[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 51 (Wednesday, April 14, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3667-S3669]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 KOSOVO

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, not very long ago it would have been 
difficult to find anyone in this country who had heard of Kosovo, that 
part of the former Yugoslavia which is today engulfed in a humanitarian 
calamity and where NATO is conducting the first combat operation in its 
50 year history.
  During the past three weeks we have watched the catastrophe in Kosovo 
unfold. Over 600,000 Kosovar-Albanians have fled their homes or been 
herded onto trains with little more than the shirts on their backs, 
simply because of their ethnicity and because they are Muslim.
  Today they are struggling to survive in the mud and squalor of camps 
in Macedonia and Albania, or in third countries. Families have been 
torn apart. Men and boys have been taken away and their fate is 
unknown. Women and girls have been raped. Children have been lost or 
abandoned.
  Another 200-500,000 people are said to be displaced inside Kovoso, 
with little access to food or medicine. Luckily it is not winter, but 
it is still a humanitarian disaster on a scale not seen in Europe for 
half a century.
  I supported NATO's decision to attack Serbian President Milosevic's 
forces.
  We could debate how we got to this point, about the way the 
negotiations were handled at Rambouillet and whether he might have 
refrained from invading Kosovo had the diplomacy been conducted 
differently.
  Legitimate questions have been asked about whether the ultimatum put 
to the Serbs at Rambouillet, which would have led to the partition of 
their country, was realistic or sustainable. Many knowledgeable people 
have argued that administration officials did not fully understand the 
history of the former Yugoslavia or the importance of Kosovo to the 
Serbs, that they seriously underestimated Milosevic, took a bad 
situation and have made it worse.

  We could also ask whether our relations with Russia, which have been 
badly damaged in recent weeks, could

[[Page S3668]]

have been managed better, and what role the Russians should be 
encouraged to play in helping to resolve this crisis.
  But after the collapse of the Rambouillet talks, and after Milosevic 
had ignored dozens of United Nations resolutions, violated every 
agreement he had signed, continued to slaughter innocent Kosovar-
Albanians and amassed tens of thousands of troops and armor on the 
Kosovo-Serbia border--and there apparently is evidence that Milosevic 
planned the expulsion of ethnic Albanians well before the NATO bombing 
began--we had but two choices:
  Do nothing as Milosevic's forces rolled through Kosovo while savagely 
beating or executing and burning the homes of every man, woman and 
child who refused his ``ethnic cleansing''; or try to deter him with 
force. I favored the latter.
  Like so many others who hoped that Milosevic would accept autonomy 
for Kosovo secured by an international peacekeeping force, I have seen 
my worst fears realized.

  The NATO air attacks have damaged Serbia's military infrastructure, 
but they have failed to achieve their primary goal: preventing the 
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
  Milosevic's forces have swept through Kosovo burning whole villages, 
brutalizing and killing civilians, leaving nothing in their wake and 
forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee. It may not be on the 
scale of Nazi Germany, but it is certainly reminiscent of those days.
  Mr. President, not many people would have anticipated the magnitude 
of the catastrophe that has befallen Kosovo today. But many people 
predicted that Milosevic would fight to hold on to Kosovo, and many 
doubted that air power alone would stop him.
  I favored the use of force. But, like many others, I have been 
disappointed by the way this air campaign has been carried out.
  We probably could not have stopped Milosevic's forces from invading 
Kosovo after the Rambouillet talks collapsed. Forty thousand of his 
soldiers, with tanks, were poised on the border ready to invade.
  But I certainly expected that we would hit him with enough firepower 
so that among the first targets bombed would be those Serbian forces. 
Instead, they encountered almost no resistance as they emptied Kosovo 
of its inhabitants, destroyed their homes, and achieved complete 
control over Kosovo in a matter of days--the very result we had sought 
to prevent.
  Now his soldiers are hiding in the villages and rugged terrain of 
Kosovo, and we are facing the far more difficult, dangerous and costly 
challenge of forcing them to withdraw and creating a safe environment 
for the refugees to return and rebuild their lives.

  Despite claims by NATO and Pentagon officials that they predicted 
everything, the United States and the rest of NATO were clearly 
unprepared for the debacle that has unfolded. I suspect historians may 
not look kindly on the Administration officials who did not have a 
contingency plan if Milosevic refused to back down after a few days or 
weeks of NATO bombing, who seem to have no strategy except more 
bombing, and who apparently selected their targets by committee.
  The fact that NATO leaders have been scrambling to get more aircraft 
to Kosovo, and that we are told that it will take weeks to put a few 
Apache helicopters into service there, is perhaps the best evidence of 
this.
  Having said that, we should not lose sight of the reasons we are in 
Kosovo. Had it not been for the Secretary of State, I doubt that anyone 
in the Administration would have argued as passionately for using force 
to try to prevent crimes against humanity.
  I applaud her for it, because I believe that today, in the year of 
the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, NATO could not have 
turned its back on the ethnic cleansing of thousands of defenseless 
people in the heart of Europe.
  The alternative was to give a green light to Milosevic and other 
would-be Milosevic's, and to severely curtail NATO's future role as an 
enforcer of international humanitarian law in Europe.

  Some have suggested that because we did not act to prevent the 
slaughter in Rwanda, or in Sierra Leone, or Sudan, or any number of 
other places, that NATO should not intervene here.
  I disagree. In fact, I believe that we and our allies in and outside 
of Africa should have tried to protect the innocent in Rwanda, where 
half a million people, in the span of only three months, were murdered 
because of their ethnicity.
  If we have learned anything from that experience and others, it is 
that by not acting, by allowing genocide to occur, we diminish 
ourselves and we invite similar atrocities elsewhere.
  Others have opposed our involvement in Kosovo on the grounds that we 
risk becoming bogged down in another Vietnam. As one who in 1974 cast a 
deciding vote against the Vietnam war, I am sympathetic to those 
concerns.
  But we and our NATO allies have been at war in Kosovo for a total of 
three weeks. For the first four years of the Vietnam War, our 
Government's policy was strongly supported by the Congress and the 
American people. It was only when the Pentagon's credibility was 
shattered by the 1968 Tet offensive, and it became clear that the war 
could not be won, that the country turned against the war.
  It is also interesting that some of the most vocal opponents of 
NATO's use of force in Kosovo are the very Members of Congress who 
strongly supported our involvement in Vietnam.
  Some of them have argued that since the Serbian people have rallied 
behind President Milosevic we should recognize that our policy is not 
working and find a way out. The reaction of the Serbian people is very 
troubling, but it is a predictable consequence of war and Milosevic's 
tight control of the press. We saw the same thing in Iraq, despite 
Saddam Hussein's brutal repression of his own people.
  One does not have to equate Milosevic with Hitler. But let us not 
forget that millions of Germans supported Adolf Hitler. That was hardly 
a reason not to fight him.
  And contrary to the lies of Serbian officials that the ethnic 
Albanians who were rounded up and forced to flee were only trying to 
escape the NATO bombing, the refugees, many of whom saw their relatives 
murdered, see NATO as their only hope.
  The facts are:
  Whether or not we believe that diplomacy handled differently might 
have achieved a different result;
  Whether or not the NATO military campaign should have been conducted 
differently once the decision to use force was made;
  Whether or not the President should have publicly ruled out the use 
of ground forces;
  Whether one likes it or not--we need to recognize the unavoidable 
fact of which the senior Senator from Arizona, Senator McCain, has so 
consistently reminded us: Our country is the leader of NATO and NATO is 
fighting a war. Now that we are in it we need to win it. If we fail we 
will all be the losers.
  This is not the time to debate what might have been or to obfuscate 
or to hedge one's bets. It is a time to stand up as a country united 
behind the President, the Secretary of State, the Pentagon, our 
soldiers and our NATO allies in support of a cause that is just, and a 
cause that will determine the credibility, effectiveness, and future 
mission of NATO.
  Let us remember. It is President Milosevic who is destroying the 
lives of the people of Kosovo, the very people whom he claims to 
represent. It is he who has driven them from their homes. It is his 
forces who are killing, raping and pillaging. It is his forces who are 
laying landmines where refugees are fleeing.
  And let us remember that this is not the first time President 
Milosevic has laid waste to an entire country. In Bosnia his troops 
murdered thousands and buried them in mass graves, and uprooted 
hundreds of thousands, again because of their ethnicity.
  We should all be concerned by the damage the NATO military campaign 
has caused to our relations with Russia.
  I am told that the Russian people are united in their anger at the 
United States like never before since the end of the Cold War.
  They have seen their country transformed from a superpower to a 
crippled giant. They felt that NATO's expansion was unnecessary and an 
attempt to gain advantage over Russia. They see

[[Page S3669]]

the air attacks against Serbia as one more example of the unchecked 
misuse of American power.
  I am told that our policy has only strengthened the hard-liners in 
Russia.
  I am disturbed by the photographs of Russian Prime Minister Primakov 
coddling President Milosevic. We have also heard threatening statements 
by President Yeltsin and other Russian officials, opposing the NATO air 
strikes and intimating that Russia might act militarily to defend its 
interests in the Balkans.
  No one can deny the overriding importance of our relations with 
Russia and the need to find a way for Russia to join with us in trying 
to resolve this crisis. Perhaps that includes a major role for Russian 
soldiers in any international security force in Kosovo.
  But the fact remains that it would be foolhardy for Russia to become 
militarily involved in Kosovo. The NATO attacks against Milosevic are 
not in any way directed at Russia. All of NATO's members are 
collectively standing up against genocide in Europe. Russia's long-term 
economic and security interests are clearly better served by joining 
with the United States and Europe, rather than casting its lot with the 
likes of Milosevic.
  We must also reflect on the reaction of the people of Serbia and 
Montenegro. For years our policy has failed to account for the 
complexities of the history of the Balkans, and we are paying a price 
for that today.

  We have a tendency to oversimplify and over-personalize our foreign 
policy, to forget that in the past the Serbian people have suffered, 
too. But while we know that they also have been victimized by President 
Milosevic, we cannot excuse them for rallying to his defense when all 
of Europe is united against everything he represents.
  Mr. President, there has been a great deal of talk, both pro and con, 
about the deployment of American soldiers as part of a NATO ground 
force, in Kosovo.
  As much as I hope that ground troops are not necessary, I felt it was 
unwise to rule them out because I believe it only emboldened President 
Milosevic.
  I also know of no one who thinks this mission can be accomplished by 
air power alone, and the administration needs a more realistic 
strategy. We need policy based on solid plans--not policy based on 
polls.
  Again, I think we should heed the advice of Senator McCain. What are 
our goals--NATO's goals--today? In my mind, it is to force Milosevic to 
agree to a ceasefire, the withdrawal of his forces from Kosovo, the 
safe return of the refugees secured by an international force, and 
autonomy for Kosovo.
  If we can prove the experts wrong and accomplish that with air power 
alone, so much the better.
  But if we cannot, if ground troops are necessary to achieve our 
goals, we must use them, and NATO should be making preparations for the 
possibility that they will be needed. The bulk of those forces should 
come from Europe, but as the leader of NATO we would have a 
responsibility to contribute our share.

  To those who complain that Kosovo is not worth the life of a single 
American soldier, I would say this: As Americans we cherish the life of 
every American soldier, and we give our armed forces the best available 
training and technology to defend themselves. Military missions always 
involve danger. In this mission, an enormous amount is at stake for our 
country, for NATO, for the people of Kosovo, and for humanity.
  What is the alternative? To give in to ethnic cleansing after taking 
a principled stand against it? That would be a terrible defeat for 
NATO, and for the cause of international justice and security. It would 
be a terrible precedent for us to bequeath to the generations that will 
follow us in the next century.
  No one can predict how long this war will last, or how it will end. 
Let us hope that President Milosevic soon recognizes that he risks 
losing everything.
  In the meantime, we owe our gratitude and our support to our 
soldiers, and to the humanitarian relief organizations that are 
providing emergency food, shelter and medical assistance to the 
refugees.
  They have been heroic.
  Mr. President, I am also concerned about a disturbing report I 
received this morning that United States forces have used landmines 
against the Serbs.
  I am told that these are anti-tank mines, but they are mixed with 
anti-personnel mines, which are prohibited under an international 
treaty which unfortunately the United States has not signed.
  However, every one of our NATO allies except for Turkey is a party to 
that treaty, and I wonder if they are aware of this since our planes 
are using airfields located in those countries.
  In fact, at last count 135 nations had signed the treaty, and 71 have 
ratified. The United States should be among them.
  Nobody would argue that the United States is bound by a treaty it has 
not ratified. But it is very disappointing that at the same time that 
the Administration is holding itself out as a leader in the worldwide 
effort to ban landmines, it is using mines itself.
  Mr. President, I have asked the Pentagon to confirm whether or not 
this report is true. I hope it is not.
  But if it is true, it is only a matter of time before innocent people 
are maimed or killed by these weapons.
  It sends the wrong message to the rest of the world. And frankly, 
while I support the Administration's use of force against Milosevic I 
do not know anyone who believes we need landmines to achieve our goals. 
It is unnecessary, it is wrong, and it will only further erode the 
Administration's credibility on an issue that cries out for the United 
States to set the example.
  Mr. President, I am hoping this report is not true. But we will find 
out because if it is, we should stop using them. It is a disturbing 
thing that we would be so different from the rest of our allies.

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