John W. Olver: “Mr. Chairman, I rise at this point to speak in favor of the Gejdenson amendment but also to say that I think the…”

“Mr. Chairman, I rise at this point to speak in favor of the Gejdenson amendment but also to say that I think the original amendment, the Gilman amendment, is an acceptable alternative. I would prefer that we were not doing this. I think tonight the timing is not exactly right, but we are doing it. So in those terms I would ask that we remember the history that has gone on; who it is we are dealing with and what the history of those dealings have been in the period of time that Slobodan Milosevic has been the leader of Yugoslavia. I ask us to remember that Milosevic attacked not one but two members of the United Nations in 1991 and 1992, both Croatia and Bosnia, and it was the regular Yugoslav Army, not indigenous folk, who attacked and destroyed the ancient and beautiful city of Vukovar after a 2-month siege, and in the aftermath of that siege the slaughter included people who were pulled out of the hospital, men and women pulled out of hospital beds and slaughtered at the end of that siege. Their crime was that they happened to live in an area that Milosevic wanted to add to Serbia, but their other crime was that they were Roman Catholics. Then I ask us to remember that Milosevic deployed his regular Yugoslav army, that that was the instrument by which the overwhelming Muslim cities and towns in the Drina River Valley in eastern Bosnia were ethnically cleansed in early 1992.”