[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 15 (Monday, April 19, 1999)]
[Pages 628-631]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, 
Louisiana

April 12, 1999

    Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking Secretary Cohen and 
General Shelton for their truly outstanding leadership on behalf of our 
Nation's military. They are eloquent and profound representatives of 
what is best about this country, and I thank them.
    I want to thank Senator Breaux, Senator Landrieu, Representative 
McCrery for their support for you and for our country. I would like to 
acknowledge in the audience today, or here with us, are other Members of 
Congress: Congressmen Bill Jefferson and Chris John from Louisiana; and 
Congressman Thornberry and Congressman Sandlin, who come from the 
neighboring State of Texas to be with us. So I thank all of them for 
their support.
    I would like to thank the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Mike 
Ryan, for coming down here with me; the Acting Secretary of the Air 
Force, Whitt Peters; my National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger. We also 
have the FEMA Director here, James Lee Witt, because, you know, you've 
had some pretty tough natural disasters here recently, and we're here 
doing double duty.
    And General Marcotte and General Smoak, thank you for welcoming me 
here and for giving me the chance to meet with some of the fine people 
with whom you work who have also been involved in our work over Kosovo.
    I thank the adjutant general, Bennett Landreneau, who is 
representing Governor Foster; Treasurer Ken Duncan; and the mayor of 
Bossier City, George Dement; and the mayor of Shreveport, Keith 
Hightower, for coming to meet me as well.
    Now, the nice thing about speaking last is that everything that 
needs to be said has been said, but not everyone has said it. [Laughter] 
What I would like to do is to be just serious for a moment and first 
thank all the previous speakers for what they have said and try to put 
this in some larger context.
    The conflict in Kosovo in which we are involved is really about two 
things: first, what you know and see every night--all those hundreds of 
thousands of innocent people uprooted, many of them killed, some of them 
dying from disease in refugee camps, some families divided forever--not 
because of anything they did, but because they happen to be Albanian 
instead of Serbian; Muslim instead of Orthodox Christian. It is a human 
tragedy that touches everyone.
    But there is a second issue here, as well, and that is whether we 
and our allies in Europe are going to allow that kind of problem--hatred 
based on race or ethnicity or religion--to be the defining force of the 
next 20 or 30 years. In other words, whether we're going to go into the 
21st century, this great modern time, where all our kids can do amazing 
things on the Internet, where all of our planes can do amazing things 
with high technology, and have all of the tools of the modern world put 
at the service of the most primitive hatreds known to man, or whether 
our European allies--18 other countries in NATO and their friends and 
sympathizers across Europe--will stay united with us, and with our 
neighbors to the north in Canada, and say, ``We would like the 21st 
century to be different for our children. We would like to nip this 
conflict in the bud before it destabilizes all of Europe. We would like 
to see us make a statement that we don't want the 21st century to be 
defined, and we don't want

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American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, to die on distant 
battlefields in large numbers because we walked away from these ethnic, 
religious, and racial atrocities.'' And that's what's going on.
    Now, I wanted to come here to Barksdale today for two reasons. One 
is, you're involved with the B-52's and what we're trying to achieve 
there. The other is, Barksdale has a rich heritage of being part of an 
allied effort, where America does not act alone but with others who love 
freedom and are prepared to defend it.
    This base was named for Lieutenant Eugene Barksdale of the U.S. Army 
Air Corps, who flew combat missions alongside British pilots in World 
War I with enormous skill and bravery. This base was where Jimmy 
Doolittle's famed bomber unit and so many others, including French 
pilots, trained to fight for freedom in World War II. It was from this 
base during the very large coalition effort in the Gulf war that crews 
launched the longest strike mission in the history of aerial combat, 35 
nonstop hours in the air, when B-52's left Barksdale to strike at 
Saddam Hussein's war machine and returned safely here.
    Now you have this new mission, one that echoes the allied 
achievements of the past and embodies our determination to create a 
better future. As I said, I met earlier with aircrews who have returned 
from Kosovo, where, with the aircraft from other NATO countries, they 
struck at the Serbian forces who have so brutally attacked the civilian 
population of Kosovo.
    The forces are working to save innocent lives, to protect the peace 
and freedom and stability of Europe, to stand against the notion that 
it's okay to uproot, destroy, and murder people because of their race, 
ethnic background, or religion.
    I am grateful for your service and grateful for the sacrifice of 
your families. We are all--those of us in positions of responsibility--
committed to support you. I listened very, very carefully today when the 
crewmembers talked to me about the challenges of maintaining a long-term 
career in the military today, about the challenges they face, the 
challenges their families face, the challenges that relate to income, 
the challenges that relate to health care, the challenges that relate to 
housing, the challenges that relate to operations tempo.
    We are working on that. We know that, now that we have downsized the 
military and the economy in the civilian sector has picked up, we're 
going to have to work harder to get and keep good people. Our new budget 
provides for an increase in pay and more money for housing and other 
quality-of-life supports, for more support for training and equipment. 
It is the first sustained increase in overall defense spending since 
1985.
    There's something else that, since it is now April the 12th, I think 
I ought to do. Our tax laws give the President the authority to issue an 
Executive order granting tax benefits to Americans serving in a combat 
zone or supporting combat efforts. I want you to know that I will issue 
that Executive order for our forces who are working to save Kosovo.
    This will mean that for military personnel serving in the combat 
zone, most or all pay for each month served will be tax-free, not 
withheld from paychecks, not subject to IRS claims later. They will also 
be eligible for some additional pay for service.
    There's another advantage to the Executive order that will apply not 
only to personnel in the combat zone and others deployed overseas but 
also for some civilian personnel as well, including accredited 
journalists and relief workers. It will suspend the time for filing tax 
returns and related obligations to the IRS. With our citizens working so 
hard to protect the people of Kosovo, they shouldn't have to worry about 
their taxes.
    Now, Secretary Cohen will work out all the details with the Treasury 
Department as soon as possible. [Laughter] He's got 72 hours. [Laughter] 
You all have to have quicker turnaround than that. So he's going to 
fight with the tax person for you.
    Let me say again, I know I speak for all of the Members of Congress 
here in saying they support this. We have had remarkable bipartisan 
support from the leadership in Congress for this--Congressmen Archer and 
Rangel, Senators Roth and Moynihan, who have made it quite clear that 
they support what we are doing.

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    Let me just say one other word or two about this mission, because 
more of you will be going in the days ahead. Hundreds of thousands of 
these Kosovars are now refugees. There have been thousands of innocent 
victims. Many are just dying because they're stuck in these refugee 
camps and can't get adequate health care or support; some of them from 
severe dehydration. There is also the possibility that Albania, 
Macedonia, and other countries around there receiving these refugees 
will be destabilized because they have ethnic problems of their own. 
There are also countries, believe it or not, in the Balkans that have 
worked hard to resolve their ethnic differences, and they have things 
going pretty well. Pretty soon, their malcontents may wonder whether 
they could have gotten a better deal by behaving in a more destructive 
way.
    We've learned the hard way through two World Wars and through what 
we saw in Bosnia that with these kinds of conflicts, if you don't halt 
them, they spread, to be stopped later at greater cost and greater risk.
    I have worked hard for the last 6 years to build in the aftermath of 
the cold war a Europe that is united, democratic, and at peace for the 
first time in history. The two great World Wars of the 20th century 
started in Europe. We have learned that so much of our liberty, our 
safety, our prosperity depends upon an alliance with a democratic 
Europe. That's what NATO has been all about.
    We know in the years ahead, when we're going to have to fight 
terrorism, when we're going to have to fight organized crime and drug 
trafficking, when we're going to have to fight the spread of weapons of 
mass destruction, when we're going to have to join together with 
countries to fight the spread of disease and environmental problems 
across national boundaries, that we will have to work with Europe.
    That is why we have taken new members into NATO. That is why we've 
established new partnerships with many other countries across the whole 
expanse of Europe. That's why we are adopting new missions, to be ready 
when somewhere, someone again challenges the peace and stability of 
Europe. That is what Mr. Milosevic has done.
    Keep in mind, before Kosovo, he started wars of ethnic hatred in 
Croatia and in Bosnia, with a quarter of a million killed and more than 
2 million refugees. And the fighting there did not end until we and our 
allies acted.
    Now, we did everything we could possibly do to avoid the conflict 
which is now occurring. We worked and worked and worked for a peaceful 
solution. Last year we stopped the threatened assault in October. We had 
a peace agreement. The Kosovar Albanians agreed to sign it, even though 
it didn't give them everything they wanted. Mr. Milosevic rejected it 
because he had 40,000 troops and nearly 300 tanks on the border and 
already in Kosovo, and he knew that he could move his troops and his 
tanks at will and do to the Kosovars what he had supported being done to 
the other ethnic minorities in the former Yugoslavia.
    The stories we are hearing now are truly chilling: Serb security 
forces herding Albanian villagers together, gunning them down with 
automatic weapons, and setting them on fire; telling villagers, ``Leave 
or we will kill you;'' separating family members; loading up buses and 
trains, carrying some to the borders and some to be slaughtered; 
confiscating identity papers and property records, seeking, literally, 
to erase the presence of these people in their own land forever.
    We must not let that happen. We must stand against that. As I speak, 
Secretary Albright and the other NATO foreign ministers are in Brussels, 
reaffirming our common commitment to do what is necessary to prevail.
    There are a lot of people who didn't think that an alliance of 19 
countries could do what we have done and could stay together as we have 
stayed together, would have the patience to endure the inevitable 
progress that the tanks and the pre-positioned troops would make and the 
patience to deal with the bad weather and the patience to deal with all 
the questions to stay the course. But when American B-52's like the ones 
here at Barksdale take to the skies, they're joined by British Harrier 
jets, German and Italian Tornadoes, French Mirages, Canadian and Spanish
F-18's, Dutch, Danish, Belgian,

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Norwegian, Portuguese, and Turkish F-16's. We are united in this effort.
    And we are united in our humanitarian effort. And I say to all of 
you: I am very proud of you. I hope you are proud of your mission. This 
is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain; we seek no 
political advantage. We have promised, if we are a part of a 
multinational force in Kosovo, we will protect the Serb minority with 
exactly the same vigilance as we stand up for the Kosovar Albanian 
majority. This is America trying to get the world to live on human 
terms, so we can have peace and freedom in Europe, and our people will 
not be called to fight a wider war for someone else's madness. Thank 
you. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause]
    I also want to thank the American people for their work in the 
humanitarian relief effort, and I thank our forces for their support. 
Thousands and thousands of Americans have called the number I announced 
a week ago, the 1-800-USAID-RELIEF. It's hard to believe; it's an 11-
digit 1-800 number, but it works.
    A pastor friend of mine called me the other day to say, just 
spontaneously, his church had taken up a donation for the relief in 
Kosovo and had collected $15,000 last Sunday. This kind of thing is 
happening all over America, and I am very grateful for that.
    As I said, our Government is doing its part there, and when I 
introduced Mr. Witt, I said that we are trying to do our part in helping 
Louisiana deal with its disaster, as well, expanding aid and individual 
assistance for families in affected parishes. It's ironic, but I think 
it's appropriate that under the leadership of Mr. Witt, our Federal 
Emergency Management Agency is playing a vital role in both the Kosovo 
relief efforts and the work here in Louisiana today.
    Let me say one final word: Mr. Milosevic can end this tragedy 
tomorrow. What has to be done is clear: Withdraw the forces, as he, 
himself, promised to do last October; have the refugees come home freely 
and in security; establish an international force to protect all the 
people of Kosovo, of whatever ethnic or religious group; and let the 
people begin to work toward the self-government that they were promised 
and then robbed of years ago.
    This is not complicated. The United States seeks no territorial 
advantage. I will say again: Europe seeks only stability, security, 
freedom, and democracy for those people. He can end it tomorrow. But 
until he does, he should be under no illusions that we will end it from 
weariness. We are determined to continue on this mission. And we will 
prevail because of you and people like you.
    The last thing I want to say is something you know very well here at 
Barksdale. You are the proud heirs of a great tradition, a tradition of 
serving the United States, and a tradition, as I said at the beginning 
of my remarks, of doing it in cooperation with freedom-loving allies 
from other nations. You are doing it again. Make no mistake about it. 
You are doing two things: You are trying to save the lives of innocent 
people, and you are trying to do it in a way that creates a 21st century 
world that you can be proud to have your children live in.
    Thank you, and God bless America.

Note: The President spoke at 9:55 a.m., in an outdoor area at Hogan 
Hall. In his remarks, he referred to Lt. Gen. Ronald C. Marcotte, USAF, 
Commander, 8th Air Force; Brig. Gen. Andrew W. Smoak, USAF, Commander, 
2d Bomb Wing; Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, USA, adjutant general, 
Louisiana National Guard; Gov. Mike Foster of Louisiana; and President 
Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and 
Montenegro).