June 17, 1999
Dubai - US President Bill Clinton also needs to go on trial for war crimes, along with Slobodan Milosevic, for the Kosovo tragedy and for genocide in Iraq, leading Palestinian author Edward Said charged Wednesday.
"That the illegal [US-led NATO] bombing increased and hastened the flight of people out of Kosovo cannot be doubted," Said wrote in an article for the newspaper Gulf Today. "How the NATO high command... could have ever assumed that the number of refugees would have decreased as a result of the bombing fairly beggars the imagination," he said.
"Given Clinton's appalling record in Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and the White House corridors, he should be indicted as a war criminal as much as" the Yugoslav president, said Said, a US national. He said the International Tribunal which issued an arrest warrant for Milosevic should apply the same standards to Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark. The professor of literature at Columbia University in New York charged that their "murderous purpose completely overrode any notion of decency and the laws of war."
As for Iraq, the country was "in the process of genocidal dissolution thanks to US sanctions, which go on well past any sensible purpose other than to satisfy US feelings of righteous anger," the academic said. Said, who has written several books on the Palestinians and is a critic of Yasser Arafat, was referring to the U.S. hard line against any lifting of UN sanctions in force against Iraq since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. "By comparison with what Clinton has done to Iraq alone, Milosevic for all his brutality is a rank amateur in viciousness. What makes Clinton's crimes worse is the sanctimony and fraudulent concern in which he cloaks himself."
