An interesting article by Edward Said.
elias
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 28 June
> Subject: The Treason of the Intellectuals
>
> The treason of the intellectuals
> Al-Ahram Weekly
> Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
> http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/435/op1.htm
> 24
> - 30 June 1999
> By Edward Said
>
> No one at all can doubt that what has transpired in
> Kosovo as a result both
> of Slobodan Milosevic's brutality and the NATO
> response has made matters a good deal worse than
> they were before the
> bombing. The cost in human suffering on all sides
> has been dreadful, and
> whether it is in the tragedy of the refugees or the
> destruction of
> Yugoslavia, no simple reckoning or remedy will be
> available for at least a
> generation, perhaps longer. As any displaced and
> dispossessed person can
> testify, there is no such thing as a genuine,
> uncomplicated return to one's
> home; nor is restitution (other than simple, naked
> revenge, which sometimes
> gives an illusory type of satisfaction) ever
> commensurate with the loss of
> one's home, society, or environment. Through a
> combination whose exact
> proportions we will never know, despite NATO as well
> as Serbian propaganda,
> Kosovo has been purged
> forever of any hopes that coexistence between
> different
> communities is soon going to be possible. A number
> of honest
> reporters here and there have admitted that what
> exactly took
> place so far as the ethnic cleansing of Albanians by
> Serbs was concerned is
> still mostly unknown, since the NATO bombings of
> Kosovo, the actions of the
> Kosovo Liberation Army, and the actual brutality of
> individual or collective
> Serb actions took place all at once: trying to
> determine the blame and
> responsibility in such a chaos, except to score
> self-justifying debating
> points, is pretty difficult, if not impossible.
>
> But that the illegal bombing increased and hastened
> the flight of people out
> of Kosovo cannot be doubted. How the NATO high
> command, with Bill Clinton
> and Tony Blair leading the pack, could ever have
> assumed that the number of
> refugees would have decreased as a result of the
> bombing fairly beggars the
> imagination. Neither leader, significantly, has ever
> experienced the horrors
> of war; neither man fought, neither has any direct
> knowledge of what it
> means to search desperately for survival, to protect
> and feed one's family.
> For those
> reasons alone, both leaders deserve the strongest
> moral condemnation and,
> 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
> Milosevic. In any event, even according to US law,
> Clinton violated the
> constitution by fighting a war without congressional
> sanction. That he also
> violated the UN Charter simply adds to the felony.
>
> Morality teaches that, if one wants to intervene to
> alleviate suffering or
> injustice (this is the famous idea of humanitarian
> intervention which so
> many Western liberals have dragged out
> as an excuse for the bombing war), then one must
> make sure first of all that
> by doing so the situation will not be made worse.
> That lesson seems to have
> eluded the NATO leaders, who plunged in
> ill-prepared, poorly informed and
> heedless, and therefore cold-bloodedly sealed
> the fate of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who,
> whether they had to bear
> the brunt of Serbian vengeance on them, or because
> the sheer volume and
> density of the bombing (despite ludicrous claims
> about precision-guided
> ordinance) made it imperative for them to flee the
> province, became victims
> twice over.
>
> There is now the colossal job of trying to restore a
> million people to their
> homes with no clear idea of what, once they return,
> is to be their fate.
> Self-determination? Autonomy under Serbia? Military
> occupation under NATO?
> Partition? Shared sovereignty? According to what
> sort of timetable? Who is
> going to pay? These are only some of the questions
> that remain unanswered,
> if the agreement brokered by Russia actually works
> and goes through. What
> does it mean that (according to the agreement) some
> Serb police or military
> personnel will be allowed back in? Who will protect
> them against Albanian
> violence, and who will regulate their actions? Who
> will protect the Serbian
> Kosovars? Add to that the exorbitant cost of
> re-building
> Kosovo and Serbia, and you have a web of problems
> that simply defies the
> limited powers of understanding and political
> sophistication possessed by
> any or all of the present NATO leaders.
>
> What concerns me most, though, as an American and a
> citizen, is what the
> Kosovo crisis portends for the future of the world
> order. "Safe" or "clean"
> wars, in which American military personnel and their
> equipment are almost
> totally invulnerable to enemy retaliation or attack,
> are profoundly
> troubling things to think about. In effect, as the
> distinguished
> international jurist Richard Falk has argued, such
> wars share the same
> structure as torture, with the investigator-torturer
> having all the power to
> choose and then employ whatever method he wishes;
> the victim, who has none,
> consequently is left to the whim of his persecutor.
> America's status in the
> world today is at its lowest, that of a stupid bully
> capable of inflicting
> much more damage than any power in history.
>
> The US military budget is 30 per cent higher than
> that of the total budget
> spent by all the other NATO countries combined. Over
> half the countries of
> the world today have felt either the threat or the
> actuality of US economic
> or trade sanctions. Pariah states like Iraq, North
> Korea, Sudan, Cuba and
> Libya (pariahs because the US has labelled them so)
> bear the brunt of US
> unilateral anger; one of them, Iraq, is in the
> process of genocidal
> dissolution, thanks to US sanctions which go on well
> past any sensible
> purpose other than to satisfy the US's feelings of
> righteous anger. What is
> all this supposed to accomplish, and what does it
> say to the world
> about US power? This is a frightening message
> bearing no relationship to
> security, national interest, or well-defined
> strategic aims. It is all about
> power for its own sake. And when
> Clinton takes to the airwaves to inform Serbs or
> Iraqis that they will get
> no help from the country that destroyed theirs
> unless they change their
> leaders, arrogance simply knows no bounds. The
> International Tribunal that
> has branded Milosevic a war criminal cannot in the
> present circumstances have either viability or
> credibility unless the same
> criteria are applied to Clinton, Blair, Albright,
> Sandy Berger, General
> Clark and all the others whose murderous purpose
> completely overrode any
> notion of decency and the laws of war. In 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 and, worse,
> which seem to fool the neo-liberals who now run the
> Natopolitan world.
> Better an honest conservative than a deceptive
> liberal.
>
> Adding to this unhealthy situation, making it worse
> in fact, is the media,
> which has played the role not of impartial reporter
> but of partisan and
> partial witness to the folly and cruelty of the war.
> During the 79 days of
> bombing I must have watched at least 30 days of NATO
> briefings, and I cannot
> recall more than five or six reporters' questions
> that even remotely
> challenged the bilge put out by Jamie Shea, George
> Robertson and, worst of
> all, Javier Solano, the NATO
> honcho who has simply sold his "socialist" soul to
> US global hegemony.
> There was no scepticism in evidence at all from the
> media, no attempt to do
> anything more than "clarify" NATO positions, using
> retired military men
> (never women) to explicate the niceties of the
> terror bombing. Similarly liberal columnists and
> intellectuals, whose war in
> a sense this was,simply looked away from the
> destruction of Serbia's
> infrastructure (estimated at $136 billion) in their
> enthusiasm for the idea
> that "we" were doing something to stop ethnic
> cleansing. Worst of all, the
> media only half-heartedly (if at all) reported on
> the war's unpopularity in
> the US, Italy, Greece, and Germany. No memory of
> what happened in Rwanda
> four years ago, or
> in Bosnia, or the displacement of 350,000 Serbs at
> the hands of Tudjman, or
> the continuing Turkish atrocities against the Kurds,
> the killing of over
> 560,000 Iraqi civilians, or -- to bring it back to
> where it all started --
> Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine in l948,
> which continues, with
> liberal support, until today. In what essential ways
> are Barak, Sharon,
> Netanyahu and Eitan different in their views and
> practices toward different
> and "inferior" races from Milosevic and Tudjman?
>
> In the post-Cold War era, the question remains: is
> the US and its sordid
> military-economic policy, which knows only profit
> and opportunism, to rule
> the world, or can there develop a sufficiently
> powerful intellectual and
> moral resistance to its policies? For those of us
> who live in its sphere or
> are its citizens, the first duty is to demystify the
> debased language and
> images used to justify American practices and
> hypocrisy, to connect US
> policies in places like
> Burma, Indonesia, Iran and Israel with what it is
> now doing in Europe --
> making it safe for US investments and business --
> and to show that the
> policies are basically the same, though they are
> made to seem different.
> There can be no resistance without memory and
> universalism. If ethnic cleansing is evil in
> Yugoslavia -- as it is, of
> course -- it is also evil in Turkey, Palestine,
> Africa, and elsewhere.
> Crises are not over once CNN stops covering them.
>
> There can be no double standards. If war is cruel
> and deeply wasteful, then
> it is cruel whether or not American pilots bomb from
> 30,000 feet and remain
> unscathed. And if diplomacy is always to be
> preferred over military means,
> then diplomacy must be used at all costs.
>
> Finally, if innocent human life is sacred, then it
> must not cynically be
> sacrificed if the victims happen not to be white and
> European. One must
> always begin one's resistance at home, against power
> that as a citizen one
> can influence; but alas, a fluent nationalism
> masking itself as patriotism
> and moral concern has taken over the critical
> consciousness, which then puts
> loyalty to one's "nation" before everything. At that
> point there is only the
> treason of the
> intellectuals, and complete moral bankruptcy.
>