    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 13 (Monday, April 5, 1999)]
    [Pages 564-568]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks to the Military Community at the Norfolk Naval Station

    April 1, 1999

        The President. Thank you very much. I'm just curious, can you all
    hear me out there?
        Audience member. No!
        The President. No? The echo is pretty bad, isn't it? Well, if I
    speak louder, is it better or worse? No difference. I'll do the best I
    can.
        First, I'd like to thank Secretary Cohen and General Shelton for
    their truly outstanding service in our administration at a difficult
    time. I'd like to thank Admiral Gehman, Admiral Reason, General Pace,
    General Keck, and the other leaders of all the forces represented here.
        I thank Secretary Danzig, National Security Adviser Berger, and
    others who came with me from the White House. Mayor Oberndorf, thank you
    for welcoming me to Virginia Beach.
        I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to the Members of
    Congress who are here: your representatives, Congressmen Scott and
    Sisisky; Senator Levin, our ranking member of the Armed Services
    Committee; and a special thanks to my longtime friend Senator Chuck
    Robb, who is one of the most courageous Members of the United States
    Congress, and Virginia is very fortunate to be represented by him.
        Let me say to all of you, I came here today primarily to thank two
    groups of people: our men and women in uniform and their families, for
    the service and sacrifice that makes America strong.
        I just met a few moments ago with several members of families,
    spouses and children of members of four different services who are
    deployed away from here now. They're all over here to my right. And
    whatever it is you would like to say to me today, I think there's a very
    good chance they said it. They did a very good job for you, and I'm very
    proud of them.
        I heard about the financial sacrifices, and I heard about the human
    sacrifices. I don't think that anyone could say it better than this lady
    over here with this beautiful baby in the red hat, with the ``I miss
    you, Daddy'' sign. I thank you. And this sign, ``I love my TR
    sailor. Support our troops.''
        I wanted to come here today because I want America to know that the
    sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform are fully mirrored by
    their families back home, by the opportunities that are missed to be
    with wives and husbands and children on birthdays and holidays, and just
    being there for the kids when they're needed at night and in the morning
    as they go off to school. They are fully felt in terms of the financial
    sacrifices of the family members left at home to pay the bills and see
    to the health care and other needs of the children.
        And America should know that and should be very, very grateful to
    all of you. We are

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    grateful, and we think all Americans will be grateful as they know what
    you do.
        Let me also say I had a chance to speak just before I came out here
    with the 510th Fighter Squadron at Aviano Air Base in Italy, part of our
    Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, to thank them and to hear of their
    immense pride and determination in their mission.
        I know that many, many people here have friends or family members
    who are working hard in our mission in Kosovo. I know this port is home
    to 100 ships, not only the powerful battle groups now at sea led by the
    Enterprise and the Theodore Roosevelt but also ships in the Adriatic:
    guided missile destroyers like the Gonzalez; fast-attack submarines like
    the Norfolk. [Applause] Yes, you can clap for your ships; that's okay.
    [Applause]
        I can't name every ship or every unit, but I know that all of you
    are proud of all of them. Again, let me say, too, a special word of
    thanks to the family members of those who are deployed in the Kosovo
    operation now.
        And let me say to all of you, we spend a lot of time--perhaps more
    time than you would think--in the White House, and at the Pentagon,
    talking about our obligations to the families of our service members. We
    know that we are asking more and more of you as we have downsized the
    military and diversified and increased the number of our operations
    around the world. We know that the more we ask of you, the greater our
    responsibilities to you.
        We know that we owe you the support, the training, the equipment you
    need to get the job done. We know we owe you fair pay, decent housing,
    and other support. Our new defense budget contains not only a
    substantial pay raise but increased funding to keep our readiness razor
    sharp. It is our solemn obligation to those of you who accept the
    dangers and hardships of our common security.
        Since the cold war ended, we have asked more and more of our Armed
    Forces--from the Persian Gulf to Korea, to Central America to Africa--
    today, to stand with our allies in NATO against the unspeakable
    brutality in Kosovo.
        Now, this is not an easy challenge with a simple answer. If it were,
    it would have been resolved a long time ago. The mission I have asked
    our Armed Forces to carry out with our NATO allies is a dangerous one,
    as I have repeatedly said. Danger is something the brave men and women
    of our country's Armed Forces understand because you live with it every
    day, even in routine training exercises.
        Now, we all know that yesterday three Army infantrymen were seized
    as they were carrying out a peaceful mission in Macedonia, protecting
    that country from the violence in neighboring Kosovo. There was
    absolutely no basis for them to be taken. There is no basis for them to
    be held. There is certainly no basis for them to be tried. All Americans
    are concerned about their welfare.
        President Milosevic should make no mistake: The United States takes
    care of its own. And President Milosevic should make no mistake: We will
    hold him and his government responsible for their safety and for their
    well-being.
        But I ask you, also, to resolve that we will continue to carry out
    our mission with determination and resolve.
        Over the past few weeks, I have been talking with the American
    people about why we're involved with our NATO allies in Kosovo and the
    risks of our mission and why they're justified. It's especially
    important that I speak to you and, through you, to all men and women in
    uniform about these matters.
        The roots of this conflict lie in the policies of Mr. Milosevic, the
    dictator of Serbia. For more than 10 years now, he has been using ethnic
    and religious hatred as a path to personal power and a justification for
    the ethnic cleansing and murder of innocent civilians. That is what he
    did first in Bosnia and Croatia, where the United States, with our
    allies, did so much to end the war. And that is what he is doing in
    Kosovo today. That is what he will continue to do to his own people and
    his neighbors unless we and our allies stand in the way.
        For months, we tried and tried and tried every conceivable peaceful
    alternative. We did everything we could through diplomacy to solve this
    problem. With diplomacy backed by the threat of NATO force, we forged a
    cease-fire last October that rescued from cold and hunger hundreds of
    thousands

    [[Page 566]]

    of people in Kosovo whom he had driven from their homes.
        In February, with our allies and with Russia, we proposed a peace
    agreement that would have given the people of Kosovo the autonomy they
    were guaranteed under their constitution before Mr. Milosevic came to
    power and ended the fighting for good.
        Now, the Kosovar leaders, they signed that agreement--even though it
    didn't give them the independence they said they wanted and that they
    had been fighting for. But Mr. Milosevic refused. In fact, while
    pretending to negotiate for peace, he massed 40,000 troops and hundreds
    of tanks in and around Kosovo, planning a new campaign of destruction
    and defiance. He started carrying out that campaign the moment the peace
    talks ended.
        Now the troops and police of the Serbian dictator are rampaging
    through tiny Kosovo, separating men from their families, executing many
    of them in cold blood, burning homes--sometimes, we now hear, with
    people inside--forcing survivors to leave everything behind,
    confiscating their identity papers, destroying their records so their
    history and their property is erased forever.
        Yesterday Mr. Milosevic actually said this problem can only be
    solved by negotiations. But yesterday, as he said that, his forces
    continued to hunt down the very Kosovar leaders with whom he was
    supposed to be negotiating.
        Altogether now, more than half a million Kosovars have been pushed
    from their homes since the conflict began. They are arriving at the
    borders of the country, shaken by what they have seen and been through.
    But they also say--as a delegation of Albanian-Americans, many of whom
    have relatives in Kosovo, told me personally in the White House
    yesterday--that NATO's military action has at least given them some hope
    that they have not been completely abandoned in their suffering.
        Had we not acted, the Serbian offensive would have been carried out
    with impunity. We are determined that it will carry a very high price,
    indeed. We also act to prevent a wider war. If you saw my address to the
    country the other night and the maps that I showed, you know that Kosovo
    is a very small place. But it sits right at the dividing line of Europe,
    Asia, and the Middle East; the dividing line between Islam and
    Christianity, close to our Turkish and Greek allies to the south; our
    new allies, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to the north;
    surrounded by small and struggling democracies that easily could be
    overwhelmed by the flood of refugees Mr. Milosevic is creating.
        Already, Macedonia is so threatened. Already, Serbian forces have
    made forays into Albania, which borders Kosovo. If we were to do
    nothing, eventually our allies and then the United States would be drawn
    into a larger conflict at far greater risks to our people and far
    greater costs.
        Now, we can't respond to every tragedy in every corner of the world.
    But just because we can't do everything for everyone doesn't mean that
    for the sake of consistency we should do nothing for no one.
        Remember now, these atrocities are happening at the doorstep of
    NATO, which has preserved the security of Europe for 50 years because of
    the alliance between the United States and our allies. They are
    happening in violation of specific commitments Mr. Milosevic gave to us,
    to our NATO allies, to other European countries, and to Russia. They are
    happening to people who embrace peace and promise to lay down their own
    arms. They put their trust in us, and we can't let them down.
        Our objective is to restore the Kosovars to their homes with
    security and self-government. Our bombing campaign is designed to exact
    an unacceptably high price for Mr. Milosevic's present policy of
    repression and ethnic cleansing and to seriously diminish his military
    capacity to maintain that policy.
        We've been doing this for 7 days now--just 7 days. Our pilots have
    performed bravely and well in the face of dangerous conditions and often
    abysmal weather. But we must be determined and patient. Remember, the
    Serbs had 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo, and nearly 300 tanks, when
    they began this, before the first NATO plane got in the air. They had a
    sophisticated air-defense system. They also have a problem which has
    been festering for a decade, thanks

    [[Page 567]]

    to the efforts of Mr. Milosevic to make people hate each other in the
    former Yugoslavia because they are Muslims instead of Orthodox
    Christians or Catholics; because they're Albanians instead of Serbians
    or Croatians, or Bosnian Muslims, or Macedonians, or you have--whatever.
    It is appalling.
        For decades, those people lived in peace with one another. For 10
    years and more, now, a dictator has sought to make himself powerful by
    convincing the largest group, the Serbs, that the only way they can
    amount to anything is to uproot, disrupt, destroy, and kill other people
    who don't have the same means of destruction--no matter what the
    consequences are to everybody around them, no matter how many innocent
    children and their parents die, no matter how much it disrupts other
    countries.
        Why? Because they want power, and they want to base it on the kind
    of ethnic and religious hatred that is bedeviling the whole world today.
    You can see it in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland. You can see it
    in the tribal wars in Africa. You can see that it is one of the dominant
    problems the whole world faces. And this is right in the underbelly of
    Europe.
        We have to decide whether we are going to take a stand with our NATO
    allies and whether we are prepared to pay the price of time to make him
    pay the price of aggression and murder. Are we, in the last year of the
    20th century, going to look the other way as entire peoples in Europe
    are forced to abandon their homelands or die? Are we going to impose a
    price on that kind of conduct and seek to end it?
        Mr. Milosevic often justifies his behavior by talking about the
    history of the Serbs going back to the 14th century. Well, I value the
    history of this country, and I value what happened here in the 18th
    century. But I don't want to take America back to the 18th century. And
    he acts like he wants to take Serbia back to the 14th century--to 14th
    century values, 14th century ways of looking at other human beings.
        We are on the edge of a new century and a new millennium, where the
    people in poor countries all over the world, because of technology and
    the Internet and the spreading of information, will have unprecedented
    opportunities to share prosperity and to give their kids an education
    and have a decent future, if only they will live in peace with the basic
    human regard for other people. That is absolutely antithetical to
    everything that Mr. Milosevic has done.
        So I ask you--you say, what has this got to do with America?
    Remember, we fought two World Wars in Europe. Remember that the unity,
    the freedom, the prosperity, the peace of Europe is important to the
    future of the children in this room today. That is, in the end, what
    this is about.
        We're not doing this on our own. We could not have undertaken it on
    our own. This is something we're doing with our NATO allies. They're up
    there in the air, too. If there's a peace agreement, they've agreed to
    provide 85 percent of the troops on the ground to help to monitor the
    peace agreement and protect all the ethnic groups, including the Serbs.
        This is something we are doing to try to avoid in the 21st century
    the kind of widespread war, large American casualties, and heartbreak
    that we saw too much of in the century we are about to leave.
        So this is not just about a small piece of the Balkans. But let me
    ask you something. When we are moved by the plight of three service men,
    when we stay up half the night hoping that our rescue teams find that
    fine pilot who went down when his plane was hit, when we see a sign that
    says, ``I love my TR sailor'' or ``I miss my Daddy,'' we remember that
    all political and military decisions ultimately have a human component
    that is highly individualized.
        Think how you would feel if you were part of the half million people
    who lived peaceably in a place, just wanted to be let alone to practice
    your religion and educate your children and do your work--if people came
    to your house and your village and said, ``Pack up your belongings and
    go; we're going to burn your property records; we're going to burn your
    identity records. And if your husband or your son is of military service
    age, we might take them out behind the barn and shoot them dead''--just
    because you have a different religion, just because you have a different
    ethnic background. Is that really what

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    we want the 21st century to be about for our children?
        Now, that is what is at stake here. We cannot do everything in the
    world, but we must do what we can. We can never forget the Holocaust,
    the genocide, the carnage of the 20th century. We don't want the new
    century to bring us the same nightmares in a different guise.
        We also want to say again how proud the United States is that each
    of NATO's 19 members is supporting the mission in Kosovo in some way--
    France and Germany, Turkey and Greece, Poland and Hungary, the Czech
    Republic, Britain, Canada--all the others. And this is also important.
        Let me finally say--I'd like to read you something. Near the end of
    the Second World War, President Roosevelt prepared a speech to give at a
    holiday honoring Virginia's famous son, Thomas Jefferson. He never got
    to give the speech. But it still speaks to us, his last words. And to
    those of you who wear the uniform of our Nation and to those of you who
    are part of the families of our uniformed service members. I ask you to
    heed these words.
        After the long war was almost drawing to a close, these were
    Franklin Roosevelt's last words that he never got to deliver: ``We as
    Americans do not choose to deny our responsibilities. Nor do we intend
    to abandon our determination that within the lives of our children and
    our children's children, there will not be a third world war. We seek
    peace, enduring peace. More than an end to war, we want an end to the
    beginnings of all wars.''
        That is what we are trying to achieve in Kosovo. That is what many
    of you in this room, perhaps, and your colleagues, did achieve in
    Bosnia. We want to end a war that has begun in Europe, and prevent a
    larger war. And we want to alleviate the burdens and the killing of
    defenseless people. Let us heed President Roosevelt's last words.
        Let me say again, for those of you who serve and for those of you
    who serve as family members and who sacrifice as wives and husbands and
    children: I thank you for your service and your sacrifice, and America
    thanks you.
        God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:17 p.m. in Hangar SP2. In his remarks, he
    referred to Adm. Harold (Hal) Gehman, Jr., USN, Supreme Allied
    Commander, Atlantic; Adm. J. Paul Reason, USN, Commander in Chief, U.S.
    Atlantic Fleet; Lt. Gen. Peter Pace, USMC, Commander, U.S. Marine Corps
    Forces, Europe; Lt. Gen. Thomas Keck, USAF, Vice Commander, Air Combat
    Command; Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf of Virginia Beach; President Slobodan
    Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro);
    and the three U.S. Army infantrymen in custody in Serbia: Staff Sgt.
    Andrew A. Ramirez, Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone, and Specialist
    Steven M. Gonzales.