STATEMENT OF SHIRLEY CLOYES DIOGUARDI
BALKAN AFFAIRS ADVISER, THE ALBANIAN
AMERICAN CIVIC LEAGUE
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
“KOSOVO: CURRENT AND FUTURE STATUS”
MAY 18, 2005
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank Chairman Hyde and Congressman Lantos
for your leadership in calling this hearing and both of you for introducing
H.Res. 24, calling on the United States to support the independence of Kosova
now.
In order to address Kosova’s current political
and economic status and U.S.
policy in relation to final status, I think that it is beneficial to briefly
review the record of the U.S.
government in responding to the conflict in Southeast
Europe in the latter part of the 20th century and at the beginning
of the 21st century. When we do this, we see that the House International
Relations Committee has consistently exercised leadership by throwing its
support behind the aspirations for freedom and democracy on the part of the
peoples in the region who suffered from almost fifty years of Communism after
World War II and, in the case of Albanians, who have been the victims of racism
and genocide much longer. Eighteen years ago, in June 1987, Congressman Lantos
and then Congressman Joe DioGuardi introduced, with
fifty-seven of their colleagues in the House, a resolution (H.Con.Res 162) exposing the egregious abuse of the human rights
of Kosova’s Albanian majority and calling for justice.
A month later, in July 1987, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic came to power
on a platform of anti-Albanian racism.
Unfortunately, the State Department, under considerable pressure from former
colleagues and American friends of Milosevic who got to know him when he was
a banker in Washington, worked hard behind the scenes
to promote Serbian dominance in Yugoslavia, a federation in the process of dissolution.
In a letter to then Chairman of the House International Relations Committee
Dante Fascell, State opposed H.Con.Res.
162 as an affront to Yugoslavia,
America’s
“friend and ally.” State also opposed the Committee’s intent to have
a hearing on H.Con. Res. 162, but Chairman Fascell
and Congressmen Lantos and DioGuardi prevailed and
the hearing was held. The hearing and the subsequent high-level meeting that
Congressmen Lantos and DioGuardi held with State
Department officials and the Ambassador from Yugoslavia to discuss human rights
abuses in Kosova led Milosevic to recall his ambassador
to the United States in a show of contempt.
A pattern was established in 1989 that continued for a decade with terrible
consequences for the peoples of Southeast Europe. In
1990, the House Committee on International Relations called on the administration
to end Milosevic’s occupation of Kosova and to stop his military march across Southeast Europe after his
forces attacked Vucovar and Dubrovnic
in Croatia. In 1992, Congressman Lantos introduced
the first resolution calling on the U.S.
government to recognize the independence of Kosova.
That same
year Milosevic invaded Bosnia-Herzegovina. Not
long afterward five members of the
U.S. State Department resigned over their superiors’ concealing of Milosevic’s
concentration camps in Bosnia. The photographs
of emaciated Bosnian Muslim men, so reminiscent of the Nazi era, flashed across
television screens throughout the world. Apart from President George Herbert
Walker Bush’s “Christmas warning” in 1993, admonishing Milosevic that there
would be dire consequences if he waged war in Kosova, the State Department embraced a policy of appeasement
and containment in the Balkans. State opposed the dissolution of the former
Yugoslavia, wanting to, in the words of then Secretary
of State James Baker, “keep it together at all costs.”
At the end of February 1998, the “Christmas warning” was violated, when Serbian
military and paramilitary forces attacked Drenice and began to rape, pillage, and murder their way across
Kosova. Milosevic’s invasion was enabled by State
Department Balkan Envoy Robert Gelbard, when he
publicly called the Kosova Liberation Army (the people’s defense force that had
risen up to defend Kosovar Albanians against the
Serbian army) as a “terrorist” organization. Less than a month later, on
March 12, 1998, Gelbard was forced to retract his
statement in a hearing convened by then House International Relations Committee
Chairman Ben Gilman. In May of that year, former Congressman Joe DioGuardi testified at a full committee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chaired by Gordon Smith and Joe Biden,
calling for military intervention to save the lives of Kosovar
Albanians who were facing extermination.
By the time the United States was forced to lead NATO air strikes against
Serbia in March 1999, with the collapse of then Balkan envoy Richard Holbrooke’s
weak-kneed diplomacy and under the moral suasion of then U.S. Secretary of
State Madelyn Albright, Serbian military and paramilitary forces had killed
more than 300,000 men women and children in Bosnia, at least 10,000 in Kosova
(2,400 people are still missing), and had displaced more than four million.
For a short period of time, from March until June 1999, the Congress and
the administration were united in bringing down Milosevic, and the American
people broadly supported their government, especially as they watched Albanians
forced out of their homes in Kosova on cattle cars
and herded into camps on the border of Macedonia
and Albania.
But when the war came to an end with the capitulation of Milosevic, the United
States agreed to defer any decision regarding Kosova’s
final status. This was the first indication that the State Department would
re-embrace its historical Belgrade-centric orientation. In agreeing to put
Kosova’s final status on hold, the United
States was also bowing to Western
Europe, which it expected to shoulder primary responsibility for ending conflict
in the Balkans. But if history in the Balkans has shown us anything, it has
shown us that a divided Europe will not act without U.S.
leadership.
The evidence of the past six years is that delaying final status has been
a mistake. In the postwar period, Belgrade
has consistently attempted to destabilize Kosova
by opposing the integration of Kosova’s Serbs.
Just this past week, UN head of Mission in Kosova Soren Jessen-Petersen
publicly expressed his disappointment with reports in the press
that “Belgrade has once again discouraged Kosovo Serbs to be part of dialogue
and part
of Kosovo institutions.” Kosovar
Serbs have been intimidated into non-participation.
Above all, in the postwar period reactionary forces in Belgrade in Washington have
succeeded in creating in the international media a false parity between the
perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism and the Albanian victims of genocide,
some of whom have retaliated against individual Serbs. Even as it was discovered
that withdrawing Serbian troops took Albanian corpses in refrigerated trucks
across the border to be reburied in Serbia in an effort to conceal the scope
of Milosevic’s crimes and, even as it was discovered much earlier, that Serbian
paramilitaries had burned Albanian corpses in the Trepca
mines, the sovereign state of Serbia has been able to miscast the Albanians
of the Balkans as the source of violence in the region.
It has accomplished this amazing feat (I consider it amazing because it runs
totally counter to my experience in thirteen trips to postwar Kosova) solely because the majority of Kosovar
Albanians are Muslims. In a post-9-11 world, it has been easy to convince
Westerners, largely untutored in the history and realities of Eastern Europe,
that Albanians are a potentially Muslim terrorist state in the heart of Europe.
In reality, and as you have heard from my Kosovar colleagues today, Albanians are secular Muslims, Catholics,
and Eastern Orthodox Christians who have lived side by side in harmony for
centuries.
Belgrade’s effort to portray Kosovar
Albanians as unworthy of their right to freedom and self-determination was
made easier by the tragic events of March 2004, in which nineteen people (eleven
Albanians and eight Serbs) lost their lives and thirty Orthodox churches and
religious sites were either damaged or destroyed. The Serbian propaganda
machine immediately depicted the violence that erupted a year ago as “reverse
ethnic cleansing” of the Kosova Serb minority and
as an orchestrated “anti-Christian” act on the part of Albanian Muslims.
But neither was the case. Most Albanians deplored the violence that took
place between March 17 and 19, 2004. A few incidents, including the UN’s
refusal to end a Serbian demonstration that made Kosova’s
main arteries impassible for three days and the drowning of an Albanian child
in northern Kosova allegedly by Serbian adults, ignited a spontaneous
eruption of pent-up anger and frustration on the part of beleaguered Albanians
who had lost trust in the international community’s intentions. The world
should be surprised not that violence erupted in Kosova,
but that it has happened so rarely in a society whose political and economic
future has been held hostage to lack of final status for the past six years.
Seventy percent of Kosovars are under the age of
thirty, and more than sixty percent of the population is unemployed. In a
February 2005, meeting, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher rightly captured the
reality of U.S. policy in Kosova when he said that we are “stealing the lives” of Kosovar Albanians.
In the postwar period and notably after the events of March 2004, only the
House
International Relations Committee grasped the dangers of delaying Kosova’s
final status
and keeping it on life support. At the start of
the 108th Congress, Congressman
Lantos and Chairman Hyde introduced House Resolution 28, calling on the United
States
to recognize the independence of Kosova now, and held a full committee hearing on the independence
of Kosova in May 2003. They reintroduced the resolution,
now House Resolution 24, at the start of the 109th Congress. They
did this not just because they are supporters of the human rights and dignity
of human beings everywhere, but because they recognize that it is in the vital
interests of the United States to have lasting peace and stability in Southeast
Europe, which can only begin with ending the de facto partition of Mitrovice
and recognizing an independent Kosova.
It is in the vital interest of the United States not to create a seeming
contradiction between calling for free and fair elections and democracy in
Iraq and in the Ukraine, affirming the wholesale transition from Communism
to democracy in the Baltic states, supporting the inclusion of Turkey, a moderate
Muslim state, into the European Union, and then opposing the will of the people
in Kosova who first voted for their independence
in a national referendum in 1990. In the summer of 2004, more than one million
Kosovar Albanians and hundreds of Kosovo Serbs,
as well as thousands more Albanians in Macedonia,
Albania, Montenegro, Croatia,
Slovenia, Chameria, the Presheva Valley, America,
England, Germany, Switzerland,
France, Scandinavia,
Australia, and New Zealand, signed a petition
calling on President Bush to support the passage of House Resolution 28, now
H.Res. 24. (Parenthetically, the White House has
not yet expressed a willingness to receive their signatures, either privately
or publicly.)
It is in the vital interest of the United States to have a progressive Muslim Albanian
majority in the heart of Europe. Albanians totally oppose
the kind of reactionary and oppressive Muslim forces
that have emerged in the Middle East, and have rebuffed their attempts to make incursions into
the Balkans. It is also in the vital interest of the United
States to support the freedom and democratic development
of Albanians, who are the most pro-Western, pro-American ethnic group in Southeast
Europe—and in fact in all of Europe. When America was
attacked on 9-ll, Albanians lit candles and held an all-night vigil with posters
emblazoned with the words “We are with you,” while all too many Serbs, Macedonian
Slavs, Greek, and Russians danced in the streets with joy at America’s pain.
It is in the vital interest of the United States to provide genuine
support for the democratization of all societies emerging from Communism and
ultranationalism. This means coming to grips with
the fact that U.S. policy
in the past fifteen years has failed to de-Nazify and democratize Serbia. While the Albanians
of Kosova are at greatest risk because of this,
it is also the case that Serbs in Serbia proper and in Kosovo
are also suffering from our failure to dismantle the Milosevic system. Until
the standards that have been applied to Kosova as
a tactic for delaying final status are applied to Serbia
first and foremost, Serbia
will continue to be a quasi-Mafia state that destabilizes
its neighbors. At a time when the United States is confronting a prolonged
crisis in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East and the prospect of a nuclear
North Korea, it is in the
vital interest of the United States to end the prospect of war in Southeast Europe once and for all. President Bush’s decision to focus
on final status resolution is a welcome one. House Resolution 24 will provide
him with a blueprint for action.
# # #
Click here for the follow up
interview in English and Click here for the
Interview in Albanian