John W. Olver: “I think what you have said, Mr. Hoyer, is very important. And indeed, if we do not apply what you have said in this…”

“I think what you have said, Mr. Hoyer, is very important. And indeed, if we do not apply what you have said in this situation, from this day forward, in this situation, to save what can be saved of an otherwise absolutely tragic and disastrous situation, then we are going to see what I described in Kosovo of the impression on the part of Milosevic in Belgrade, that he can act totally with impunity in Kosovo. And that message, if that were to get out, that undermines as a further part of the growing ripples of this overall tragedy that I had mentioned earlier, could go on for decades, that undermines secular Moslem states, many of them our allies like Egypt and Turkey and Pakistan, who are already seeing the rise of fundamentalism, in part because of what has been happening to secular Moslem populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. And then you have no credible way of saying to people, you are beyond the pale of international law, when any other small dictator somewhere, in Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa, decides, gee, look at what they did in Bosnia. Look at what they did. I have a minority I can scapegoat. We will have this, I would predict, time and time again. I think you can argue easily there has been some of that already happening, just watching what has happened in the last 3 years in the former Yugoslavia, and the unwillingness of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions in that state, what has been happening in other places.”