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PRESIDENT CLINTON: My fellow Americans, today our armed forces joined our NATO allies in airstrikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo. We have acted with resolve for several reasons.
We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive.
We act to prevent a wider war, to defuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe, that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results.
We act to stand united with our allies for peace. By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace.
Tonight I want to speak with you about the tragedy in Kosovo and why it matters to America that we work with our allies to end it.
First, let me explain what it is that we are responding to. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, in the middle of south eastern Europe and about 160 miles east of Italy. That's less than the distance between Washington and New York, and only about 70 miles north of Greece.
Its people are mostly ethnic Albanian and mostly Muslim.
In 1989 Serbia's leader Slobodan Milosevic, the same leader who started the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and moved against Slovenia in the last decade, stripped Kosovo of the constitutional autonomy it's people enjoyed, thus denying them their right to speak their language, run their schools, shape their daily lives. For years, Kosovar's struggled peacefully to get their rights back. When President Milosevic sent his troops and police to crush them, the struggle grew violent.
Last fall, our diplomacy, backed by the threat of force from our NATO alliance, stopped the fighting for awhile, and rescued tens of thousands of people from freezing and starvation in the hills where they had fled to save their lives. And last month, with our allies and Russia, we proposed a peace agreement to end the fighting for good. The Kosovar leaders signed that agreement last week.
Even though it does not give them all they want, even though their people were still being savaged, they saw that a just peace is better than a long and unwinable war.
The Serbian leaders, on the other hand, refused even to discuss key elements of the peace agreement. As the Kosovars were saying yes to peace, Serbia stationed 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo in preparation for a major offensive and in clear violation of the commitments they had made.