US Congressman Weldon: Clinton's Kosovo Genocide!

[Andrej Tisma]

CLINTON'S KOSOVO GENOCIDE!

US Congressman Weldon: The genocide and ethnic cleansing started when Bill
Clinton and Jacques Chirac started the war against Milosevic

(Excerpts from speech by US Congressman Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania in House
of Representatives - July 16, 2003)
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  Mr. Speaker (Mr. Gingrey), enough is enough. I sat in my office last night
and listened to Member after Member on the other side rail about President
Bush and whether or not we could trust him in the Iraqi situation. I have
listened to my colleagues tonight. Enough is enough. Mr. Speaker, this is
just outrageous.

 Where were these voices, where were these petitions, where were these
outcries when President Clinton told us about the Balkans mass deaths to
justify NATO's invasion into the Balkans? The Clinton administration claimed
that ethnic cleansing had killed hundreds of thousands of people, and I will
include the articles from the papers in the Congressional Record.

  The Clinton administration was later criticized, and I have newspaper
articles here to back it up by the press for grossly exaggerating the number
of  victims of ethnic cleansing, the mass graves. President Clinton told us
we would find 100,000 people that were murdered and that was his
justification for using NATO for the only time ever to invade a non-NATO
country in order to justify a war against Slobodan Milosevic where U.S.
citizens, where U.S. troops, and where innocent Serbs were killed.

  In fact, it was the USA Today in July of 1999, an article that said, ``As
the allied forces take control in Kosovo, many of the figures used by the
Clinton administration and NATO were greatly  exaggerated. Six hundred
thousand ethnic Albanian men were not trapped within Kosovo or buried in
mass graves, as President Clinton told a veterans group. Instead of 100,000
ethnic Albanian men feared murdered, officials now estimate about 10,000;
and we think the confirmed number was 3,000.''

  Mr. Speaker, that was from USA Today in 1999.

  Let us go to the Little Rock newspapers. They did an investigative story
on January 16, 2000, after the Clinton administration had made these
outrageous claims of ethnic cleansing. Why did they say these things, Mr.
Speaker? Because they wanted the Congress and they wanted the American
people to support his war to get Milosevic out of power.

  Let us read some of the quotes from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette,
January 16, 2000:

 ``Of 500 potential grave sites, 150 have been opened and, no, we have not
found the 100,000 missing declared by President Clinton, or the lower but
probably equally preposterous figure of 10,000 advanced by British Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook and repeated by the BBC.''

  This was not the Republican Party. This was the Arkansas Democrat Gazette
on January 16, 2000, saying that all the justification that Clinton used to
go to war in Yugoslavia was false, it was erroneous.

  Let us go on, Mr. Speaker, with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette article of
January 16, 2000: ``We have more than 10,000 photographs of graves, sites
and bodies, and more than 300 hours of video, and we share all our evidence
with the war crimes tribunal. From survivors who are giving us testimonies,
we calculate there were 6,000 Kosovo Albanians killed in the 3 months of the
war,'' not before the war, in the 3 months of the war which President
Clinton led.

 Listen to this, Mr. Speaker. In the previous 12 months before the war,
there were 1,000 killed. So 1,000 were killed in the previous months, 6,000
were killed in the immediate 3 months of the war itself by the bombs of the
U.S., France and Germany and the other NATO countries.

 Let us go on, Mr. Speaker, to some other examples.

  Here is an article from the Washington Post, March 26, 2000. The headline,
Was It a Mistake? We Were Suckers for the KLA was the headline of this
article written by Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz. Let us go
through some of the claims.

 ``Clinton's assertion,'' and I am quoting here, Mr. Speaker, ``at a June 25
, 1999, postwar news conference that the bombing was a way to stop, quote,
deliberate, systematic efforts at genocide,'' he called it genocide in
Kosovo. It goes on to say, ``was either disingenuous or ignorant. Before the
start of NATO's bombing on March 24, 1999, almost 2,000 civilians,
overwhelmingly ethnic Albanians but also Serbs, had been killed in 15 months
of bitter warfare. Up to that point, there had been no genocide or ethnic
cleansing.'' The genocide and ethnic cleansing started when Bill Clinton and
Jacques Chirac started the war against Milosevic.

 I will go on, Mr. Speaker, this same article, Washington Post, March
26, 2000:

 ``Not only did the forced removal of civilians result from the NATO
bombing, but administration claims of mass killings, made to rally popular
support for the war, turn out to have been exaggerated. Clinton defended the
intervention on the grounds that the Yugoslavs had slaughtered tens of
thousands.'' President Clinton said tens of thousands, Mr. Speaker. It never
turned out to be true. All lies. Secretary of Defense William Cohen termed
it a, quote, horrific slaughter. The numbers we now have, according to this
article in the Post, disprove those claims. U.N. numbers and U.S. numbers
and Allied numbers say the information provided to Congress was wrong.

 Let us go on to a story in the Contra Costa Times, March 4, 2000. ``We
 became involved in Kosovo after being bombarded with exorbitant claims of
 ethnic cleansing, subsequently proven exaggerated and largely committed
after NATO started bombing.''

 Another newspaper, Mr. Speaker. I do not remember my colleagues quoting
from these papers. I do not remember my colleagues coming to the floor and
demanding an investigation of Bill Clinton for distorting things. Not only
were
these distortions, they were outright, outright lies.

  We will go on with that Contra Costa story of March 4, 2000:

 ``As a result of false and misleading news reports, Americans were led to
believe tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians
were killed by the Serbs and buried in mass graves. Many are still under
that impression.

 ``According to U.N. investigators who have been scouring the area since the
bombing stopped, the total number of ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs is
closer to 2,000, far fewer than the number of civilians killed by NATO
bombers.''


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The entire speech can be found at Mr. Weldon's web page:
http://www.house.gov/curtweldon/july16speech.html