Joe Crowley: “for the past decade, ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, have fought…”

“for the past decade, ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, have fought a courageous campaign to regain the rights they had taken away by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who in 1989 stripped away the autonomy they had enjoyed under the Yugoslav Constitution. Milosevic, the architect of this crisis who also produced the Bosnian tragedy, and presided over the dissolution of what was once Yugoslavia, has brought poverty and misery to his own people and has sown the seeds of strident nationalism throughout the Balkans. Milosevic has met all attempts to reach a peaceful settlement with the ethnic Albanian community with forceful vengeance and repression. President Milosevic escalated this campaign of terror about one year ago when he launched a brutal crackdown on the majority Albanian population. Civilians were terrorized, tortured and murdered by Serbian police and military forces while hundreds more were driven from their homes. This systematic campaign of repression manifested itself this past January, when Serbian security forces brutally massacred 45 Albanian citizens in the village of Racak.”