BBC Broadcasts Debate on Kosovo Refugee “Family Planning”
For Immediate Release
August 5, 1999
Contact Scott Weinberg
(540) 622-5240
WASHINGTON, DC – The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) this week broadcast a live debate between a UNFPA official and PRI journalist Austin Ruse – who spent eight days in Albanian refugee camps documenting human rights abuses committed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
PRI confirmed last week that war criminal Slobodan Milosevic brought UNFPA to the region to target the ethnic Albanian refugee population because of their high birth rate.
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo outnumber Serbs nine to one. The Serbian birthrate is currently below replacement; ethnic Albanians, who are mostly Muslim and Catholic, have a total fertility rate of 5.4, the highest in dying Europe.
Recently, a senior official in the Milosevic government commented that “The state must find a way… to limit of forbid the enormous birthrate in Kosovo.”
During the BBC broadcast, UNFPA official Pam Delargy confirmed that UNFPA’s biggest client is governmental ministries. UNFPA has moved massive amounts of “reproductive health” supplies into the region, sufficient to target a population of 350,000 ethnic Albanians (PRI Review, “Kosovar Women ‘Just Say No’ June / July 1999).
“Where have all these supplies gone,” said Steve Mosher, President of PRI. “And for what purpose are they being used?”
PRI’s investigation of the camps discovered that these supplies included dangerous and outdated devices such as as manual vacuum aspirators, which can be used to perform abortions, morning-after pills, and crude intra-uterine devices (IUDs) no longer used in the West.
“Milosevic is undoubtedly pleased that the UNFPA has accepted his invitation to carry out a kind of ‘stealth’ ethnic cleansing against the Kosovars,” said Mosher. “We urge the UNFPA to reject the partnership offered by Milosevic, and to withdraw from Kosovo.”
The UN draft resolution calls for ‘meaningful self-administration for Kosovo’ (UN resolution draft on Kosovo, Article J, 8 June 1999). “If and when this local administration is set up in Kosovo, then it can decide whether Kosovar women and families need the wares that the UNFPA, in collaboration with Milosevic and local NGO’s, are peddling,” Mosher concluded.
Last week the US Congress narrowly approved $25 million in funding for the UNFPA.
