    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [April 16, 1999]
    [Pages 569-572]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to Humanitarian Relief Organizations in Roseville, Michigan
    April 16, 1999

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Dean, for your work and your introduction. Mr. Mayor, thank you for making us feel welcome. I'd like to
    thank Hattie Babbitt and James Lee
    Witt, Eric Schwartz, and the other members of our humanitarian team at the
    Federal Government level for being here with me today.
        I thought the youth choir was magnificent. I think we should give
    them another hand. [Applause] Thank you. I'd like to thank the Members
    of the Michigan delegation who are here, Congressman Dingell--we just left his district--Congressman
    Levin, Congressman Kildee, Congresswoman Stabenow. I
    thank Congressman Patrick Kennedy from
    Rhode Island, who has joined us today; and a special word of thanks to
    our leader, Dick Gephardt, and to your
    Congressman, Dave Bonior, for their
    leadership and support in this important endeavor.
        I know many people here have very strong feelings about the conflict
    in Kosovo. In a moment I will meet with a few families who have
    relatives there. Later tonight, 50 reservists from the area will go to
    France to support Allied Force. I'm going from here to Selfridge Air
    National Guard Base to thank the people there for their service to
    America and the cause of peace.
        The Detroit area has a large number of Albanian-Americans, roughly
    40,000. Many here today are from here, in Roseville, from Armada, from
    other communities in the region. Many of you have loved ones in Kosovo,
    relatives, friends, kicked out of their homes under pain of death. Our
    hearts and our prayers, our aid and our arms are with you today.
        But I also want to point out, so as to make the larger point of my
    remarks, that America is proud to be the home to a large community

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    of Serbian-Americans, many of them living in the Midwest, Michigan,
    Ohio, other places. I believe overwhelmingly they want a democratic
    Serbia that is a part of Europe, not apart from it. I say that because I
    think it is very important that the American people not develop some
    negative feeling or bias against Serbian-Americans, or even the Serbian
    people themselves, because most of them don't even know what has been
    done in their name in Kosovo, because the state-run media has covered it
    up.
        I say that to make the larger point. We just came, as I said, from a
    meeting in Representative Dingell's district
    where we had Albanian-Americans who were inside meeting with me, and
    Serbian-Americans who were outside demonstrating against me. And I said
    that was good because that was the American way. That is not Mr.
    Milosevic's way. And that's the point I
    want to make. Our quarrel is not with the Serbs in Serbia; it is not
    with the Serbs in Kosovo; it is not with Serbian-Americans. It is with
    the leadership of a person who believes it is all right to kill people
    and to uproot them and to destroy their family records and to erase any
    record of their presence in a land simply because of their ethnic
    heritage. Most, but not all, are Muslims. So there is an element of
    religious conflict here as well. But it is not entirely that.
        And as I have said repeatedly and I'd like to say one more time, the
    battle we see in Kosovo today is the harshest example at the moment of
    what we have seen in Bosnia, what we saw in the slaughter, the tribal
    slaughter in Rwanda, what we see in the still-unresolved but hopefully
    about to be resolved conflict in Northern Ireland, what we see in the
    Middle East. We have come to the end of the cold war. People, by and
    large, have rejected communism. And we now see the prospect of a bright
    new future for the world in which we can resolve our differences in an
    orderly way and build a common future--that future threatened by the
    oldest problem of human society, our tendency to fear and dehumanize
    people who are different from ourselves.
        And that is why the United States is in Kosovo; that and the fact
    that the practical significance of that war there could spread across
    all the Balkans, all of Southeast Europe, and threaten everything we
    want for our children in the 21st century world.
        I have been very moved by the response of the American people to
    this crisis. Our men and women in uniform have performed superbly. So
    many thousands of Americans have donated money and supplies. I was
    telling our folks before we came in, right after Easter Sunday the
    minister of the church that Hillary and I
    attend in Washington called and said, just on the spur of the moment he
    had called for an Easter offering for the refugees. And without any
    prior announcement in a church that is largely quite a middle class
    church, he raised $15,000. And he was so proud of that.
        Mr. Witt just told me about a person
    calling in to our 1-800 number and pledging $1,000 and then calling the
    next day and said that he'd wrestled with it all night long, and he
    realized he hadn't given enough, and he wanted to give another $1,000.
    So the heart of America has been engaged by this.
        Many hardworking Americans have lent their time and energy to
    provide food and shelter. Some work for international organizations,
    like the Red Cross; some work for small NGO's and local charities,
    including some of the Albanian-American groups represented here today.
    Some are affiliated with the United States military or NATO, who are
    also working very hard on the humanitarian issues now. We in the United
    States, through our Government, have contributed $150 million to
    humanitarian relief since last year. We've sent more troops to Albania
    and Macedonia to distribute supplies. We provide now over a million
    daily rations, over 50,000 blankets, 1,000 tents, tens of thousands of
    water jugs because dehydration is a terrible, terrible problem now.
        I have directed our Defense Department to build a new refugee
    facility in Albania for up to 20,000 people, to help preserve lives,
    health, in hope of return. We will do the most we can also to make sure
    that the innocent families trapped within Kosovo do not go hungry,
    unprotected, or forgotten.
        You know, this is a sad chapter, as was Bosnia, in an otherwise
    remarkable period of Europe in the last decade of this century: the fall
    of the Berlin Wall; the peaceful reunification of Germany; the
    enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic;
    our partnerships with Russia, Ukraine, and two dozen other countries;
    the increasing unification of Western Europe economically and
    politically. It all gave us the chance, on the continent

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    where the two World Wars began, to build a Europe that was peaceful,
    undivided, and at peace for the first time in history.
        And as I said, it is truly ironic that as we look toward a future
    where we want every classroom connected to the Internet, all the peoples
    of the world drawing closer together culturally and economically, that
    this entire vision is threatened by the most primitive of all human
    weaknesses, the fear and the tendency to hate those who are different
    from ourselves.
        Now, this is a challenge we still face within the United States. The
    mayor of Detroit said at our previous meeting that in Wayne County there
    are over 150 different languages spoken--140 different languages and
    ethnic groups. Michigan looks very different than it did when Mr.
    Dingell first went to Congress over 40 years
    ago. Macomb County looks different than it did when people said in the
    1980's that it was the mirror image of emerging America. It probably is,
    but in a very different way today. Mr. Bonior, himself, has Ukrainian and Polish roots. In this
    congressional district, you have not only those who are here, you have
    Italian-Americans, Belgian-Americans, Asian-Americans, African-
    Americans, Latinos.
        We have to say to ourselves as well as to the rest of the world,
    that there will be a great contest for the next several years between
    the forces bringing us together and the forces tearing us apart, between
    our commitment to empower people and those who would suppress them,
    between the idea that we can only find unity with people who are just
    like us and the idea that life is richer in every way, not just
    materially, when people can celebrate their own convictions and their
    own ethnic heritage and their own religious faiths and still reaffirm
    their common humanity and draw up a set of rules which permit us all to
    live together, to pursue our faith, and pursue our humanity.
        That is why we are in Kosovo, and that is why we must work here at
    home.
        Now, I just want to make one other point. I tried to make it
    yesterday to the newspaper editors in San Francisco, and I want you here
    who have roots in the region to support our elected officials and to
    remind us of this. For the moment, we are caught up in a conflict in
    which we have clear objectives: We want the refugees back in; we want
    the Serbian forces out; we want an international security force to
    protect the people, including the Serb minority in Kosovo, as they work
    toward self-determination. Our objectives are clear, and for the moment
    we must focus on that.
        But we must be thinking about tomorrow, the tomorrow when the
    conflict is over, the tomorrow when the Kosovars are home. Now, what
    kind of future do we want? Do we want a future where every ethnic group
    is confined in smaller and smaller and denser and denser pieces of land,
    and then, just to be secure, they must be a separate country? Or do we
    want a future in the Balkans and in southeastern Europe where they can
    do what we are struggling to do here in America, where, yes, people can
    have their own heritage and their own faith and their own traditions,
    but they are a part of a larger effort to share a bigger future?
        I think the answer is clear. If you want people to give up the
    misery of yesterday, you must give them the hope of a better tomorrow.
    And that is what we have to focus on. After World War II, that's what we
    did for Germany, our adversary, as well as France and Great Britain, our
    allies. After the cold war, we reached out to Hungary, Poland, and the
    Czech Republic with economic and other aid. We reached out to Ukraine
    and to Russia to try to help to deal with the nuclear problems, to try
    to help them get started again. And if you look at the success of
    Central Europe, it's hard to say that it wasn't the right decision.
        But if you look at the Balkans and Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, if
    you look at all these countries in southeastern Europe, we have to say
    when the fighting is over and the Kosovars go home, what will Albanians,
    Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians--how will they live? What will they do?
    What happens the next day? Will we have another decade where people
    carry around all this hatred in their heart, and every time they turn a
    corner in every little village, they look to see who lives on this
    corner and what they did to them? Or will we challenge them and help
    them to be involved in a bigger, brighter future?
        So I ask you, all of you here today who have been so involved in
    this: We must do for southeastern Europe, including the Balkans, what
    was done for Central Europe after the cold war, and for the battleground
    nations of Europe after World War II.
        This is our competing vision. Mr. Milosevic's vision: Greater Serbia, enforced by paramilitary
    thugs and propaganda, denying the humanity of

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    people who do not fall within his ethnic group. But our version is
    democracy, messy sometimes, yes--votes and arguments and disagreements
    and demonstrations and religious differences and ethnic differences--but
    recognizing that it is better to work together for a brighter tomorrow
    because, underneath, our common humanity is more important than anything
    that divides us; that we are all the children of God. And it is hard to
    imagine that God would have ordained the construction of any religion or
    political philosophy which would justify the extinction of another of
    God's children simply because of their religious, racial, or ethnic
    background. It is a very simple statement.
        So I thank you for being here. I thank you for your loyalty to your
    loved ones back home. I ask you to help me in making sure that in this
    difficult period we do not diminish the humanity of any group of
    Americans, including the Serbian-Americans, that we go out there and
    tell the world what we're trying to fight for is the fundamental dignity
    and integrity of all people and a system of democracy and cooperation
    which gives all of our children a better tomorrow.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:11 p.m. in the gymnasium at the Roseville
    Recreation Center. In his remarks, he referred to Albanian-Islamic
    Center spokesman Dean Shaska, who introduced the President; Mayor Gerald
    K. Alsip of Roseville; Mayor Dennis W. Archer of Detroit, MI; President
    Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and
    Montenegro); and Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, senior minister, Foundry United
    Methodist Church. The President also referred to the Mosaic Youth
    Theatre of Detroit choir.