Timothy Roemer: “I will not offer this amendment. I am precluded from offering this amendment due to the UC that was arrived at last…”

“I will not offer this amendment. I am precluded from offering this amendment due to the UC that was arrived at last week, but I think that this was a noncontroversial amendment that both Republicans and Democrats would have agreed to. This amendment dealt with the ongoing conflict between the Russians and the Chechens. Certainly on last year's foreign operations bill, we got up and we spoke about the need to bring an end to this war that has killed probably over 30,000 Chechens and maybe close to 5,000 Russians. This ongoing war threatens not only the human rights situation in Russia. It threatens their economic stability, when they are transferring so much money that we are loaning through the IMF, trying to bring their economy back to stability and back to growth, when they are now taking this money to fight a war and kill Chechens day after day in a brutal and inhuman manner. We attached some successful legislation last year to the foreign operations bill that cut $5 million out of aid to Russia, saying we must bring an end to this war. And this is a signal from the American people and the U.S. Congress that we want to see it end now. No longer will this war go on. We are not going to subsidize this war.”