Commencement Address by Richard Holbrooke.
	Honorary Degree Recipients at the 1999 Commencement.
	Baccalaureate Blessings from parents, faculty, students, and friends.

NATO ground troops will be entering Kosovo before the year ends, predicted Richard C. Holbrooke, President Clinton's nominee for United Nations ambassador, during commencement exercises at Bates College on Monday, May 31.

During an interview with news media immediately after his keynote address, Holbrooke stressed that he hopes that those NATO ground troops enter as "peacekeepers."

"One way or another, NATO troops will be in Kosovo by the end of this year," Holbrooke said. "I'm not here to predict how that will unfold. Intense diplomatic activity is underway in Europe and Washington and around the world. I would be misleading you if I predicted a timetable for success. Failure, however, is unthinkable. I can assure you that 19 NATO nations are in the end going to prevail.

"At the end of that process," he said, "we will be left with a very difficult and expensive reconstruction effort."

Holbrooke defended the Clinton Administration's Kosovo responses to date.

"Bombing has its limits," he said, "but ground troops will pose a different and more complicated set of problems if they go in as an invading force," he said. "That is why at this point the administration continues to believe that the correct process is to punish the aggressors from the air while offering them a diplomatic solution that protects the interests of the Serbs."

Holbrooke described what he considers the limits of culpability of the Serb citizenry. "I don't believe in collective guilt and I do not believe that all Serbs are equally responsible for the tragedy, anymore than all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust. But the Serb leadership, chosen by its own people, has created this tragedy. The Serb leadership has started four wars in eight years in the Balkans and has become the most destabilizing force in Europe since the end of World War II."

A crowd of 2,500 attended the ceremonies in front of historic Coram Library on the college's main quadrangle. Beneath sunny skies, Bates President Donald W. Harward conferred bachelor's degrees on 417 graduates.

Joining Holbrooke as honorary degree recipients were career educator Robert E. Dunn, Bates class of 1950 (doctor of humane letters); biochemist Leroy E. Hood, M.D. (doctor of science); and urban sociologist William Julius Wilson (doctor of laws).

Holbrooke, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, has played a major role in the U.S. effort to employ diplomacy and military force to put and end to bitter regional conflicts. He is awaiting confirmation as President Clinton's nominee to the U.S. ambassadorship to the United Nations.

As U.S. special envoy in 1995, Holbrooke presided over the Dayton peace accord that ended the war in Bosnia.