[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 107 (Tuesday, July 27, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1660-E1661]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     NATO'S OBLIGATION TO THE SERBS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 27, 1999

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, in the Boston Globe for 
today, Tuesday, July 27, there is an excellent editorial occasioned by 
the terrible murder of 14 Serb farmers in Kosovo. As the editorial 
notes, NATO--with the United States as a lead member--has an absolute 
obligation to do everything humanly possible to apprehend the murderers 
of these men, and of course an even greater obligation to do everything 
humanly possible to prevent any recurrence of this sort of outrage.
  I believe that the military action in which America took the lead 
against Serbia was morally justified by the need to prevent the 
continued systematic oppression of the Albania population of Kosovo. 
But exactly the same moral considerations demand that we do a better 
job than we have of protecting the Serbian people left in Kosovo.
  The Boston Globe editorial is a forceful, lucid and morally 
compelling statement and I ask that it be printed here.


[[Page E1661]]



                     NATO's Obligation to the Serbs

       Precisely because NATO's justification for intervention in 
     Kosovo was humanitarian, the NATO allies must not allow 
     Friday's gruesome slaughter of 14 Serb peasants in Kosovo to 
     go unpunished. A war for humanitarian motives contradicts its 
     own purpose if it leaves one group of noncombatants 
     unprotected.
       The Serb demagogue Slobodan Milosevic understood 
     immediately the political implications of the murders. The 
     next day he said the slaughter of Serbs in a province that 
     NATO still recognizes as an integral part of Serbia proves 
     that there is a need for Yugoslav soldiers and Milosevics 
     special police to return to Kosovo.
       Such a return of Milosevic's ethnic cleansers would, of 
     course, vitiate NATO's military triumph. Milosevic can have 
     no illusions about the possibility that his killers and 
     rapists will be allowed any time soon to return to Kosovo. 
     But his political point is well taken. If Serb civilians can 
     be massacred at will in Kosovo, then NATO's propaganda is 
     negated and the allies' war against Milosevic can be 
     described as a naked power grab--an effort to steal a Serb 
     province from its rightful owners.
       To prove this was not NATO's war aim, the allies keeping 
     the peace in Kosovo and the UN bureaucrats managing the 
     province's rehabilitation must act quickly and decisively.
       Although Hashim Thaci, the Kosovo Liberation Army's self-
     appointed prime minister, has said members of his provisional 
     government ``strongly condemn this act,'' the KLA must be 
     encouraged to take a public role in locating the killers of 
     the 14 Serbs. At the same time, the NATO countries must send 
     to Kosovo the full complement of peace-keepers they promised. 
     At present, only 60 percent of the 32,000 have arrived.
       The revenge killings also illustrate the need for rapid 
     dispatch of 3,000 more international police. Only 170, a 
     small fraction of those committed, are yet serving in Kosovo. 
     If the NATO allies allow Serbs to be murdered and expelled 
     from Kosovo, they will lose in peacetime the war they thought 
     they won from the air.

     

                          ____________________