[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8956-8958]
[From the U.S. 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.
  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

[[Page 8957]]

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 
     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?

[[Page 8958]]

       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.''

                          ____________________