[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 15 (Monday, April 19, 1999)]
[Pages 664-667]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 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

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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 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

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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 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; and 
President Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 
(Serbia and Montenegro). The President also referred to the Mosaic Youth 
Theatre of Detroit choir.

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