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“SERBIAN PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC HAS A LONG HISTORY OF BRUTALITY AND ETHNIC CLEANSING” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2924-H2926 on May 10, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SERBIAN PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC HAS A LONG HISTORY OF BRUTALITY AND ETHNIC
CLEANSING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) is recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, although I would not have taken the actions of the Clinton administration, which has led us where we are today in the Balkans, the question has now become, we are here; now what do we do?
I want to rise today to set forth my concerns and my thoughts on America's response to the terrible things that have taken place in the Balkans. I, of course, address my remarks to everybody in the Congress but especially to my Republican colleagues here in the Congress.
Last Thursday afternoon, May 6, while listening to the debate on the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, I was struck by two notions. The first was that some in the House apparently believe that the U.S. and NATO can negotiate and then continue to coexist with Serbian President Milosevic as though the terrible, brutal, and criminal acts inflicted upon the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as daily fare did not even take place. The second notion is that many are acting as if this Balkan conflict just got under way or began a short 8 weeks ago.
I am convinced that neither of these are true. So are many, many others. In fact, Milosevic's bloody pursuit of ethnic cleansing began in 1991 with the military assault on Vukovar, Croatia, near the Serbian border. This assault signaled an ethnic cleansing, and I might say there were mass graves found outside Vukovar once the West was able to get there of many, many people who have been killed as a result of Milosevic's effort to take Vukovar. This assault signaled an ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina that lasted for years under the benign eye of the United Nations and casual disinterest of much of the free world.
By the time the world could no longer look the other way, about a quarter of a million, 250,000, people were killed, and almost 2 million more were homeless and displaced refugees.
Kosovo is only the latest chapter in this dark history. Most of the nearly 2 million ethnic Albanian population are now homeless and on the run within Kosovo or are refugees languishing in camps outside the border. Most have hopes of someday returning. But to what? To homes that no longer exist and towns and villages that are largely destroyed and to families which have been brutalized and torn apart and with many killed or missing?
There seems to be a mood that we can ignore these hard facts of what actually is taking place, that we can negotiate an honorable truce with Milosevic where people can go home and everything can be nice. But this is a fantasy. More, it is a dangerous fantasy.
The world simply cannot ignore the fact that Milosevic and many others in his employ are war criminals. They meet the test by any historical yardstick one could use to measure them. As long as he is in power, it will not be possible to have a lasting peace in the Balkans.
Let me paraphrase two experts from Peter Maass' book, ``Love Thy Neighbor, A Story of War''. Maass, writing about war crime indictments, relates accounts so horrifically graphic that I cannot read them verbatim but will include them for the Record.
In one account he says that the Serb forces put the gun up against a father's head and tells the father to rape your daughter. The father says, no, I cannot do that. Then he puts the gun up to the daughter's head and says to the father, now rape your daughter. The father says, oh, no.
Then, according to the account, and I will not go any further, but I now would have like to have Peter Maass' account of what took place, beginning on page 51.
Then on page 53 he goes on to tell of other atrocities and brutalities that are so graphic that I will not read them on the floor of the House but will insert them whereby they will appear in the Record at this very, very point.
Beginning on page 51 while writing about war criminal activity, Maass says: ``You can, for example, barge into a house and put a gun to a father's head and tell him that you will pull the trigger unless he rapes his daughter or at least simulates the rape. (I heard of such things in Bosnia.) The father will refuse and say I will die before doing that. You shrug your shoulders and reply, Okay, old man, I won't shoot you, but I will shoot your daughter. What does the father do now, dear reader? He pleads, he begs, but then you the man with the gun, put the gun to the daughter's head, you pull back the hammer and you shout Now! Do it! Or I shoot! The father starts weeping, yet slowly he unties his belt, moving like a dazed zombie, he can't believe what he must do. You laugh and say, That's right, old man, pull down those pants, pull up your daughter's dress, and do it!''
Continuing on page 53: ``Three days after her arrival at the prison, she went with a huge number of women and other girls to fetch water from a well about 50 meters from the prison gates. Returning from the well Trnopolje guards held back six girls, including the witness, and stopped them from reentering the prison gates. They were then joined by four more female prisoners. The guards took the 10 girls to a house across the meadow. They were taken to the side yard of the house, out of sight of the roadway. Thirty Serbian soldiers--including ``some dressed like a tank crew''--were there and they taunted the girls, calling them ``Turkish whores.'' The girls were ordered to undress or have their clothes pulled off. Three girls resisted or hesitated from their fear. Their clothes were cut off with knives.
The Serbian soldiers told the naked girls to parade slowly in a circle. The men sat outside the circle--smoking, drinking and calling out foul names. The witness estimates the ``parade'' lasted about 15 minutes. Three soldiers took one girl--one to rape her while the two others held her down. The three men took turns. A soldier approached the witness and mocked her, saying he had seen her before. Though she did not recognize him, he pulled out a photo of the witness with her 19-year-old Muslim boyfriend, whom he cursed for being in the Bosnian Territorial Defense Forces. The man with the photograph raped her first. The witness said she fought and pulled his hair, but he bit her and hit her face. Her lips bled. He hit her hard with the butt of his gun on her cheek, causing extreme pain. Another rapist ran the blade of his knife across her breasts as if to slice the skin off, leaving bleeding scratches. After that, she was raped by eight more men before losing consciousness.''
Keeping those atrocities and brutalities in mind, and some want to resume normal relations with an individual who allowed these atrocities to take place, an individual who continues to allow them to take place today, even today right now in Kosovo, once people know about these things, once the depth and breadth of Milosevic's brutality sinks in, no one can entertain the idea of normal relations or pursue a no-fault peace with him.
Last week, in the Wall Street Journal, last Thursday, which I include for the Record, Margaret Thatcher wrote of the thousands of slaughtered in unmarked graves around Srebrenica, Bosnia, victims of, and I quote,
``depravities of human wickedness, what depths of human degradation, those endless columns of refugees have fled. Mass rape, mass graves, death camps, historic communities wiped out by ethnic cleansing, these are the monuments to Milosevic's triumphs.''
During the fighting in Bosnia, I had an opportunity with one of my staff to visit a Serb-run POW camp, and it was very, very brutal, if you could see the way the Muslims were being treated in that camp.
Margaret Thatcher went on to write that appeasement has failed in the 1990s as it failed in the 1930s. I believe she is right, just as I believe she is right when she goes on to write that it would be both cruel and stupid to expect the Albanian Kosovars to now return home and live under any form of Serbian rule.
Also in Sunday's New York Times, which I include for the Record, Blaine Harden writes about the dangers of allowing Milosevic to retreat from Kosovo with his dictatorship intact. Harden predicts that if the pattern holds, Milosevic will continue to inflame Serbs and preserve his power by reassuring them that they are the victims, as he is doing today in Kosovo and as he did earlier in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina.
I am going to insert the entire Blaine Harden article from Sunday's New York Times in the Record, and I would urge all of my colleagues to read his record. Blaine harden had covered the war in Sarajevo and Bosnia and many other places throughout the early and mid 1990s for the Washington Post. I think he writes with a lot of wisdom.
As I listened to last Thursday's debate and as I read and watched the TV talk shows, Milosevic hopefully will not pull it off. He could, however, unless we recognize Milosevic for what he is, a war criminal of the highest order.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record articles I referred to as follows:
The West Must Answer Evil With Strength
(By Margaret Thatcher)
Last September I went to Vukovar, Croatia, a city destroyed and its inhabitants butchered by the soldiers of Slobodan Milosevic. The place still smells of death, the widows weep, and the ruins gape. Around Srebrenica, Bosnia, where neither I nor many other Westerners have gone, the bodies of thousands of slaughtered victims still lie in unmarked graves. In Kosovo, we can only image what depravities of human wickedness, what depths of human degradation, those endless columns of refugees have fled. Mass rape, mass graves, death camps, historic communities wiped out by ethnic cleansing--these are the monuments to Milosevic's triumphs.
They are also the result of eight long years of Western weakness. When will Western leaders ever learn?
Appeasement has failed in the 1990s, as it failed in the
'30s. Then, there were always politicians to argue that the madness of Nazism could be contained. Likewise, there has never been a lack of politicians and diplomats willing to collaborate with Milosevic's Serbia. In both cases, the tyrant carefully laid his snares, and naive negotiators obligingly fell into them. For eight years I have called for Serbia to be stopped. Even after the massacre of Srebrenica I was told that my calls for military actions were mere
``emotional nonsense.''
There were good reasons for taking action early. The West could have stopped Milosevic in Slovenia or Croatia in 1991, or in Bosnia in 1992. But instead we deprived his opponents of the means to arm themselves, thus allowing his aggression to prosper. Even in 1995, when at last a combination of air strikes and well-armed Croat and Muslim ground forces broke the power of the Bosnian Serb aggressors, we intervened to halt their advance into Serb-controlled Banja Luka.
Western political leaders believed that the butcher of Belgrade could be a force for stability. So here we are now, fighting a war eight years too late, on treacherous terrain, so far without much effective local support, with imperfect intelligence and with war aims that some find unclear and unpersuasive.
But with all that said--and it must be said, so that the lessons are well and truly learned--let there be no doubt: This war must be won.
I understand the unease many people feel about the way in which the operation began. But those who agonize over whether what is happening in Kosovo today is important enough to justify military intervention, gravely underestimate the consequences of doing nothing. There is always method in Milosevic's madness. He is a master at using tides of refugees to destabilize his neighbors and weaken his opponents. This we simply cannot allow. The surrounding countries can't absorb two million Albanian refugees without provoking a new spiral of violent disintegration, possibly involving NATO members.
But the overriding justification for military action is quite simply the nature of the enemy we face. We are not dealing with some minor thug whose local brutalities may offend our sensibilities from time to time. Milosevic's regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represent something altogether different--a truly monstrous evil, one that cannot be merely checked or contained, one that must be totally defeated.
When that has been done, we need to learn the lessons of what has happened and of the warnings that were given but ignored. But there has already been too much media speculation about targets and tactics, and some shameful and demoralizing commentary that can only help the enemy. So I shall say nothing of detailed tactics.
But two things more I must say. First, about our fundamental aims. It would be both cruel and stupid to expect the Albanian Kosovans now to return to live under any form of Serbian rule. Kosovo must be given independence, initially under the international protection. And there must be no partition. Partition would only serve to reward violence and ethnic cleansing. It would be to concede defeat. And I am unmoved to Serb pleas to retain their grasp on most of Kosovo because it contains their holy places. Coming from those who systematically leveled mosques and Catholic churches wherever they went, such an argument is cynical almost to the point of blasphemy.
Second, about the general conduct of the war. There are, in the end, no humanitarian wars. War is serious and it is deadly. Casualties, including civilian casualties, are to be expected. Trying to fight a war with one hand tied behind your back is the way to lose it. We always regret the loss of lives. But we should have no doubt that it is the men of evil, not our troops or pilots, who bear the guilt.
The goal of war is victory. And the only victory worth having now is one that prevents Serbia from ever again having the means to attack its neighbors and terrorize its non-Serb inhabitants. That will require the destruction of Serbia's political will, the destruction of its war machine and all the infrastructure on which these depend. We must be prepared to cope with all the changing demands of war--including, if it is required, the deployment of ground troops. And we must expect a long haul until the job is done.
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What It Would Take To Cleanse Serbia
(By Blaine Harden)
Along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, Kosovo is merely the hideous Now. There was a Before--in Croatia and Bosnia. Assuming that Mr. Milosevic retreats from Kosovo with his dictatorship intact, as now seems likely, Balkans experts foresee an unspeakable After.
It may feature: Fratricidal civil war in Montenegro. Ethnic cleansing of Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. Mass murder of Muslims in the Sandzak region of Serbia. No need, for the moment, to bother about the location or correct pronunciation of these obscure places. The world will likely learn. Just as it learned where Kosovo is--or was--before more than 700,000 human beings were chased from their homes in a systematic military campaign of burning and intimidation, theft and murder.
If the pattern holds, Mr. Milosevic will soldier on, using Big Lie manipulation of television to tap into a collective soft spot in the Serbian psyche. Even as legions of non-Serbs are dispossessed or killed, he will continue to inflame the Serbs and preserve his power by reassuring them that, yes, they are the victims.
Given the character of Mr. Milosevic's regime and knowing that there is almost certainly more horror to come, a bold, if impractical, question is just now beginning to be formulated. Is it finally time for outside powers to make the effort necessary to cure a national psychosis inside Serbia that has been destabilizing a corner of Europe for a decade? Put another way, has the time come for NATO to do in Serbia what the Allies did in Germany and Japan after World War II?
To follow that model, Serbia's military would have to be destroyed, and Mr. Milosevic crushed, by an invasion that almost certainly would cost the lives of hundreds of American soldiers. After unconditional surrender, the political, social and economic fabric of Serbia would be remade under outside supervision so that the Serbs could take their place in a prosperous and democratic world.
The question cuts three ways. Will it happen? Should it happen? Could it possibly work?
The answer to the first part of this question, at least for the foreseeable future, is a resounding No Way. The other answers, however, are provocative enough to make it worthwhile to suspend disbelief and indulge the fantasy of a post-Milosevic Balkans.
Let's start, though, with the real world. Policy makers and long-time students of the West's slow-motion intervention in Yugoslavia during the 1990's see no possibility of Mr. Milosevic's military defeat or of Serbia's occupation.
An agreement last week between the West and Russia outlined the kind of solution the outside powers would seek instead--a withdrawal from Kosovo of the Yugoslav Army, policy and paramilitary fighters, with an international security force to replace them. Details of the deal are still being argued over, but one thing was clear: If the outside powers can get him to sign on, Mr. Milosevic would remain in power in his shrinking Yugoslavia. Thus, he would have the opportunity to ``cleanse'' another day. The West's calculation seems to be that avoiding a land war, keeping NATO tegether and cementing relations with Russia outweigh the long-term costs of letting Mr. Milosevic off the hook.
That, then, is the real world.
Such a course does nothing, of course, to eradicate extreme Serb nationalism.
The only way to stamp out the desease, protect Serbian's minorities and bring lasting peace to the Balkans ins a Japan- or Germany-style occupation of Serbia, according to Daniel Serwer, who until two years ago was the director of European intelligence and research for the State Department. Mr. Serwer concedes that occupation has never been on the West's list of serious options, but he echoes many experts on the Balkans when he argues that it should be.
``It is very hard to see how Serbia undergoes this process all on its own,'' said Mr. Serwer, now a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a research group in Washington. ``This regime is deeply rooted. It is not like some dictatorship that you take off its head and it will die. It is so corrupt and the corruption is not superficial.''
Daniel Johah Goldhagen, a Harvard historian who wrote
``Hitler's Willing Executions: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' published a kind of manifesto last week that demands Serbia ``be placed in receivership.''
``Serbia's deeds are, in this essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale,'' Mr. Goldhgen wrote in The New Republic. ``Milosevic is not Hitler, but he is a genocidal killer who has caused the murders of many tens of thousands of people.''
It is worth remembering, though, that Mr. Milosevic is an elected leader, having won three elections that were more or less fair. That, along with the Serb leader's soaring popularity in the wake of NATO bombing, support an argument that what ails Serbia goes far deeper than one man.
No one makes this argument more powerfully than Sonja Biserko, director of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and a former senior advisor in the European department of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. Ms. Biserko, who fled Belgrade a week after the NATO bombings began, said in New York last week that Serbia's fundamental problem is not Mr. Milosevic, but a ``moral devastation'' that has infected her nation.
``People in Serbia wer undergoing a mass denial of the barbarity of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,'' Ms. Biserko said. ``The denial is itself commensurate to the crime taking place before the eyes of the world.''
Ms. Biserko, who met 10 days ago with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and urged her to consider occupation, believes that Serbia's opposition politicians are incapable now of coming to grips with a culture victimhood. ``Serbs have managed now with the NATO bombing to convince themselves they are victims and as victims they cannot be responsible for what happened in Kosovo,'' she said.
A surreal sense of victimhood in Serbia is nothing new. During the seige of Saragevo, when Serb forces ringed the city with artillery and routinely killed its civilians, Belgrade television reported that Bosnian Muslims were laying siege to themselves. ``The Serbs continue to defend their centuries-old hills about Sarajevo,'' and Radio-Television Serbia.
To shatter this Looking Glass victimhood, Ms. Biserko offers a prescription: Indictment of Mr. Milosevic by the War Crimes Tribunal. A military defeat of Serbia and demilitariazation of the country. Highly publicized trials that will force Serbs to confront the savagery committed in their name. A Western takeover of the mass media, with strict prohibitions against the dissemination of extreme Serb nationalism. A Marshall Plan for the Balkans.
Asked why the West should be willing to undertake an occupation that would risk many lives, cost billions and take years, Ms. Biserko shrugged: ``What other choice is there?''
``The Western world has lost its political instinct,'' she said. ``To bring substance to the ideals of human rights, at some point you must be willing to commit troops.''
But could the occupation of Serbia work? Could it break the cycle of violence? Two prominent historians believe it could, if done properly.
``The key in Japan was unconditional surrender,'' said John W. Dower, a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of ``Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.'' ``The Americans went in and they did everything. They had a major land reform. They abolished the military, simply got rid of it. They drafted a new constitution. This is what you can do when you have unconditional surrender.''
Mr. Dower was struck by the eagerness with which a defeated people welcomed reform. ``In Japan the average person was really sick of war and I think that would be the case in Yugoslavia,'' he said. ``The Americans cracked open a repressive military system and the people filled the space.''
The occupation of Germany also suggests ways of dealing with Yugoslavia, according to Thomas Alan Schwartz, a historian at Vanderbilt and author of ``America's Germany.''
``When Germany was totally defeated, it provided opportunity,'' he said. ``You could be physically there, controlling the flow of information and using war-crime trials to show the Germans that atrocities were done in their name.''
Without something similar in Serbia, Mr. Schwartz said,
``We can look forward to more trouble in Serbia.
``What reminds me of Germany is the comparison to the end of World War I,'' he added. ``Then, the Germans had this powerful sense of being victims. There was a deep resentment that Hitler was able to exploit. It will be the same in Serbia when NATO bombing stops.''
The Japan and German analogies, of course, are flawed. Those major-league powers ravaged a part of the world that America cared about. Occupation was nothing less than emergency triage for the worst violence in history.
Mr. Milosevic, by comparison, is small potatoes. He leads a minor-league country that periodically lays waste to poor, unpronounceable, strategically irrelevant places. Pristina is not Paris.
There is, though, an inkling that the West has begun to try for a solution. In Bosnia, 32,000 NATO-led troops and High Commissioner Carlos Westendorp are even now doing the hard, slow, complex work of healing that country.
Mr. Westendorp has not attempted a Japan-style remake of the Serb-populated half of Bosnia (just as nobody has tried to do that in neighboring Croatia, with its own accomplishments in ethnic cleansing). The indicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have not been hunted down. Radical Serb parties have not been banned. But tough action is being taken. Mr. Westendorp ordered radical Serb nationalists out of state television. He has fired the nationalist zealot who was elected the Bosnian Serbs' president. If Serbs violently object to what the peacekeepers do, NATO-led forces shoot to kill.
In a recent interview in Sarajevo, Mr. Westendorp said most Bosnian Serbs are cooperating because they are sick of war. It will take time, he said, but the West has enough money and muscle in Bosnia to extinguish the will to war. The one insoluble problem, he said, was the leader in Belgrade.
``If getting rid of Milosevic fails,'' he said, ``then everything fails.''
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