The New York Times

April 2, 1999

CRISIS IN THE BALKANS:

Clinton's Speech on Kosovo: 'We Also Act to Prevent a Wider War'

ORFOLK, Va. -- Following are excerpts from an address Thursday by President Clinton at the Norfolk Naval Air Station, provided by Federal News Service, a private transcription company:

Since the cold war ended, we have asked more and more of our armed forces, from the Persian Gulf to Korea, to Central America, to Africa; today, to stand with our allies in NATO against the unspeakable brutality in Kosovo. Now, we all know that yesterday, three Army infantrymen were seized as they were carrying out a peaceful mission in Macedonia, protecting that country from the violence in neighboring Kosovo.

There was absolutely no basis for them to be taken. There is no basis for them to be held. There is certainly no basis for them to be tried. All Americans are concerned about their welfare.

President Milosevic should make no mistake: The United States takes care of its own. And President Milosevic should make no mistake: We will hold him and his Government responsible for their safety and for their well-being.

But I ask you also to resolve that we will continue to carry out our mission with determination and resolve.

Altogether now more than half a million Kosovars have been pushed from their homes since the conflict began. They are arriving at the borders of the country shaken by what they have seen and been through.

Had we not acted, the Serbian offensive would have been carried out with impunity. We are determined that it will carry a very high price, indeed. We also act to prevent a wider war. If you saw my address to the country the other night and the maps that I showed, you know that Kosovo is a very small place. But it sits right at the dividing line of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the dividing line between Islam and Christianity, close to our Turkish and Greek allies to the south, our new allies Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the north, surrounded by small and struggling democracies that easily could be overwhelmed by the flood of refugees Mr. Milosevic is creating.

Already Macedonia is so threatened. Already Serbian forces have made forays into Albania, which borders Kosovo. If we were to do nothing, eventually our allies and then the United States would be drawn into a larger conflict, at far-greater risks to our people and far-greater costs.

Now, we can't respond to every tragedy in every corner of the world, but just because we can't do everything for everyone doesn't mean that, for the sake of consistency, we should do nothing for no one.

Remember now, these atrocities are happening at the doorstep of NATO, which has preserved the security of Europe for 50 years because of the alliance between the United States and our allies. They are happening in violation of specific commitments Mr. Milosevic gave to us, to our NATO allies, to other European countries and to Russia. They are happening to people who embrace peace and promise to lay down their own arms. They put their trust in us, and we can't let them down.

Our objective is to restore the Kosovars to their homes with security and self-government. Our bombing campaign is designed to exact an unacceptably high price for Mr. Milosevic's present policy of repression. . . .

For 10 years and more now a dictator has sought to make himself powerful by convincing the largest group, the Serbs, that the only way they can amount to anything is to uproot, disrupt, destroy, and kill other people, who don't have the same means of destruction, no matter what the consequences are to everybody around them, no matter how many innocent children and their parents die, no matter how much it disrupts other countries. Why? Because they want power, and they want to base it on the kind of ethnic and religious hatred that is bedeviling the whole world today. You can see it in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland. You can see it in the tribal wars in Africa. You can see that it is one of the dominant problems the whole world faces. And this is right in the underbelly of Europe.

We have to decide whether we are going to take a stand with our NATO allies and whether we are prepared to pay the price of time to make him pay the price of aggression and murder. Are we, in the last year of the 20th century, going to look the other way as entire peoples in Europe are forced to abandon their homelands or die, or are we going to impose a price on that kind of conduct and seek to end it?

Mr. Milosevic often justifies his behavior by talking about the history of the Serbs going back to the 14th century. Well, I value the history of this country, and I value what happened here in the 18th century. But I don't want to take America back to the 18th century, and he acts like he wants to take Serbia back to the 14th century -- to 14th-century values, 14th-century ways of looking at other human beings.

We are on the edge of a new century and a new millennium where the people in poor countries all over the world, because of technology and the Internet and the spreading of information, will have unprecedented opportunities to share prosperity and to give their kids an education and have a decent future, if only they will live in peace with the basic human regard for other people that is absolutely antithetical to everything that Mr. Milosevic has done.