[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 76 (Tuesday, May 25, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1084-E1085]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E1084]]


      CALLING FOR MILOSEVIC TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS ACTIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 25, 1999

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, today I am joined by my friend 
and colleague, Representative Bill Pascrell and 14 other cosponsors in 
introducing a resolution which declares the conviction of this Congress 
that Slobodan Milosevic is responsible for war crimes, crimes against 
humanity, and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. His actions in that 
region cannot be excused by anything which Serbia's neighbors or the 
international community has done. His victims demand justice. 
Unfortunately, the United States Government may not be doing all that 
it can to provide evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal in 
The Hague to have Milosevic publicly indicted.
  In the 105th Congress, there was near unanimous support for H. Con. 
Res. 304 and its Senate companion, S. Con. Res. 105. But in the past 
year little has been done to advance the just cause of ascribing blame 
to this man. Instead, we have had to watch as more atrocities have been 
committed in Kosovo, but no evident attempts to hold Milosevic 
personally and fully responsible for his actions. This is the reason 
that this resolution, which updates those passed last Congress, must 
again be considered by this body.
  During the Bosnian phase of the Yugoslav conflict, from 1992 to 1995, 
Slobodan Milosevic was able to incite extreme nationalist feelings 
among Serbs, and he used that as basis to commit acts of genocide 
against non-Serb civilians. From early 1998 to the present, the same 
thing has been happening in Kosovo. As the resolution points out, about 
4 million people have been displaced during the Yugoslav conflicts, 
including 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians, most of the latter since late 
March. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, some by mass executions 
and others by reckless shelling of towns and villages. Tens of 
thousands have been raped and tortured, often in detention centers and 
concentration camps. Vestiges of a people's daily lives, from their 
mosques to their local registration papers, are destroyed. Read the 
definition of genocide from the Genocide Convention itself, and read 
what happened in Bosnia and what is happening today in Kosovo.
  Clearly, this is genocide.
  The Helsinki Commission, which I Chair, has heard testimony from many 
witnesses--including lawyers, doctors, humanitarian relief aid workers, 
and diplomats who have had extensive firsthand experience in the 
region--and they have testified to this fact. As a result, in addition 
to last year's resolution, I recently wrote to President Clinton urging 
that prosecution of war criminals not be placed on the negotiating 
table as a bargaining chip to be thrown away, and urging that the U.S. 
Government use the resources at its disposal to help the Tribunal issue 
an indictment of Milosevic. Just two weeks ago, the Commission held a 
hearing on a variety of legal actions stemming from the genocide in 
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
  Many of us in this body have witnessed firsthand stories from ethnic 
Albanians who escaped their homeland into Macedonia and Albania. These 
traumatized people now sit in refugee camps, their entire lives left 
behind, with an uncertain future.
  Mr. Speaker, all those involved in war crimes, crimes against 
humanity and genocide in the former Yugoslavia must be held accountable 
for their roles. The evidence is overwhelming. As the head of his 
country, Milosevic must be among them. We must ask ourselves why he has 
done nothing other than give medals to those who have engaged in 
terrible crimes in Kosovo if he himself is not responsible for those 
crimes. He is at minimum responsible as Head of State for stopping 
these crimes from occurring. He is at least responsible for giving 
soldier the license to get away with raping, killing and cleansing the 
people of Kosovo. And he is likely responsible for directing his 
security forces and paramilitary associates to commit such acts.
  Mr. Speaker, with this resolution we are putting the House on record 
as saying: The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo was no 
accident but part of Belgrade's policy. There can be no true peace in 
the Balkans that excludes justice. It is in U.S. national interest to 
assist those who can provide justice, and that our government must 
therefore do more to help the Tribunal develop a case against Slobodan 
Milosevic.
  As Mark Ellis of the American Bar Association's Coalition for 
International Justice, who provided testimony at one of our hearings on 
Kosovo, recently stated, ``Inevitably, lasting peace will be linked to 
justice, and justice will depend on accountability. Failing to indict 
Milosevic in the hope that he can deliver a negotiated settlement makes 
a mockery of the words `Never Again.' '' Let's affirm that we really do 
mean ``Never Again'' by again passing a resolution which states our 
belief that Milosevic is responsible for war crimes, crimes against 
humanity and, yes, genocide.
  For the Record, Mr. Speaker, I want to submit an article by Mark 
Ellis from the May 9, 1999, Washington Post and the letter I sent to 
President Clinton which further illustrate the culpability of Slobodan 
Milosevic.

                                            Commission on Security


                                     and Cooperation in Europe

                                   Washington, DC, March 31, 1999.
     Hon. William Jefferson Clinton,
     President of the United States, The White House, Washington, 
         DC.
       Dear Mr. President: I request that you direct all federal 
     agencies that may hold information relevant to a possible 
     indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, President of Serbia and 
     Montenegro, to provide the evidence of war crimes, crimes 
     against humanity, and genocide to the International Criminal 
     Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The 
     United States should make it a high priority to assemble this 
     information, review and where necessary declassify it, and 
     provide the documentation in the most expeditious manner 
     possible to the prosecutor's office at the Tribunal. I 
     respectfully suggest that you should include in your 
     directive instructions to agency heads to reprogram funds and 
     reassign personnel as necessary to permit immediate and 
     effective implementation of this requested directive.
       As the sponsor of H. Con. Res. 304, expressing the sense of 
     the Congress regarding the culpability of Slobodan Milosevic 
     for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the 
     former Yugoslavia, that was adopted by the House by a record 
     vote of 369 to 1 on September 14, 1998, I was startled and 
     surprised to learn that the United States has not made an 
     effort to gather information on Milosevic as the House and 
     Senate requested. The attached article entitled ``CONFLICT IN 
     THE BALKANS: THE TRIBUNAL; Tactics Were Barrier To Top Serb's 
     Indictment,'' by Raymond Bonner, appeared in the March 29, 
     1999, edition of The New York Times. The article notes:
       The Clinton administration could hardly have taken the 
     initiative to build a case against Milosevic, one senior 
     administration official explained Sunday, after it adopted 
     the policy in late 1994 of working with the Serbian leader to 
     bring about an end to the war in Bosnia. ``We, the United 
     States government, have been the largest source of 
     information for the tribunal, but we have never compiled 
     dossiers with the aim of indicting Milosevic, or any specific 
     individual,'' said this official, who spoke on condition of 
     anonymity. ``The indictment of Milosevic would require a 
     policy change by the United States,'' he added.
       If this report is accurate, it is past time for U.S. policy 
     to include the pursuit of a public indictment of Milosevic by 
     the ICTY. Issuance of a Presidential directive establishing 
     such a policy, supported by adequate resources to assure its 
     immediate and effective implementation, is clearly justified 
     by the reports of the Helsinki Commission has received about 
     actions by Yugoslav Army, paramilitary, and police forces 
     under Milosevic's command in Kosovo that probably constitute 
     war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Congress 
     has already expressed its overwhelming support for such a 
     course of action by adopting both H. Con. Res. 304 and S. 
     Con. Res. 105 (copy attached) last year.
       I look forward to learning what direction you have given 
     the policy-level officers of the United States government 
     concerning this issue.
           Sincerely,

                                         Christopher H. Smith,

                                                         Chairman.


                [From the Washington Post, May 9, 1999]

           War Criminals Belong in the Dock, Not at the Table

                           (By Mark S. Ellis)

       Just a few weeks ago, I stood among a sea of 20,000 
     desperate people on a dirt airfield outside Skopje, 
     Macedonia, listening to one harrowing story after another. I 
     had come to the Stenkovec refugee camp to record those 
     stories and to help set up a system for documenting 
     atrocities in Kosovo.
       As I collected their accounts of rape, torture and 
     executions at the hands of Serbian troops, I was struck by 
     the refugees' common yearning for justice. They wanted those 
     responsible for their suffering to be held accountable. Their 
     anger was not only directed at the people they had watched 
     committing such savagery, but at the political leaders--and 
     Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in particular--who had 
     orchestrated the misery and continue to act with impunity.
       The means exist to hold Milosevic and his underlings 
     accountable. In recent weeks, there have been calls from 
     members of Congress for his indictment by the International 
     Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and 
     Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering has said that the 
     United States is gathering evidence that could lead to his 
     indictment. And there is plenty of evidence. In the Kosovo 
     town of Djalovica, for example, residents carefully 
     documented the Serbian barbarity for investigators, recording 
     the details of each murder, each rape, each act of violence, 
     before they fled the city. The time has come to act on the 
     testimony of these and other witnesses.

[[Page E1085]]

       To do so, of course, flies in the face of last week's much 
     ballyhooed optimism about reaching a negotiated settlement 
     with Milosevic. However eager the Clinton administration 
     might be to reach a political and diplomatic solution, we 
     should remember that those who have recently suffered under 
     Serbian attacks reject outright the notion that justice must 
     sometimes be forfeited for the sake of diplomatic expediency. 
     During the Bosnian conflict, accountability was sacrificed on 
     the dubious premise that negotiating with someone who is 
     widely regarded as a war criminal is a legitimate exercise 
     in peace-making. We shouldn't make that mistake a second 
     time around. Milosevic's broken promises still echo among 
     the charred ruins and forsaken mass grave sites that 
     defile the landscape of Bosnia.
       If Milosevic had been indicted for the mass killings and 
     summary executions that the Bosnian Serbs--with backing from 
     Serbia--are accused of carrying out, would he have acted so 
     brazenly to ``cleanse'' Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians? 
     Nobody knows. At the very least an indictment would probably 
     have deterred him; and apprehension and a trial would have 
     stopped him. But there should be no uncertainty about what 
     occurs when Milosevic is allowed to act unencumbered. The 
     time has come for the international war crimes tribunal to 
     help put an end to that.
       Inaugurated by the United Nations on May 25, 1993, and 
     based in The Hague, the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has, to 
     date, tried just 16 defendants. With a staff of more than 750 
     and an annual budget of more than $94 million, it has the 
     resources--and the authority--to indict Milosevic. Indeed, 
     failure to indict would reveal the tribunal's impotence in 
     the face of political controversy, and prove that this 
     institution of international law and justice is merely an 
     expensive and irrelevant relic.
       How difficult would it be to indict Milosevic? Not 
     difficult at all. Under the tribunal's statute, the office of 
     the prosecutor need only determine ``that a prima facie case 
     exists.'' that's to say that the prosecutor must gather 
     evidence sufficient to prove reasonable grounds that 
     Milosevic committed a single crime under the tribunal's 
     extensive jurisdiction.
       With this in mind, the chances of Milosevic being held 
     accountable increase with the arrival of each new group of 
     refugees driven from their homes in Kosovo. Their remarkably 
     consistent testimony is providing crucial information--now 
     being gathered by representatives of the tribunal as well as 
     by human rights organizations--about what has actually taken 
     place in Kosovo. These firsthand accounts are indispensable 
     in building a case against Milosevic--and the refugees I 
     interviewed during the days I was there are willing to 
     testify about what they saw.
       But with refugees flooding out of Kosovo and some being 
     relocated in distant countries, the prosecutor's office must 
     ensure that testimony is taken swiftly, legally and 
     professionally. The lack of access to Kosovo by independent 
     journalists and human rights monitors and the extreme 
     instability of refugee life heighten the importance of 
     collecting these accounts while they are still fresh in 
     people's minds. Yet the prosecutor's office was slow to act. 
     A full five weeks went by before the tribunal sent a corps of 
     investigators to the region.
       What crimes should the Yugoslav president be indicted for? 
     The tribunal's statute provides jurisdiction over ``serious 
     violations of international humanitarian law'' including both 
     ``crimes against humanity'' and ``genocide,'' the most 
     abhorrent of all. Milosevic should be indicted for both.
       Crimes against humanity are defined as ``systematic and 
     widespread'' and directed at any civilian population; they 
     include murder, extermination, imprisonment, rape and 
     deportation. They are distinguished from other acts of 
     communal violence because civilians are victimized according 
     to a systematic plan that usually emanates from the highest 
     levels of government.
       In Kosovo, the forced deportation of ethnic Albanians by 
     the Yugoslav army and the Serbian Interior Ministry police 
     force is an obvious manifestation of such crimes. The 
     refugees with whom I spoke described being robbed, beaten, 
     herded together and forced to flee their villages with 
     nothing but the clothes they were wearing. By confiscating 
     all evidence of the ethnic Albanians' identity--passports, 
     birth certificates, employment records, driver's licenses, 
     marriage licenses--the Serbian forces also severed the 
     refugees' links with their communities and land in Kosovo. 
     This attempt to make each ethnic Albanian a non-person is 
     itself a crime against humanity. Emerging evidence of mass 
     killings, summary executions and gang rape lends further 
     credence to the widespread and systematic nature of these 
     crimes.
       As to the crime of genocide, the tribunal's statute rests 
     on the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of 
     Genocide, which defines genocide as ``acts committed with 
     intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 
     racial or religious group.'' Arising as it did from the 
     extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the convention 
     invites comparison with the Holocaust and is intended to 
     prevent such heinous crimes from happening again. This 
     tragedy has not reached that perverse level of brutality but, 
     like earlier efforts to eliminate an entire people--whether 
     the Jews, the Armenians or the Tutsis--it should be 
     prosecuted as a crime of genocide.
       The convention addresses intent, and stipulates that acts 
     designed to eliminate a people--in whole or in part--
     constitute genocide. Among other acts covered by the 
     convention, crimes of genocide include ``(a) killing members 
     of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to 
     members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the 
     group conditions of life calculated to bring about its 
     physical destruction in whole or in part.''
       In the former Yugoslavia, acts of genocide have been 
     perpetrated through the abhorrent policy of ethnic 
     cleansing--that is, making areas ethnically homogenous by 
     expelling entire segments of the Kosovar population and 
     destroying the very fabric of a people.
       Ethnic cleansing does not require the elimination of all 
     ethnic Albanians: it may target specific elements of the 
     community that make the group--as a group--sustainable. The 
     abduction the execution of the intelligentsia, including 
     public officials, lawyers, doctors and political leaders, for 
     example, is part of a pattern of ethnic cleansing and could 
     constitute genocide, as could targeting a particular segment 
     of the population such as young men. It is clear from the 
     refugees who have been interviewed that these acts are being 
     systematically committed in Kosovo.
       An often overlooked but important element of the 1948 
     convention is that an individual can be indicated not only 
     for committing genocide, but also for conspiring to commit 
     genocide, inciting the public to commit genocide, attempting 
     to commit genocide or for complicity in genocide. The Point 
     is that criminal responsibility extends far beyond those who 
     actually perform the physical acts resulting in genocide. In 
     short, the political architects such as Milosevic are no less 
     responsible than the forces that carry out this butchery. 
     There is no immunity from genocide.
       Prosecuting Milosevic will require relying on a legal 
     strategy based on the concept of ``imputed command 
     responsibility.'' Under this theory, Milosevic can be held 
     responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates if he 
     knew or had reason to know that crimes were about to be 
     committed and he failed to take preventive measures of to 
     punish those who had already committed crimes.
       Since it is unlikely that Milosevic has allowed documentary 
     evidence to be preserved that would link him to atrocities in 
     Kosovo, the prosecutor's office will have to rely heavily on 
     circumstantial evidence to build its case. This means 
     identifying a consistant ``pattern of conduct'' that links 
     Milosevic to similar illegal acts, to the officers and 
     staff involved, or to the logistics involved in carrying 
     out atrocities. The very fact that atrocities have been so 
     widespread, flagrant, grotesque and similar in nature 
     makes it near certain that Milosevic knew of them; despite 
     his recent protestations to the contrary, it defies logic 
     to suggest that he could be unaware of what his forces are 
     doing.
       What will the consequences be if the Yugoslav president is 
     indicted? First an indictment would send a clear message that 
     the international community will not negotiate or have 
     contact with a war criminal. It is current U.S. policy not to 
     negotiate with indicted war crimes suspects. And so it should 
     be. Milosevic would be stripped of international statute 
     except as a fugitive from justice. This might, in turn, open 
     an avenue for Serbians to once again distance themselves from 
     their leader's regime. Second, an indictment would likely 
     result in an ex parte hearing in which the prosecutor's 
     office could present its case in open court--without 
     Milosevic being there. By establishing a public record of 
     Milosevic's role in the crimes committed, such a hearing 
     would be cathartic for both victims and witnesses, and also 
     for citizens long denied access to the truth. Finally, the 
     tribunal would issue an international arrest warrant making 
     it unlikely that Milosevic would venture outside his 
     country's borders.
       When I watched the bus loads of new arrivals enter the 
     Stenkovec camp, I saw a small girl's face pressed against the 
     window. Her hollow eyes seemed to stare at no one. History 
     was being repeated. In his opening statement at the Nuremberg 
     trials in 1945, U.S. chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said, 
     ``The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so 
     calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that 
     civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it 
     cannot survive their being repeated.'' Jackson was expressing 
     the hope that law would somehow redeem the next generation 
     and that similar atrocities would never again be allowed. 
     Today, we must hold personally liable those individuals who 
     commit atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. To negotiate with 
     the perpetrators of these crimes not only demands the 
     suffering of countless civilian victims, it sends a clear 
     message that justice is expendable, that war crimes can go 
     unpunished. Inevitably, lasting peace will be linked to 
     justice, and justice will depend on accountability. Failing 
     to indict Milosevic in the hope that he can deliver a 
     negotiated settlement makes a mockery of the words ``Never 
     Again.''



     

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