[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 96 (Friday, July 17, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H5846-H5847]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE BALKANS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to talk about 
something that is happening in the Balkans, and that is, unfortunately, 
ethnic cleansing rearing its ugly head once again.
  Just a few minutes ago, we heard the President of the United States 
say that he was going to maintain sanctions on Serbia because of the 
way they have been treating their population. I applaud that. But I 
think it is time for us in the Congress to speak out forcefully and 
also to look at this in its totality.
  We went through a situation in Bosnia just a few short years ago 
where Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, unleashed ethnic 
cleansing, Serbian nationalism, 200,000 people were dead, and it was 
something that the world just wrang its hands and did nothing until the 
United States grabbed the bull by the horns.
  We were able to put an end to the carnage in Bosnia. Unfortunately, 
history is repeating itself in an area called Kosovo, where 2 million 
ethnic Albanians live. They constitute 92 percent of the population.

                              {time}  1400

  I say Kosova not Kosovo, as many people say, because the Albanians 
living there call it Kosova, with an ``A.'' And if it is good enough 
for 92 percent of the population to speak that way and to say Kosova, 
that is good enough for me.
  I have been to Kosova a number of times. The people there live under 
total oppression. They have no rights; no political rights, no human 
rights, no economic rights. Albanians have been summarily fired. 
Communities are 80 percent and higher in terms of unemployment. It is 
just a people under occupation.
  There have been many, many talks, many, many discussions, and the 
United States has been meeting with a group called a contact group, 
which contains six countries, Britain, the United States, Italy, 
Germany, France and Russia. And the contact group has basically been 
rendered impotent because Russia is always standing behind Slobodan 
Milosevic, its traditional Serbian ally. So when we try to put 
sanctions in with teeth, they are always watered down.
  NATO, just recently, underwent all kinds of flights to show Milosevic 
that, if need be, NATO means business. But so far it has been empty 
words. The stated policy for the United States and the administration 
and of NATO in the West has been that the Albanians in Kosova, the 
Kosovars, ought to have some kind of autonomy within Yugoslavia, within 
Serbia. Autonomy is something they had until 1989 when Slobodan 
Milosevic summarily threw it out the window.
  The former Yugoslavia, in those days, had a lot of different 
components other than the Serbs. It had the Croats, the Slovenians, the 
Macedonians and the Bosnians, and the Albanians, in Kosova the 
Vojvodinas. They had all kinds of different components. Today, rump 
Yugoslavia is dominated by the Serbs, containing just Serbia and 
Montenegro, and the Albanians could never get a fair shake in an 
equation such as that.
  So the United States' policy and the West's policy and NATO's policy 
that

[[Page H5847]]

somehow the two parties should sit down and negotiate and work their 
way back to autonomy for Kosova, in my opinion, does not work. The only 
thing that will work, Mr. Speaker, and I think we should say it loudly 
and clearly, is self-determination for the people of Kosova. They have 
a right, the right that we want for ourselves, the right that our 
country had 222 years ago, of self-determination, and that we say we 
want for all peoples. The Albanians in Kosova have the same right of 
self-determination.
  If they want to be a free and independent nation, the Republic of 
Kosova, they ought to be allowed to do that. I support that. If they 
want to have union with Albania or stay within a federation with 
Serbia, that is the Kosovars' way. That is what they should decide. 
Nobody else should decide that for them. And it is ludicrous to pretend 
that autonomy will continue to work. Why would people who are being 
oppressed want to continue in a situation where their oppressors have 
the upper hand? It just does not work.
  There has been a disturbing trend in the past couple of weeks to 
somehow, in some quarters, equate the people who are being oppressed 
with the oppressors; to somehow say that everybody ought to lay down 
their arms; everybody ought to sit and talk. The only way to get rid of 
ethnic cleansing and the only way to end the oppression in Kosova is to 
get Milosevic, the Serbs, to back off; get their police and everybody 
else out of Kosova; impose a no-fly zone over Kosova, the way we have 
one over Iraq; and use air strikes, if need be, against Serbian 
positions who are terrorizing and killing innocent Albanian civilians.
  Ethnic cleansing and genocide is rearing its head once again on the 
continent of Europe, and the world is standing by and wringing its 
hands because nobody knows what to do. The only thing Milosevic 
understands is tough talk, and we need to have self-determination for 
the people of Kosova.

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