Quoted By:
We're here to talk about a very different tragedy in another part of the world, but one that is equally demanding of our response. The humanitarian disaster in Kosovo is almost incomprehensible.
You've come here because you do want to help and for that we are grateful because we need that help more desperately than ever. We've seen the horrifying images of children in trains, children separated from families, robbed of their childhoods, their homes and their memories.
Two out of three of the Kosovars have already been forced to flee their homes, often at gun point, without time to even snatch a family photograph from the wall or even to take identification papers or medications on their fearful journeys.
Like all Americans, I have been outraged by recent reports of paramilitary forces destroying health centers and hospitals, driving out doctors and nurses and depriving refugees of much needed medical care.
I've heard chilling examples of what is happening from a doctor whom I met with again just last week. I met with her first last summer when she came to the White House to tell me what was occurring even then as people were being driven into the mountains.
This brave woman, who had worked around the clock, has now become a refugee herself. Last week when she visited me, I could not only tell from her words, but by the haunted pain in her eyes, what she and the people around her have endured.
: She had come here -- luckily enough she still had her passport which she smuggled out in the diaper of a nephew she held on her lap -- she'd come here to bear witness and to make sure we understood what was happening to the people of her country.
We are doing as much as we can to ease the suffering of the refugees, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. Some of you have seen first-hand what life is like in those camps as wave after wave of
