John W. Olver: “If I may, that is a right which we as Americans cherish, the right of self-defense, defending yourself against attack…”

“If I may, that is a right which we as Americans cherish, the right of self-defense, defending yourself against attack, as individuals, as families. That is written into the United Nations charter, the right of nations to their own self defense. This is what I have said again and again is the most--the starting act which allowed this genocide to go forward, in fact, the arms embargo, in such a way that the insurgent Serb nationalists, that minority of the population, always had the possibility of supply and resupply from Yugoslavia; whereas the Croatians first and much more critically over the longer period of time the Bosnians, simply did not have the opportunity to get arms. That is the most immoral kind of act on an international level that you could apply to people and then to also propose that you have safe havens. And the United Nations resolutions for safe havens, and then we, acting with the United Nations and the U.N. as a whole, does not have the guts to enforce its own safe haven resolutions, which then leave a city like Gorzade being destroyed, destroyed before the very eyes of the world. And a city like Srebrenica being simply strangled and starved. And so it goes. That represents really the most abject moral abdication of moral responsibility, it seems to me.”