Tom Lantos: “Mr. Speaker, let me first express my thanks and respect to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the chairman of our…”

“Mr. Speaker, let me first express my thanks and respect to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the chairman of our committee, for his strong support of this long overdue measure. If I may, Mr. Speaker, I would like to put this whole resolution in some historic context. Kosova, an Albanian province of Serbia, was a relatively peaceful, poor place until 1989. In 1989, without the slightest provocation, Mr. Milosevic destroyed whatever modicum of autonomy the people of Kosova had and created of 1,800,000 Albanian ethnic Kosovars colonial subjects within their own country. I visited Kosova many times during the last decade. It is, without any question, Europe's poorest region. It is the only region, Mr. Speaker, where you can meet a young man or a young woman in their twenties having only one or two or three teeth, because there are no dental services available. The grinding poverty of the Albanian ethnic population of Kosova is pitiful and heartrending. The people of Kosova have been fortunate to have reasonable, moderate, peace-loving leadership in the person of Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, a scholar of great distinction. But he could not get anyplace with the dictatorial regime of Milosevic, and gradually an extremist element emerged within the Albanian population which started military activities.”