO airstrikes on Serb 
militant positions or on allowing the Bosnians to defend themselves by 
lifting the arms embargo. But where is the result? Where is the 
commitment to stand firm? Where is that commitment to the principles 
that we so correctly invoked year after year toward the Baltics, a 
principle that the United States and the people of this country can and 
are deeply proud of because we would not relent most favored nation. 
Every year this Senate has voted on a resolution not to recognize the 
Baltic States as part of the former Soviet Union. Unfortunately, we 
have been reduced, in this instance, to coaxing a Serb agreement by 
offering outrageous promises to lift sanctions on Serbia before an 
agreement is actually implemented and there is a force to implement it.
  To simply accept Serbia's word after all the killing it has fostered 
would be an act of appeasement which would appall even the most cynical 
of any of us.
  Just as President Kennedy saw Berlin as a vulnerably surrounded front 
line between free and unfree people in 1963, President Clinton can find 
Sarajevo to be that same front line today. And the people there are 
determined--more so now that they have been challenged--to maintain a 
multicultural society based on tolerance.
  It would, therefore, be fitting for President Clinton to build upon 
his welcomed words in Berlin by now declaring himself and all free 
people today, not just Berliners but also Sarajevans, and make a stand 
against the new threat--nationalist hatred.
  He should propose, for example, that in 1996, he and the leaders of 
Canada and of all Europe meet for a summit in Sarajevo under the 
auspices of the Commission on Security and Cooperation. In so doing, he 
will not only renew our commitment to Europe but revise that commitment 
to meet present challenges. The CSCE itself stands for respecting the 
territorial integrity of states. It helped to reunite a Europe 
artificially divided. It is especially suited to symbolize our 
continued opposition to the dark forces which seek to enslave the 
European continent. It will give impetus to efforts to restore Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, rebuild it and reconcile its people.
  As chairs of the Helsinki Commission, Representative Steny Hoyer and 
I are suggesting the United States propose this idea. It is an 
important way for our country, through our President, again to express 
the courage of our continuing conviction in creating a world based on 
peace, tolerance, and freedom.
  In the meantime, we will wait one more week or so to see if the 
Bosnians and the Serb militants will accept the proposed peace plan or 
not. I will comment later on what I think we should do if they accept 
the plan.
  While the Bosnians have legitimate complaints about it, their 
leadership has indicated it will argue for acceptance. That is a great 
sacrifice for the Bosnian leaders, having met with them many times and 
knowing how deeply they feel about the intrusion and murder and 
genocide committed by the Serbs, that they are willing to accept it. If 
the Serb militants, on the other hand, reject it, we must immediately 
respond in a way commensurate with their horrible aggression.
  No matter what, Madam President, we must come back to policy based on 
principle. We must recognize the present reality not as a fait accompli 
but as something we can change for the better if we have the resolve 
and commitment. We did it in the Baltics; we can do it in the Balkans. 
We have done it to Berlin; we must do it for Sarajevo.
  Madam President, on another note, I want to compliment the President 
and the administration for its consultation and its deliberate efforts 
to lay out a policy and conditions for restoration of democracy in 
Haiti. It is not an easy task, and I cannot help but observe from 
primarily the Republican side of this body the criticism that the 
administration is receiving on this policy.
  I do not remember anybody ever questioning President Bush's and 
President Reagan's initiatives into Grenada or into Panama. No, at that 
time it was OK to stand up and talk about using force to restore 
democracy. Now that it is even an option, there is continuous sniping 
and shooting at this administration, not with bullets, but with 
political rhetoric to attempt to demonstrate and to portray that the 
administration has no policy.
  Indeed, the administration has laid out its policy. I suspect that if 
the administration had done more like Bush and Reagan and just acted 
with military force, there would not be the time to have the 
resolutions like we had yesterday, there would not be the time to 
continue to have the rhetoric in opposition to a policy that I think is 
proper, a tough policy and one that is not knee-jerk.
  And on the policy on Korea, again, I wonder where these Republicans, 
who are so critical of the President for continuing dialog, for even 
making some moderate, I believe, observations at the death of Kim Il-
song of Korea, where were they when President Bush went to Japan for 
the funeral of Emperor Hirohito? Where were they when the President 
went over there and bowed before that leader's casket? They were not 
critical of President Bush. They did not say, ``My gosh, how can you 
deal and give any credence and credibility to someone who killed 
millions of people during the Second World War?''
  I do not justify the former leaders or the present leaders of North 
Korea. They are terrorists. No question about it. They deserve to be 
criticized, and they deserve to be pressured. And the Clinton 
administration is doing that.
  But to play the partisan role because the President said something 
about let us wait for a little time while the great leader--and I do 
not think that is really what he is but, in fact, that is what he has 
been referred to by that Government.
  To continue possible dialog on their compliance with nonproliferation 
is exactly what we should do as a country, and we should not have the 
partisan politics that we have seen time and time again because this 
President said something about North Korea's great leader that was 
interpreted to be friendly or accepting, that his activities over the 
years had been proper which, of course, is not the case in the 
President's remarks.
  Madam President, it is time to always assess political rhetoric and 
statements with a little bit of history. Where was everybody when 
George Bush made these statements about the Emperor of Japan, who was 
the leader of that country during the Second World War and its 
destruction throughout the world in an attempt to defeat the United 
States.

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