[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 117 (Thursday, August 18, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 18, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 BURUNDI MUST NOT BECOME ANOTHER RWANDA

  (Mr. EMERSON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, clear evidence of increasing ethnic 
tensions and violence in Burundi, Rwanda's neighbor, is demanding that 
the international community not only imagine but that it demonstrate 
what it has learned from the horror in Rwanda. With alarm, we are 
witnessing in Burundi a familiar pattern of deteriorating conditions, 
but I fear we can only find marginal efforts by the international 
community to intervene, to make the timely and critical difference, to 
effectively mitigate the spiraling pattern of violence. if the 
international community does not heavily insist on conflict resolution 
in Burundi it will never know if it could have prevented yet greater 
instability in central Africa.
  Bipartisan American leadership in providing humanitarian relief to 
refugees in complex emergencies is well established. I call upon the 
administration, in the strongest possible terms, to urgently provide an 
equal degree of leadership in addressing with all possible ways and 
means the alarming escalation of conflict in Burundi. We cannot once 
again say, ``Who could have imagined.''

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