Mark Souder: “having visited the Balkans, and I was privileged to be included in the trip with Senator Stevens and Chairman Young a…”

“having visited the Balkans, and I was privileged to be included in the trip with Senator Stevens and Chairman Young a few weeks ago, I have been aggressively against this war which I do not believe is winnable in the traditional sense. And it is time to get a negotiated settlement and it is time to cut off the funding, but I wanted to share a couple of things tonight about the terrible things that have happened to the people there. These are pictures that I took in Vranje, just north of Skopje, in Macedonia. This shows just one of what I call the long white road to the mountains. These are actually the shorter mountains. They rise higher up. It is impossible to get ground troops through this area, which many armies throughout hundreds of years have learned is impossible. This street goes on and on, miles and miles, and this is just one of the camps. There were 23,000 people, we were told, in that camp when we first came in. 8,000 additional people were added just that day. These Albanian men were at the back of the place because they kept asking us, ``Are the Apaches going to save us? Are they going to wipe out the tanks?'' Of course, we had to tell them no, that is not what Apaches are designed to do, but we wondered where they were getting that information. They have radios throughout the camp that are constantly broadcasting to them that there is this hope that they are suddenly going to go back. These are some of the people trying to make do.…”