Bill Clinton: “Thank you. We are preparing houses for the winter, fixing schools, bringing in police officers. KLA fighters are…”

“Thank you. We are preparing houses for the winter, fixing schools, bringing in police officers. KLA fighters are returning to civilian life. Radio stations and newspapers are operating. The U.N. is doing a good job under tough conditions. And last week, the international community pledged another one billion American dollars to help Kosovo, to fully fund the U.N. operation next year. With all the problems that remain, we should remember, Kosovar children are going back to school, learning in their language in communities that answer to their parents. That is in some ways better than it was before. And we can do better still. I want to make one last point, more important than anything else I have to say to the children and to the parents. You can never forget the injustice that was done to you. No one can force you to forgive what was done to you, but you must try. And let me tell you why. First of all, all the schoolchildren will soon be learning in their biology classes that all the people in the world--all the people in the world--in terms of their genetic makeup, scientifically, are 99.9 percent the same: the Serbs, the Albanians, the Irish, the Africans, the Latins, the Asians. Children are not born hating those who are different from them, and no religion teaches them to do so. They have to be taught to hate by people who are already grown. But all over the world--not just here in Kosovo, all over the world--it is children who bear the burden of their parents' blind hatred. I have been in Africa with a young man who lost his arm to someone of a different ethnic group, who cut it off with a machete simply because of his family heritage. I have been in Israel with schoolchildren staring at the pictures of their classmates who were blown up in buses simply because they were Jewish. I have been in Ireland with a beautiful, beautiful 16-year-old girl playing and singing to me, but her eyesight was gone because she was blown up in a bomb just because of the religious differences in Ireland. We owe the children in Kosovo a better future than that. Audience members. Clin-ton! Clin-ton!”