[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 19 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Pages 879-886]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States at Fort 
McNair

May 13, 1999

    Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Commander Pouliot. I 
am grateful to you and to Veterans of Foreign Wars for your support of 
America's efforts in Kosovo.
    General Chilcoat, Secretary Albright, Secretary Cohen, Secretary 
West, National Security Adviser Berger, Deputy Secretary Gober, General 
Shelton and the Joint Chiefs, and to the members of the military and 
members of the VFW who are here. I'd also like

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to thank Congressman Engel and Congressman Quinn for coming to be with 
us today.
    I am especially honored to be here with our veterans who have 
struggled for freedom in World War II and in the half-century since. 
Your service inspires us today, as we work with our Allies to reverse 
the systematic campaign of terror and to bring peace and freedom to 
Kosovo. To honor your sacrifices and fulfill the vision of a peaceful 
Europe, for which so many of the VFW members risked your lives, NATO's 
mission, as the Commander said, must succeed.
    My meetings last week in Europe with Kosovar refugees, with Allied 
leaders, with Americans in uniform, strengthened my conviction that we 
will succeed. With just 7 months left in the 20th century, Kosovo is a 
crucial test: Can we strengthen a global community grounded in 
cooperation and tolerance, rooted in common humanity? Or will repression 
and brutality, rooted in ethnic, racial, and religious hatreds dominate 
the agenda for the new century and the new millennium?
    The World War II veterans here fought in Europe and in the Pacific 
to prevent the world from being dominated by tyrants who used racial and 
religious hatred to strengthen their grip and to justify mass killing.
    President Roosevelt said in his final Inaugural Address: ``We have 
learned that we cannot live alone. We cannot live alone at peace. We 
have learned that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of 
other nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world, 
members of the human community.''
    The sacrifices of American and Allied troops helped to end a 
nightmare, rescue freedom, and lay the groundwork for the modern world 
that has benefited all of us. In the long cold war years, our troops 
stood for freedom and against communism until the Berlin Wall fell and 
the Iron Curtain collapsed.
    Now, the nations of central Europe are free democracies. We've 
welcomed new members to NATO and formed security partnerships with many 
other countries all across Europe's east, including Russia and Ukraine. 
Both the European Union and NATO have pledged to continue to embrace new 
members.
    Some have questioned the need for continuing our security 
partnership with Europe at the end of the cold war. But in this age of 
growing international interdependence, America needs a strong and 
peaceful Europe more than ever as our partner for freedom and for 
economic progress and our partner against terrorism, the spread of 
weapons of mass destruction, and instability.
    The promise of a Europe undivided, democratic, and at peace, is at 
long last within reach. But we all know it is threatened by the ethnic 
and religious turmoil in southeastern Europe, where most leaders are 
freely elected and committed to cooperation, both within and among their 
neighbors.
    Unfortunately, for more than 10 years now, President Milosevic has 
pursued a different course for Serbia, and for much of the rest of the 
former Yugoslavia. Since the late 1980's he has acquired, retained, and 
sought to expand his power by inciting religious and ethnic hatred in 
the cause of Greater Serbia, by demonizing and dehumanizing people, 
especially the Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, whose history, culture, and 
very presence in the former Republic of Yugoslavia impedes that vision 
of a Greater Serbia. He unleashed wars in Bosnia and Croatia, creating 2 
million refugees and leaving a quarter of a million people dead. A 
decade ago, he stripped Kosovo of its constitutional self-government and 
began harassing and oppressing its people. He has also rejected brave 
calls among his own Serb people for greater liberty. Today, he uses 
repression and censorship at home to stifle dissent and to conceal what 
he is doing in Kosovo.
    Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic 
extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related, both vicious, 
premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic 
hatred. This campaign to drive the Kosovars from their land and to, 
indeed, erase their very identity is an affront to humanity and an 
attack not only on a people but on the dignity of all people.
    Even now, Mr. Milosevic is being investigated by the International 
War Crimes Tribunal for alleged war crimes, including mass killing and 
ethnic cleansing. Until recently,

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1.7 million ethnic Albanians, about the population of our State of 
Nebraska, lived in Kosovo among a total population of 2 million, the 
other being Serbs.
    The Kosovar Albanians are farmers and factory workers, lawyers and 
doctors, mothers, fathers, school children. They have worked to build 
better lives under increasingly difficult circumstances. Today, most of 
them are in camps in Albania, Macedonia, and elsewhere, nearly 900,000 
refugees, some searching desperately for lost family members. Or they 
are trapped within Kosovo itself, perhaps 600,000 more of them, lacking 
shelter, short of food, afraid to go home. Or they are buried in mass 
graves dug by their executioners.
    I know we see these pictures of the refugees on television every 
night, and most people would like another story. But we must not get 
refugee fatigue. We must not forget the real victims of this tragedy. We 
must give them aid and hope. And we in the United States must make 
sure--must make sure--their stories are told.
    A Kosovar farmer told how Serb tanks drove into his village. Police 
lined up all the men, about 100 of them, by a stream and opened fire. 
The farmer was hit by a bullet in the shoulder. The weight of falling 
bodies all round him pulled him into the stream. The only way he could 
stay alive was to pretend to be dead. From a camp in Albania, he said, 
``My daughter tells me, `Father, sleep. Why don't you sleep?' But I 
can't. All those dead bodies on top of mine.''
    Another refugee told of trying to return to his village in Kosovo's 
capital, Pristina. ``On my way,'' he said, ``I met one of my relatives. 
He told me not to go back because there were snipers on the balconies. 
Minutes after I left, the man was killed. I found him. Back in Pristina 
no one could go out, because of the Serb policemen in the streets. It 
was terrible to see our children, they were so hungry. Finally, I tried 
to go shopping. Four armed men jumped out and said, `We're going to kill 
you if you don't get out of here.' My daughters were crying day and 
night. We were hearing stories about rape. They begged me, `Please get 
us out of there.' So we joined thousands of people going through the 
streets at night toward the train station. In the train wagons, police 
were tearing up passports, taking money, taking jewelry.''
    Another refugee reported, ``The Serbs surrounded us. They killed 
four children because their families did not have money to give to the 
police. They killed them with knives, not guns.''
    Another recalled, ``The police came early in the morning. They 
executed almost a hundred people. They killed them all, women and 
children. They set a fire and threw the bodies in.''
    A pregnant woman watched Serb forces shoot her brother in the 
stomach. She said, ``My father asked for someone to help this boy, but 
the answer he got was a beating. The Serbs told my brother to put his 
hands up, and then they shot him 10 times. I saw this. I saw my brother 
die.''
    Serb forces, their faces often concealed by masks, as they were 
before in Bosnia, have rounded up Kosovar women and repeatedly raped 
them. They have said to children, ``Go into the woods and die of 
hunger.''
    Last week in Germany I met with a couple of dozen of these refugees, 
and I asked them all, in turn, to speak about their experience. A young 
man--I'd say 15 or 16 years old--stood up and struggled to talk. 
Finally, he just sat down and said, ``Kosovo, I cannot talk about 
Kosovo.''
    Nine of every 10 Kosovar Albanians now has been driven from their 
homes, thousands murdered, at least 100,000 missing, many young men led 
away in front of their families; over 500 cities, towns and villages 
torched. All this has been carried out, you must understand, according 
to a plan carefully designed months earlier in Belgrade. Serb officials 
pre-positioned forces, tanks, and fuel and mapped out the sequence of 
attack: what were the soldiers going to do; what were the paramilitary 
people going to do; what were the police going to do.
    Town after town has seen the same brutal procedures: Serb forces 
taking valuables and identity papers, seizing or executing civilians, 
destroying property records, bulldozing and burning homes, mocking the 
fleeing.
    We and our Allies, with Russia, have worked hard for a just peace. 
Just last fall, Mr. Milosevic agreed under pressure to halt

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the previous assault on Kosovo, and hundreds of thousands of Kosovars 
were able to return home. But soon, he broke his commitment and renewed 
violence.
    In February and March, again we pressed for peace, and the Kosovar 
Albanian leaders accepted a comprehensive plan, including the disarming 
of their insurgent forces, though it did not give them all they wanted. 
But instead of joining the peace, Mr. Milosevic, having already massed 
some 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo, unleashed his forces to 
intensify their atrocities and complete his brutal scheme.
    Now, from the outset of this conflict, we and our Allies have been 
very clear about what Belgrade must do to end it. The central imperative 
is this: The Kosovars must be able to return home and live in safety. 
For this to happen, the Serb forces must leave; partial withdrawals can 
only mean continued civil war with the Kosovar insurgents. There must 
also be an international security force with NATO at its core. Without 
that force, after all they've been through, the Kosovars simply won't go 
home. Their requirements are neither arbitrary nor overreaching. These 
things we have said are simply what is necessary to make peace work.
    There are those who say Europe and its North American allies have no 
business intervening in the ethnic conflicts of the Balkans. They are 
the inevitable result, these conflicts, according to some, of centuries-
old animosities which were unleashed by the end of the cold war 
restraints in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. I, myself, have been guilty of 
saying that on an occasion or two, and I regret it now more than I can 
say. For I have spent a great deal of time in these last 6 years reading 
the real history of the Balkans. And the truth is that a lot of what 
passes for common wisdom in this area is a gross oversimplification and 
misreading of history.
    The truth is that for centuries these people have lived together in 
the Balkans and southeastern Europe with greater or lesser degree of 
tension but often without anything approaching the intolerable 
conditions and conflicts that exist today. And we do no favors to 
ourselves or to the rest of the world when we justify looking away from 
this kind of slaughter by oversimplifying and conveniently, in our own 
way, demonizing the whole Balkans by saying that these people are simply 
incapable of civilized behavior with one another.
    Second, there is--people say, ``Okay, maybe it's not inevitable, but 
look, there are a lot of ethnic problems in the world. Russia has dealt 
with Chechnya, and you've got Abkhazia and Ossetia on the borders of 
Russia. And you've got all these ethnic problems everywhere, and 
religious problems. That's what the Middle East is about. You've got 
Northern Ireland. You've got the horrible, horrible genocide in Rwanda. 
You've got the war, now, between Eritrea and Ethiopia.'' They say, ``Oh, 
we've got all these problems, and, therefore, why do you care about 
this?''
    I say to them, there is a huge difference between people who can't 
resolve their problems peacefully and fight about it and people who 
resort to systematic ethnic cleansing and slaughter of people because of 
their religious or ethnic background. There is a difference. There is a 
difference.
    And that is the difference that NATO--that our Allies have tried to 
recognize and act on. I believe that is what we saw in Bosnia and 
Kosovo. I think the only thing we have seen that really rivals that, 
rooted in ethnic or religious destruction, in this decade is what 
happened in Rwanda. And I regret very much that the world community was 
not organized and able to act quickly there as well.
    Bringing the Kosovars home is a moral issue, but it is a very 
practical, strategic issue. In a world where the future will be 
threatened by the growth of terrorist groups, the easy spread of weapons 
of mass destruction, the use of technology including the Internet, for 
people to learn how to make bombs and wreck countries, this is also a 
significant security issue. Particularly because of Kosovo's location, 
it is just as much a security issue for us as ending the war in Bosnia 
was.
    Though we are working hard with the international community to 
sustain them, a million or more permanent Kosovar refugees could 
destabilize Albania, Macedonia, the wider region, become a fertile 
ground for radicalism and vengeance that would consume southeastern 
Europe. And if Europe were overwhelmed with that, you know we would have 
to then come in and help them.

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Far better for us all to work together, to be firm, to be resolute, to 
be determined to resolve this now.
    If the European community and its American and Canadian allies were 
to turn away from and, therefore, reward ethnic cleansing in the 
Balkans, all we would do is to create for ourselves an environment where 
this sort of practice was sanctioned by other people who found it 
convenient to build their own political power, and therefore, we would 
be creating a world of trouble for Europe and for the United States in 
the years ahead.
    I'd just like to make one more point about this, in terms of the 
history of the Balkans. As long as people have existed there have been 
problems among people who were different from one another, and there 
probably always will be. But you do not have systematic slaughter and an 
effort to eradicate the religion, the culture, the heritage, the very 
record of presence of the people in any area unless some politician 
thinks it is in his interest to foment that sort of hatred. That's how 
these things happen. People with organized political and military power 
decide it is in their interest that they get something out of convincing 
the people they control or they influence to go kill other people and 
uproot them and dehumanize them.
    I don't believe that the Serb people in their souls are any better--
I mean, any worse--than we are. Do you? Do you believe when a little 
baby is born into a certain ethnic or racial group that somehow they 
have some poison in there that has to, at some point when they grow up, 
turn into some vast flame of destruction? Congressman Engel has got more 
Albanians than any Congressman in the country in his district. 
Congressman Quinn's been involved in the peace process in Ireland. You 
think there's something about the Catholic and Protestant Irish kids 
that sort of genetically predisposes them to--you know better than that, 
because we're about to make peace there, I hope--getting closer.
    Political leaders do this kind of thing. Think the Germans would 
have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own without Hitler? Was there 
something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No.
    We've got to get straight about this. This is something political 
leaders do. And if people make decisions to do these kinds of things, 
other people can make decisions to stop them. And if the resources are 
properly arrayed, it can be done. And that is exactly what we intend to 
do.
    Now, last week, despite our differences over the NATO action in 
Kosovo, Russia joined us, through the G-8 foreign ministers, in 
affirming our basic condition for ending the conflict, in affirming that 
the mass expulsion of the Kosovars cannot stand. We and Russia agreed 
that the international force ideally should be endorsed by the United 
Nations, as it was in Bosnia. And we do want Russian forces, along with 
those of other nations, to participate, because a Russian presence will 
help to reassure the Serbs who live in Kosovo, and they will need some 
protection, too, after all that has occurred.
    NATO and Russian forces have served well side-by-side in Bosnia, 
with forces from many other countries. And with all the difficulties, 
the tensions, the dark memories that still exist in Bosnia, the Serbs, 
the Muslims, and the Croats are still at peace and still working 
together. Nobody claims that we can make everyone love each other 
overnight. That is not required. But what is required are basic norms of 
civilized conduct.
    Until Serbia accepts these conditions, we will continue to grind 
down its war machine. Today our Allied air campaign is striking at 
strategic targets in Serbia and directly at Serb forces in Kosovo, 
making it harder for them to obtain supplies, protect themselves, and 
attack the ethnic Albanians who are still there. NATO actions will not 
stop until the conditions I have described for peace are met.
    Last week I had a chance to meet with our troops in Europe, those 
who are flying the missions, and those who are organizing and leading 
our humanitarian assistance effort. I can tell you that you and all 
Americans can be very, very proud of them. They are standing up for what 
is right. They are performing with great skill and courage and sense of 
purpose. And in their attempts to avoid civilian casualties, they are 
sometimes risking their own lives. The wing commander at Spangdahlem Air 
Force Base in Germany told me, and I quote ``Sir, our team wants to stay 
with this mission until it's finished.''

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    I am very grateful to these men and women. They are worthy 
successors to those of you in this audience who are veterans today.
    Of course, we regret any casualties that are accidental, including 
those at the Chinese Embassy. But let me be clear again: These are 
accidents. They are inadvertent tragedies of conflict. We have worked 
very hard to avoid them. I'm telling you, I talked to pilots who told me 
that they had been fired at with mobile weapons from people in the 
middle of highly populated villages, and they turned away rather than 
answer fire because they did not want to risk killing innocent 
civilians.
    That is not our policy. But those of you who wear the uniform of our 
country and the many other countries represented here in this room today 
and those of you who are veterans know that it is simply not possible to 
avoid casualties of noncombatants in this sort of encounter. We are 
working hard. And I think it is truly remarkable--I would ask the world 
to note that we have now flown over 19,000 sorties, thousands and 
thousands of bombs have been dropped, and there have been very few 
incidents of this kind. I know that you know how many there have been 
because Mr. Milosevic makes sure that the media has access to them.
    I grieve for the loss of the innocent Chinese and for their 
families. I grieve for the loss of the innocent Serbian civilians and 
their families. I grieve for the loss of the innocent Kosovars who were 
put into a military vehicle that our people thought was a military 
vehicle, and they've often been used as shields.
    But I ask you to remember the stories I told you earlier. There are 
thousands of people that have been killed systematically by the Serb 
forces. There are 100,000 people who are still missing. We must remember 
who the real victims are here and why this started.
    It is no accident that Mr. Milosevic has not allowed the 
international media to see the slaughter and destruction in Kosovo. 
There is no picture reflecting the story that one refugee told of 15 men 
being tied together and set on fire while they were alive. No, there are 
no pictures of that. But we have enough of those stories to know that 
there is a systematic effort that has animated our actions, and we must 
not forget it.
    Now, Serbia faces a choice. Mr. Milosevic and his allies have 
dragged their people down a path of racial and religious hatred. This 
has resulted, again and again, in bloodshed, in loss of life, in loss of 
territory, and denial of the Serbs' own freedom and, now, in an 
unwinnable conflict against the united international community. But 
there is another path available, one where people of different 
backgrounds and religions work together, within and across national 
borders, where people stop redrawing borders and start drawing 
blueprints for a prosperous, multiethnic future.
    This is the path the other nations of southeastern Europe have 
adopted. Day after day, they work to improve lives, to build a future in 
which the forces that pull people together are stronger than those that 
tear them apart. Albania and Bulgaria, as well as our NATO ally, Greece, 
have overcome historical differences to recognize the independence of 
the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, 
and others have deepened freedoms, promoted tolerance, pursued difficult 
economic reforms. Slovenia has advanced democracy at home, and 
prosperity, stood for regional integration, increased security 
cooperation, with a center to defuse land mines left from the conflict 
in Bosnia.
    These nations are reaffirming that discord is not inevitable, that 
there is not some Balkan disease that has been there for centuries, 
always waiting to break out. They are drawing on a rich past where 
peoples of the region did, in fact, live together in peace.
    Now, we and our Allies have been helping to build that future, but 
we have to accelerate our efforts. We will work with the European Union, 
the World Bank, the IMF, and others to ease the immediate economic 
strains, to relieve debt burden, to speed reconstruction, to advance 
economic reforms and regional trade. We will promote political freedom 
and tolerance of minorities.
    At our NATO Summit last month we agreed to deepen our security 
engagement in the region, to adopt an ambitious program to help aspiring 
nations improve their candidacies to join the NATO Alliance. They

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have risked and sacrificed to support the military and humanitarian 
efforts. They deserve our support.
    Last Saturday was the anniversary of one of the greatest days in 
American history and in the history of freedom, V-E Day. Though America 
celebrated that day in 1945, we did not pack up and go home. We stayed 
to provide economic aid, to help to bolster democracy, to keep the peace 
and because our strength and resolve was important as Europe rebuilt, 
learned to live together, faced new challenges together.
    The resources we devoted to the Marshall plan, to NATO, to other 
efforts, I think we would all agree have been an enormous bargain for 
our long-term prosperity and security here in the United States, just as 
the resources we are devoting here at this institution to reaching out 
to people from other nations, to their officers, to their military, in a 
spirit of cooperation are an enormous bargain for the future security of 
the people of the United States.
    Now, that's what I want to say in my last point here. War is 
expensive; peace is cheaper. Prosperity is downright profitable. We have 
to invest in the rebuilding of this region. Southeastern Europe, after 
the cold war, was free but poor. As long as they are poor, they will 
offer a less compelling counterweight to the kind of ethnic exclusivity 
and oppression that Mr. Milosevic preaches.
    If you believe the Marshall plan worked and you believe war is to be 
avoided whenever possible and you understand how expensive it is and how 
profitable prosperity is, how much we have gotten out of what we have 
done, then we have to work with our European Allies to rebuild 
southeastern Europe and to give them an economic future that will pull 
them together.
    The European Union is prepared to take the lead role in southeastern 
Europe's development. Russia, Ukraine, other nations of Europe's east 
are building democracy; they want to be a part of this.
    We are trying to do this in other places in the world. What a great 
ally Japan has been for peace and prosperity and will be again as they 
work to overcome their economic difficulty. Despite our present 
problems, I still believe we must remain committed to building a long-
term strategic partnership with China.
    We must work together with people where we can, as we prepare, 
always, to protect and defend our security if we must. But a better 
world and a better Europe are clearly in America's interests.
    Serbia and the rest of the Balkans should be part of it. So I want 
to say this one more time: Our quarrel is not with the Serbian people. 
The United States has been deeply enriched by Serbian-Americans. 
Millions of Americans are now cheering for some Serbian-Americans as we 
watch the basketball play-offs every night on television. People of 
Serbian heritage are an important part of our society. We can never 
forget that the Serbs fought bravely with the Allies against Fascist 
aggression in World War II, that they suffered much, that Serbs, too, 
have been uprooted from their homes and have suffered greatly in the 
conflicts of the past decade that Mr. Milosevic provoked.
    But the cycle of violence has to end. The children of the Balkans, 
all of them, deserve the chance to grow up without fear. Serbs simply 
must free themselves of the notion that their neighbors must be their 
enemies. The real enemy is a poisonous hatred unleashed by a cynical 
leader, based on a distorted view of what constitutes real national 
greatness.
    The United States has become greater as we have shed racism, as we 
have shed a sense of superiority, as we have become more committed to 
working together across the lines that divide us, as we have found other 
ways to define meaning and purpose in life. And so has every other 
country that has embarked on that course.
    We stand ready, therefore, to embrace Serbia as a part of a new 
Europe if the people of Serbia are willing to invest and embrace that 
kind of future; if they are ready to build a Serbia, and a Yugoslavia, 
that is democratic and respects the rights and dignity of all people; if 
they are ready to join a world where people reach across the divide to 
find their common humanity and their prosperity.
    This is the right vision and the right course. It is not only the 
morally right thing for America; it is the right thing for our security 
interests over the long run. It is the vision

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for which the veterans in this room struggled so valiantly, for which so 
many others have given their lives.
    With your example to guide us, and with our Allies beside us, it is 
a vision that will prevail. And it is very, very much worth standing 
for.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11 a.m. in Eisenhower Hall. In his remarks, 
he referred to Thomas Pouliot, commander in chief, Veterans of Foreign 
Wars; and President Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of 
Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro).