By Stephen Gowans, 8th November 2012

Maximilian C. Forte’s new book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (released November 20) is a searing indictment of NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, and of the North American and European left that supported it. He argues that NATO powers, with the help of the Western left who “played a supporting role by making substantial room for the dominant U.S. narrative and its military policies,” marshalled support for their intervention by creating a fiction that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was about to carry out a massacre against a popular, pro-democracy uprising, and that the world could not stand idly by and watch a genocide unfold.

Forte takes this view apart, showing that a massacre was never in the cards, much less genocide. Gaddafi didn’t threaten to hunt down civilians, only those who had taken up armed insurrection—and he offered rebels amnesty if they laid down their arms. What’s more, Gaddafi didn’t have the military firepower to lay siege to Benghazi (site of the initial uprising) and hunt down civilians from house to house. Nor did his forces carry out massacres in the towns they recaptured…something that cannot be said for the rebels.

Citing mainstream media reports that CIA and British SAS operatives were already on the ground “either before or at the very same time as (British prime minister David) Cameron and (then French president Nicolas) Sarkozy began to call for military intervention in Libya”, Forte raises “the possibility that Western powers were at least waiting for the first opportunity to intervene in Libya to commit regime change under the cover of a local uprising.” And he adds, they were doing so “without any hesitation to ponder what if any real threats to civilians might have been.” Gaddafi, a fierce opponent of fundamentalist Wahhabist/Salafist Islam “faced several armed uprisings and coup attempts before— and in the West there was no public clamor for his head when he crushed them.” (The same, too, can be said of the numerous uprisings and assassination attempts carried out by the Syrian Muslim Brothers against the Assads, all of which were crushed without raising much of an outcry in the West, until now.)

Rejecting a single factor explanation that NATO intervened to secure access to Libyan oil, Forte presents a multi-factorial account, which invokes elements of the hunt for profits, economic competition with China and Russia, and establishing US hegemony in Africa. Among the gains of the intervention, writes Forte, were:

1) increased access for U.S. corporations to massive Libyan expenditures on infrastructure development (and now reconstruction), from which U.S. corporations had frequently been locked out when Gaddafi was in power; 2) warding off any increased acquisition of Libyan oil contracts by Chinese and Russian firms; 3) ensuring that a friendly regime was in place that was not influenced by ideas of “resource nationalism;” 4) increasing the presence of AFRICOM in African affairs, in an attempt to substitute for the African Union and to entirely displace the Libyan-led Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD); 5) expanding the U.S. hold on key geostrategic locations and resources; 6) promoting U.S. claims to be serious about freedom, democracy, and human rights, and of being on the side of the people of Africa, as a benign benefactor; 7) politically stabilizing the North African region in a way that locked out opponents of the U.S.; and, 8) drafting other nations to undertake the work of defending and advancing U.S. political and economic interests, under the guise of humanitarianism and protecting civilians.

Forte challenges the view that Gaddafi was in bed with the West as a “strange view of romance.” It might be more aptly said, he counters, that the United States was in bed with Libya on the fight against Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists, since “Libya led by Gaddafi (had) fought against Al Qaeda years before it became public enemy number one in the U.S.” Indeed, years “before Bin Laden became a household name in the West, Libya issued an arrest warrant for his capture.” Gaddafi was happy to enlist Washington’s help in crushing a persistent threat to his secular rule.

Moreover, the bed in which Libya and the United States found themselves was hardly a comfortable one. Gaddafi complained bitterly to US officials that the benefits he was promised for ending Libya’s WMD program and capitulating on the Lockerbie prosecution were not forthcoming. And the US State Department and US corporations, for their part, complained bitterly of Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” and attempts to “Libyanize” the economy. One of the lessons the NATO intervention has taught is that countries that want to maintain some measure of independence from Washington are well advised not to surrender the threat of self-defense.

Forte, to use his own words, gives the devil his due, noting that:

Gaddafi was a remarkable and unique exception among the whole range of modern Arab leaders, for being doggedly altruistic, for funding development programs in dozens of needy nations, for supporting national liberation struggles that had nothing to do with Islam or the Arab world, for pursuing an ideology that was original and not simply the product of received tradition or mimesis of exogenous sources, and for making Libya a presence on the world stage in a way that was completely out of proportion with its population size.

He points out as well that “Libya had reaped international isolation for the sake of supporting the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the African National Congress (ANC)”, which, once each of these organizations had made their own separate peace, left Libya behind continuing to fight.

Forte invokes Sirte in the title of his book to expose the lie that NATO’s intervention was motivated by humanitarianism and saving lives. “Sirte, once promoted by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as a possible capital of a future United States of Africa, and one of the strongest bases of support for the revolution he led, was found to be in near total ruin by visiting journalists who came after the end of the bombing campaign by members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). “ This,” observes Forte, “is what ‘protecting civilians’ actually looks like, and it looks like crimes against humanity.” “The only lives the U.S. was interested in saving,” he argues “were those of the insurgents, saving them so they could defeat Gaddafi.” And yet “the slaughter in Sirte…barely raised an eyebrow among the kinds of Western audiences and opinion leaders who just a few months before clamored for ‘humanitarian intervention.’”

Among those who clamored for humanitarian intervention were members of the “North American and European left—reconditioned, accommodating, and fearful—(who) played a supporting role by making substantial room for the dominant U.S. narrative and its military policies.” While Forte doesn’t name names, except for a reference to Noam Chomsky, whom he criticizes for “poor judgment and flawed analyses” for supporting “the no-fly zone intervention and the rebellion as ‘wonderful’ and ‘liberation’”, self-proclaimed Africa expert Patrick Bond may be emblematic of the left Forte excoriates. Soon after the uprising began, Bond wrote on his Z-Space that “Gaddafi may try to hang on, with his small band of loyalists allegedly bolstered by sub-Saharan African mercenaries – potentially including Zimbabweans, according to Harare media – helping Gaddafi for a $16,000 payoff each.” This was a complete fiction, but one Bond fell for eagerly, and then proceeded to propagate with zeal, without regard to the consequences. As Forte notes, “the only massacre to have occurred anywhere near Benghazi was the massacre of innocent black African migrant workers and black Libyans falsely accused of being ‘mercenaries’” by the likes of Bond.

Forte also aims a stinging rebuke at those who treated anti-imperialism as a bad word. “Throughout this debacle, anti-imperialism has been scourged as if it were a threat greater than the West’s global military domination, as if anti-imperialism had given us any of the horrors of war witnessed thus far this century. Anti-imperialism was treated in public debate in North America as the province of political lepers.” This calls to mind opprobrious leftist figures who discovered a fondness for the obloquy “mechanical anti-imperialists” which they hurdled with great gusto at anti-imperialist opponents of the NATO intervention.

“NATO’s intervention did not stop armed conflict in Libya,” observes Forte—it continues to the present. “Massacres were not prevented, they were enabled, and many occurred after NATO intervened and because NATO intervened.” It is for these reasons he urges readers to stand idly by the next time that empire comes calling in the name of human rights.

Slouching Towards Sirte is a penetrating critique, not only of the NATO intervention in Libya, but of the concept of humanitarian intervention and imperialism in our time. It is the definitive treatment of NATO’s war on Libya. It is difficult to imagine it will be surpassed.

Maximilian C. Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Montreal, ISBN 978-1-926824-52-9. Available November 20, 2012. http://www.barakabooks.com/

Counterpunch, DANIEL KOVALICK, 8th November 2012

When I studied law at Columbia in the early 1990s, I had the fortune of studying under Louis Henkin, probably the world’s most famous human rights theoretician.   Upon his passing in 2010, Elisa Massimino at Human Rights First stated in Professor Henkin’s New York Times obituary that he “literally and figuratively wrote the book on human rights” and that “[i]t is no exaggeration to say that no American was more instrumental in the development of human rights law than Lou.”

Professor Henkin, rest his soul, while a human rights legend, was not always good on the question of war and peace.  I know this from my own experience when I had a vigorous debate with him during and continuing after class about the jailing of anti-war protestors, including Eugene V. Debs, during World War I.  In short, Professor Henkin, agreeing with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, believed that these protestors were properly jailed because their activities, though peaceful, constituted a “clear and present danger” to the security of the nation during war time.  I strongly disagreed.

That Professor Henkin  would side with the state against these war protestors is indicative of the entire problem with the field of human rights which is at best neutral or indifferent to war, if not supportive of it as an instrument of defending human rights.   This, of course, is a huge blind spot.   In the case of World War I, for example, had the protestors been successful in stopping the war, untold millions would have been saved from the murderous cruelty of a conflict for which, to this day, few can adequately even explain the reasons.   And yet, this does not seem to present a moral dilemma for today’s human rights advocates.  (I will note, on the plus side, that Professor Henkin did become increasingly uneasy with the Vietnam War as that conflict unfolded, and specifically with the President’s increasing usurpation of Congress’s war authority).

In the end, it was not from Professor Henkin, but from other, dissident intellectuals who I learned the most about human rights and international law.  The list of these intellectuals, none of whom actually practice human rights in their day job, includes Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone.  And of course, I have read a lot of what they have to say on this subject on these very pages of CounterPunch.

And, what all of these individuals have emphasized time and time again is that international law, as first codified in the aftermath of World War II in such instruments as the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Charter, was created for the primary purpose of preserving and maintaining peace by outlawing aggressive war.   And, why is this so?  Because the nations which had just gone through the most destructive war in human history, with its attendant crimes of genocide and the holocaust, realized full well that those crimes were made possible by the paramount crime of war itself.  As Jean Bricmont, then, in his wonderful book Humanitarian Imperialism, explains, the first crime for which the Nazis “were condemned at Nuremberg was initiating a war of aggression, which, according to the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, ‘is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes is that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’”

In other words, the logic of the very founders of international law, including international human rights law, was that, to preserve human rights, the primary task of nations is to ensure peace and to prevent war which inevitably leads to the massive violation of human rights.  As Noam Chomsky has noted for years, quite notably in his 1971 Yale Law Review article entitled, “The Rule of Force in International Affairs,” 80 Yale L.J. 1456, one of the very first substantive norms established by the UN Charter is prohibition against aggressive war.   Such a norm is contained, as Chomsky relates, in Article 2(4) which provides that all UN members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force . . . .”   And, contrary to the position of the new humanitarian interventionists, Article 2(7) of the Charter specifically states that “[nothing in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state . . . .”

Sadly, as Chomsky noted even back in 1971, these norms, the paramount ones of the entire UN system, have sadly been read out of international law.   And, they have been read out by, among others, such chief human rights groups as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW).   As Jean Bricmont, citing international law scholar Michael Mandel, explains in Humanitarian Imperialism, while AI and HRW urged all “’beligerents’” (without distinguishing between the attackers and the attacked) at the outset of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to respect the rules of war, neither group said a word about the illegality of the war itself.  As Bricmont quite correctly stated, “[t]hese organizations are in the position of those who recommend that rapists use condoms,” ignoring the fact that once the intervention they failed to oppose  “takes place on a large scale, human rights and the Geneva Conventions are massively violated.”

This brings us to the present time.   Just last week, Amnesty International issued a long statement in opposition to an article I penned for Counterpunch on “Libya and the West’s Human Rights Hypocricy.”   AI, in its counter-blog, entitled, “A Critic Gets it Wrong on Amnesty International and Libya” (see, owl.li/eYmTb), AI claims that I was wrong in stating that it had supported  the NATO intervention in Libya.  AI, affirming the critiques of Bricmont and Mandel, claims in this blog, that “Amnesty International generally takes no position on the use of armed force or on military interventions in armed conflict, other than to demand that all parties respect international human rights and humanitarian law.”  AI then goes on to try to clarify that, in advance of the NATO intervention in Libya, AI, in a February 23, 2011, release, merely called on the Security Council to take immediate measures against Libya and Gaddafi, including [but not limited to] freezing the assets of Gaddafi and his senior military advisers, and investigating the possibility of a referral to the International Criminal Court.

In its blog contra my article, AI claims that it called for such action based upon Gaddafi’s  verbal “threat to ‘cleanse Libya house by house’” to end the resistance.  While this is true, this is not the whole truth.   Thus, inAI’s Feburary 23, 2011 release, it also based this call upon “persistent reports of mercenaries being brought in from African countries by the Libyan leader to violently suppress the protests against him.”   And, as we learned from our own Patrick Cockburn in anIndependent article from June 24, 2011, entitled, “Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as a weapon of war,” Amnesty ended up debunking the reports (though well after NATO’s attack against Libya had begun)  that Gaddafi was bringing in foreign mercenaries to fight.

As Cockburn, citing Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty International, explains:

“Rebels have repeatedly charged that mercenary troops from Central and West Africa have been used against them. The Amnesty investigation found there was no evidence for this. “Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released,” says Ms Rovera. “Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents.”

In other words, AI, on Feburary 23, 2011, was calling for Security Council action against Libya based upon reports about foreign mercenaries which it would later conclude were false, and upon verbal threats Gaddafi had made  — very weak bases indeed for Security Council action.

And what about the calls for such action themselves?  As we all know, the Security Council did act, authorizing a NATO attack upon Libya which began on March 19, 2011.  The ordering of such an attack was a possible and indeed likely action which the Security Council would take, especially given that countries like the U.S. and France were aggressively pushing for such action at the time.  And, AI full well knew this, and its calls for Security Council action worked in tandem with the efforts of the U.S. and France to obtain authorization for such an intervention.

In other words, AI, based at least in part on false reports, was pushing for Security Council action which it knew could, and most likely would, result in the authorization of force against Libya.  And indeed, AI’s other call for possible referral of sitting Libyan officials to the International Criminal Court was tantamount to a call for armed intervention, including regime change, because only such intervention could bring about the hauling of sitting government officials to The Hague.   AI’s current professions of neutrality on the issue of intervention notwithstanding, it can truly be stated that AI supported the intervention that took place in March of 2011 as an objective matter.

And sadly, this objective support was based in part on false reports of foreign, black mercenaries being brought into Libya.   These false reports of mercenaries, in addition to feeding the calls for intervention, had another terrible effect – they helped lead to the massive reprisals against black Libyans and foreign guest workers during the conflict in Libya and continuing after the time that Gaddafi was toppled.   The most notable of such reprisals was the utter destruction of the town of Tawarga, a town largely populated by black Libyans, by anti-Gaddafi rebels.  To its great discredit, AI, in its rush to push for Security Council intervention, spread the very false reports which fueled such acts of vengeance.

And, what about AI’s response to crimes committed by NATO’s intervention in and bombing of Libya?  AI, in its response to my article, cites to its criticism of NATO as evidence of its even-handedness in responding to the conduct of all sides of the Libyan conflict.  Specifically, AI cites to the following criticism it made as such evidence:

Although NATO appears to have made significant efforts to minimize the risk of causing civilian casualties, scores of Libyan civilians were killed and many more injured. Amnesty International is concerned that no information has been made available to the families of civilians killed and those injured in NATO strikes about any investigations which may have been carried out into the incidents which resulted in death and injury.

Of course, this mere criticism demonstrates AI’s utter lack of even-handedness.   First of all, in order to please its NATO patron, AI obviously felt compelled to lead its criticism with a compliment – patting NATO on the back for allegedly trying to “minimize the risk of causing civilian casualties,” as if aerial bombardment of major cities can ever constitute the minimization of such risks.

Then, AI complains that “no information has been made available” to the families of civilians killed or injured “about any investigations which may have been carried out into the incidents which resulted in death and injury.”   What “investigations” is AI referring to here?  Clearly, AI is complaining that NATO, left to police itself, has not shared the results of its own investigations into its own crimes.

The truth is that AI, which called for Security Council and possible ICC action against Libya as NATO was sharpening its knives to invade, has not called for a body outside NATO (e.g., the ICC) to investigate and possibly prosecute NATO officials for their crimes.  What is good for the goose then, is not good for the gander in AI’s view.  Of course, the ICC does not exist to prosecute those from the paler, Western countries.   No, the ICC (which the U.S. is not even a signatory to and is therefore exempt from) is, in practice, for the darker races of the poorer countries; for those from Africa, Asia, and from time to time, the lesser Slavic nations.  And, therein lies the problem inherent in the entire international human rights system of which AI is an integral part.

As we learn from Diana Johnstone in a CounterPunch article entitled, “How Amnesty International Became the Servant of U.S. Warmongering Foreign Policy,”  AI’s journey to becoming an appendage of the U.S. and NATO recently became complete with its appointment of Suzanne Nossel as the new Director of Amnesty International USA.  Diana Johnstone explains that Suzanne Nossel openly advocated, and indeed coined the term, “soft power” projection by the U.S. when she served in her last job as Assistant Secretary for International Organizations at none other than the U.S. State Department.  And, as Jean Bricmont notes in Humanitarian Intervention, and as Ms. Nossel herself and AI fully understand, “soft power” only works because it has the very real threat of “hard power” (including economic sanctions and military intervention) behind it.  AI has sadly forgotten that the wielding of such power by the rich countries to bully the weak is forbidden by the UN Charter which prohibits both the actual use and threat of force.   It is those prohibitions which must be enforced first and foremost to truly protect human rights.

What’s more, as Diana Johnstone further explained in her CounterPunch article, Suzanne Nossel, just before being hired by AI, played a direct role while at the U.S. State Department in ginning up the pretexts for the NATO intervention in Libya.   Ms. Johnstone explains that,  “As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, Ms. Nossel played a role in drafting the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on Libya. That resolution, based on exaggeratedly alarmist reports, served to justify the UN resolution which led to the NATO bombing campaign that overthrew the Gaddafi regime. “  In other words, Ms. Nossel’s role in pushing the NATO intervention was similar to that of AI’s at the time, with both pushing exaggerated, and indeed false, claims to justify stepped up action against Libya.

AI’s current attempts to distance itself from the very NATO intervention which AI and Ms. Nossel worked together to help bring about simply do not ring true.  I would submit that it is time for AI to do some real soul-searching on the issue of whether it wants to serve the interests of human rights or to serve the interests of NATO and Western military intervention, for it truly cannot serve both masters.

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh.  He currently teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Asari Sobukwe, All African Peoples Revolutionary Party

Sukant Chandan, Sons of Malcolm

Dan Glazebrook

Minkah Odofo, Pan-Afrikan Society Community Forum

Libyan National

More videos of the event to follow…

Essam al-Muntasir of the Zawiya Oil Refining Company said many wounded veterans of the war which ousted Muammar Gaddafi last year were demonstrating in front of the refinery.

“They are not allowing the employees to enter the company and not allowing our tankers to leave,” he told Reuters.

“They say they haven’t received adequate compensation and feel the government hasn’t given them their full rights.”

He would not say if the protesters were armed.

A day after a gun battle that wounded five people in central Tripoli, the refinery protest is another reminder of volatile security conditions in Libya, where a weak central government has yet to control militias or meet its people’s needs.

In Tripoli, dozens of cars lined up outside petrol stations patiently waiting to fill their tanks.

The Zawiya refinery, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, has a capacity of 120,000 barrels per day and provides 40 per cent of western Libya’s oil needs, Muntasir said.

He said refinery officials and elders from Zawiya were trying to resolve the dispute without resorting to police.

Rival Libyan militias fired guns and rocket-propelled grenades at each other in Tripoli on Sunday and set fire to a former intelligence building in one of the worst breakdowns in security in the capital since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

At least five people were wounded and a stray bullet entered a hospital in the city centre, where residents rushed to arm themselves, saying calls to police had gone unheeded. After more than 12 hours, the army moved in.

The violence underscored the challenges faced by Libya‘s first freely elected government, which was approved last week, in reining in the militias that gained power during the conflict that ended Gaddafi’s 42-year rule a year ago and holding together a country riven by regional, sectarian and clan divisions.

By early afternoon, a building belonging to the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), set up last year to try to regulate armed groups, was set alight and looted by members of a militia faction, witnesses said.

The fight erupted just after midnight, according to residents in the southern district of Sidi Khalifa. The militias involved are both affiliated to the SSC, an umbrella group for various armed groups that refused to join the police or army saying these were still run by Gaddafi loyalists.

Civilians blocked the street where the fighting raged to prevent cars entering, and many went home to get their own weapons. “We called the police early in the morning to help us stop the shooting, but no one came,” said Khaled Mohamed.

At the nearby Tripoli central hospital, doctors and nurses ran for cover. Dr Khaled Ben Nour said five casualties had been brought in. “We have real patients with real needs. These rogue militias need to leave us in peace so we can do our jobs,” he said.

Some fighters said the clash was over the detention of a militiaman, while others said the SSC headquarters had been occupied by a militia called Support Unit No 8, led by Mohamed al-Warfali.

Rival militias, also belonging to the SSC, fired at the building from a former post office. “Mohamed al-Warfali and his lawless group of men have occupied the SSC building and refuse to come out,” said militia member Mohamed al-Himrazy, who accused Warfali’s group of breaking SSC rules.The clash highlighted the latent tensions between Libya’s semi-official militias, which hold a great deal of power and have loyalties sometimes at odds with those of the government.

“The government needs to find a solution for this security mess,” said resident Khaled Ahmed. “It’s been two years since the revolution and there is still no security. They either need to find a solution or we take to the streets again.”

Apart from draining public finances, SSC members have been accused of kidnappings and intimidation across Libya. For their part, the armed revolutionaries who fought the war feel unrepresented by the elected civilian membersauthorities.

Just over a mile from the gun battle, members of the general national congress debated whether the new government should be sworn in on Thursday and whether they should move to a different city because of recurrent attacks on their building.

Saturday, 3rd November, 5pm until 8.30pm

SPEAKERS:

Chair: Sukant Chandan

Dr Abdal Aziz – Libyan patriot and expert on Libyan affairs

Mohamed Hassan – former African diplomat and expert on African, Arab and Global South affairs

Asari Sobukwe – All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party

Dave Roberts – peace activist, anti-imperialist socialist and a decades long friend of the Libyan Jamahirya

Libyan from Sirte

This is a free but ticketed event, please send your confirmation of your place to sukant.chandan@gmail.com

This event is a private event and will have security, any disruption to this event is unwelcome.

See more details here - https://www.facebook.com/events/271571699628611/

Pan-African News Wire, October 29th, 2012
By Gerald A. Perreira

It is a year since the brutal killing of Muammar Qaddafi and the installation of NATO’s proxy government in Tripoli. The installed government is not in control and heavily armed militias and foreign mercenaries are running the show.

This past year has been one of chaos and savagery. Thousands have been hunted down, imprisoned or killed. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring countries to flee the persecution. The images emerging from the current siege of Bani Walid are gruesome.

NATO’s henchmen are attacking their own people with bombs and chemical weapons, injuring and killing scores of civilians. Women, children and old people lie maimed or dismembered on the side of the roads, many of them buried in the rubble.

Residents tell stories of bombs filled with burning toxic gases and white phosphorous raining down from missiles. Scorched victims of the constant shelling are proof of the sinister nature of the Islamist militias and the fascist government forces which have been ordered to use ‘all necessary means to deal with Bani Walid’.

Where is the ‘international community’ condemnation? Where is Amnesty? And where is NATO? Why has the Security Council not called an emergency session to address this atrocity?

Where is the ‘humanitarian intervention’?

Russia finally put forward a draft statement to the UN Security Council calling for ‘a peaceful resolution to the ongoing crisis’ – a lukewarm response to a ‘killing fields’ scenario and even this was blocked by the US. This is the freedom sanctioned by NATO in Libya – accept the mark of the beast or die.

Where is the African Union? Ethnic cleansing of people with black skin is being carried out by Arab Supremacists and where is the African Union? The answer is that its troops, drawn from neo-colonial African countries, are mired down in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting imperialism’s battles under the command of AFRICOM.

Since Qaddafi’s murder, all but three African countries have accepted US military occupation in the form of AFRICOM. And what about the Eurocentric left in the US, Europe, Canada and elsewhere – it seems they are so confused over Libya and the Arab Spring thing, that they are unable to put up any effective opposition to the murder and mayhem that their governments are perpetrating.

It is so much more comfortable and easier all round to join the frenzy over Pussy Riot, while the siege of Libya and Bani Walid, which can easily be compared to the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia, is unfolding before their eyes. There is no question that the Islamist militias that have surrounded Bani Walid are certainly on a par with the Khmer Rouge.

Everything you can imagine and everything you can’t… Bani Walid, like many other towns and neighborhoods loyal to the Al Fateh revolution, has been under constant siege since NATO first invaded. Two years later the residents have no food, water, electricity, medicine or even oxygen for the hospitals but they have set up their own television station which broadcasts daily, and no matter how desperate their situation they continue to resist the savage hordes at the gates of their city.

The current onslaught is entering its fourth week, part of a killing and maiming spree which has been on-going since the NATO led invasion of the Libyan Jamahiriya. It is only in the last few days that the dominant global media has broadcast news from Bani Walid, and only then because the horror of what is taking place there could no longer be ignored.

The events that have unfolded in Libya over the past year have occurred away from the eyes of the world. Imperialist media outlets, such as BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera were told to turn their cameras off so that NATO’s thugs could quietly engage in a cleanup operation, that is, to finish off the necessary racial and ideological cleansing.

NATO expected that these vicious militias would have finished the ‘mop-up’ by now, but once again they failed to understand the true dynamic of this battle.

There is no doubt that NATO has destroyed much of Libya but that was an attack on material structures – albeit a devastating one.

However, this battle is not being fought on the material plane alone. It is therefore wholly different to anything that the North Atlantic Tribes can conceive of. They should take note of a catch phrase taken from an old Libyan tourism poster which describes the Jamahiriya as ‘everything you can imagine and everything you can’t’.

This is a battle being fought on many planes, including the metaphysical plane – it is not something that can be exterminated with physical force alone, no matter how great that force is.

The real revolution will definitely not be televised…

Bani Walid is a bastion of resistance, sheltering many of those who fled the Black Libyan town of Tawergha and numerous Africans living in Libya, all of whom are escaping the persecution meted out towards anyone whose skin is black. The Muslims of Bani Walid refused to accept that people with black skin are to be hunted and killed, since this is antithetical to the teaching of Islam.

There are Libyans of every skin shade in Bani Walid – Libyans who believe in Muammar Qaddafi’s vision of a truly independent Libya taking its rightful place in a United States of Africa.

On the anniversary of the slaying of Shaheed Muammar Qaddafi, we salute the heroic resistance of all those at Bani Walid, Sirte, Abu Salim, Janzur, Kufra and all over Libya, all of whom are willing to die rather than accept the ‘mark of the beast’.

Let our defiant brothers and sisters in Bani Walid know that they should not worry about the fact that their cause is receiving little or no corporate global media attention. They dare not televise the real revolution.

Nevertheless, the real revolution is acknowledged by millions of people throughout the world who stand in solidarity with the real revolutionaries, inspired by some of the greatest acts of defiance and resistance seen in our times.

This is how the battles of Sirte and Bani Walid will be recorded by us. In the words of the Brother Leader: ‘I live in a place where you cannot reach me. I live in the hearts of millions of people’.

You came, you didn’t see, he died…

‘Today many Americans are asking, indeed I asked myself, how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate? In a city we helped save from destruction…’, wailed Hillary Clinton, upon hearing the news that Christopher Stevens had been murdered in Benghazi.

Let’s just put it this way Hillary, everything is not as it seems. One thing we know for sure is that no US ambassador or diplomatic staff would have been killed if you and your NATO allies had not destroyed Libya and murdered Muammar Qaddafi. Put the blame where it belongs. ‘You came, you didn’t see, he died’.

You are way out of your depth.

This ‘Arab Spring’ Thing

Regardless of the amount of damage control, lies and spin that comes out of Washington, nothing can clean up the mess they have gotten themselves into with their so-called Arab Spring – a construct straight out of their warped imaginations.

The sad thing is that so many commentators and activists are also talking about an Arab Spring as if it exists, allowing Empire to name, set the agenda and call the shots –what it should be called, where and when, and how it should be understood.

Via their globally dominant media outlets, they feed people a daily diatribe of simplistic binary oppositions – ‘the good guys and the bad guys’. In the real world it is not so simple but in fact highly complex.

So highly complex, that without an in-depth knowledge of the region’s history, politics, religious issues and theological discourse, no commentator would be in a position to make sense of current events. While we expect right wing pundits to regurgitate imperialist propaganda, there is an enormous amount of confusion even in progressive circles with regard to Libya, so much so that we have witnessed a convergence of the ‘left’ and ‘right’.

One reason for this is that both sides are analyzing events using Eurocentric paradigms – paradigms which are reductionist, incomplete, flawed and incapable of providing an accurate understanding of what is taking place.

Following the hijacking of uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and the subsuming of unrest across the region into a ‘one size fits all’, using that key phrase – ‘Arab Spring’, the Empire was on a roll. It was then that they committed their worst blunder – a calamity so catastrophic that its fall out will haunt them for decades to come.

They handed the most progressive and prosperous country in all of Africa on a platter to a conglomerate of religious deviants (Salafi Islamists).

Their plan was to use these Salafi Islamists to get rid of Qaddafi and destroy the Libyan Jamahiriya, and with it, any possibility of a truly independent Africa and the specter of an African currency based on Africa’s gold standard. And they did use them to achieve this objective, but the Salafis, who have had a long and tedious love-hate relationship with white supremacists/imperialists, were also using NATO.

The US and their European allies had no qualms about backing Al Qaeda affiliated thugs to finally get rid of Muammar Qaddafi.

They had attempted to assassinate Muammar Qaddafi a number of times over the years and failed. They imagined that after ridding themselves of Qaddafi they could set up sham elections, fly in some ‘moderate’ and out of touch Libyan emigres in suits and set up a proxy government.

Their plan was to marginalize the Islamist thugs, send them packing after using them to do their dirty work, patch things up sufficiently with an inept government that would implement their sham democracy, and then get their hands on some of the world’s best sweet crude.

At the same time, with Qaddafi out of the way, they could ensure unhindered access to the continent, something they need at any cost for their very survival.

The imperialists and their oil companies are now in Libya in full force. However, their victory posturing was short lived. Their poorly hatched plan has backfired. US foreign policy has always suffered from the ignorance of successive presidents and their mouthpieces, including their intelligence services, which are inept at best.

As one US general said regarding the war in Afghanistan, ‘we are flying blind’. When we listen to the nonsense emanating from their ‘think tanks’, such as the Hoover Institute and the Heritage Foundation, we are left incredulous that they could be so ill-informed and misguided.

‘Who’s Gonna Stop Dem Now?’

US imperialist blunders, resulting in immeasurable amounts of human suffering, are nothing new on this earth. Obama’s administration is just one in a long line of US administrations with no real understanding of the Arab and African worlds. Following Obama’s election, Muammar Qaddafi, along with Hugo Chavez and other progressive world leaders, expressed their hope that Obama might bring a different mindset to the White House.

However, a few months after Obama’s inauguration, they came to the disappointing conclusion that this liberal from Chicago had no real understanding of the world and had in fact, as we say in the Caribbean, ‘hung his hat up where he could not reach it’. In other words, he was out of his depth and his European allies are no better informed.

This is why NATO leaders did not know that Abdelhakim Belhadj and his followers could not be used and then disposed of. They were too busy using the Islamists to see that in fact, it was the Islamists who were using them – the US and NATO – a scenario that is currently being replayed in Syria.

In both cases the imperialists are being out played at their own game of deception. The fact is that a few months ago the same people who were waving US flags and hailing the US as their ‘liberators’ are now chanting ‘death to America’ and burning US flags.

Hillary – you came, but you didn’t see. The battle raging in Libya today, in Bani Walid and throughout the nation, predates Qaddafi’s 1969 revolution.

There is no ‘Arab Spring’ – the ‘Arab Spring’ is a Neo-Con ideological construct

Qaddafi warned the world about the Salafis – no one knew them better than he and his fellow Libyans. This battle raging out of Benghazi and Bani Walid is as old as Islam itself.

I have heard commentators talking about Qaddafi’s cooperation with the CIA and MI5 when he negotiated with them to get the Libyan detainees returned to Libya. Following these negotiations, Belhadj and other returnees from the Afghan war were able to return home.

Some progressive commentators, who unfortunately, are so caught up in a textbook interpretation of events, that they have ceased themselves to understand the complexity of what they would term ‘realpolitik’, and have as a result misunderstood what happened in Libya post 9/11. The leaders of this recent rebellion in Benghazi were fighting US forces in Afghanistan only months before.

They were in US prisons and rendition centers being tortured. It was not that Qaddafi sought to work with imperialist intelligence services – it was that he could – he had the sufficient economic power to negotiate a deal which allowed the Libyan Islamic jihadists to come home.

Since the Al Fateh revolution’s inception, he had been dealing with these Islamists. He wanted to reintegrate them into society.

He believed in the principle of restorative justice, a fundamental tenet of Sharia. He actually released them all from prison because he knew that the Libyan revolutionary forces and the Libyan masses were capable of keeping them in check.

Enter US and NATO fools. All hell has broken loose. The Islamists, now in power in Libya, are arming and financing their allies in neighboring countries.

Groups such as Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in Mali have emerged from out of nowhere. Heavily armed and well funded, they are causing chaos across the region. As the reggae song laments, ‘Who’s gonna stop dem now?’

Latest Spin

In true V for Vendetta style we wake up daily to the lies. The TV news anchors were definitely blinking as they read the spin handed them following Stephens’ murder. Mohamed Magarief, leader of the CIA and Saudi financed counter-revolutionary group – National Front for the Salvation of Libya, and now president of the General National Congress of Libya, told CBS News he had ‘no doubt’ the attack was pre-planned, contradicting US envoy to the UN, Susan Rice’s statement that it had been part of ‘spontaneous’ protests.

Magarief said the suspects were connected to ‘Al-Qaeda or its affiliates and maybe sympathizers’. The truth is that all of those who are in control in Benghazi, Magarief included, are Al Qaeda affiliates and sympathizers. Qaddafi told us this from day one of the rebellion.

The Al Qaeda Factor: Getting it Right

When the US wants to cause commotion or justify more spending on arms and further global militarization they shout ‘Al Qaeda’ where they used to shout ‘Communism’ and this fits their spin. However, in reality, like us, they know the real name of their game. As Jamahiriyan loyalist Dr Yusuf Shakir put it, ‘the name of their game regarding Arab and African foreign policy is to cause as much commotion as they can and then stand back and let us sons of bitches kill each other’.

Remember the infamous George Bush Snr statement, ‘we need Africa without the Africans’?

The Islamist groups in Libya were in existence long before the concept of Al Qaeda emerged.

That is why Qaddafi was able to warn the world of the danger of these Islamist groups and their ideology, and why Libya was the first country in the world to issue an arrest warrant for Osama Bin Laden.

While many were full of zeal and excitement when these groups seemed to be giving the US what it finally deserved, Qaddafi knew that this was not Islam, but rather reactionary ideas and tyranny in the name of Islam and that it could take us nowhere.

Al Qaeda is a brand. It’s an off shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both are shaped and influenced by the writings and teachings of Hassan al Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Maudaudi.

The fundamental difference between these Islamist fighting groups and the original Iqwan (Brotherhood) is one of strategy and tactics rather than worldview. While the original Iqwan believed and preached reform, their offshoots, groups such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Ansar Dine in Mali and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb all believe in violent action, even against other Muslims.

Many of these Islamist groups that pre-dated al Qaeda have re-emerged and affiliated to the Al Qaeda brand, a brand that was developed and globalised with the assistance of Arab client regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, US and Pakistani Intelligence forces and successive US regimes and their media. And no one brands better than the U.S.

And so the chaos and commotion continues. This is the same strategy the imperialists opt for every time they are in crisis and their grip on the world threatens to unravel.

In this phase, the imperialists draw up extra judicial hit lists which include whoever displeases them and, having reached amazing new technological heights, they work their lists, murdering at will with unmanned drones which target not only those on their hit lists but scores of civilians in the process.

There are no trials, no freedom of speech, thought or action, no democracy – just more lies, hypocrisy, plunder and chaos. That is all the North Atlantic Tribes know and understand.

Imperialism Will Be Buried in Africa

It is no surprise that the imperialists are re-focused on Africa in this phase of their battle to maintain control of the world. Control of Africa is integral to their continued dominance. Central to their current strategy is the re-militarization of the continent via AFRICOM.

From the outside looking in, the situation may seem hopeless, but this is part of the plan: to create a sense of hopelessness that seeks to overwhelm and disempower.

However, Bani Walid reminds us that no amount of chaos, confusion, set-backs, deception or mass murder can stop the African resistance or lead to its defeat. It will never stop until Africa is free and it is Africa’s freedom that will bury imperialism.

It does not matter how many revolutionary leaders and fighters are murdered, more stand willing to resist in their place – this is an historical lesson learned, not only in Africa but throughout the Global South.

The imperialists cannot win because there are no winners in the evil and destructive plan that they have been engaged in for centuries, and remain engaged in. Their game plan will not only consume us but will consume them as well, evidenced by the unprecedented crisis and inevitable downward spiral that the Empire is currently experiencing.

The Hon. Elijah Muhammad warned us many years ago that their reign is over. The world they have created is dying – either we fight in whatever way we can to defeat them, willing to die for our cause, or we accept the mark of the beast and join them in their descent into hell.

Gerald A. Perreira is a founding member of the Guyanese organizations, Joint Initiative for Human Advancement and Dignity and Black Consciousness Movement Guyana (BCMG). He lived in Libya for many years, served in the Green March, an international battalion for the defense of the Al Fateh revolution and was an executive member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli.