Condolences to Libya

Only one person gained from the Japanese disaster. It was Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, whose relentless suppression of the revolt against his regime’s dictatorship, was temporarily bumped off the world’s television screens, while the Japanese tragedy occupied the vacated space. To see Libyan warplanes bombarding combatants armed only with rifles and other ineffective weapons, day after day after day, was sad to behold.

I found it t is amazing that on some Internet forums, many of my fellow Africans who, one suspects, set a great deal of store by freedom and democracy in their own countries, and who would be the first to protest if their governments showed any signs of repressing them, were supporting Gaddafi.

Some said that he was worth supporting, because he is anti-Western. But this is not true. One of his best friends is the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, that hypocritical and unprincipled fruit-case who joined George W. Bush and his Neocons in a brutal and stupid war against Iraq, based on patent lies.

Some of these Africans argue that because Bush and Blair invaded Iraq and unleashed so much suffering on the Iraqi populace, it would be wrong for the Western countries to invade Libya and assist its anti-Gaddafi forces.

The only thing wrong with that argument is that no-one was asking for a Western invasion of Libya. The anti-Gaddafi fighters in Benghazi and elsewhere were only asking for a ‘no-fly-zone’over Libya so that Gaddafi’s Air Force could be prevented from continuing to bombard them and annihilate their struggle for freedom.

The request of the anti-Gaddafi forces was supported – most unusually – by the Arab League, whose representative, Lebanon, jointed the group at the UN Security Council that drafted the resolution that authorised action against Gaddafi – Resolution No. 1973. We may loathe the politics of the USA, Britain or France, but when they go out on a limb to assist people in danger of being incinerated by bombs dropped by warplanes, they ought to be applauded.

The Western ‘rescuers’ must be watched with a wary eye, though, for slimy Western companies will be queuing up to exploit the political confusion in Libya to obtain control of Libya’s oil production – just as they unscrupulously did in Iraq.

I must admit that I fumed with impotent rage, as the Americans, in particular, dithered endlessly over whether to help the anti-Gaddafi forces or not. The Americans always dither when freedom and democracy are at stake. They refused to help the Poles when the Poles fought against their dictatorial Communist Party in Poznan in June 1956. They didn’t even break off diplomatic relations with Poland when Polish soldiers murdered 57 workers who were taking part in demonstrations in favour of improved living conditions.

The Americans also left the heroic Hungarian freedom fighters, who heroically challenged their ruthless Communist Government, in November 1956. And they repeated their mistake when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

The annoying thing is that the Americans were all the time carrying out an enormous propaganda effort, through ‘Radio Free Europe’and the ‘Voice of America’, extolling the value of freedom, and human rights to the people of Eastern Europe. They laced this sugar-coated message with ‘Music USA’broadcasts, which consisted of mainly jazz music, which, although jammed by the Communists, managed to attract wide audiences. But when political action followed, the Americans were nowhere to be found. (That did not prevent them, in 1989, from claiming that it was they who caused the Berlin Wall to fall).

When Mikhail Gorbachev risked his life to tear down the totalitarian walls that enclosed the Soviet Union itself as well as its satellites, again the Americans claimed that it was they who’d done it – by making the Cold War too expensive for the Soviets. Not only that – Gorbachev, if a version of the American reading of history is to be accepted, dismantled the Soviet Union to please Reagan and his ‘Iron Lady’friend, Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain!

Yet, it was indeed the relatively meagre knocks made by the Poles, the Hungarians, the East Germans and the Czechs, in themselves, ‘insignificant’military forays but in psychological terms, of the greatest consequence, that eventually eroded the concrete core of the Berlin Wall, and shot Communist self-confidence to pieces. And thus, Eastern Europe was freed. Through the heroism of its own people.

Now, here was Libya, trying to free itself of a Gaddafi yoke that had lasted nearly 42 years. Not only did the Americans not help them, but the most senior intelligence chieftain of the US, James R. Clapper, Jr. (a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force who is currently the director of National Intelligence) made it a point to tell the Congressional Armed Forces Committee, in open session, that he thought the Gaddafi forces would ‘prevail’! I suppose he expected Saif Gaddafi, the psychotic son of Muammar, to go into his room and weep when he heard that? Obama’s Defence Secretary Robert Gates publicly poured cold water on the idea of a ‘no-fly-zone’, thus embarrassing poor Barack Obama, who was under great pressure to ‘do something’ about the (then) imminent slaughter by Gaddafi’s warplanes, of the populace of Benghazi and elsewhere.

The Obama administration had seemed divided, and had indeed stumbled whilst reacting to every stage of the ‘Arab spring of democracy’ – from Tunisia to Egypt – and now to Libya. Nevertheless, for the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper to so thoughtlessly knock the psychological stuffing out of the anti-Gaddafi forces, will merit a special place in the history of the movement of the world’s peoples towards freedom and democracy.

Anyway, as it is written, ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’. In this case, two men actually – David Cameron, prime minister of Britain, and Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France. Both men pursue policies at home that are seen by their opponents as ‘reactionary’ and they were not supposed to be the type of politicians who would be expected to confront ‘isolationists’ within their own parties and adopt a militant line against a man called Gaddafi who lives in a small country far away.

Yet that is exactly what they did. And when their effort at the UN began to bear fruit, the dragged an unwilling Obama administration along, until they managed to get that all-important Security Council Resolution 1973 passed. The Resolution was notable for the fact that even though the Russians and the Chinese were rumoured to be unhappy about it, they did not veto it. Another remarkable thing about it was that all the three African countries in the Security Council – Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa – voted in favour, as did Lebanon

One of its most compelling paragraphs drew attention to the ‘widespread and systematic attacks currently taking place in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya against the civilian population, [which] may amount to crimes against humanity,’ and authorised the establishment of a ‘no-fly-zone’, as well as other measures, to prevent the ‘crimes against humanity’ from happening.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi became apoplectic. He described his enemies in Benghazi and elsewhere in these intemperate terms: ‘They are rats and drug users. They are Al Qaeda!’ In a radio broadcast on 17 March 2011, in which he fiercely promised to storm Benghazi, a city of 700,000 inhabitants, he declared: ‘We shall show ‘no mercy, no pity‘, he threatened, adding: ‘We will come... House by house, room by room!‘

As he was mouthing these words, did he expect the watching world to stand by unconcerned?

When I was growing up, one of the lessons I learnt was that if you went and played with a known bully, and the bully – as expected – belted you well and proper, your own mother would beat you as well, when you ran home crying to complain.

‘But why at all did you go and play with him? Haven’t I told you that he is no good and you shouldn’t go near him?’ my mother would say. So one got punished twice – first by the bully, and a second time by one’s own mum for allowing oneself to fall into the hands of the bullyboy.

As I watched Gaddafi’s TV tantrums, and those of his sons, I said to myself, ‘These guys are really nuts.’

Nuts?

Yes. In the atmosphere created by the post-Tunisian, post-Egyptian revolutions, it was impossible to threaten fighters for democracy that way and expect the rest of the world not to take notice. As Shakespeare said:

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood…’

The ‘tide’ in the Middle East started with the immense courage shown by Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old vegetable seller in Tunis, who immolated himself rather than continue to tolerate the corrupt dictatorship of the Tunisian authorities. They had been making his life a misery by seizing his stall repeatedly, on the grounds that he was occupying illegal space on a street corner.

His action of impotent rage produced a greater resonance within the Tunisian populace than, perhaps, the mutiny of a unit of the Tunisia army probably could have caused. Self-immolation always catches the eye – as was proved in South Vietnam, to the dismay of that country’s American former occupiers. Now, the Tunisian populace transmogrified Boazizi’s simple act of personal bravery into a national metaphor that went beyond the feeble protest of a single wronged individual, into a symbolic act of resistance by a weak entity against a strong-armed authority.

People began to fill the streets of Tunis, chanting abuse against the corrupt government. Their numbers swelled with each passing day. The police and the army were sent to disperse the crowds, but they had been reading the ‘Tweets’ and Facebook entries uploaded by people in the crowd, and thus understood their motive in staying put where they were, despite being ordered to leave or be killed. The security forces found it more sensible to join the crowd and could be seen on TV, fraternising with the protesters. Ben Ali’s 24-year-old regime was at an end.

The lesson taught by the Tunisian revolution is that when a government makes itself unpopular with its own people, its security forces cannot save it from falling. They may go into the street and shoot at unarmed protestors. But they will return to their barracks and be forced to discuss what they had done. They will watch the reaction of their loved ones towards themselves. When they realise that they have gone against the popular will, nothing can make them stay loyal to the regime that has turned them into unclean murderers. The conscience of a human being is mightier than a gun.

Next, the ‘tide’ turned and rushed its unstoppable waters towards Cairo. Mubarak was receiving over US$2 billion a year from the Americans to beef up his security. But when Tahrir Square filled up with angry crowds, shouting at him to ‘Leave! Leave now!’ because they said he was corrupt and authoritarian, the soldiers Mubarak sent to disperse the crowds, also, like their Tunisian counterpart, joined the crowds! Their solidarity with the Tahrir Square crowd was even more eye-catching than the Tunisian solider-civilian rapport had been.

Who did not marvel at the tanks climbed by ordinary members of the public, who were putting scarves around the necks of the Mubarak-paid soldiers? So Mubarak too fell – in a game that resembled the children’s counting game, ‘ten green bottles standing on the wall.’

Where was Muammar Gaddafi all this time? He thought he was safe, did he? Yes, the self-delusions of men come to haunt them at crucial times. Bahrain was in flames. So was Yemen. In fact, the ‘tide’ of freedom sweeping Arabia had become viral.

But Gaddafi was shored up by his sense of self-deification. He was the ‘Brother Leader’ of the Libyans, who – per his own description – held ‘no post’ and was as constitutionally impotent as ‘the Queen of England’. Ah – yes. Until someone criticised him, in which case, that person would be strung up on a wall, and his fingernails and toenails painfully extracted, or his genitals burnt with electric shocks.

Wasn’t Muammar Gaddafi the uncrowned ‘King of Africa’, who had disciples spread across Central and West Africa – from Chad to Burkina Faso, from Nigeria to Ghana, and from Liberia to Mauritania? Hadn’t traditional rulers from Ghana, Uganda, Zululand other African kingdoms flocked to him to decorate his person with eye-catching traditional symbols, in exchange for millions of dollars?

No wonder, then that when the ‘tide’ reached his shores, he mistook its tsunami power for the rumblings of a wave inviting swimmers to come and surf it.

When it became evident that he was in trouble, he over-reacted and thus fell into the trap his opponents had sprung for him. He would suppress the rebellion with overwhelming military power. He wouldn’t be as ‘defeatist’ or ‘weak-kneed’as Mubarak and Ben Ali had shown themselves to be. He would send jet bombers and huge tanks to mow down those stupid ‘rats’ who thought they could overthrow him with rifles, sticks and stones.

Both Gaddafi and his sons gave wild-eyed TV interviews, threatening the opposition with fire and brimstone. What they did not realise was that what was happening in Arab countries had become world political theatre. Great cries of anguish emanated from the throats of sympathisers all over of the world: ‘Gaddafi and his sons are going to massacre the people of Benghazi!’

Western politicians reacted in different ways. David Cameron of Great Britain and Nicolas Sarkozy of France were among those who ‘seized the tide at the flood.’ They both realised that this was a cause which, if embraced, could provide them with a ‘win-win’ situation. In becoming the ‘tail’ that wagged the American dog, they gained greatly in prestige, despite the post-imperial decline of both countries.

As noted before, the Americans reacted in a pathetic manner. But they did eventually come round: according to the New York Times, the Obama administration was saved by three women – Susan Rice, the US representative at the UN, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (a late convert) and Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council. Ms Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Both she and Mr. Clinton have been living with consequences of that failure and she wasn’t going to watch Obama fumble and later express the view that his failure to act on Libya was his ‘biggest regret’.

While all these battles were going on behind the scenes, Gaddafi himself was insouciant. Nothing could touch him. Like Saddam Hussein and his idiotic negotiator, Tarikh Aziz, in 2003, who wouldn’t pause to analyse and find out what they could do, in practical, realpolitik terms, to prevent the dispatching of the awesome forces being assembled against their nation, Gaddafi went on TV to ramble and issue threats.

The West, on the other hand, resorted to skilful diplomacy – they even got the Arab League to help them draft the resolution that became UN Security Council Resolution 1973.

But Gaddafi still did not get the message. He tried to pull a fast one on the Western forces – by announcing an immediate ‘ceasefire’, whilst attempting to capture Benghazi and effect a fait accompli. Where it will all end, only God knows. But the people of Libya deserve all our sympathy – for having been obliged to endure the calamitous rule of a man, apparently destined to inflict so much suffering on them.

Does Gaddafi have a mother? Did she not teach him not to go and court a fight with bullies who are palpably stronger than oneself? Oh God! Please help the innocent people of Libya!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a writer and commentator.
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