The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE IN BOSNIA” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H13787-H13795 on Nov. 29, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE IN BOSNIA
The Speaker pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. I did not realize your time was wrapping up, Mr. Burton. I just wanted to, in a colloquy with you, underscore what you said about the targeting of Americans by people from outside Bosnia. The MOIS, the secret police of Iran, have people in all the areas in Bosnia and around there. They are the security for shipping arms to the Moslem Bosnians through Zagreb with the complicity, the tolerance of the Croatian Government, all the way up to President Franjo Tudjman. They have targeted Americans for over a year.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. And they are having Americans killed, you might add.
Mr. DORNAN. Yes.
Now here is what adds a dimension to this today. Someone who has told me who I trust--now this makes it hearsay and puts it in the category of rumor for our friends in the dominant media culture. The liberals will go wild here, but a meeting took place at the White House, all the key players from Defense and from the State Department and security agencies, and Clinton himself expressed concern and asked many questions about the mujaheddin from Iran, the bad mujaheddin, just like we had good and bad in Afghanistan--the Hamas, some of the groups you have named, and the secret police, the terrorist secret police of Iran. He asked about them targeting Americans. He has known about this for a year.
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The President is purported to have said, looking at Leon Panetta, my classmate from 1976, ``Do not let the Congress get fired up on this. Downplay this when you talk to the Congressmen and the Senators.''
In other words, instead of telling the American people the danger that we are in, and, to quote his own words which I will do in a minute, he is asking them to downplay the threat to our Americans.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the gentleman will continue to yield, the fact of the matter is we know there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Moslem terrorists from Iran who are in the Bosnia area right now. We do not know how many. We have no idea. The fact of the matter is that some of those people were involved in such tragedies here in America as the World Trade Center bombing. They do not like our policies, they do not like America very much.
When you put troops, American troops strung out between, say, Sarajevo and Tuzla, that long corridor 2\1/2\ miles wide, you are leaving them open for an attack anyplace among that line. That means that you are probably going to have, anyplace along that corridor for Sarajevo to Tuzla that there could be a bomber, there could be a mortar attack, there could be any kind of attack on our troops and they will not know when it is coming.
I remember when President Clinton had a number of us in the White House when we were in Mogadishu, in Somalia. The President came up with a new policy. He said he was going to billet our troops on the tarmac at the airport there in Mogadishu. He said they would be safe. They would be there as a security measure, but they would not be involved in any combat or other operations. This was after we started nation building, we quit the food handling over there.
Two days later the Aideed forces, the terrorist tribal leader over there, lobbed mortars into the exact spot where our soldiers were going to be billeted. That was not anything like Bosnia, yet if we had had troops in that area where the President said they were going to be, and they found out about it, there would have been many of them killed. Think about that when you talk about a corridor between Sarajevo and Tuzla, 2\1/2\ miles wide with 25,000 American troops in there. They could pick any spot along there, any time day or night, attack our troops and kill hundreds, maybe thousands of them. This is a recipe for disaster.
I appreciate the gentleman for yielding to me. The President should reconsider, and he should come clean with the American people. If he said what you alleged he said to Leon Panetta, you know, we do not let the Congress get into this thing, then he should be taken to task. I do not know if he said it or not.
The American people need to know the risks. There are going to be young women lose their legs, their arms, their eyes from these land mines, but even a greater risk is the possibility of a terrorist attack from possibly Bosnian Serbs who are going to be upset about losing their homes and the problems around Sarajevo, or possibly Moslem terrorist from Iran. There are a number of people who do not like what is going on over there. They do not like anybody very much. I think our troops are really at risk. It is a mistake to get into this quagmire.
Mr. DORNAN. Dan, stay with me just a minute here, because I have been to Central America with you several times, we have both been to Haiti and been very concerned about what is happening there. We both have taken a personal interest in the calls that are coming into our offices from families of men who are in active duty in Germany and who resented Clinton referring to them as volunteers.
One mother said to one of my staffers,
My son is not a French legionnaire or a mercenary, he did not join the military to fight under any flag, he joined and took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And he did take a follow-on order that we do not take as Congressmen Newt would like this probably at this point, that we will obey all lawful orders of our commander. But it is coming down to the word
``lawful.''
Because you suffered through Mogadishu and spoke so forcefully and eloquently on the floor, I want to share something with you. When I was in my thirties I produced my own TV show. We had, the year I started, just gotten state-of-the-art close-up lenses where we could go in on an ant on the set and fill someone's television screen at home with that ant. Here we are, 27 years later, since I first started in December of 1967 28 years later, and we cannot call for a close-up with these good Americans down in the control room a couple of floors below us, and it is too bad. I think the day is going to come, just like some day we will have color in the Congressional Record.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I would like for them to see this map.
Mr. DORNAN. If they can see this Posavina corridor that we are supposed to widen by the Dayton-Wright Patterson treaty, widen and enforce----
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the Americans could see the corridor we are supposed to try to defend----
Mr. DORNAN. Hold that steady and maybe the camera here in the southeast corner of the House could come in, point with your finger----
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. It is going to run all the way this way.
Mr. DORNAN. Take it from there at the top. The little pink strip there, between the part of Serb-held Bosnia that is against Milosevic's Bosnia-Serbia proper and Montenegro, and this huge glob in the northern part of what is Bosnia, this little, tiny Posavina corridor, 2\1/2\ miles, is supposed to be expanded to five.
Keep in mind the Israelis were properly always exercised about the distance from the furthest west point of the West Bank, Judea, from Natanya, by the sea, was 18 miles. They say that is an artillery-lobbed shell. This is 2\1/2\. Our men----
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. You have been in the military you might tell our colleagues how far a mortar will go, how far they can stay back from that 2\1/2\-mile-wide corridor to hit American troops if they wanted to lob something in there.
Mr. DORNAN. The mortars that hit the marketplace in Tuzla when I was in Zagreb the 28th of August, and threw bodies every which way, killed 60 or 70 people and maimed 150; when I look at that ``maimed,'' I always think ``Who is blind? Who has no legs there? Who lost all their fingers there?'' We always put the death toll in bigger caps than the maimed. That is lives changed forever. A person will never earn the same income. Those mortars could be 5 or 10 miles from the corridor and lob these shells into the corridor.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The point is they could get within a half a mile and be more accurately targeted in. That is the problem.
Mr. DORNAN. I wish almost, like in every television show, we had a monitor buried in the table here so we could see. I don't know how close they can come in on this picture, but I am going to walk over there and give it to you so you can look at this handsome young American soldier's face, First Sergeant Randall Shughart. I visited his grave 2 weeks ago in Carlisle, PA. His parents sent me this picture because they did not like the standard Army picture. They said, ``This is more what Randy looked like when he was helping us on the farm.'' I am sure that as close as they can get, it is just a color picture of a handsome young fellow with a closely cropped beard and a cowboy hat, in his barn. Take a look at this while I tell you this story.
Randy Shughart, together with Gary Gordon, begged the headquarters at Mogadishu International Airport to let them go down and disembark from their helicopter, because they could see movement in the cockpit of Michael Durant's crashed Blackhawk helicopter. Three times they were told no. They were, in a sense, because they knew the odds, begging to die for their friends. St. John the Evangelist 15:13, ``Greater love no man has than he died for his friends.''
They saved Durant. Durant hugging me, and both of us crying, told me that he owes his life to Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon. All four men had spine injuries when that helicopter made a hard landing. The helicopter that he disembarked took a direct hit of a rocket-propelled grenade and blew out one of the door posts and tore the leg right off one of the door gunners.
I talked to the young Corporal Hall who jumped in and took over the door gun, and they flew back to Newport and crashed the helicopter, totaling it out. So that day we lost Wolcott's helicopter, Cliff Wolcott, killing him and his pilot, and then we lost this one, Durant's, and then we lost that one to a total accident after they were out of it.
They held off for about 30 minutes. I have asked the Army for their last transcriptions. Durant told me the last thing Gordon or Shughart said to him was ``Good luck, pal. I hope you make it.'' Went around the front of the helicopter, heard him take a couple of shots, heard him grunt with pain. Hopefully they died with the rifle shots as the crowd overwhelmed the helicopter and captured Durant.
Durant told me another man was lying on the ground, and I will not give his name because of his parents, and he was taken alive with Durant. They beat him to death. Then they began to so abuse their bodies that now that it is 2 years and 2 months later, a former Congressman said to me tonight, ``Congressman, these men are owned by America. Why don't you tell the country what happened to them?''
I will not, but I will go further than I have ever gone before. These five men, including the two that won the Medal of Honor and including Randy Shughart's picture you have there, they did not just mutilate their bodies and drag them through the streets and stick rifles and poles into every bodily orifice, including their mouths, and have women and children dance upon them in the streets for Canadian Broadcasting, the guy won a Pulitzer Prize for his video and film coverage, Paul something, they cut their arms off the bodies. We never got those limbs back. They dumped their burned remains on the steps of the United Nation every 2 days until we had gotten back----
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If I may interrupt, that was never reported to the American people?
Mr. DORNAN. Never. Look at Randy's handsome face, and he was born in Lincoln, NE. I showed this to our Medal of Honor winner, the Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, and he started at him intently, and I said,
``This guy is from Lincoln.'' And he said, ``Are you sure?'' and I said yes, I thought he was buried there. And then the Army told me where, so I went to his grave, because the week before when I was at a presidential forum in Bangor, ME, and I had asked where the other Lincoln was, in Lincoln, ME, where Gary Gordon is from. ``Two Young Men from Lincoln'' is the story I would like to write.
They said, ``50 minutes north of here,'' and I took my son and drove up this first week of November to Gary Gordon's grave. I said to Mark,
``I want to see Randy Shughart's grave.'' His dad, that man there, his father is the one who refused to shake Clinton's hand in the East Ballroom of the White House, and Bob Kerrey, Senator, told me he was at this ceremony and remembers it vividly. I said, ``How is it Bob, the press never reported that story, that it only came out on talk radio?''
Mr. Shughart, a basic American farmer type, retired in Carlisle near his son's grave. He told me that he said to Clinton, ``Why did you fly Aideed down to Addis Abbaba days after this people killed and multilated my son's body?''
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. He was the dictator and tribal terrorist over there that was responsible for that.
Mr. DORNAN. Another Fidel Castro, another General Jopp, another Aristide, the same mold, all of them. He said Clinton told him, ``I did not know about that operation.''
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the gentleman will yield, that is a ludicrous statement for anybody to make, because the administration had their Ambassador over there, negotiating with Aideed during a lot of this stuff that was going on. They knew entirely, from intelligence sources, what was going on. It is absolutely unbelievable that they would make a statement like that.
Let me just add one more thing.
Mr. DORNAN. It is Clinton making the statement to the father of a dead, murdered, Medal of Honor winner.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I just cannot believe that is the case. The President said in his speech----
Mr. DORNAN. He meant the operation, taking Aideed down to Addis Abbaba.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The President said, ``I take full responsibility for whatever might happen over there.'' The fact of the matter is he should take full responsibility for what happened in Mogadishu to those men who got killed. They did not send proper equipment there, they did not send M-1 A-1 tanks, they did not send Bradley armored vehicles. He knew they should have sent those over there. The men trapped there, they did not get to them in that little town for 40 or 50 minutes because they could not get through the crowds.
Mr. DORNAN. Eleven and one-half hours before they relieved the Rangers.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The fact of the matter is we lost some of those men because we did not get there quick enough.
Mr. DORNAN. Four or five died during the night.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. The fact of the matter is we are going to lose more young men and women, many more times, 40 or 50 more times in Bosnia. I think the President is making a terrible mistake.
Mr. SCARBBOROUGH. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. DORNAN. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank the gentleman from California for yielding, and thank him for all of his service on the Committee on National Security, where we have worked together. I certainly appreciate the comments you have made about the horrible treatment that American soldiers have to go through, and humanizing this process.
Let me tell you something that really has disturbed me during this debate. There have been three falsehoods. The first is that we should blindly fall in line behind our Commander in Chief, regardless of what he suggests. We should send out troops, whether we know if there is a vital American interest, a time line, or all of the things we need to make this successful.
I remember back in the mid-1990's, before I was in Congress, and you were here, maybe you can expand on this in a minute or two, just to remind Americans that there can be a loyal opposition. I remember when we were trying to remove Communists, when Ronald Reagan was trying to remove Communists from Central America, there were actually Members of this body that wrote Communist leader Ortega in Nicaragua and apologized for our support of the freedom fighters. These same people tell us that we cannot even debate this openly, so America can decide whether they want young American men and women killed in Bosnia?
Let us make no mistake of it, we have sat through the briefings on the Committee on National Security. Everybody that comes in says,
``Young Americans will die if they go to Bosnia and get involved in a civil war that has been raging for over 500 years.'' What have we kept asking? We have kept saying, ``What is the vital American interest?''
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They have set up straw men and tried to knock them down, saying that if we did not get involved that somehow our credibility in NATO would be greatly diminished. That is a joke. The fact of the matter is, we are NATO. We have protected NATO countries for a generation from the threat of communism, and we will continue.
Mr. DORNAN. A generation and a half.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. A generation and a half. We are NATO. So that is a straw man.
Then they talk about it expanding and starting World War III. I heard the Vice President make that statement. That is blatantly false. It will not expand. The testimony that we have heard in the Committee on National Security clearly shows that that will not happen.
I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say that I remember when the other side, when we were in Vietnam, and they were talking about the domino theory, they pooh-poohed that. Of course, now the same people who are doing that are saying, oh, my gosh, this may be a world war. The fact of the matter is, this war is not going to spread unless everybody decides that they want to let it spread.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Is it not ironic that the very same people during the Vietnam war that were protesting in the streets and on campuses across this country were saying, we cannot be the world's policeman. These are the same people, 30 years later, who are saying, let us sacrifice young Americans because it will make us feel good about ourselves.
The fact of the matter is, there is no vital American interest. The Secretary of Defense admitted as much, and it was in Time magazine, that there is not a vital American interest. But what is disturbing to me is, now we are seeing people saying, well, maybe, since we are beyond the cold war, maybe we do not need a vital American interest.
I hear that we have a volunteer army. You notice that is what they are saying. It is a volunteer army, they signed up for this, so we can send them off. It does not matter whether there is a vital American interest, and we spend all of this money on the military, so let us use our military. That is obscene.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, it is.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. That is why I thank the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Indiana for talking about the harsh realities of war.
Does it mean that Americans are gun-shy and that we do not believe that any American troops should ever be sent into harm's way? No. But is it asking too much to say, let there be a vital American interest so when the President of the United States picks up the phone and calls a parent and says, your son was just blown apart in Bosnia, but he did it for a good reason. He did it because, and that is where they start to fade out. Because, maybe the NATO people will feel better because we have sacrificed, had human sacrifices in Bosnia.
I do not want to trivialize this point, but it is so central to this argument, we have to define what a vital American interest is.
We have head the Secretary of Defense, we have heard the Secretary of State, we have heard General Shalikashvili, we have heard a lot of good military men and women come before our Committee on National Security, and all have failed to state that vital American interest. I do not fault them; I fault the Commander in Chief.
Mr. DORNAN. Let my good colleague from Florida pause for a moment while I show the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton] and the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] another photograph, and a series of photographs starting on the cover of Paris Match magazine that you are not going to forget. I guarantee you that you will be bringing this up at town hall meetings.
First of all, I hand to Mr. Burton a picture from a war that has great personal significance for me that started in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on June 28, 1914, when a Bosnian Serb murdered Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Carlotta, the heir to the throne of the Austro-
Hungarian empire, and changed Europe for this whole century and began the bloodiest war in its time, 11 million killed, the flower of European youth, and it set us up for World War II where 55 to 60 million died, and it set up Stalin and Lenin and communism where 100 million more died, including China.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. And your dad was there.
Mr. DORNAN. I do not have but one studio photograph of my father from World War I.
A gentleman called me from North Carolina last fall and said, ``I bought for 100 bucks in a garage sale a bunch of postcards from World War I.'' He asked my staff, ``Does the Congressman have a father who was a lieutenant in World War I?'' Yes. I called him back. Send me the photograph.
He sends it, and it is a photograph of my dad with about 15 French children and another young captain. My dad had suffered poison gas, mustard gas twice, shrapnel in his face under his eye, three-wound chevrons turned into Purple Hearts in a ceremony that I witnessed in the Seventh Armory in New York.
If my dad were still alive, he went to his reward in 1975 at 83 years of age, he would be saying to me, in the last 4 years of the bloodiest century in all of history, ``We are going back to the hills around Sarajevo where this killing started?''
Now I want to show you both something. I am going to read the text while Dan looks at this and then he gives it to you. I have been on the French Embassy for months to get photographs of the two French pilots in a double seat Mirage 2000 that were shot down while I am at Aviano greeting our pilots back on August 30.
They said, ``Uh-oh, we have lost an airplane.'' My heart starts pounding. Is this guy going to be as lucky as young Captain Scott O'Grady? Is he coming down on our side of the line like a British Harrier pilot 2 years earlier? Is he going to come down into Serb hands?
Then they come in. I was talking to my wife on the phone. You cannot talk on the phone, but it is a French airplane. We take a two-seater. Then we hear there were good shoots. I am supposed to greet the squadron commander. He bends around in the air, goes back to the tanker and goes back to cover him.
On the evening news here you saw their two good parachutes come down. That was August 30. Fifty-two days later, an indicted war criminal indicted at The Hague in the Netherlands by an international war crimes tribunal, Radovan Karadvic, says, ``Oh, the two French pilots were kidnapped from the hospital. What were they doing in a hospital 52 days after? They had good parachutes.''
I am about to show you their pictures the day of capture.
The French embassy calls me about Frederique Chiffot, C-H-I-F-F-O-T. I misspelled it when I said it on the floor last. The other one is Souvignet, Jose, J-O-S-E. Let me spell his name, S-O-U-V-I-G-N-E-T. These two pilots are in captivity here. One of them looks like he has a sprained ankle, no cuts on their faces. The French Foreign Minister thinks that they have been murdered, beaten to death.
When Karadzic says they were kidnapped he says, maybe by Moslems; Moslems would not do that, not with the support we are giving them; and he said, or by some band of a rogue brigands for a hostage reward. There has been no asking for money.
Look at these pictures. Look at this man's face. The lieutenant, probably the back-seater; well, not necessarily, maybe the captain was the back-seat radar intercept officer. Turn the page. Look at how, like our pilots first captured in Vietnam, he is making this mean grimace into the camera like, I am resisting and I am okay. They are mature men. They are in their mid 30's, you can tell.
Why at Dayton, at Wright Patterson, did not somebody say to Milosevic, by the way, all of this is predicated upon the return of these two French allied pilots who are our friends and comrades in arms? The whole deal is off, and here we are on day 82, 30 days after they announced they were kidnapped from a hospital that they should not have been in, and that could be two Americans in a heartbeat.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Bob, it is probably going to be more than two. We are going to have 25,000 there, plus support troops, in that 2\1/2\-
mile-wide corridor, and they will be able to attack at any point along that corridor, at any time, day or night, with mortars, land mines, or they can use a terrorist attack with a truck bomb. I am telling you, you are probably going to see, and I hope I am wrong, but you are probably going to see a lot more Americans than two or three.
Mr. DORNAN. Look at the faces of the Serb fighters there. How old do you think they are?
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. They are probably in their 20's and 30's.
Mr. DORNAN. And some in their 40's. Are they tough-looking, warrior-
class people?
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Oh, of course.
Mr. DORNAN. Have you ever seen tougher looking guys in your life?
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I saw a 60-year-old gentleman in Sarajevo, a Serb, with an assault rifle on the evening news saying, I will kill anybody that comes in here to protect my family. We are getting involved in a three-way civil war that we cannot begin to fathom, the emotions and the hatred. It is just like Mogadishu that you talked about before.
We are going even beyond the original U.N. charter where we were only supposed to get involved when the sovereign state was attacked. Why are we putting Americans in the middle of a three-way civil war with what you talked about, war-hardened criminals, for the most part, that will kill Americans as soon as look at them?
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say something here.
Mr. Speaker, this administration has a history of blunders in foreign policy decisions. Haiti, we are now finding out, is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars, and all hell is breaking loose down there. There are a lot of political killings that have been instigated in part by Aristide's own rhetoric. He is now saying he may not leave power, and he is using almost $2 million of American taxpayers' money to lobby Congress for more money.
We have Mogadishu and Somalia and the tragedies that occurred there, and now we are going to do the same thing or worse in Bosnia? It makes no sense.
This administration needs to get a foreign policy compass. They need to get some direction in their foreign policy, get some experts up there that know what they are doing and know what they are getting us into.
Mr. DORNAN. But where was Clinton this morning? Speaking to the British Parliament, instead of over here counseling with us and figuring out how we can contribute to this.
Now, let me bounce off of both of you my notes from Clinton's remarks on Monday night.
First of all, he did take you on with that first question of yours and me. Because I put 50 questions to him in the Congressional Record just yesterday and put in the Cap Weinberger-Bob Dornan principles, the 10 things that you must satisfy before you put men, and now, thanks to Les Aspin, women, in harm's way.
He said, this is Central Europe. It is vital to our national interests. So he used the word. He said so.
This House, by a vote of 243 to 171 says no, and it shows you that if there is ever a constitutional power that does not involve the purse, the President can send people anywhere in this world.
Wilson asked for a declaration of war. So did Roosevelt. But Harry Truman got into Korea and did not know how to get out and it cost him his Presidency.
LBJ, thanks to Kennedy, got into Vietnam, did not know how to extract himself, threw his hands up on March 31, 1968, and said, I am out of here. I will serve out and try and conduct the war. He did not do anything except keep a bombing pause on for all of 1968 that he made even more severe to try and throw the election to Humphrey and destroyed his Presidency.
Listen to what Clinton says. They, that is you, Mr. Scarborough, Mr. Burton, and me, and a majority of this House and Senate, they argue America can now step back. As young people would say, excuse me. Step back? We have almost 500 men in Macedonia. We have air power, sea power. We lost that French airplane and lucked out with our American air crew. We threw 90 percent of the strikes that cost those two Frenchmen 82 days of freedom. Please, God, that they are still alive and being moved from village to village.
He says, we are going to end the suffering. How much money are we pouring into that area with airlift and sealift? You men should walk through the hospital at Zagreb at the airport. You should look at the U.N. facilities and the U.N. personnel there who are all overpaid, and every nickel they get is tax-free, all the bureaucrats.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say, he said he is going to end the suffering and we are going to be there 1 year. In 1 year we are going to be in and out, we are going to end the suffering, and this is a civil war, civil strife that has been going on, as you said, for 500 years or more. I am telling you, you are not going to change these people's attitudes, take away their homes and give them to somebody else, solve all of these problems in a year and make this country whole. It is just not going to happen.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. To expand on that briefly, getting back to the testimony we heard from the Committee on National Security, and I am sure you were there. When a retired U.N. general from Canada talked to us about the folly that you were just talking about, about us believing that we can send in one division in 1 year and bring peace to Bosnia for the 21st century, he said that he was responsible for surveying the crimes against humanity, being a monitor for what the Serbs did.
One morning he was on the roadside and had to go out and look at a slaughter. The Serbs had slaughtered Moslem children, they had slaughtered women, had slaughtered elderly people. As he was looking at, surveying the scene, a Serb came up to him and he said, well, it serves them right. And the U.N. general turned and said, it serves them right for what? And the Serb responded, it serves them right for what they did to us in 1473.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. In 1473.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. And then the general was silent for a moment, and he looked at the committee. A smile went across his face, and he said, and you Americans believe that you can send in one division for 1 year and make a difference? You are kidding yourselves. You had better stay out.
That comes from a man who had been there a lot longer than anybody in the administration and who understands it a lot better than anybody serving in this administration.
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Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say one thing, there is an old statement, ``Those that don't profit from history are destined to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.'' This administration in its foreign policy decisions has not looked at history. They do not have the underpinning, the background necessary to be making these decisions. Yet they are going right ahead, hell-bent for leather, making these decisions, putting our young people in harm's way.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. The irony is, I know this is sort of the electrified third realm, we do not want to get into it because he is our President, our Commander in Chief. I will just talk about the administration generally.
The irony is that the people that are sitting in this administration now are the same people 20 years ago, 30 years ago protesting the Vietnam war. Not only have they not learned from European history, they have not learned the lessons of Vietnam that they taught the country: that unless the American people are solidly behind a military action, and unless there is an immediate vital interest, we do not get involved in other people's civil wars.
I thought that is what the Vietnam protests were about. I thought that is what the President and many others in good conscience protested about during the Vietnam war, that this was not our war, that there was not a direct American interest, that America had to leave that civil war to Vietnam.
If they wanted to protest that 25, 30 years ago, I am not going to second-guess them or challenge them. That was their right. But why are these same people 30 yeas ago who were telling us that we cannot be policemen of the world and get involved in other people's conflicts, why are these same people, now that they are in charge 30 years later, asking us to do the same exact thing?
Mr. DORNAN. Try just 26 years ago, this very week. Clinton himself, ditching class at Oxford, left for Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Leningrad, 2\1/2\ days in Moscow, in Prague, on a tour to help secure victory for Hanoi. It had nothing to do with peace or ending the war in some sort of neutrality respecting the DMZ at the 17th parallel. It was to secure a victory for Hanoi.
Here is an article in the current Insight magazine, the one that has Newt on the cover. It says, ``McNamara met the enemy and it turned out to be him.'' On Bosnia, ``There is a chilling McNamara-like rhetoric'' coming from administration people. ``Perry's assertion,'' Secretary of defense Perry, ``is the same guff that McNamara tossed off during Vietnam.''
It says, ``Only industrial strength arrogance can account for Robert Strange McNamara's visit to Hanoi on Veterans Day. The former defense secretary at least is unchanging in the lack of sensibility that characterized his Pentagon tenure during the Vietnam War.''
This is the man, McNamara, that said that we cannot use college men in the Vietnam struggle; they are our future. Clinton told his draft board, ``I'm too educated to go.''
Now we have, just as you pointed out, Joe, the very same people making sure Clinton does not make any reference to Vietnam in his speeches about suffering, I am looking at my notes again from Monday night, he says 250,000 people have been killed. In Cambodia it was 2 million, 8 times that.
He says 2 million are on the road. They are alive. Because the road in the South China Sea meant sharks, pirates, and the death of 750,000 people, 68,000 who worked with us executed. And always the one order, the one order from Ho Chi Minh that they pursued even after he died in September 1969 was kill Americans.
Are they thinking that when Haitians that we talked about on the docks were jumping up and down and saying, ``We're going to give you Somalia,'' at the end of October, referring to the man who was killed on the 6th, Matt Rearson, they had a dud land at the feet, 5 feet away from a two-star General Garrison. He told me about it himself. The 18 Rangers and helicopter pilots and Delta commandos like Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, they are yelling about this on the docks of Haiti, 10, 12 days later, and turned around the Norton Sound.
Do you not think that these people in Sarajevo who have constant TV, CNN, probably watch some of our C-SPAN debates, are not aware that the key to get Clinton to bug out is Clinton's next words? ``We must expect casualties,'' he said.
Of all people, who is he to say that?
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say on the front page of the New York Times this week they quoted a gentleman from Sarajevo who lives, one of the 60,000 Bosnian Serbs that live around Sarajevo, and he said,
``What you're going to see is what you saw in Somalia when you saw that American dragged through the streets dead.''
Another lady who lives in one of those suburbs said, ``I'll kill myself and my kids before I'll let them take over my home and my property here.'' And those people are going to be coming back. I am telling you, when people say that they will even kill themselves and their kids, what do you think they are going to do to somebody else who tries to take their property?
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. If the gentleman will yield, once again drawing comparisons between Bosnia and Vietnam, I remember after the war was over listening to the words of the generals for North Vietnam. They said ``We knew we could not win the war in the jungles of Vietnam, but we knew we would win this war on the streets and the college campuses of America.''
Mr. DORNAN. In the Halls of the Congress.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. ``That is why we kept fighting.'' The same thing is going to happen now. That is why the Weinberger doctrine, which the gentlemen from California [Mr. Dornan] also worked on, that is why one of the key components was support from the American people. We have to have a campaign that Americans support. It is the President's responsibility to step forward and explain what the vital American interest is.
Let me just say this. I will tell you this. A lot of people will say,
``Well, why are you all talking about Bosnia in such strident terms,'' and I will tell you, this is my feeling. We have to do it now. It is our responsibility. Because once those young men and women get in Bosnia, at that point I shut my mouth, I follow the Commander in Chief. I will not do what Members of this Congress did in the 1960's and play politics with the lives of American troops.
So now is the time that we have to voice our opposition to this, because once the President makes that move, and I can only speak for myself, at that point I believe we as a country fall in line behind the Commander in Chief if he chooses to do that. But until that time comes, I think we need to point out that this is the most misguided foreign policy decision not only that this administration has made but any administration in this country has made since Vietnam. We have to do all we can to draw the line in the sand and tell the President, do not send young Americans.
I already have men and women from my district over there. I have NAS Pensacola, Eglin Air Force Base, Hobart Field. I have got a lot of other bases.
These are not just the military. It is not abstract terms. We are talking about men and women and the children of people I know, and also my own peers who have children that go to school with my 7-year-old boy in Pensacola, FL, talking about how their father is going to be going to Bosnia. We are talking about killing real people.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Human beings. Real people. The gentleman has said it very well. I do not think anybody could have said it better.
The fact of the matter is that I think everybody in this Chamber, once our troops are on the ground, are going to say, ``Hey, we didn't want them there. They shouldn't be there, but they're there and we're going to support our American young men and women who are over there to do a job.''
But the fact of the matter is, I will be supporting our troops, but I certainly will not be supporting this President and this policy that he has adopted because I think it is going to get a lot of them killed.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. What frightens me is this: The fact of the matter is that this has been a very emotional decision by this administration and it has been a decision based, I believe, on emotion.
Because I watch TV. I talked about my 7-year-old boy. I saw on ABC News several months back a young 7-year-old Muslim boy was blown off his bicycle, and the boy was screaming and crying, and it looked just like my son. He said, ``Please don't cut off my leg. Don't cut off my leg.'' And the ABC reporter said ``Well, the 7-year-old boy's leg was not cut off but he did die 3 hours later.''
That hit me, and I said I know what the President has to be saying at times. We have got to do something. We have got to stop the killing. That is what my immediate response is, and that is what a lot of Americans think.
But then you step back and you think through this process, and you are not run totally by emotion, and you say, ``Wait a second, it won't be young Bosnians that we are going to be seeing killed and TV 2 months from now, 3 months from now, if we go over there. It is going to be young Americans.''
We better make sure that it is a cause worth dying for, to make sure we do not repeat the same mistakes we made in Somalia, where we made an emotional decision to go over there. Then Americans were slaughtered, drug through the streets. Americans then made an emotional decision to bring them back. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not base it on emotion. Let us base it on sound foreign policy.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Let me just say one thing about Somalia. When President Bush sent our troops over there initially, it was to feed the hungry masses, and those people welcomed us with open arms and treated our troops very well. It was not until President Clinton made the decision to get into nation-building, which is what he is leading us into in Bosnia, that we started losing troops and ended up having to pull out of there and leaving that dictator Aideed back in power.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. This is what is so frightening. I have heard testimony again before the Committee on National Security and I actually had somebody with a straight face tell me, from the administration, that we needed to go into Bosnia to, quote, reknit the fabric of the Bosnian society, close quote.
That, my friend, is extremely frightening. It is extremely naive, and it is going to be young Americans' blood that will be spilled because of that naive view of geopolitical realities.
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, some of the members of the dynamic freshman class of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] have joined us.
I want to put one set of figures into the Record and make one comment, because Clinton at least heeded the warnings of this Congress not to put our men and women under the United Nations. I would ask people to please save their Reader's Digest. I will put this in the Record following our remarks, Dale Van Atta's article commissioned by Reader's Digest on ``The Folly of U.N. Peacekeeping.'' It begins thusly.
``Sonja's Kon-Tiki Cafe is a notorious Serbian watering hole 6 miles north of Sarajevo. While Serb soldiers perpetrated atrocities in all the Bosnian villages, local residents reported that U.N. peacekeepers,'' and it hurts me to read these names, ``from France, Ukraine, Canada, and New Zealand regularly visited Sonja's, drinking and eating with these very same soldiers'' committing the atrocities
``and sharing their women.''
However, the women of Sonja's Kon-Tiki Club were actually prisoners of the Serbs. These are Muslim and Croatian women.
``As one soldier, Borislav Herak, would later confess, he visited Sonja's several times a week, raping many of the 70 females present and killing two of them'' because he felt like it.
Then I go down to Haiti and I see white U.N. vehicles, this wonderful dream that grew out of the League of Nations in my father's war, see white U.N. vehicles lined up at the houses of prostitution in Haiti, and wondered why the United Nations is so disrespected. Well, here is what we are doing, and these figures come from the U.N. peacekeeping ops office up in New York.
At this time, when Clinton says we are going to pull back, we have 2,267 people in Haiti.
I did not know we had 30 in the western Sahara. The gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton] is the African expert. I did not know that. The part of Africa that Morocco has taken over. In Macedonia we have 494. When I was there it was 530.
We already have 3 in Bosnia, an advance team is arriving as we speak in Tuzla, where that rocket hit on August 28 when I was up in Zagreb, could not believe the imagery on the news that night. We have 361 already in Croatia. I do not know if that includes all the hospital people.
We have four in ex-Soviet Georgia. What kind of a Christmas are they going to have? We have 15 still on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, and 11 in Jerusalem. Grand total, 3,185.
And not spending Christmas with their families will be 17,000 support troops all around Bosnia that are there now, air power, sea power, airlift, sea lift, hospitals, intelligence, more than they know how to use, and Clinton has the gall to say we are pulling back and not helping, and we are going to close out this century with American kids dead in the tinderbox of the Balkans?
Let me share some time, and thank you for staying, Dan. I really appreciate it. My wife is calling me all day long, why are you discussing all these mundane things, when for the first time in American history a leader is saying not ``They will be home by Christmas'' but saying ``I think we can have them all in place by Christmas.'' The opposite of MacArthur, of Truman. I have never heard of such a thing in my life.
Here is the way I want to allocate some time. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left on my hour?
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Taylor of North Carolina). The gentleman has 13 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. Then let me share this, and let me cut it just a bit, then Steve Chabot of Ohio, I will give you 4 minutes, Steve, because Cynthia McKinney missed her opportunity, and I want all of her people in Georgia waiting for her special order to know she is still here and going to talk about the problem of gerrymandering in Georgia. But, Steve, I will give you 4 minutes, Mark Neumann 4 minutes, Sam Brownback 2 minutes, Mark Sanford of South Carolina 2 minutes, and Jack Metcalf 4 minutes, and that ought to do it. Then on to Cynthia.
I yield to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Chabot].
{time} 1730
Mr. CHABOT. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank the gentleman for using the French pronunciation of my name, which I do not hear very often. Thank you very much.
I have been listening to the arguments and points made by my colleagues here. I think they made some very good, some very persuasive arguments.
I would just like to reiterate some of the things they have made and make some new ones myself.
First, I think it is important for us to always remember that these people in that very, very dangerous area of the world have been fighting with each other for centuries now, for hundreds of years. They have been battling each other, and, unfortunately, our President is now talking about and pushing forward with a plan which will put young Americans, both men and women, on the ground in Bosnia right in the middle of that bloody mess. I am very concerned that, rather than fighting and shooting at each other, in the very near future they are going to be shooting at Americans, and I hope and I pray that I am wrong. But I am very concerned that many, many Americans are going to come back to the shores of this country in body bags.
There are many other dangers besides the snipers and rogue Serbs or rogue folks on either side lobbing mortars, mortar shells, artillery shells into our U.S. troops. There are 6 million mines in Bosnia. Many of those mines, nobody has a clue as to where they are at. People can be out on a routine patrol just walking down the street and could very easily set off a mine, could be mangled and mutilated or killed, and I am very concerned we are going to lost a lot of people to those very lethal instruments. That is the 6 million estimated mines there are throughout the Bosnian area.
In addition, I think we really have to recognize that, whereas the Serbs have certainly been the most aggressive and have performed the most atrocious acts and have killed the most innocent people, that none of the parties really have clean hands in this incident. The Moslems, the Bosnian Moslems, and the Croats have also allegedly committed a number of atrocities themselves. All three parties have done some very awful things in the past couple of years in that very, very dangerous part of the world. Certainly, the Serbs have been the worst.
In addition, the President is talking about our troops will be out in an estimated 1-year period of time. Again, go back to the point that these people have been fighting for hundreds of years now. How anyone can predict that our troops will have solved the problems over there, kept the peace and then pulled out in a year's period of time, I think that there is no way in the world that is going to happen. If our troops are pulled out, it is very likely that in a very short period of time the atrocities will start again, the fighting will start, and we are going to have the same type of chaos and death that we have over there now. So the 1-year period of time, I think, is a period of time that has been grabbed out of the air, and some would argue that it has to do with the fact that there is an election a year down the road. Who knows why the President picked 1 year.
But I do not think there is any way we are going to be able to go over there and then suddenly peace is going to break out in that very dangerous part of the world after we have been there for a 1-year period of time.
This is in Europe's backyard. It is very, very difficult for anybody to make the argument that this is in the vital interests of the United States. We have an interest to the extent that I think we think it was a good idea for the President to get the parties together. I think it is appropriate for us to play a role in getting people to talk about peace. I think we can play a role in supporting the Europeans through our air power, which we are able to project without great loss of life to American citizens. But I do not think that a legitimate argument can be made that it is necessary for U.S. troops to be at risk on the ground, and it does not take very long for anybody to pick out a couple of examples of the type of things which could very well happen in the very near future in that very dangerous part of the world.
Look what happened in Lebanon. You know, it was something as unsophisticated as a truck filled with explosives to blow up a building and kill over 200 United States Marines in Beirut, Lebanon. In Somalia we went in with the best of intentions to feed people, and then mission creep set in. The goal got expanded. We were trying to build democracies over there. We got in the middle of the warlords. Our helicopters got shot down. American lives were lost, and the bodies of young Americans were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
What we are trying to do here is to prevent the President from making a very, very tragic mistake. He certainly has not convinced me that this is in the vital interests of the United States to put United States troops on the ground in Bosnia. From the calls that I am receiving in my office every day, he certainly has not convinced the people of Cincinnati, the people that I represent, that this is the right action. The calls are overwhelmingly coming in that we should not put United States troops on the ground in Bosnia.
I have talked to many, many of my colleagues here on both sides of the aisle, both Democrats and Republicans, and the calls are coming in from people all over this country, ``Don't do it. Don't put United States troops on the ground in Bosnia.''
The President apparently is determined to move ahead with this venture. I think he is making a terrible mistake. I wish he would listen to Congress, and I wish he would listen to the American people and, please, prevent this tragedy from happening. We do not need to lose American lives in Bosnia. I beg the President to reconsider this effort that he seems to be determined to make. I think it is a very tragic event. I hope I am wrong. I hope and pray that my concerns are unfounded and things will go well.
But I am very, very concerned that I am right, and if that happens, we are going to have many, many Americans who lose their lives in that very dangerous part of the world.
Mr. DORNAN. I thank the gentleman for his excellent remarks. I yield to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf].
Mr. METCALF. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I just want to start out by saying this is under no circumstances a partisan issue. It makes no difference whatsoever and would not ever make a difference to me whether the President was Republican or Democrat on this kind of an issue.
I listened really carefully to President Clinton's' speech, and I re-
read the speech word for word just so I was certain what he said. The vital United States interests the President laid out in his speech were broad, universal interests and would apply to any trouble spot in the world. This is not satisfactory.
I have said since I ran for Congress that I would support committing American troops only if vital, specific U.S. interests were involved, and the interests that he gave were not.
Militarily, U.S. troops are not needed. Our own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that Europe can handle the military aspect themselves. European powers have direct interest in Bosnia, and they should step up to the plate on this. Britain and France have done so and will be part of the operation as it is planned.
You know, it is interesting, Germany had not pledged troops until today. I guess Germany remembers World War II, when they occupied that area for several years during World War II. They understand the problems there of an occupying nation, and it just seems to me that maybe their reason for not joining until today is that they understood better than we do some of the problems that are involved.
The President promised that the troops in Haiti would be home in a year. Remember? It has now been 16 months, and the troops are still there. Why should we believe that Bosnia is different?
One of the things that the President did say was he said he would provide a clear mission statement, a specific operational plan, what are the objectives, how will these troops accomplish the objectives, and what is the exit strategy. Thus far, and he said he would present that, and I assume that that is still coming. I am not being critical at all. We just do not have it yet. We certainly need it before we can make the judgment as to whether or not troops should be sent.
Also we do not have the money to engage this operation. That is another very critical factor. We fight and work very hard to cut $2 million here or $12 million there from the budget. The estimate of the cost of this is $2.1 billion at the present time. Judging from all previous estimates that I have seen, you should multiply it at least by 2, so we are talking about, I believe, close to a $4 billion cost. Remember, this is money that we do not have. This is money that will have to be borrowed if we move into Bosnia.
The idea of balancing the budget is absolutely critical, and there are circumstances certainly where we would go ahead and even if we had to borrow the money, but only if we are certain of what is going to happen, what is the vital U.S. interest that is involved, what is the plan to actually achieve the kind of peace we are looking for and set up the conditions by which we can exit.
Those are the points that I see, and we will try to have an open mind and watch what the President comes up with for these things.
As of now, from what I have seen, my vote would be an absolute
``no.'' I certainly hope and will do everything I can to see that we do get a vote on this in the House of Representatives.
I think the Senate should also vote on whether or not to authorize troops, ground troops in Bosnia.
Mr. DORNAN. I say to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf], I want to recommend a book to you on Mogadishu. On the cover is the picture of Durand's helicopter crew, the ones that were killed, Ray Frank, three full combat tours in Vietnam, big, handsome, blond David Cleveland, William, his mother called him David, the men called him William, like his father. He was one of the door gunners, and Tommy Fields, another door gunner. It is just called ``Mogadishu.'' It tells a story of a tragedy in the Clinton administration that he just put behind him.
Let me ask you something, I say to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf], there is a report from my district office today. The calls dropped to 100 for the first time. It is usually 200. Not a single person calling my district office, oh, they will call now, detractors and stuff. We are going to ignore their calls, and I have every right to be as tough as I want on this because I am the one who went to Mogadishu less than 10 days after the last man was killed there, to photograph this whole area. They are saying 100 calls a day in my office without one saying ``Go; we should go.''
How are they in your office from the great Pacific Northwest?
Mr. METCALF. Our calls are running more than 30 to 1 against sending troops to Bosnia, and there comes a time certainly that you should listen to the American people.
Mr. DORNAN. I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. Sanford].
Mr. SANFORD. I do not know how much more actually can be added between my colleague, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough], my colleague, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan], and the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton], go down the list, and therefore I mean you have touched on this idea of 200 American men, best-case scenario, dying. You have touched on the idea of spending $1.5 billion. You have touched on the idea we do not have a clearly defined exit strategy. You touched on the idea of 37,000 American boys being directly involved.
Mr. DORNAN. I have run out of time. We did not give you gentlemen enough heads-up over here.
The documents referred to are as follows:
The Folly of U.N. Peacekeeping
(By Dale Van Atta)
Sonja's Kon-Tiki cafe is a notorious Serbian watering hole six miles north of Sarajevo. While Serb soldiers perpetrated atrocities in nearby Bosnian villages, local residents reported that U.N. peacekeepers from France, Ukraine, Canada and New Zealand regularly visited Sonja's, drinking and eating with these very same soldiers--and sharing their women.
The women of Sonja's, however, were actually prisoners of the Serb soldiers. As one soldier, Borislav Herak, would later confess, he visited Sonja's several times a week, raping some of the 70 females present and killing two of them.
U.N. soldiers patronized Sonja's even after a Sarajevo newspaper reported where the women were coming from. Asked about this, a U.N. spokesman excused the incident by saying no one was assigned to read the newspaper.
The U.N. soldiers who frequented Sonja's also neglected to check out the neighborhood. Less than 200 feet away, a concentration camp held Bosnian Muslims in inhuman conditions. Of 800 inmates processed, 250 disappeared and are presumed dead.
Tragically, Sonja's Kon-Tiki illustrates much of what has plagued U.N. peacekeeping operations: incompetent commanders, undisciplined soldiers, alliances with aggressors, failure to prevent atrocities and at times even contributing to the horror. And the level of waste, fraud and abuse is overwhelming.
Until recently, the U.N. rarely intervened in conflicts. When it did, as in Cyprus during the 1960s and '70s, it had its share of success. But as the Cold War ended, the U.N. became the world's policeman, dedicated to nation building as well as peacekeeping. By the end of 1991, the U.N. was conducting 11 peacekeeping operations at an annual cost of
$480 million. In three years, the numbers rose to 18 operations and $3.3 billion--with U.S. taxpayers paying 31.7 percent of the bill.
Have the results justified the steep cost? Consider the U.N.'s top four peacekeeping missions:
bosnia
In June 1991, Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia and was recognized by the U.N. The Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army invaded Croatia, ostensibly to protect its Serbian minority. After the Serbs agreed to a cease-fire, the U.N. sent in a 14,000-member U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to build a new nation. (The mission has since mushroomed to more than 40,000 personnel, becoming the most extensive and expensive peacekeeping operation ever.)
After neighboring Bosnia declared its independence in March 1992, the Serbs launched a savage campaign of ``ethnic cleansing'' against the Muslims and Croats who made up 61 percent of the country's population. Rapidly the Serbs gained control of two-thirds of Bosnia, which they still hold.
Bosnian Serbs swept into Muslim and Croat villages and engaged in Europe's worst atrocities since the Nazi Holocaust. Serbian thugs raped at least 20,000 women and girls. In barbed-wire camps, men, women and children were tortured and starved to death. Girls as young as six were raped repeatedly while parents and siblings were forced to watch. In one case, three Muslim girls were chained to a fence, raped by Serb soldiers for three days, then drenched with gasoline and set on fire.
While this was happening, the UNPROFOR troops stood by and did nothing to help. Designated military ``observers'' counted artillery shells--and the dead.
Meanwhile, evidence began to accumulate that there was a serious corruption problem. Accounting procedures were so loose that the U.S. overpaid $1.8 million on a $21.8 million fuel contract. Kenyan peacekeepers stole 25,000 gallons of fuel worth $100,000 and sold it to the Serbs.
Corruption charges were routinely dismissed as unimportant by U.N. officials. Sylvana Foa, then spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, said it was no surprise that ``out of 14,000 pimply 18-year-olds, a bunch of them should get up to hanky-panky'' like black-market dealings and going to brothels.
When reports persisted, the U.N. finally investigated. In November 1993 a special commission confirmed that some terrible but ``limited'' misdeeds had occurred. Four Kenyan and 19 Ukrainian solders were dismissed from the U.N. force.
The commission found no wrong-doing at Sonja's Kon-Tiki, but its report, locked up at U.N. headquarters and never publicly released, is woefully incomplete. The Sonja's Kon-Tiki incidents were not fully investigated, for example, because the Serbs didn't allow U.N. investigators to visit the site, and the soldiers' daily logbooks had been destroyed.
Meanwhile, Russian troop commanders have collaborated with the Serb aggressors. According to U.N. personnel at the scene, Russian battalion commander Col. Viktor Loginov and senior officer Col. Aleksandr Khromchenkov frequented lavish feasts hosted by a Serbian warlord known as ``Arkan,'' widely regarded as one of the worst perpetrators of atrocities. It was also common knowledge that Russian officers directed U.N. tankers to unload gas at Arkan's barracks. During one cease-fire, when Serbian materiel was locked in a U.N. storage area, a Russian apparently gave the keys to the Serbs, who removed 51 tanks.
Eventually, Khromchenkov was repatriated. Loginov, after finishing his tour of duty, joined Arkan's Serbian forces.
Problems remained, however, under the leadership of another Russian commander, Maj. Gen. Aleksandr Perelyakin. Belgian troops had been blocking the movement of Serb troops across a bridge in northeastern Croatia, as required by U.N. Security Council resolutions. Perelyakin ordered the Belgians to stand aside. Reluctantly they did so, permitting one of the largest movements of Serbian troops and equipment into the region since the 1991 cease-fire.
According to internal U.N. reports, the U.N. spent eight months quietly trying to pressure Moscow to pull Perelyakin back, but the Russians refused. The U.N. finally dismissed him last April.
cambodia
In 1991, the United States, China and the Soviet Union helped broker a peace treaty among three Cambodian guerrilla factions and the Vietnamese-installed Cambodian government, ending 21 years of civil war. To ease the transition to Cambodia's first democratic government, the U.N. created the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). In less than two years, about 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers and other personnel were dispatched at a cost of $1.9 billion.
Some of the Cambodian ``peacekeepers'' proved to be unwelcome guests--especially a Bulgarian battalion dubbed the
``Vulgarians.'' In northwest Cambodia, three Bulgarian soldiers were killed for ``meddling'' with local girls. One Bulgarian was treated for 17 different cases of VD. The troops' frequent carousing once sparked a mortar-rifle battle with Cambodian soldiers at a brothel.
The Bulgarians were not the sole miscreants in Cambodia, as internal U.N. audits later showed. Requests from Phnom Penh included 6500 flak jackets--and 300,000 condoms. In the year after the U.N. peacekeepers arrived, the number of prostitutes in Phnom Penh more than tripled.
U.N. mission chief Yasushi Akashi waved off Cambodian complaints with a remark that ``18-year-old hot-blooded soldiers'' had the right to enjoy themselves, drink a few beers and chase ``young beautiful beings.'' He did post an order: ``Please do not park your U.N. vans near the nightclubs'' (i.e., whorehouses). At least 150 U.N. peacekeepers contracted AIDS in Cambodia; 5000 of the troops came down with VD.
Meanwhile, more than 1000 generators were ordered, at least 330 of which, worth nearly $3.2 million, were never used for the mission. When U.N. personnel started spending the $234.5 million budgeted for ``premises and accommodation,'' rental costs became so inflated that natives could barely afford to live in their own country. Some $80 million was spent buying vehicles, including hundreds of surplus motorcycles and minibuses. When 100 12-seater minibuses were needed, 850 were purchased--an ``administrative error,'' UNTAC explained, that cost $8.3 million.
Despite the excesses, the U.N. points with pride to the free election that UNTAC sponsored in May 1993. Ninety percent of Cambodia's 4.7 million eligible voters defied death threats from guerrilla groups and went to the polls.
Unfortunately, the election results have been subverted by the continued rule of the Cambodian People's Party--the Vietnamese-installed Communist government, which lost at the ballot box. In addition, the Khmer Rouge--the guerrilla group that butchered more than a million countrymen in the 1970s--have refused to disarm and demobilize. So it was predictable that they would repeatedly break the ceasefire and keep up their killing. The U.N. has spent nearly $2 billion, but there is no peace in Cambodia.
somalia
When civil war broke out in this African nation, the resulting anarchy threatened 4.5 million Somalis--over half the population--with severe malnutrition and related diseases. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali, the first African (and Arab) to hold the position, argued eloquently for a U.N. peacekeeping mission to ensure safe delivery of food and emergency supplies. The U.N. Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) was deployed to Mogadishu, the capital, in September 1992. It was quickly pinned down at the airport by Somali militiamen and was unable to complete its mission.
A U.S. task force deployed in December secured the Mogadishu area, getting supplies to the hungry and ill. After the Americans left, the U.N. took over in May 1993 with UNOSOM II. The $2-million-a-day operation turned the former U.S. embassy complex into an 80-acre walled city boasting air-conditioned housing and a golf course. When U.N. officials ventured out of the compound, their ``taxis'' were helicopters that cost $500,000 a week.
The published commercial rate for Mogadishu-U.S. phone calls was $4.91 a minute, but the ``special U.N. discount rate'' was $8.41. Unauthorized personal calls totaled more than $2 million, but the U.N. simply picked up the tab and never asked the callers to pay.
Meanwhile, the peacekeeping effort disintegrated, particularly as warlord Mohammed Aidid harassed UNOSOM II troops. As the civil war continued, Somalis starved. But U.N. peacekeepers--on a food budget of $56 million a year--dined on fruit from South America, beef from Australia from frozen fish from New Zealand and the Netherlands.
Thousands of yards of barbed wire arrived with no barbs; hundreds of light fixtures to illuminate the streets abutting the compound had no sockets for light bulbs. What procurement didn't waste, pilferage often took care of. Peacekeeping vehicles disappeared with regularity, and Egyptian U.N. troops were suspected of large scale black-marketing of minibuses.
These losses, however, were eclipsed in a single night by an enterprising thief who broke into a U.N. office in Mogadishu and made off with $3.9 million in cash. The office door was easy pickings: its lock could be jimmied with a credit card. The money, stored in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, had been easily visible to dozens of U.N. employees.
While the case has not been solved, one administrator was dismissed and two others were disciplined. Last summer, UNOSOM II itself was shut down, leaving Somalia to the same clan warfare that existed when U.N. troops were first deployed two years before.
RWANDA
Since achieving independence in 1962, Rwanda has erupted in violence between the majority Hutu tribe and minority Tutsis. The U.N. had a peacekeeping mission in that nation, but it fled as the Hutus launched a new bloodbath in April 1994.
Only 270 U.N. troops stayed behind, not enough to prevent the butchery of at least 14 local Red Cross workers left exposed by the peacekeepers' swift flight. The U.N. Security Council dawdled as the dead piled up, and a daily horror of shooting, stabbings and machete hackings. The Hutus were finally driven out by a Tutsi rebel army in late summer 1994.
Seven U.N. agencies and more than 100 international relief agencies rushed back. With a budget of some $200 million, the U.N. tried unsuccessfully to provide security over Hutu refugee camps in Rwanda and aid to camps in neighboring Zaire.
The relief effort was soon corrupted when the U.N. let the very murderers who'd massacred a half million people take over the camps. Rather than seeking their arrest and prosecution, the U.N. made deals with the Hutu thugs, who parlayed U.N. food, drugs and other supplies into millions of dollars on the black market.
Earlier this year the U.N. began to pull out of the camps. On April 22 at the Kibeho camp in Rwanda, the Tutsi-led military opened fire on Hutu crowds. Some 2000 Hutus were massacred.
Where was the U.N.? Overwhelmed by the presence of nearly 2000 Tutsi soldiers, the 200 U.N. peacekeepers did nothing. A U.N. spokesman told Reader's Digest, meekly, that the U.N. was on the scene after the slaughter for cleanup and body burial.
With peacekeeping operations now costing over $3 billion a year, reform is long overdue. Financial accountability can be established only by limiting control by the Secretariat, which routinely withholds information about peacekeeping operations until the last minute--too late for the U.N.'s budgetary committee to exercise oversight.
In December 1993, for example, when the budget committee was given one day to approve a $600-million budget that would extend peacekeeping efforts into 1994, U.S. representative Michael Michalski lodged an official protest: ``If U.S. government employees approved a budget for a similar amount with as little information as has been provided to the committee, they would likely be thrown in jail.''
More fundamentally, the U.N. needs to re-examine its whole peacekeeping approach, for the experiment in nation building has been bloody and full of failure. Lofty ideas to bring peace everywhere in the world have run aground on reality: member states with competing interests in warring territories, the impossibility of lightly armed troops keeping at bay belligerent enemies, and the folly of moving into places without setting achievable goals.
``It has been a fundamental error to put U.N. peacekeepers in place where there is no peace to keep,'' says Sen. Sam Nunn (D., Ga.), ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. ``We've seen very vividly that the U.N. is not equipped, organized or financed to intervene and fight wars.''
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Our Pilots are Prisoners of the Serbs
(Translated by David Skelly)
Two tiny points in an incandescent sky. These images have been holding us in cruel suspense for nearly a month. The two points are two French officers, a captain pilot and a lieutenant navigator, shot down on August 30 in their Mirage 2000-K2, almost directly above Pale, the capital of the Bosnian Serbs, during the first NATO raid. Three exfiltration missions according to the CSAR (combat, search and rescue procedure), which had succeeded in rescuing Captain O'Grady, failed. The Serbs have confirmed that they are holding two men alive, but no one, not even the Red Cross envoys has actually seen them. These photos reached us from Pale. Here are the faces of the two prisoners whom France has been anxiously waiting to see. The first scenes of their captivity.
Peasants turned the lieutenant over to the `special forces commandos'.
Being helped to walk by two Serbs from their special forces, Lieutenant Jose Souvignet seems to be suffering from a leg wound. Peasants turned the two airmen over to the
``specijali,'' who have been hiding them from the whole world ever since.
The captain, Frederique Chiffot, snarls at his guards.
Contrary to what happened with the American pilot, ours were brought down in broad daylight, above a mountain in an area with a high density of Serbian soldiers. Militiamen in the city of Pale were able to be there when they came down, and so it was impossible for the Frenchmen to escape. As soon as they hit ground they were captured and stripped of their warning, location, and survival equipment. Since these unique photos were taken, probably very shortly after their capture
(in the foreground, a militiaman is still holding their helmets), they have probably been moved from their place of captivity, making it very difficult to exfiltrate them.
According to rare Serbian information, it was thought that only Lieutenant Jose Souvignet had a leg wound. But here, Captain Frederique Chiffot, grimacing at the camera, also seems to be supported by members of the militia.
Three attempts already: NATO is doing everything possible to free them.
From September 5th to the 8th, three times over, NATO commandos have flown off in search of the two Frenchmen. These very complicated missions make use of airplanes and helicopters which have taken off from different bases, from Italian territory or the aircraft carrier ``Theodore Roosevelt.'' On board this ship, the Admiral Smith's general staff is coordinating, second by second, the delicate precision engineering of this warriors' ballet. The first attempt was completely American, but the weather was not on our side. The second and third attempts were French and American. Only the latter enabled the commandos to set down on a meadow near Pale. In vain. They had to withdraw under fire from the Serbs before having found the prisoners. When they were taken back up in the helicopter, two had been wounded.
In the control room of the ``Theodore Roosevelt'' operations are being followed in real time. It was in an identical Mirage 2000 that the two pilots were brought down. Photos of the debris from the crash were widely disseminated in the press by the Serbs.
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