Mr. President, Albanians over the last ten years have suffered greatly from our foreign policy mistakes. In 1989, we said nothing when Milosevic occupied Kosova, even though our State Department's Country Reports every year spelled out the most egregious human right violations in Europe since the Nazi era. In 1991, Milosevic occupied Slovenia, and Slovenes managed to declare their independence and to repulse the Serbian Army before then Secretary of State, James Baker went to Belgrade to throw his support behind a unified Yugoslavia, and hence, behind Milosevic. Then, in 1995, Richard Holbrooke secured Milosevic's cooperation at Dayton by agreeing to exclude from the negotiations the Albanians, the third largest ethnic group in the Balkans, and to keep the status of Kosova off the table.

Today, in 1999, we hear that NATO may not be willing to take the steps necessary to stop the genocide against Kosovar Albanians, while there are disquieting indications that we are doing exactly what Slobodan Milosevic wants. We not only told Milosevic that we would not deploy ground troops, enabling him to conduct the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosova with impunity, but we have gone so far as to legitimate his destruction of Kosova by saying that we will absorb into their countries almost half of the 300.000 Albanian refugees who have thus far been forced to flee to the borders of Albania and Macedonia.

Mr. President, how many Albanians must die before we do the right thing - namely arm the KLA, as we did Croats in Bosnia - and commiting NATO ground troops to stop the genocide and finish the job we started? We must win this conflict and remove Milosevic's hard-line and brutal Communist Regime in order to create, in your words to the American People, "a united, free, and prosperous Europe" as we enter the 21^st century.

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