USA: PRESIDENT CLINTON AND BORIS YELTSIN PRESS CONFERENCE

(23 Oct 1995) Russian/Eng/Nat President Yeltsin, after a summit meeting with President Clinton in New York, announced Monday that Russian troops will participate in the planned international peacekeeping force in Bosnia. The two leaders addressed a joint news conference: Boris Yeltsin, announcing agreement on Bosnia, poked fun at reporters who had forecast that the talks would end in failure: SOUNDBITE: “This is all due to you because coming from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today’s meeting was going to be a disaster. Now for the first time I can tell you that YOU (the press) are a disaster.“ SUPERCAPTION: President Yeltsin SOUNDBITE: “Make sure you get the right attribution there.“ SUPER CAPTION: President Bill Clinton Yeltsin confirmed that Russian troops would serve in Bosnia: SOUNDBITE: “We agreed today Russian armed forces will participate in these operations, but how they go about doing it is the affair of the military, it is not a question for us two presidents. We have done our tasks.“ SUPERCAPTION: President Boris Yeltsin President Clinton stressed the need for the peacekeeping force to be effective: SOUNDBITE: “Our position is that we are going to have an operation that works. We want Russia to be involved in it. We made some progress today consistent with both of our objectives with neither side giving up the things that were most important to it. We made some progress today on that. And we recognize that some of the things that needed to be decided neither of us could in good conscience could decide without giving our military leaders a chance to work through that. So we agreed that this week our military leaders would keep working. That is all I can tell you. The more we say about it the worse it’ll be. We are moving towards peace. We are moving towards peace. The first and most important thing is make peace in Bosnia. That has not been done yet. “ SUPER CAPTION: President Bill Clinton The two leaders, who met at the former home of American wartime President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ended their press conference with an apparent show of unity on the Bosnian issue.