[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 135 (Thursday, October 1, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H9212]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            CRISIS IN KOSOVO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Everett). 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 address the House today. I want to 
call attention to a very, very serious crisis in the world and that is 
in the Province of Yugoslavia called Kosovo.
  We read about it in the paper today on the front page, that there 
were several massacres, that bodies were found of innocent civilians, 
men, women and children, as the Serbian police forces and military 
units continue their campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against 
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
  Kosovo is a place where over 92 percent of the population, 2 million 
people, are ethnic Albanians, and they are totally dominated and ruled 
by Belgrade, by the Serbs who comprise less than 10 percent of the 
population. These people for 10 years have had no freedoms, no 
political freedoms, no economic freedoms, no social freedoms. 
Unemployment is rampant, 80 percent, 90 percent. No hope. And on the 
ground, the situation gets worse and worse and worse.
  We have to take a stand before we see Bosnia repeat itself. Bosnia is 
indeed repeating itself. That ended up with 200,000 innocent people 
slaughtered. Kosovo could be even worse.
  Now, I have called and I will call again and say it again, we read in 
the paper today that NATO is considering air strikes in order to stop 
the Serbs from killing innocent civilians. We have been saying this 
time in and time out. Actions speak louder than words. Mr. Speaker, it 
is time for action. We need to have immediate NATO air strikes on 
Serbian positions in Kosovo so that the innocent civilians will not 
continued to be slaughtered.
  We now have at least 300,000 homeless civilians, more than a tenth of 
the entire population, some people would say it is as much as a quarter 
of the entire population, driven from their homes, and the pattern is 
like this. First Serbian artillery shells the villages, causing 
innocent civilians to flee in panic, fleeing into the hills and into 
the mountains. Then the next thing they do after the civilians have 
left is they come in and loot the houses and they steal everything they 
can. And then finally they burn the houses down to the ground.
  So we have a situation where refugees now cannot have a place to go 
back to. And we are facing, as winter is approaching, perhaps another 
week or two at the most, where we need to get in so that innocent 
civilians can have humanitarian aid. The Serbs are keeping out 
humanitarian relief workers to get food and lodging and clothing to 
these people. Will the West again wait until it is too late?
  I have a letter signed by 18 of our colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle calling on the President to issue immediate air power with our 
NATO allies to stop the carnage; to indict Slobodon Milosevic, the 
leader of Yugoslavia, who is responsible for this, who because of 
Serbian nationalism has again, as he did in Bosnia, caused the death of 
innocent people.
  The short-term problem, Mr. Speaker, is that we need to get aid to 
these people because what is going to start to happen is they are going 
to start to die because of the cold and because of starvation. And that 
is the immediate concern that the world should have.
  Of long range concern is what to do in Kosovo, and I have said time 
and time again and will say it again, self-determination for the people 
of Kosovo is the only answer. Why should the Albanians in the former 
Yugoslavia be treated any different than any of the other peoples that 
were allowed to form their own nation? The Croats, the Bosnians, the 
Slovenians, the Macedonians and so on and so forth.
  Self-determination is a basic principle in which we in America 
believe, and if it is good enough for all the other ethnic groups in 
the former Yugoslavia, it should be good enough for the Albanians as 
well, particularly since this is the group that was getting the worst 
end of the stick in Yugoslavia, and certainly now that we are seeing 
genocide and ethnic cleansing rear its ugly head on the continent of 
Europe.
  The time for action is now. The only thing that Mr. Milosevic 
understands is the credible use of force. He will only stop as he did 
in Bosnia, when we had NATO air strikes and he knew that NATO and, more 
importantly, the United States meant business. If he thinks these 
threats are empty, and quite frankly they have been empty for months 
upon months upon months. We have said that we would threaten, we have 
threatened him, we have said that we would bring in NATO air power, we 
have done all kinds of flying, but he knows it does not mean a hill of 
beans. The only thing he will understand is if he knows the West is 
ready to take action.
  Now, shamefully our allies in Germany and Italy are trying to say 
that the United Nations Security Council needs to approve before NATO 
could move forward. I did not know the United Nations had a veto on 
what NATO can do. I think the NATO alliance needs to take action and 
needs to take action now, from a humanitarian point of view. Also, the 
thing is that this can explode into a wider war and drag our NATO 
allies in if we do not act now. The time for military strikes is now.




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