Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 8, 1994 TAG: 9406080090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: PARIS NOTE: LEDE LENGTH: Medium
Bosnian Muslims have long feared such a plan would lock in their huge territorial losses, confining them to a fraction of their former lands.
But Clinton announced he was going along with France in backing the truce proposed by Yasushi Akashi, the senior United Nations official in the former Yugoslavia.
Clinton made the remarks in an address to the National Assembly, where he became only the second U.S. president to address the French legislature. Woodrow Wilson spoke there 75 years ago in the aftermath of World War I.
Evoking memories of that earlier period when Europe and America were complacent in the face of growing fascism, Clinton said a similar danger has emerged now in the rise of "cancerous" nationalism.
"It will require us to do what is very difficult for democracies - to unite our people when they do not feel themselves in imminent peril," Clinton said in the gilded 18th-century chamber. "We must set our sights on a strategic star ... the integration and strengthening of a broader Europe," Clinton said.
The lawmakers listened passively, although they gave the president a standing ovation both at his entrance and his conclusion.
It was a muted welcome compared with that given Wilson in 1919, when visitors packed the galleries and the lawmakers greeted him with a raucous five-minute ovation and then insisted on standing for the duration of his speech.
Just as Wilson had counseled vigilance against a new menace from Germany, Clinton pointed to the "random violence of skinheads in all countries" and to the "purposeful slaughter" in the ethnic strife in Bosnia.
"Militant nationalism is on the rise, transforming the healthy pride of nations, tribes, religious and ethnic groups into cancerous prejudice, eating away at states and leaving their people addicted to the political pain-killers of violence and demagoguery," Clinton said.
The president ends his eight-day tour of Italy, France and England today when he stops in England to accept an honorary degree from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.
by CNB