It funds longterm investments but denies money to immediate needs. This rule will not give House Members the chance to correct that. I am particularly disturbed because the Committee on Rules denied my request to offer a bipartisan HallRoukema amendment to provide $150 million in much needed food assistance to the Albanian Kosovar refugees and displaced persons in the Balkans. Mr. Speaker. last weekend I went to Albania and Macedonia with a House delegation of 20 members. led by Majority Leader DICK ARMEY. We visited Stankovac 1. which is the largest refugee camp in Macedonia. which at that time housed 30.000 who were forced to flee from their homes in Kosovo. This is only one of many refugee camps in the Balkans housing the victims of President Milosevic genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Thousands more are arriving every day. There is a critical need to feed these people. A report released last week by the U.N. World Food Programme calculated that 1.4 million refugees and misplaced people will need to be fed in the Balkans and that report estimated the cost of feeding them over the next 17 months to be almost $300 million. The situation is getting worse. I quote from the World Food Programme report: The situation for displaced and other people inside Kosovo is certain to worsen because the entire food distribution system has ground to a halt. Without this money. many of the refugees face malnutrition or starvation. If the United States shifted money from other emergency feed accounts to handle this crisis. then we would have to cut our assistance to southern Sudan. North Korea and the Horn of Africa.
Keywords matched
refugees refugee