[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 66 (Monday, May 10, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H2924-H2926]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SERBIAN PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC HAS A LONG HISTORY OF BRUTALITY AND ETHNIC
CLEANSING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) is recognized
for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, although I would not have taken the actions of
the Clinton administration, which has led us where we are today in the
Balkans, the question has now become, we are here; now what do we do?
I want to rise today to set forth my concerns and my thoughts on
America's response to the terrible things that have taken place in the
Balkans. I, of course, address my remarks to everybody in the Congress
but especially to my Republican colleagues here in the Congress.
Last Thursday afternoon, May 6, while listening to the debate on the
emergency supplemental appropriations bill, I was struck by two
notions. The first was that some in the House apparently believe that
the U.S. and NATO can negotiate and then continue to coexist with
Serbian President Milosevic as though the terrible, brutal, and
criminal acts inflicted upon the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as daily
fare did not even take place. The second notion is that many are acting
as if this Balkan conflict just got under way or began a short 8 weeks
ago.
I am convinced that neither of these are true. So are many, many
others. In fact, Milosevic's bloody pursuit of ethnic cleansing began
in 1991 with the military assault on Vukovar, Croatia, near the Serbian
border. This assault signaled an ethnic cleansing, and I might say
there were mass graves found outside Vukovar once the West was able to
get there of many, many people who have been killed as a result of
Milosevic's effort to take Vukovar. This assault signaled an ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina that lasted for years under the
benign eye of the United Nations and casual disinterest of much of the
free world.
By the time the world could no longer look the other way, about a
quarter of a million, 250,000, people were killed, and almost 2 million
more were homeless and displaced refugees.
Kosovo is only the latest chapter in this dark history. Most of the
nearly 2 million ethnic Albanian population are now homeless and on the
run within Kosovo or are refugees languishing in camps outside the
border. Most have hopes of someday returning. But to what? To homes
that no longer exist and towns and villages that are largely destroyed
and to families which have been brutalized and torn apart and with many
killed or missing?
There seems to be a mood that we can ignore these hard facts of what
actually is taking place, that we can negotiate an honorable truce with
Milosevic where people can go home and everything can be nice. But this
is a fantasy. More, it is a dangerous fantasy.
The world simply cannot ignore the fact that Milosevic and many
others in his employ are war criminals. They meet the test by any
historical yardstick one could use to measure them. As long as he is in
power, it will not be possible to have a lasting peace in the Balkans.
Let me paraphrase two experts from Peter Maass' book, ``Love Thy
Neighbor, A Story of War''. Maass, writing about war crime indictments,
relates accounts so horrifically graphic that I cannot read them
verbatim but will include them for the Record.
In one account he says that the Serb forces put the gun up against a
father's head and tells the father to rape your daughter. The father
says, no, I cannot do that. Then he puts the gun up to the daughter's
head and says to the father, now rape your daughter. The father says,
oh, no.
Then, according to the account, and I will not go any further, but I
now would have like to have Peter Maass' account of what took place,
beginning on page 51.
Then on page 53 he goes on to tell of other atrocities and
brutalities that are so graphic that I will not read them on the floor
of the House but will insert them whereby they will appear in the
Record at this very, very point.
Beginning on page 51 while writing about war criminal activity, Maass
says: ``You can, for example, barge into a house and put a gun to a
father's head and tell him that you will pull the trigger unless he
rapes his daughter or at least simulates the rape. (I heard of such
things in Bosnia.) The father will refuse and say I will die before
doing that. You shrug your shoulders and reply, Okay, old man, I won't
shoot you, but I will shoot your daughter. What does the father do now,
dear reader? He pleads, he begs, but then you the man with the gun, put
the gun to the daughter's head, you pull back the hammer and you shout
Now! Do it! Or I shoot! The father starts weeping, yet slowly he unties
his belt, moving like a dazed zombie, he can't believe what he must do.
You laugh and say, That's right, old man, pull down those pants, pull
up your daughter's dress, and do it!''
Continuing on page 53: ``Three days after her arrival at the prison,
she went with a huge number of women and other girls to fetch water
from a well about 50 meters from the prison gates. Returning from the
well Trnopolje guards held back six girls, including the witness, and
stopped them from reentering the prison gates. They were then joined by
four more female prisoners. The guards took the 10 girls to a house
across the meadow. They were taken to the side yard of the house, out
of sight of the roadway. Thirty Serbian soldiers--including ``some
dressed like a tank crew''--were there and they taunted the girls,
calling them ``Turkish whores.'' The girls were ordered to undress or
have their clothes pulled off. Three girls resisted or hesitated from
their fear. Their clothes were cut off with knives.
[[Page H2925]]
The Serbian soldiers told the naked girls to parade slowly in a
circle. The men sat outside the circle--smoking, drinking and calling
out foul names. The witness estimates the ``parade'' lasted about 15
minutes. Three soldiers took one girl--one to rape her while the two
others held her down. The three men took turns. A soldier approached
the witness and mocked her, saying he had seen her before. Though she
did not recognize him, he pulled out a photo of the witness with her
19-year-old Muslim boyfriend, whom he cursed for being in the Bosnian
Territorial Defense Forces. The man with the photograph raped her
first. The witness said she fought and pulled his hair, but he bit her
and hit her face. Her lips bled. He hit her hard with the butt of his
gun on her cheek, causing extreme pain. Another rapist ran the blade of
his knife across her breasts as if to slice the skin off, leaving
bleeding scratches. After that, she was raped by eight more men before
losing consciousness.''
Keeping those atrocities and brutalities in mind, and some want to
resume normal relations with an individual who allowed these atrocities
to take place, an individual who continues to allow them to take place
today, even today right now in Kosovo, once people know about these
things, once the depth and breadth of Milosevic's brutality sinks in,
no one can entertain the idea of normal relations or pursue a no-fault
peace with him.
Last week, in the Wall Street Journal, last Thursday, which I include
for the Record, Margaret Thatcher wrote of the thousands of slaughtered
in unmarked graves around Srebrenica, Bosnia, victims of, and I quote,
``depravities of human wickedness, what depths of human degradation,
those endless columns of refugees have fled. Mass rape, mass graves,
death camps, historic communities wiped out by ethnic cleansing, these
are the monuments to Milosevic's triumphs.''
During the fighting in Bosnia, I had an opportunity with one of my
staff to visit a Serb-run POW camp, and it was very, very brutal, if
you could see the way the Muslims were being treated in that camp.
Margaret Thatcher went on to write that appeasement has failed in the
1990s as it failed in the 1930s. I believe she is right, just as I
believe she is right when she goes on to write that it would be both
cruel and stupid to expect the Albanian Kosovars to now return home and
live under any form of Serbian rule.
Also in Sunday's New York Times, which I include for the Record,
Blaine Harden writes about the dangers of allowing Milosevic to retreat
from Kosovo with his dictatorship intact. Harden predicts that if the
pattern holds, Milosevic will continue to inflame Serbs and preserve
his power by reassuring them that they are the victims, as he is doing
today in Kosovo and as he did earlier in Croatia and Bosnia
Herzegovina.
I am going to insert the entire Blaine Harden article from Sunday's
New York Times in the Record, and I would urge all of my colleagues to
read his record. Blaine harden had covered the war in Sarajevo and
Bosnia and many other places throughout the early and mid 1990s for the
Washington Post. I think he writes with a lot of wisdom.
As I listened to last Thursday's debate and as I read and watched the
TV talk shows, Milosevic hopefully will not pull it off. He could,
however, unless we recognize Milosevic for what he is, a war criminal
of the highest order.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record articles I referred to as
follows:
[From the Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1999]
The West Must Answer Evil With Strength
(By Margaret Thatcher)
Last September I went to Vukovar, Croatia, a city destroyed
and its inhabitants butchered by the soldiers of Slobodan
Milosevic. The place still smells of death, the widows weep,
and the ruins gape. Around Srebrenica, Bosnia, where neither
I nor many other Westerners have gone, the bodies of
thousands of slaughtered victims still lie in unmarked
graves. In Kosovo, we can only image what depravities of
human wickedness, what depths of human degradation, those
endless columns of refugees have fled. Mass rape, mass
graves, death camps, historic communities wiped out by ethnic
cleansing--these are the monuments to Milosevic's triumphs.
They are also the result of eight long years of Western
weakness. When will Western leaders ever learn?
Appeasement has failed in the 1990s, as it failed in the
'30s. Then, there were always politicians to argue that the
madness of Nazism could be contained. Likewise, there has
never been a lack of politicians and diplomats willing to
collaborate with Milosevic's Serbia. In both cases, the
tyrant carefully laid his snares, and naive negotiators
obligingly fell into them. For eight years I have called for
Serbia to be stopped. Even after the massacre of Srebrenica I
was told that my calls for military actions were mere
``emotional nonsense.''
There were good reasons for taking action early. The West
could have stopped Milosevic in Slovenia or Croatia in 1991,
or in Bosnia in 1992. But instead we deprived his opponents
of the means to arm themselves, thus allowing his aggression
to prosper. Even in 1995, when at last a combination of air
strikes and well-armed Croat and Muslim ground forces broke
the power of the Bosnian Serb aggressors, we intervened to
halt their advance into Serb-controlled Banja Luka.
Western political leaders believed that the butcher of
Belgrade could be a force for stability. So here we are now,
fighting a war eight years too late, on treacherous terrain,
so far without much effective local support, with imperfect
intelligence and with war aims that some find unclear and
unpersuasive.
But with all that said--and it must be said, so that the
lessons are well and truly learned--let there be no doubt:
This war must be won.
I understand the unease many people feel about the way in
which the operation began. But those who agonize over whether
what is happening in Kosovo today is important enough to
justify military intervention, gravely underestimate the
consequences of doing nothing. There is always method in
Milosevic's madness. He is a master at using tides of
refugees to destabilize his neighbors and weaken his
opponents. This we simply cannot allow. The surrounding
countries can't absorb two million Albanian refugees without
provoking a new spiral of violent disintegration, possibly
involving NATO members.
But the overriding justification for military action is
quite simply the nature of the enemy we face. We are not
dealing with some minor thug whose local brutalities may
offend our sensibilities from time to time. Milosevic's
regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represent
something altogether different--a truly monstrous evil, one
that cannot be merely checked or contained, one that must be
totally defeated.
When that has been done, we need to learn the lessons of
what has happened and of the warnings that were given but
ignored. But there has already been too much media
speculation about targets and tactics, and some shameful and
demoralizing commentary that can only help the enemy. So I
shall say nothing of detailed tactics.
But two things more I must say. First, about our
fundamental aims. It would be both cruel and stupid to expect
the Albanian Kosovans now to return to live under any form of
Serbian rule. Kosovo must be given independence, initially
under the international protection. And there must be no
partition. Partition would only serve to reward violence and
ethnic cleansing. It would be to concede defeat. And I am
unmoved to Serb pleas to retain their grasp on most of Kosovo
because it contains their holy places. Coming from those who
systematically leveled mosques and Catholic churches wherever
they went, such an argument is cynical almost to the point of
blasphemy.
Second, about the general conduct of the war. There are, in
the end, no humanitarian wars. War is serious and it is
deadly. Casualties, including civilian casualties, are to be
expected. Trying to fight a war with one hand tied behind
your back is the way to lose it. We always regret the loss of
lives. But we should have no doubt that it is the men of
evil, not our troops or pilots, who bear the guilt.
The goal of war is victory. And the only victory worth
having now is one that prevents Serbia from ever again having
the means to attack its neighbors and terrorize its non-Serb
inhabitants. That will require the destruction of Serbia's
political will, the destruction of its war machine and all
the infrastructure on which these depend. We must be prepared
to cope with all the changing demands of war--including, if
it is required, the deployment of ground troops. And we must
expect a long haul until the job is done.
____
[From the New York Times, May 9, 1999]
What It Would Take To Cleanse Serbia
(By Blaine Harden)
Along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milosevic's
Yugoslavia, Kosovo is merely the hideous Now. There was a
Before--in Croatia and Bosnia. Assuming that Mr. Milosevic
retreats from Kosovo with his dictatorship intact, as now
seems likely, Balkans experts foresee an unspeakable After.
It may feature: Fratricidal civil war in Montenegro. Ethnic
cleansing of Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina.
Mass murder of Muslims in the Sandzak region of Serbia. No
need, for the moment, to bother about the location or correct
pronunciation of these obscure places. The world will likely
learn. Just as it learned where Kosovo is--or was--before
more than 700,000 human beings were chased from their homes
in a systematic military campaign of burning and
intimidation, theft and murder.
If the pattern holds, Mr. Milosevic will soldier on, using
Big Lie manipulation of television to tap into a collective
soft spot in the Serbian psyche. Even as legions of non-Serbs
[[Page H2926]]
are dispossessed or killed, he will continue to inflame the
Serbs and preserve his power by reassuring them that, yes,
they are the victims.
Given the character of Mr. Milosevic's regime and knowing
that there is almost certainly more horror to come, a bold,
if impractical, question is just now beginning to be
formulated. Is it finally time for outside powers to make the
effort necessary to cure a national psychosis inside Serbia
that has been destabilizing a corner of Europe for a decade?
Put another way, has the time come for NATO to do in Serbia
what the Allies did in Germany and Japan after World War II?
To follow that model, Serbia's military would have to be
destroyed, and Mr. Milosevic crushed, by an invasion that
almost certainly would cost the lives of hundreds of American
soldiers. After unconditional surrender, the political,
social and economic fabric of Serbia would be remade under
outside supervision so that the Serbs could take their place
in a prosperous and democratic world.
The question cuts three ways. Will it happen? Should it
happen? Could it possibly work?
The answer to the first part of this question, at least for
the foreseeable future, is a resounding No Way. The other
answers, however, are provocative enough to make it
worthwhile to suspend disbelief and indulge the fantasy of a
post-Milosevic Balkans.
Let's start, though, with the real world. Policy makers and
long-time students of the West's slow-motion intervention in
Yugoslavia during the 1990's see no possibility of Mr.
Milosevic's military defeat or of Serbia's occupation.
An agreement last week between the West and Russia outlined
the kind of solution the outside powers would seek instead--a
withdrawal from Kosovo of the Yugoslav Army, policy and
paramilitary fighters, with an international security force
to replace them. Details of the deal are still being argued
over, but one thing was clear: If the outside powers can get
him to sign on, Mr. Milosevic would remain in power in his
shrinking Yugoslavia. Thus, he would have the opportunity
to ``cleanse'' another day. The West's calculation seems
to be that avoiding a land war, keeping NATO tegether and
cementing relations with Russia outweigh the long-term
costs of letting Mr. Milosevic off the hook.
That, then, is the real world.
Such a course does nothing, of course, to eradicate extreme
Serb nationalism.
The only way to stamp out the desease, protect Serbian's
minorities and bring lasting peace to the Balkans ins a
Japan- or Germany-style occupation of Serbia, according to
Daniel Serwer, who until two years ago was the director of
European intelligence and research for the State Department.
Mr. Serwer concedes that occupation has never been on the
West's list of serious options, but he echoes many experts on
the Balkans when he argues that it should be.
``It is very hard to see how Serbia undergoes this process
all on its own,'' said Mr. Serwer, now a fellow at the U.S.
Institute of Peace, a research group in Washington. ``This
regime is deeply rooted. It is not like some dictatorship
that you take off its head and it will die. It is so corrupt
and the corruption is not superficial.''
Daniel Johah Goldhagen, a Harvard historian who wrote
``Hitler's Willing Executions: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust,'' published a kind of manifesto last week that
demands Serbia ``be placed in receivership.''
``Serbia's deeds are, in this essence, different from those
of Nazi Germany only in scale,'' Mr. Goldhgen wrote in The
New Republic. ``Milosevic is not Hitler, but he is a
genocidal killer who has caused the murders of many tens of
thousands of people.''
It is worth remembering, though, that Mr. Milosevic is an
elected leader, having won three elections that were more or
less fair. That, along with the Serb leader's soaring
popularity in the wake of NATO bombing, support an argument
that what ails Serbia goes far deeper than one man.
No one makes this argument more powerfully than Sonja
Biserko, director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights
in Serbia and a former senior advisor in the European
department of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. Ms. Biserko, who
fled Belgrade a week after the NATO bombings began, said in
New York last week that Serbia's fundamental problem is not
Mr. Milosevic, but a ``moral devastation'' that has infected
her nation.
``People in Serbia wer undergoing a mass denial of the
barbarity of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,'' Ms. Biserko
said. ``The denial is itself commensurate to the crime taking
place before the eyes of the world.''
Ms. Biserko, who met 10 days ago with Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright and urged her to consider occupation,
believes that Serbia's opposition politicians are incapable
now of coming to grips with a culture victimhood. ``Serbs
have managed now with the NATO bombing to convince themselves
they are victims and as victims they cannot be responsible
for what happened in Kosovo,'' she said.
A surreal sense of victimhood in Serbia is nothing new.
During the seige of Saragevo, when Serb forces ringed the
city with artillery and routinely killed its civilians,
Belgrade television reported that Bosnian Muslims were laying
siege to themselves. ``The Serbs continue to defend their
centuries-old hills about Sarajevo,'' and Radio-Television
Serbia.
To shatter this Looking Glass victimhood, Ms. Biserko
offers a prescription: Indictment of Mr. Milosevic by the War
Crimes Tribunal. A military defeat of Serbia and
demilitariazation of the country. Highly publicized trials
that will force Serbs to confront the savagery committed in
their name. A Western takeover of the mass media, with strict
prohibitions against the dissemination of extreme Serb
nationalism. A Marshall Plan for the Balkans.
Asked why the West should be willing to undertake an
occupation that would risk many lives, cost billions and take
years, Ms. Biserko shrugged: ``What other choice is there?''
``The Western world has lost its political instinct,'' she
said. ``To bring substance to the ideals of human rights, at
some point you must be willing to commit troops.''
But could the occupation of Serbia work? Could it break the
cycle of violence? Two prominent historians believe it could,
if done properly.
``The key in Japan was unconditional surrender,'' said John
W. Dower, a professor of history at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and author of ``Embracing Defeat:
Japan in the Wake of World War II.'' ``The Americans went in
and they did everything. They had a major land reform. They
abolished the military, simply got rid of it. They drafted a
new constitution. This is what you can do when you have
unconditional surrender.''
Mr. Dower was struck by the eagerness with which a defeated
people welcomed reform. ``In Japan the average person was
really sick of war and I think that would be the case in
Yugoslavia,'' he said. ``The Americans cracked open a
repressive military system and the people filled the space.''
The occupation of Germany also suggests ways of dealing
with Yugoslavia, according to Thomas Alan Schwartz, a
historian at Vanderbilt and author of ``America's Germany.''
``When Germany was totally defeated, it provided
opportunity,'' he said. ``You could be physically there,
controlling the flow of information and using war-crime
trials to show the Germans that atrocities were done in their
name.''
Without something similar in Serbia, Mr. Schwartz said,
``We can look forward to more trouble in Serbia.
``What reminds me of Germany is the comparison to the end
of World War I,'' he added. ``Then, the Germans had this
powerful sense of being victims. There was a deep resentment
that Hitler was able to exploit. It will be the same in
Serbia when NATO bombing stops.''
The Japan and German analogies, of course, are flawed.
Those major-league powers ravaged a part of the world that
America cared about. Occupation was nothing less than
emergency triage for the worst violence in history.
Mr. Milosevic, by comparison, is small potatoes. He leads a
minor-league country that periodically lays waste to poor,
unpronounceable, strategically irrelevant places. Pristina is
not Paris.
There is, though, an inkling that the West has begun to try
for a solution. In Bosnia, 32,000 NATO-led troops and High
Commissioner Carlos Westendorp are even now doing the hard,
slow, complex work of healing that country.
Mr. Westendorp has not attempted a Japan-style remake of
the Serb-populated half of Bosnia (just as nobody has tried
to do that in neighboring Croatia, with its own
accomplishments in ethnic cleansing). The indicted war
criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have not been
hunted down. Radical Serb parties have not been banned. But
tough action is being taken. Mr. Westendorp ordered radical
Serb nationalists out of state television. He has fired the
nationalist zealot who was elected the Bosnian Serbs'
president. If Serbs violently object to what the peacekeepers
do, NATO-led forces shoot to kill.
In a recent interview in Sarajevo, Mr. Westendorp said most
Bosnian Serbs are cooperating because they are sick of war.
It will take time, he said, but the West has enough money and
muscle in Bosnia to extinguish the will to war. The one
insoluble problem, he said, was the leader in Belgrade.
``If getting rid of Milosevic fails,'' he said, ``then
everything fails.''
____________________