military air operation now taking place over Serbia is a response. belatedly in my opinion. to more than a year of the most callous brutal acts of repression of innocent men. women and children in Kosovo whose only crime is being Albanian. The architect of these policies is Slobodan Milosevic. a ruthless dictator. who has accumulated an abominable record in the former Yugoslavia. and who should be indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. The cost of Milosevics aggression has been the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people. thousands of whom are now refugees in neighboring countries. Last fall it appeared that tens of thousands of the displaced Kosovars were in danger of freezing to death during the winter months. As we all know too well. the Serbs never withdrew their police and military. and the violence gradually escalated until in January we had the massacre by Serb police of a small village that killed 45 unarmed civilians. At that point we told the Serbs that they had to agree to a plan put forward by our government and other members of the contact group of the international community that would have restored substantial selfrule to the Albanians in Kosovo: and. if Serbia did not agree. they were advised that NATO would escalate its military action. The Serbs have used NATO bombing as a pretext. a pretext to escalate the ethnic cleansing that they had prepared for Kosovo when the spring weather permitted conditions for their military operations. The major issue confronting our Nation and the Kosovo crisis has been. and continues to be. the humanitarian situation facing the refugees in Kosovo. and now in Albania. Macedonia. Montenegro. as well as some other countries in that region.
Keywords matched
refugees