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Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?

Exactly 50 years ago, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash on a mission to prevent civil war in newly independent Congo. Suspicions that the plane was shot down, never fully laid to rest, are now again on the rise.

After his death, Mr Hammarskjold was described by US President John F Kennedy as the “greatest statesman of our century”. He was a man with a vision of the UN as a “dynamic instrument” organising the world community, a protector of small nations, independent of the major powers, acting only in the interests of peace.

Dag Hammarskjold

Born in 1905 into an aristocratic Swedish family

Full name, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold

Helped lay foundations of Swedish welfare state

Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs (1947-1951)

The UN’s second secretary general (1953-1961), proposed by Britain and France

Nobel Peace Prize winner 1961

The only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize after his death, he established the first armed UN peacekeeping mission following the crisis in Suez.

Just after midnight on 18 September 1961, he was heading to negotiate a ceasefire in a mineral-rich breakaway region of Congo, where another of his peacekeeping missions was getting bogged down in the complex politics of decolonisation and Cold War rivalry.

But his DC6 aircraft crashed in darkness shortly before landing, in a forest near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia – now Zambia.

Knut Hammarskjold, his nephew, visited the crash site days later.

“It was just scattered all over the place, the pieces of the aircraft,” he says. “I did not see any bodies, they had been removed earlier, I think.”

He remembers the reaction at home in Sweden, where his uncle was a national hero.

“Everybody was so shocked. I can say the whole of Sweden was affected by this. All the shops had his picture in the window, and he had a state funeral which was very unusual for a foreign office person.”

Iron will

Eight years earlier, when the members of the Security Council appointed the unassuming Swede secretary general, they could not have predicted the zeal he would bring to the job.

“He was a very spiritual, intellectual, cultured man, and that was all part of his mystical approach to life,” says Dame Margaret Anstee, the first female under-secretary at the UN, who was starting out on a 40-year career at the organisation. “He had a certain reserve, and a certain unique kind of dignity.”

But he soon gained a reputation for independence and daring, and instead of staying in his New York office, a hands-on approach became his trademark. He personally negotiated the release of 15 American airmen who had been imprisoned in China at a time when the People’s Republic was not represented at the UN.

“He had the skills of mediation and persuasion, combined with this almost iron single-minded will of where he wanted to go,” says Margaret Anstee.

“But of course by that very token it brought him into conflict with people who wanted to use the UN for their own ends.”

In Congo, one issue was who should control the southern province of Katanga, rich in copper, uranium and tin. Belgium, the ex-colonial power, backed a secessionist movement led by Moise Tshombe, as did the UK and US who had mining interests in the region.

But Mr Hammarskjold from the start backed Congo’s elected central authorities – the Soviet-backed government of prime minister Patrice Lumumba, and later, after Mr Lumumba was deposed and murdered, Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula.

Mr Hammarskjold wanted to pursue a negotiated solution between Mr Tshombe and the central government, a goal that became even more urgent after UN peacekeepers found themselves outgunned during an aggressive operation to drive foreign mercenaries from Katanga.

Mr Tshombe was waiting to talk to him in Ndola on the night he died.

Airbrushed photos

The crash of his aircraft has never been fully explained. Two investigations held in the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, were followed by an official UN inquiry, which concluded that foul play could not be ruled out. So people have never stopped coming forward with new explanations, and asking new questions.

Some 30 years after the crash, in 1992, two men who had served as UN representatives in Katanga just before and just after Hammarskjold’s death – Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Ivan Smith – wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming to have evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally, by mercenaries. In their view, a warning shot intended to divert the plane to alternative talks with industrialists in Katanga, in fact hit the plane and caused it to crash.

In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, published eight letters that suggested CIA, MI5 and South African intelligence were involved in sabotage of the aircraft. British officials responded that these were likely to be Soviet forgeries.

In 2005, the head of UN military information in Congo in 1961, Bjorn Egge, told the Aftenposten newspaper he had noticed a round hole in Hammarskjold’s forehead when he saw the body in the mortuary. It could have been a bullet hole, he said, and it had been mysteriously airbrushed out of official photographs.

Over the past four years, Swedish aid worker Goran Bjorkdahl has carried out extensive research and British academic Susan Williams published a book on Thursday – Who Killed Hammarskjold? Both conclude that it is likely the plane was brought down.

Mr Bjorkdahl began his study after inheriting from his father, who had worked in Zambia in the 1970s, a piece of the plane fuselage containing unexplained small holes. He tracked down 12 witnesses, in whose accounts of the night three points appeared repeatedly:

The DC6 circled in the air two or three times before it crashed

A smaller plane flew above it

A bright light flashed in the sky above the large plane before it went down

Six witnesses also recall seeing uniformed personnel near the crash site that morning, even though

official reports claim it was not located until after 15:00 that day 

The official inquiries held at the time also contain witness testimony referring to a second plane in the sky.

One of the key questions Ms Williams asks in her book is why this and other inconvenient observations were discounted, or in some cases doctored during the official Rhodesian investigations. She says it is clear to her that there was a cover-up.

She places particular emphasis on three of her discoveries:

The photographs of Hammarskjold after his death are either taken in such a way as to conceal the

area around his right eye, or, where the eye is visible, they show evidence of having been touched

up, possibly to hide a wound

The sole survivor of the crash, Harold Julien, said there was an explosion before the plane fell from

the sky – his evidence was discounted in the original inquiry on the grounds that he was ill and

sedated, but Ms Williams has found a doctor’s statement insisting that he was lucid at the time (he

died of his injuries within days)

A US intelligence officer at a listening station in Cyprus says he heard a cockpit recording from Ndola,

in which a pilot talks of closing in on the DC6 – guns are heard firing, and then the words “I’ve hit it”

“There is no smoking gun, but there is a mass of evidence that points in the direction that the plane was shot down by a second plane,” she told the BBC. “That is a far more convincing and supported explanation than any other.”

There were a range of people, including white Rhodesians and the Belgian and British mining companies in Katanga, “with a sense of being at war with the UN and with African nationalism”, she says – and with a motive for preventing Mr Hammarskjold and Mr Tshombe reaching a negotiated settlement.

Model diplomat

Mr Hammarskjold’s main adviser at the time, Brian Urquhart, says it is “so wrong” to think that “at night without ground control you could shoot down a plane or even locate it”. But Ms Williams says experts have told her that the DC6, on its way in to land at Ndola airport on a moonlit night, was a “sitting duck”.

Ms Williams argues that the time has come for a new inquiry, and Mr Hammarskjold’s nephew Knut is reported to have called for one himself, after hearing of Ms Williams’ new evidence.

Fifty years later, his uncle is still a model for people working at the UN, says Knut Hammarskjold.

“Many, I’ve been told, still have his photo on their desks, and [former Secretary General] Kofi Annan says he always asks when there is a problem: ‘What will Dag have done in this situation?'”

Dame Margaret Anstee says he had the courage to stand up for his principles and to the strong member states, which his successors have lacked.

“There was a tacit agreement never to have such a single-minded secretary general again,” she says. “I think we can say they haven’t.”

Additional reporting by Stephen Mulvey

Susan Williams’ book, Who Killed Hammarskjold?, is published by Hurst and Company.

BBC World Service’s Witness programme on Monday reports on Dag Hammarskjold’s life and death, featuring contributions from Knut Hammarskjold and Dame Margaret Anstee.

By Stephanie Hegarty

17 September 2011

@ BBC World Service

 

Sigmund Freud once mentioned the defense offered by a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.

That man’s name?

Dick Cheney.

On “Morning Joe” on MSNBC [4] on Thursday, the former Vice President claimed that the intelligence used to invade Iraq had been sound and accurate; the faulty intelligence was all Bill Clinton’s fault; the invasion didn’t do any damage but rather it was the Iraqis who damaged Iraq; and any invasion causes horrific things to happen, that just comes with the territory.

This incoherence was interspersed with gossip about Cheney’s marriage and his friends and his whole lovable social self. That lie may have overshadowed the more serious ones. When in the hell did Cheney become respectable, much less lovable? But that’s a distraction. Cheney’s crimes have long been catalogued [5].

Joe Scarborough began his Cheney interview by asking, not why did you commit so many crimes and abuses, but how did you, dear Dick, suffer from having the image of Darth Vader imposed on you? Cheney replies that he had fun wearing a Darth Vader mask. But listen carefully for the Freudian slip: he says he wore it in the President’s office, not the VICE President’s office.

Cheney claims he didn’t transform into Darth Vader, and of course he didn’t. Cheney was an immoral power-mad neocon for decades who consistently favored presidential prerogatives and aggressive militarism. But Cheney claims that what changed was that a terrorist act became an act of war rather than a crime. Did it do that all on its own?

Cheney slips in his usual baseless defense of torture and related abuses as having served some useful purpose. Scarborough does not follow up on that claim. Instead, he asks about Colin Powell’s comments on Cheney’s book. Nice and gossipy. But Lawrence Wilkerson’s more serious comments on the same topic, including his expression of willingness to testify against Cheney in court, go unmentioned.

Cheney then claims the Iraq lies were well-intended mistakes and basically accurate at the same time. Content with this, Scarborough focuses in on DC social scene changes over the decades. That’s journalism!

Mike Barnicle, a SERIOUS journalist, then asks Cheney if he regrets the death of a U.S. soldier in a humvee that was operating in Iraq without proper armor. This is a question along the lines of “Why did the military waste $60 billion in Iraq?” These talking heads are not 60 seconds from the topic of the lies that launched an illegal and immoral war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, almost none of them Americans, and Barnicle wants to know why the humvees weren’t better armored. Wednesday’s news [6] of U.S. troops having murdered Iraqi children gets no mention. This is breakfast table reporting for goodness sake! And yet, even with the softball question about the humvee armor, Cheney makes excuses and points out that things like that just happen in wars.

Well, exactly. But why do the wars happen?

Finally Scarborough asks Cheney why the U.S. military invaded Iraq, and Cheney says it was the right thing to do. He paints it as defensive. We attacked an unarmed impoverished nation halfway around the globe IN DEFENSE. Cheney even regurgitates a long-debunked claim about Mohamed Atta meeting with Iraqi officials. Next, Mika Brzezinski asks Cheney about the war lies, and Cheney blames Clinton. Now, I’m no fan of Clinton, and he told plenty of his own lies and engaged in plenty of power abuses tied to wars and military actions, but the fixing of the facts around the policy on Iraq was a major operation created after Clinton was gone. On this, Scarborough and Brzezinski had no follow up questions.

Instead, Barnicle helpfully turned to the topic of moving troops early out of Afghanistan and into preparation for war in Iraq. Cheney dishonestly suggested that no troops were moved to Iraq until a year and a half later. Then Cheney claims the Iraqis are the ones who did all the damage in Iraq. And on that note, Scarborough insists on chattering about Cheney’s marriage, while Brzezinski insists on hearing about Cheney’s sedated dreams of Italian villas.

Cheney admitted in this interview that his vice presidential role was unique. But that’s not actually an argument for buying his book. It’s an argument for amending our Constitution to include a ban on vice presidents exercising executive, as opposed to legislative, power.

The trouble is that there’s little point in amending our laws until we start enforcing them. Dick Cheney is a human advertisement for the absence of the rule of law in the United States. Wilkerson thinks Cheney is bluffing because he is scared of being prosecuted. I think Cheney knows that could only happen abroad. He is safe here because the Justice Department answers to Obama, and Obama is protecting Cheney because Obama is continuing similar crimes and abuses.

If Obama were to allow Attorney General Eric Holder to enforce our laws against Dick Cheney, Obama might very well save his own electoral prospects. But he would put himself at risk of future prosecution. The question of whether we will have the rule of law becomes the question of whether Obama wants to trade four years of power for decades in prison. That’s not how it is supposed to work.

By David Swanson

1 September 2011.

@ Democrats.com

Britain’s exposure to eurozone debt

The market focus at the moment is on the exposure of French banks to Greece. But be in no doubt how exposed British banks are to eurozone sovereigns and corporations.

I’ve written about the figures before.

But this chart (courtesy of a report by the Ernst and Young ITEM club) tells the story visually.

Germany gets gold, France silver. And then it’s us. The report estimates that the overall exposure of British banks to the economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain is around $430bn, or 19 per cent of our GDP. If the eurozone unravels and those debts fall dramatically in value (or even go into default), the fact that we’re not members of the single currency will not protect us.

Incidentally, you might wonder what British banks were doing buying up all that eurozone debt in the first place. The Vickers commission, implicitly, wondered the same thing. That’s why it recommended that only British retail and corporate lending should be inside its ring fence. If bankers want to speculate by buying eurozone securities, they should surely do it without an implicit UK government backstop.

By Ben Chu, 14 September 2011 @ The Independent

Bahrain: Escalation Of Revolution As People Insist On Regime Change

The international pressure on the Al Khalifa regime has forced it to “drink the poison” and release the medical staff whose members had been accused by the Al Khalifa and Al Saud officials of the most serious crimes, including killing patients, falsifying evidence and plotting to overthrow the regime. Their release on Tuesday 6th September has exposed the lies, fabrications and most important of all, the crimes, committed by the regime.

Doctors and nurses were tortured extensively over their six months incarceration. They were beaten, hung in the chicken position, forced to stand for days, deprived of sleep, the use of electric shocks and tasers over their bodies, spitting in their mouths and stuffing their mouths with human secretion. Women medics were sexually assaulted.

International human rights bodies, including Physicians for Human Rights and Doctors Without Borders repeatedly issued statements accusing the Al Khalifa of torture and calling for their immediate release. On Tuesday, Irish doctors and supporters staged a hunger strike in Dublin in support of Bahraini medics, among them were Professor McCormack and Tara OGrady.

The victims themselves had been on hunger strike when they were released. It was a major defeat of the Al Khalifa dictatorship. Many Bahrainis also staged hunger strike in support of the prisoners who had been on strike for a week. Dr Abdul Jalil Al Singace and Abdul Hadi Al Khawaja led the hunger strike inside their cells and were followed by many inside prison and outside. Men and women from Bilad Al Qadeem, Al Zinj and Al Salihiya also participated in the hunger strike earlier this week.

International angry voices are rising against the moral failure of the US government and its allies as they maintain their support to Al Khalifa dictatorship. Of particular concern to the world is the justification of the Saudi occupation of Bahrain. On 8th September, CNN published a long report on the American immoral stand on Bahrain. Its Foreign Affairs editor, Joost R. Hiltermann ended his article with these wrods: “Washington retains real leverage over the regime. Bahrain is firmly under the U.S. security umbrella in the Gulf, and the United States provides Bahrain with funding for military purchases ($19 million in 2010) as well as military training assistance. The United States should be more assertive about using this influence: The current policy of continuing military-to-military relations without regard for the political and human rights situation is counterproductive, could be interpreted as violating U.S. law, and exposes the Obama administration to accusations of double standards in its approach to the Arab Spring.”

For the moment, Bahrain is the first successful chapter of the Arab counterrevolution spearheaded by Saudi Arabia – it is the place where the West has broken its promise to support the Arab people in their struggle for a greater say in politics and greater control over their destinies. It is time for the Obama administration to push the country back onto the road toward reform, using pro-democracy forces within the regime, its supporters and the opposition to show the way.

Meanwhile, Bahrain revolutionaries are preparing for a final assault to re-occupy the iconic Pearl Roundabout in what they have called “The final return” on 23rd and 24th September, the days of the by-elections. So far, at least three people have made the perilous attempt to occupy the Roundabout which is being defended by the Saudi and Al Khalifa troops. Abdul Qadir Darwish, Mohammad Al Hayki and Mohammad Jaffar Al Ekri had been able to cross those defences and take up positions at the Roundabout. They were all arrested, beaten and tortured by members of the regime’s Death Squads.

The people have continued their revolution with great zeal and determination. This morning a large demonstration was staged at Mhaza District of Sitra calling for regime change and shouting “Down with Hamad”. Last night people of Sitra also demonstrated against the regime whose forces reacted with fury, smashing cars and breaking people’s properties. Over the past week, several demonstrations were held at various locations; from Sitra and Ma’amir to Bouri, Duraz and Bani Jamra to Sanabis, Daih and Jidhafs. Demonstrations took place at the town of Dair, near the airport. At the protests held yesterday at Aali, called for by the 14th February Youth, harsh measures were adopted to crush the will of the people. In addition to tear and chemical gases, regime’s forces used shotguns that led to serious injuries to several people. Images of the victims have infuriated Bahrainis who feel that they are the victims of an unholy alliance between the Al Khalifa and the Western countries, especially US.

By Bahrain Freedom Movement

13 September 2011 @Countercurrents.org

America and Oil. It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin. As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other. Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence. Now, it’s a guarantee of a trip to hell in a hand basket. The Chinese know it. Does Washington?

America’s rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world’s supply of oil. Oil powered the country’s first giant corporations, ensured success in World War II, and underlay the great economic boom of the postwar period. Even in an era of nuclear weapons, it was the global deployment of oil-powered ships, helicopters, planes, tanks, and missiles that sustained America’s superpower status during and after the Cold War. It should come as no surprise, then, that the country’s current economic and military decline coincides with the relative decline of oil as a major source of energy.

If you want proof of that economic decline, just check out the way America’s share of the world’s gross domestic product has been steadily dropping, while its once-powerhouse economy now appears incapable of generating forward momentum. In its place, robust upstarts like China and India are posting annual growth rates of 8% to 10%. When combined with the growing technological prowess of those countries, the present figures are surely just precursors to a continuing erosion of America’s global economic clout.

Militarily, the picture appears remarkably similar. Yes, a crack team of SEAL commandos did kill Osama bin Laden, but that single operation — greeted in the United States with a jubilation more appropriate to the ending of a major war — hardly made up for the military’s lackluster performance in two recent wars against ragtag insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, almost a decade after the Taliban was overthrown, it has experienced a remarkable resurgence even facing the full might of the U.S., while the assorted insurgent forces in Iraq appear to be holding their own. Meanwhile, Iran — that bête noire of American power in the Middle East — seem as powerful as ever. Al Qaeda may be on the run, but as recent developments in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and unstable Pakistan suggest, the United States wields far less clout and influence in the region now than it did before it invaded Iraq in 2003.

If American power is in decline, so is the relative status of oil in the global energy equation. In the 2000 edition of its International Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy confidently foresaw ever-expanding oil production in Africa, Alaska, the Persian Gulf area, and the Gulf of Mexico, among other areas. It predicted, in fact, that world oil output would reach 97 million barrels per day in 2010 and a staggering 115 million barrels in 2020. EIA number-crunchers concluded as well that oil would long retain its position as the world’s leading source of energy. Its 38% share of the global energy supply, they said, would remain unchanged.

What a difference a decade makes. By 2010, a new understanding about the natural limits of oil production had sunk in at the EIA and its experts were predicting a disappointingly modest petroleum future. In that year, world oil output had reached just 82 million barrels per day, a stunning 15 million less than expected. Moreover, in the 2010 edition of its International Energy Outlook, the EIA was now projecting 2020 output at 85 million barrels per day, hardly more than the 2010 level and 30 million barrels below its projections of just a decade earlier, which were relegated to the dustbin of history. (Such projections, by the way, are for conventional, liquid petroleum and exclude “tough” and “dirty” sources that imply energy desperation — like Canadian tar sands, shale oil, and other “unconventional” fuels.)

The most recent EIA projections also show oil’s share of the world total energy supply — far from remaining constant at 38% — had already dropped to 35% in 2010 and was projected to continue declining to 32% in 2020 and 30% in 2035. In its place, natural gas and renewable sources of energy are expected to assume ever more prominent roles.

So here’s the question all of us should consider, in part because until now no one has: Are the decline of the United States and the decline of oil connected? Careful analysis suggests that there are good reasons to believe they are.

From Standard Oil to the Carter Doctrine

More than 100 years ago, America’s first great economic expansion abroad was spearheaded by its giant oil companies, notably John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company — a saga told with great panache in Daniel Yergin’s classic book The Prize. These companies established powerful beachheads in Mexico and Venezuela, and later in parts of Asia, North Africa, and of course the Middle East. As they became ever more dependent on the extraction of oil in distant lands, American foreign policy began to be reorganized around acquiring and protecting U.S. oil concessions in major producing areas.

With World War II and the Cold War, oil and U.S. national security became thoroughly intertwined. After all, the United States had prevailed over the Axis powers in significant part because it possessed vast reserves of domestic petroleum while Germany and Japan lacked them, depriving their forces of vital fuel supplies in the final years of the war. As it happened, though, the United States was using up its domestic reserves so rapidly that, even before World War II was over, Washington turned its attention to finding new overseas sources of crude that could be brought under American control. As a result, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a host of other Middle Eastern producers would become key U.S. oil suppliers under American military protection.

There can be little question that, for a time, American domination of world oil production would prove a potent source of economic and military power. After World War II, an abundance of cheap U.S. oil spurred the development of vast new industries, including civilian air travel, highway construction, a flood of suburban housing and commerce, mechanized agriculture, and plastics.

Abundant oil also underlay the global expansion of the country’s military power, as the Pentagon garrisoned the world while becoming one of the planet’s great oil guzzlers. Its global dominion came to rest on an ever-expanding array of oil-powered ships, planes, tanks, and missiles. As long as the Middle East — and especially Saudi Arabia — served essentially as an American gas station and oil remained a cheap commodity, all this was relatively painless.

In addition, thanks to its control of Middle Eastern oil, Washington had its hand on the economic jugular of Europe and Japan, both of which remain highly dependent on imports from the region. Not surprisingly, then, one president after another insisted Washington would not permit any rival to challenge American control of that oil jugular — a principle enshrined in the Carter Doctrine of January 1980, which stated that the United States would go to war if any hostile power threatened the flow of Persian Gulf oil.

The use of military force, in accordance with that doctrine, has been a staple of American foreign policy since 1987, when President Ronald Reagan first applied the “principle” by authorizing U.S. warships to escort Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War. George H. W. Bush invoked the same principle when he authorized American military intervention during the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, as did Bill Clinton when he ordered missile attacks on Iraq in the late 1990s and George W. Bush when he launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

At that moment, the United States and oil seemed at the pinnacle of their power. As the victor in the Cold War and then the first Gulf War, the American military was ranked supreme, with no conceivable challenger on the horizon. And nowhere were there more fervent believers in “unilateralist” America’s ability to “shock and awe” the planet than in Washington. The nation’s economy still appeared relatively robust as a major housing bubble was just beginning to form. China’s economy was then a paltry 15% as big as ours. Only seven years later, it would be approximately 40% as large. By invading Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to demonstrate the crushing superiority of America’s new high-tech weaponry, while setting the stage for further military exploits in the region, including a possible attack on Iran. (A neocon quip caught the mood of the moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)

The future of oil seemed no less robust in 2003: demand was brisk, crude prices ranged from about $25 to $30 per barrel, and the concept of “peak oil” — the notion that planetary supplies were more limited than imagined, that in the near future production would reach its peak and subsequently contract — was still considered laughable by most industry experts. By invading Iraq and setting up permanent military bases at the very heart of the global oil heartlands, the White House expected to ensure continued control over the flow of Persian Gulf oil and gain access to Iraq’s voluminous reserves, the largest in the world after those of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

From an imperial point of view, it was a beautiful dream from which Americans were destined to awaken abruptly. As a start, it quickly became apparent that American technological prowess was no panacea for urban guerrilla warfare, and so a vast occupation army was soon needed to “pacify” Iraq — and then pacify it again, and again, and again. A similar dilemma arose in Afghanistan, where a tribal-based religious insurgency proved remarkably immune to superior American firepower. To sustain hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in those distant, often inaccessible areas, the Department of Defense became the world’s single biggest consumer of oil, burning more on a daily basis than the entire nation of Sweden — this, at a time when the price of crude rose to $50, then $80, and finally soared over the $100 mark. Procuring and delivering ever-increasing amounts of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel to American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be the principal reason for the wars’ spiraling costs, but it certainly ranks among the major causes. (Just the price of providing air conditioning to American troops in those two countries is now estimated at approximately $20 billion a year.)

With oil likely to prove increasingly scarce and costly, the Department of Defense is being forced to reexamine its fundamental operating principles when it comes to energy. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s notion that troops could be replaced by growing numbers of oil-powered super-weapons no longer appears viable, even for a power already garrisoning much of the planet for which “unending” war has become the new norm.

Yes, the Pentagon is looking into the use of biofuels, solar arrays, and other green alternatives to petroleum to power its planes and tanks, but any such future still seems an almost inconceivably long way off. And yet the thought of more wars involving the commitment of vast numbers of ground troops to protracted counterinsurgency operations in distant parts of the Greater Middle East at $400 or more for every gallon of gas used appears increasingly unpalatable for the globe’s former “sole superpower.” (Hence, the sudden burst of enthusiasm over drone wars.) Seen from this perspective, the decline of America and the decline of oil appear closely connected indeed.

Don’t Bet on Washington

And this is hardly the only apparent connection. Because the American economy is so closely tied to oil, it is especially vulnerable to oil’s growing scarcity, price volatility, and the relative paucity of its suppliers. Consider this: at present, the United States obtains about 40% of its total energy supply from oil, far more than any other major economic power. This means that when prices rise or oil supplies are disrupted for any reason — hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, war in the Middle East, environmental disasters of any sort — the economy is at particular risk. While a burst housing bubble and financial shenanigans lay behind the Great Recession that began in 2008, it’s worth remembering that it also coincided with the beginning of a stratospheric rise in oil prices. As anyone who has pulled into a gas station knows, at an average price of nearly $3.70 a gallon for regular gas, the staying power of high-priced oil has crippled what, until recently, was being called a “weak recovery.”

Despite the great debt debate in Washington, oil is a factor seldom mentioned when American indebtedness comes up. And yet the United States imports 50% to 60% of its oil supply, and with prices averaging at least $80 to $90 per barrel, we’re sending approximately $1 billion every day to foreign oil providers. These payments constitute the single biggest contribution to the country’s balance-of-payments deficit and so is a major source of the nation’s economic weakness.

Consider for comparison our leading economic rival: China. That country relies on oil for only about 20% of its total energy supply, about half as much as we do. Instead, the Chinese have turned to coal, which they possess in great abundance and can produce at a relatively low cost. (China, of course, pays a heavy environmental price for its coal dependency.) The Chinese do import some petroleum, but considerably less than the U.S., so their import expenses are considerably smaller. Nor do its oil-import costs have the same enfeebling effect, since China enjoys a positive balance of trade (in part, at America’s expense). As a result, when oil prices soared to record heights in 2008 and again in 2011, Beijing experienced none of the trauma felt in Washington.

No doubt many factors explain the startling rise of the Chinese economy, including lower costs of production and weaker environmental regulations. It is hard, however, to avoid the conclusion that our greater reliance on oil as it begins its decline has played a significant role in the changing balance of economic power between the two countries.

All this leads to a critical question: How should America respond to these developments in the years ahead?

As a start, there can be no question that the United States needs to move quickly to reduce its reliance on oil and increase the availability of other energy sources, especially renewable ones that pose no threat to the environment. This is not merely a matter of reducing our reliance on imported oil, as some have suggested. As long as oil remains our preeminent source of energy, we will be painfully vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global oil market, wherever problems may arise. Only by embracing forms of energy immune to international disruption and capable of promoting investment at home can the foundations be laid for future economic progress. Of course, this is easy enough to write, but with Washington in the grip of near-total political paralysis, it appears that continuing American decline, possibly of a precipitous sort, could be in the cards.

And don’t think that China will get away scot-free either. If it doesn’t quickly embrace the new energy technologies, the environmental costs of its excessive reliance on coal will, sooner or later, cripple its development as well. Unlike Washington, however, the Chinese leadership not only recognizes this, but is acting on it by making colossal investments in green energy technologies. If China succeeds in dominating this field — as has already begun to happen — it could leave the United States in the dust when it comes to economic growth. Ditching oil for the new energy technologies should be America’s top economic priority, but if you’re in a betting mood, you probably shouldn’t put your money on Washington.

By Michael T. Klare

16 September 2011

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum. A documentary version of that book is available from the Media Education Foundation. His newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, was recently published by Metropolitan Books.

© 2011 Michael T. Klare

Al Fateh Resists White and Arab Supremacists: Imperialism will be buried in Africa

The North Atlantic tribes, under the banner of NATO, and their Arab flunkies are lining up for a showdown in Sirte. Muammar Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolutionary forces remain defiant and have issued statements saying that they will never surrender. Their extraordinary resistance has most certainly earned them a place in the history of modern warfare. Nowhere in modern history have an army of 100,000 and a population of 6.5 million been able to resist such an overwhelming and murderous invasion for so long. As I write NATO’s forces have surrounded the small desert town of Bani Walid. Talks between the rebels and residents of the town have broken down and the people of Al-Fateh have decided to stand and fight against all odds.

UN Resolution 1973 which authorized a ‘no fly zone’ was, without regard for international law, which is not difficult since there is no international law, immediately turned into a regime change operation. Under the pretext of protecting civilians, NATO has murdered thousands of Libyans and other African civilians and now, as I write, they have surrounded the people of the small desert town of Bani Walid to commit more murder. This war, under the banner of the UN, has once and for all exposed this organization’s fraudulent and criminal nature. On the one hand they have declared 2011 as the ‘International Year of People of African Descent’.  It is more aptly designated as the ‘International Year for the Destruction of Africa’.

Many in Libya, stunned after the fall of Tripoli, and the sheer criminality and barbarism of this invasion, are only now regrouping and switching to guerilla war mode. There is no choice. Even if Qaddafi were to leave Libya or be killed, this battle would continue because it is about much more than one man, Muammar Qaddafi and the Libyan nation. The ideas of Muammar Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolution are not restricted to the geographical space known as Libya. The ideology of the Third Universal Theory, as outlined in The Green Book, and the vision of a United States of Africa has taken deep root in Africa and throughout the world. In fact, this attack on Libya and Africa has only served to re-energize and galvanize revolutionary Pan-African forces and other revolutionary movements worldwide.

The imperialists reckoned that this invasion, which was planned months ahead and launched in February this year, would be over by March – a walk in the park so to speak. They needed it to be swift for a number of reasons. Africa was on the brink of adopting Qaddafi’s idea of a single currency in the form of an African gold dinar. This would have replaced European currencies as the preferred trading currency for Africa’s resources including its vast oil and gold reserves.

In addition, Qaddafi had amassed the necessary funds for the establishment of three African Banks – the African Monetary Fund (AMF) to be situated in Cameroon, The Central African Bank to be situated in Nigeria and the African Investment Bank to be established in Libya. It was this move, more than even Libya’s vast oil wealth that made Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolution a target for this invasion. Africa was on the brink of a huge and empowering breakthrough, which, as far as the Western capitals were concerned, had to be prevented at any cost.

‘The Babylon system is a vampire, sucking the blood of the sufferer…’

Bob Marley

On top of all this, the US and Europe are in deep economic crisis. They cannot afford to be engaged in yet another costly and prolonged war. They have frantically introduced bail outs to hold back the inevitable collapse of capitalism over the past years, however, these measures were only a stop gap and they are now running out of time and ideas. Certainly, a carve-up of Libya’s vast oil wealth as soon as possible is an attractive prospect, and the removal of revolutionary Libya as an obstacle to the West’s re-colonization of the African continent has also become a priority, since the continued  plunder of African and ‘Third World’ resources remains a non-negotiable ingredient for global capitalism’s survival.

The fact is that the contemporary global political economy could not have come into being without the North Atlantic Tribes plunder of African resources and trade in captured Africans over the past centuries. The unpaid labor of captured Africans laid the foundation for the material basis of capitalist development. I have outlined in previous articles the extent of Africa’s resources and the necessity of unhindered access to them if the Western capitals are to continue on their current path of world domination.  Qaddafi was an obstacle to this and therefore has to be crushed at any cost.

‘Imperialism will be buried in Africa’

When the leaders of the North Atlantic Tribes, assisted by what Webster Tarpley has referred to as the ‘rebel rabble’ in Benghazi, staged an incident in February 2011 as a pretext for a full scale invasion, they did not envisage that this war would still be raging in September, and that seven months on, NATO, the most sophisticated military machine known to humankind, could have been prevented by an army of 100,000 and a population of 6.5 million people from securing full control of Libya. The command structure and organization of the Al Fateh revolutionary forces remains intact and they are not surrendering. Regardless of the outcome of NATO’s invasion, this promises to be a protracted battle. Sooner or later, NATO will be defeated, and as the great Pan-African leader, Sekou Toure predicted, “Imperialism will be buried in Africa”.

This war will inevitably spill over into other parts of Africa such as Chad, Niger and Mali. Over the years, thousands of fighters from liberation movements in these countries benefited from the support of the Al Fateh revolution. 

The situation is a complex one. For example, in 2009 in Chad, an armed movement almost succeeded in toppling President Idris Deby, who was only saved because the French stepped in and bombed rebel positions. Deby, on the orders of the French, has now recognized the National Transitional Council (NTC) or Council of Shame, as they are referred to in Libya. This is the same Deby who received assistance from Qaddafi in the war of liberation he and others waged against the French surrogate, Hisne Habre in the 80s and 90s. Qaddafi assisted Deby in his war of liberation and many years later, was also able to mediate between Deby and the Union of Resistance Forces that almost toppled Deby. The point is that Qaddafi’s influence and long history in Africa is complex. Liberation movements throughout the continent look to him as a source of strength and revolutionary guidance, and in many cases he has relationships with Heads of State and the forces that oppose them. That is why he is called upon to mediate in many conflicts in Africa because he is respected and listened to by all sides.

Africa’s political and social reality is an extremely complex and difficult one. As in Iraq, the West is now mired in a prolonged and age old battle of which they have little understanding, and as Frederick Douglas warned:  “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Once again they have launched a war that has opened a can of worms and that will inevitably reach deep into the recesses of ancient issues and conflicts – right back in fact into the earliest Arab incursions into North Africa.

The war in Libya is being fought on many realms – religious, ideological, racial and tribal. Throw into this mix a long and painful history of Western colonialism, domination, deception and destruction, colonial borders drawn up separating tribes and nations, and the resulting web of intertwined and complex political deals and compromises up and down the continent, in the midst of the chaos and mistrust caused by Africa’s plight and you have an explosive situation for which there is no quick fix or swift outcome.

Beyond their plans to subjugate and plunder, NATO has little concern about the outcome for Libya and Africa. Even with the battle raging and no one side able to declare full control of the entire country, the imperialists and their Arab and African flunkies met in Paris to carve up Libya’s wealth, in a disgusting display of the greed that drives them. Merkel, who had not supported the invasion snuck in, tail between her legs, to beg for a slice of the pie and Russia hurried to recognize the NTC in order to get at least a piece of the action.

The Nature of the Beast

There are many lessons here for any nation-state who thinks that they can perform a balancing act between seeking their right to self-determination and establishing détente with the West. At an international conference hosted by the World Mathaba in Tripoli many years ago, in reference to Africa’s battle with the West, the Hon Minister Louis Farrakhan warned us, “that we are dealing with the beast and you cannot appeal to the beast, since the beast has no heart and no ability to reason”. Libya had tried to do just that – reason with the beast. Qaddafi had set out to bury all hostilities with the West in order to focus on Libya’s national development which had suffered after almost a decade of unjust sanctions. No one understands more than Qaddafi how constant conflict with the West can hinder a nation from realizing its revolutionary goals and objectives. He needed to get the sanctions off Libya’s back in order to proceed with not only Libya’s national development but also to raise the huge amount of capital needed to back the Pan-African project.

Qaddafi even voluntarily gave up his program for the development of nuclear weapons and urged all other countries, including Russia and the US, to do the same. Saif Qaddafi, in a recent interview, has admitted that there are many Libyans who blame him for this invasion, claiming that his ideas of tolerance and relationship building with the West were naïve and dangerous. It seems that some in Libya were so convinced that they had entered into a new phase of détente with the West, that even Libya’s military was not upgraded as it should have been. The money was instead earmarked for development projects in Libya and throughout Africa.

We have all seen the footage flashed across our TV screens of Qaddafi being embraced by Blair, Berlusconi, Sarkozy etc. In the African and Arab traditions, a person’s handshake and word counts for something. Qaddafi clearly did not understand the nature of this beast. After all, unlike the Africans in America and other parts of the Diaspora, his contact with them has been limited. It is no accident that the greatest exploration of White supremacy and the bizarre psychology that underlies it is best articulated by the Afrocentric scholars in the US. Where better to understand the Beast than from its very belly? For a scholarly and insightful account of what drives White supremacy and their continued blood thirsty domination of this planet, one should refer to the works of Drs Bobby E. Wright, Frances Cress Welsing and Marimba Ani among others.

For his part, Saif himself has said that he accepts the criticism and agrees that his approach was naïve. It was he who pushed for the release of many former Al Qaeda operatives from prison, in a move consistent with the idea of restorative justice. They were released with the understanding that they would air their ideological differences not through violent means, but through the democratic institutions set up for political deliberation in Libya – the People’s Committees and People’s Congresses. This was an attempt to reintegrate these Libyans, known as the ‘returnees’ or ‘Afghanis’, back into Libyan society. One of those released, Abdelhakim Belhaj, has now been appointed by the NTC as Tripoli’s new security chief. Belhaj is one of Al Qaeda’s top military commanders, sent back to Libya from Afghanistan by the US.

‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends’

Dr Martin Luther King

Although many worldwide have come out clearly in support of Muammar Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolution, one of the hardest things to bear over the past months has been to watch some cower in the face of this imperialist onslaught, either by ‘jumping ship’ or remaining silent. Betrayal is always hard to bear, but especially because it highlights one of the reasons why the imperialists are able to knock us off, one at a time.

Some progressive and revolutionary movements have failed to openly defend the shared goals and objectives they agreed to as members of the World Mathaba. In doing so, they have allowed Libya to be singled out for punishment and destruction by imperialist forces. They were happy to receive whatever assistance they could get, but remain shamefully silent when Libya needs defending. There is an African saying in the Caribbean – “ingratitude is worse than witchcraft”.

The Palestinian organizations are a tragic example. During the long years of the Palestinian struggle, every faction of the PLO had an office in Tripoli, from the pro-Syrian Al Saiqa to the Marxist oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and every group in between. To date, not one of these organizations have raised their voice against this invasion of Libya, despite accepting millions of dollars of assistance when their backs were up against the wall. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, without even knowing what was happening on the ground in Libya, jumped the gun with an opportunistic condemnation of the Al Fateh revolution, while failing to utter a word on what is taking place in Syria.

Muammar Qaddafi’s revolutionary politics is grounded in the Islamic injunction, that “one must want for others what one wants for oneself”. He therefore saw it as the duty of liberated zones to extend assistance to all those struggling for freedom and self-determination. During the past forty-two years, the Al Fateh revolution never compromised this principle, even when changing conditions and situations both at the regional and global level, forced Libya to adapt its strategies and tactics. Despite the immense pressure put on this small nation-state, Al Fateh helped all.

What set the World Mathaba aside from other revolutionary and progressive internationals was that it neither restricted its membership to a particular ideological orientation nor limited its assistance to a specific region or to movements and organizations that were of geo-political significance to Libya. As a result, the World Mathaba brought together forces spanning the entire progressive ideological spectrum, including Indigenous movements throughout the world, assisting all of them in their struggles, without demanding any adherence to the precepts of the Libyan revolution.

This truly pluralist outlook was proof that assistance provided by Libya transcended Libya’s national interest, and was given in accordance with what Qaddafi truly believed to be their duty before God. The gains made by many members as a direct result of the assistance they received from the World Mathaba, and the potential for future victories, shaped the extreme hostility of imperialist forces and their desperate actions against Libya over the years to this sad day, when they have been forced to pay the ultimate price.

While the AU has refused to officially recognize the NTC, it is tragic that 20 African governments could have been pressured into accepting the NTC as the legitimate government in Libya, even while there is still fierce resistance being waged against NATO and the NTC throughout the country.

This, after all Qaddafi and Libya has done for Africa, and knowing that the NTC are declared Arab supremacists, who under NATO’s cover have hunted down and murdered thousands of Black Libyans and African migrant workers.

These African governments must be aware that Libya’s ex-Minister of Justice, Mustafa Jalil, leader of the Transitional Council, and other Libyan officials who have defected to the rebels, were among those who condoned brutal attacks on Africans in a series of incidents a few years ago, when Nigerians and Ghanaians were being attacked in the streets of Tripoli. This was an attempt to embarrass Qaddafi and tarnish his Pan-African credentials, thereby undermining Libya’s Pan-African project.

Jalil is known by revolutionary and progressive organizations throughout Africa as a racist. His so-called Transitional National Council, in accordance with their Arab supremacist mindset, rejects Libya’s African identity.  It is bewildering and unfathomable to me that African leaders could have gone to the Imperialist Carve-up Conference in Paris and sat in a room with White and Arab supremacists while they plotted the looting of Libya now and inevitably, the re-colonization of Africa – one nation-state at a time.  But what else can we expect from these neo-colonial flunkies?

In a recent article, African commentator, Reason Wafawarova observed with disgust:

It is just as good that they are no longer called the Organization of African Unity – that fiery club founded by strong characters like Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Muammar Qaddafi, Milton Obote, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, later to be graced by such revolutionaries like Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, President Mugabe, Eduardo dos Santos, Sam Nujoma, Nelson Mandela and other heroes. 

Who among the bunch of the new leaders we have today could un-tie the shoes of Nasser, Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere? The OAU would never have stood aside and look while little bullies like Sarkozy and Cameron have a field day bombing the cities of a fellow African state…”

Al Fateh will never die: Don’t mourn – Organize

This September, revolutionary and progressive forces worldwide salute the astounding achievements and victories of the Al Fateh revolution and the historical and unprecedented resistance of the Libyan revolutionary forces in confronting NATO’s killing machine. While it is necessary to identify the traitors and the unprincipled amongst us so that we know them for future reference, it is important not to lose sight of the incredible resistance that has formed itself into a cohesive global movement in the space of a few months. The revolutionary governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe have been in the vanguard of a global movement of the courageous and steadfast. From governments to progressive and revolutionary organizations and individuals, there has been a resounding resistance and an outpouring of solidarity and support for Muammar Qaddafi, the courageous Libyan armed forces, including the popular militias, and the Libyan people.

We say to hell with the Transitional National Council – known as the Council of Shame. Imagine you have invited the enemies of Africa, Islam and oppressed humanity into Libya, and now, hiding behind NATO’s bombs, you dare to challenge Muammar Qaddafi and the Al Fateh revolutionary leadership to a final showdown in Sirte.  What you have done will come back to haunt you.

The look on the faces of people in Tripoli tells its own story. Libyans walked to this year’s Eid prayers in stony silence, stunned by the new and bizarre reality of the occupation of their land by NATO and Al Qaeda terrorists.

Lyse Doucet of the BBC, finally, after seven long months, gave a moment’s interview to a Qaddafi supporter.  He was standing in a clinic in the Bousalim district of Tripoli, surrounded by debris. Bousalim suffered heavy NATO air strikes since it is a well known Qaddafi stronghold. Many civilians lost their lives. The man told Lyse Doucet that the whole of Bousalim supported Qaddafi. He stated that if the rebels were ushering in a democracy then why can’t Bousalim fly whatever flag they wanted. Lyse Doucet replied that the National Transitional Council had promised that there would be no revenge killings. At this point the man laughed out loud and told Doucet that his neighbours had already been rounded up and taken away.  Under the banner of NATO and the United Nations, Libya has been turned into a killing field.

Blood on their Hands

The corporate media have been accessories to this invasion, and I deliberately use the word accessories, because BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera have most definitely relinquished their right to name themselves news organizations. They have in fact been contracted as ‘weapons of mass deception’, consciously collaborating with NATO to present a fictitious version of events. They have fought this war alongside NATO – ‘embedded’ (in bed with) NATO all the way. Their agitation and propaganda (agit/prop) techniques have been a major weapon in NATO’s armor and there can be no doubt that they are accomplices to the war crimes committed in Libya. They all have blood on their hands.

Al Jazeera has been the most rabid because, like BBC and CNN, they too dance to the tune of their master, the Emir of Qatar, who has championed this invasion of Libya. It is no secret that Libya is crawling with Qatari troops.

‘War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength’

George Orwell, 1984

The Psych-ops aspect of this war reached whole new levels of deception. Investigative journalist, Webster Tarpley has cited irrefutable evidence that a set of Tripoli’s Green Square was constructed in Doha and people dressed as Libyan rebels were filmed taking over Green Square. This was the fake footage zoomed into living rooms all over the world. The zone we have entered is a frightening one, however, the enemy’s Psych-ops is a lot less effective in the age of the internet. While we must note those media organizations that have been totally compromised so that their crimes can be catalogued for future reference, we must also acknowledge the huge and impressive fight back staged by truth warriors all over the globe.

The media lies have been countered with a powerful campaign on the worldwide web.  Serbian hackers went to war with anti-Qaddafi sites, closing them down as quickly as they appeared. Pakistani websites carried information on the fake Green Square constructed in Doha. Rappers posted videos calling Qaddafi an African hero. Minister Louis Farrakhan’s powerful presentations are all available on the net, allowing people to tune out of the mainstream lies, and articles are everywhere detailing the truth. Independent news sources such as Pan-African Newswire, Black Agenda Report, Final Call, Modern Ghana, The Nigerian Voice, Ethiopia.org, Pravda, Mathaba News Agency, Centre for Research on Globalization, New Dawn Magazine, San Francisco Bay View and many others have been in the vanguard of providing a counter-attack to the corporate media’s campaign of lies and deception.

On this, the 42nd anniversary of the Al Fateh revolution, the International Movement of Revolutionary Committees is calling on all truth warriors to continue to mobilize and organize in whatever ways are available to you because, despite what the deceivers are saying, this battle has only just begun. Thanks again to the age of internet, Qaddafi himself was able to issue a statement recently addressing his supporters throughout the world. In it he stated:

Thousands of you are waiting at various stations. I see you in Tanzania, in Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and many other parts of Africa. How will you cross the deserts to Libya? Instead group yourselves where you are. The fight if it is not won in Libya will be coming to you. Prepare for it. Prepare traps for the invaders. You must defend your corners. 

In a recent article titled ‘Message From A Black African: Our Brother Muammar Qaddafi Treated All Equal And Now They Are After Him’, Mbarika Kazingizi has called on us to put aside any and all differences we may have and unite to defeat NATO:

“We cannot start to think about these things (our differences) now that the fight is going on. We have to ACT now. Unite the Pan-Africanists, Rastafarians, African traditional Apostles, Farrakhan’s African-American Muslims and North African Muslims, to Speak with One Voice on this issue – condemn NATO and fight back together NOW. Malcolm X followers, Black Panthers, Ni’abhingi warriors, all youths must rally together.”

As sad and bitter as we may feel at the continued attempts to murder Muammar Qaddafi, the mass murder of so many Libyans and at the destruction of Libya, this is not a time to mourn but rather a time to organize as never before, on a global level. Let us make Sekou Toure’s prediction a reality.

You can kill the man, you can exterminate the revolutionary forces, but you can’t kill an idea whose time has come…

And finally this September, we salute Muammar Qaddafi’s greatest contribution to the world – the revolutionary ideology known as The Third Universal Theory. It took a revolutionary thinker like Qaddafi, who was not conceptually incarcerated by the reductionism of Marxism and liberalism, to go beyond the parameters of European political theory.

Qaddafi discarded the false divide between religion and political science, the secular and the sacred, faith and reason, and was thereby able to articulate a paradigm that is holistic/ integralist, reflecting a total reality – an African reality. Quite simply, secular European discourse is unable to comprehend and advance ideology such as the Third Universal Theory, precisely because this ideology acknowledges the transcendental and metaphysical dimension of human civilization and existence. As such, this ideology provides us with an alternative model for social and political reconstruction and transformation, in synergy with our culture and traditions. It invites us to finally reject and move beyond the vulgar economism and materialism of the Eurocentric ideologies of Marxism and liberal capitalism, which were thrust upon Africa and the ‘Third World’ as part of the imperialist project.

Recently, a CNN reporter stopped a rebel on the road to Sirte. The man, although dressed like a rebel, spoke with an American accent and was obviously part of America’s ‘boots on the ground special forces brigade’. He was clearly astounded by the intensity of the resistance and said “I don’t know what these guys are still fighting for – they must really believe in this guy Qaddafi.”

Yes, they believe in Qaddafi and they believe in his vision. They are fighting for an idea whose time has come. They are fighting to end Western hegemony in Africa, bringing about the end of Empire and the inevitable birth of a United States of Africa. It is a vision for which they are willing to die. NATO can invade with their Arab flunkies and roll back some of Al Fateh’s material gains but they can never kill the revolutionary consciousness that has taken root.  It is this consciousness and the dedication to these ideals that has enabled this small army and nation to resist NATO’s killing machine for so long, much to the amazement of the rest of the world.

Al Fateh – The Victory – Forever

Lo! We have given thee (O Muhammad) a signal victory,

Surely, We have given to you a clear Victory

Verily, We have granted thee a manifest Victory

Surah Al Fateh, Ayah: 1, Al Qu’ran

Forty-two years ago this September, a 27 year old army captain, Muammar Qaddafi, led a small group of revolutionaries, including Abdul Salam Jaloud, Mustapha Karoubi, Kweldi Hemidi and Abubakar Jaber Younis, in a bloodless coup against the corrupt regime of King Idris, ushering in what became known as the Al Fateh revolution, named after the Qu’ranic surah Al Fateh (The Victory).

And this revolution did indeed herald a victory over the repression, poverty, ignorance and backwardness that had stalked this land throughout King Idris’s nineteen year reign. In recent months, facts and figures have been provided in articles written by people from every corner of the globe, cataloging the outstanding achievements of the Al Fateh revolution. The brilliant Guyanese economist, Dr Rawle Farley, offers an in-depth account of the visionary leadership and outstanding economic achievements of this revolution in his excellent work titled, ‘Libya: The Exceptional Third World Economy’.

Suffice to say, under the leadership of this revolutionary council, Libya went from being one of the poorest nations in the world to being one of the most developed – economically, politically and morally. Libya is one of a handful of ‘Third World’ nations that can proudly claim to have actually thrown off the yoke of colonialism and neo-colonialism. They have no foreign masters. Muammar Qaddafi and the Libyan revolutionary forces dance to nobody’s tune.

It is these Free Unionist Officers, 42 years later and now in their 70s, who are being hunted down like animals by NATO and their hirelings, forced to watch their nation destroyed. It is an ugly display of the barbarism which rules this world. For revolutionaries the world over this is a particularly devastating and horrifying phase, in what is a long and protracted struggle that will take us all the way to the final conflict on this earth. However, we are not helpless, even in the face of the immense power of the North Atlantic tribes. Their continued domination of this earth is not a given. Like all Empires they will fall. We must together gather our strength, inspired by Libya’s resistance, and continue to organize and mobilize in whatever ways are available to us. As the Brother Leader said ‘we must defend from our corner’.

There can be no doubt that the Western Empire is on the verge of total collapse. The speed at which White supremacy disintegrates will directly correlate with our ability to organize international revolutionary opposition to the evil they are perpetrating in Libya and worldwide. If history has taught us anything then it has taught us that the strength of White supremacy lies in its ability to unite across class, nation-state and ideologies when it comes to furthering their sinister agenda. Tony Blair from Britain’s Labour Party had no difficulty uniting with George Bush from the US Republican Party to attack Iraq, though the two ostensibly adhere to different political ideologies. It has been so for centuries. Despite the fact that the Dutch, French, Spanish and English were actually at war with each other in Europe, they were able to fully unite when it came to putting down the uprisings and revolutions of captured Africans on their plantations in the Caribbean.

Let us now take heed of the Brother Leader’s message and unite and organize once and for all to realize our objective – to deal a final and decisive blow to imperialism and neo-colonialism. Let us put aside our differences in order to deal with the primary contradictions that we face. The power of the people united is not a cliché or an empty slogan – it is ours – if only we can make the psychological transition necessary to possess the power.

We can be sure that long after the likes of  Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy and Jalil  are forgotten, the history books will still tell the story of the courageous Bedouin, who stood up for all of oppressed humanity, and in the year 2011 was targeted for extermination by one of the  most powerful and barbaric ‘Coalition of Demons’ in human history. If freedom fighters all over the world stand up with him as he and his noble forces resist, dealing NATO a decisive blow in Africa, such an historic event will be remembered for all time. We are the makers of history – the power is in our hands.

This September we say to you Brother Leader – May Allah be with you and protect you and know that the revolutionary gains and the ideology of the Al Fateh revolution will live forever!

Tutashinda

By Gerald A. Perreira

5 September 2011

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.

A WONDERFUL SPEECH.  A beautiful speech.

The language expressive and elegant. The arguments clear and convincing. The delivery flawless.

A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience.

It was Obama at his best, Obama at his worst.

Being a moral person, he must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it, if he wanted to be re-elected.

In essence, he sold the fundamental national interests of the United States of America for the chance of a second term.

Not very nice, but that’s politics, OK?

IT MAY be superfluous – almost insulting to the reader – to point out the mendacious details of this rhetorical edifice.

Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength – Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis.

But of the two, it is the Israelis – only they – who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad.

No Occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened. It’s the straight right-wing Israeli propaganda line, pure and simple – the terminology, the historical narrative, the argumentation. The music.

The Palestinians, of course, should have a state of their own. Sure, sure. But they must not be pushy. They must not embarrass the US. They must not come to the UN. They must sit with the Israelis, like reasonable people, and work it out with them. The reasonable sheep must sit down with the reasonable wolf and decide what to have for dinner. Foreigners should not interfere.

Obama gave full service. A lady who provides this kind of service generally gets paid in advance. Obama got paid immediately afterwards, within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns.

THE TRAGIC hero of this affair is Mahmoud Abbas. A tragic hero, but a hero nonetheless.

Many people may be surprised by this sudden emergence of Abbas as a daring player for high stakes, ready to confront the mighty US.

If Ariel Sharon were to wake up for a moment from his years-long coma, he would faint with amazement. It was he who called Mahmoud Abbas “a plucked chicken”.

Yet for the last few days, Abbas was the center of global attention. World leaders conferred about how to handle him, senior diplomats were eager to convince him of this or that course of action, commentators were guessing what he would do next. His speech before the UN General Assembly was treated as an event of consequence.

Not bad for a chicken, even for one with a full set of feathers.

His emergence as a leader on the world stage is somewhat reminiscent of Anwar Sadat.

When Gamal Abd-al-Nasser unexpectedly died at the age of 52 in 1970 and his official deputy, Sadat, assumed his mantle, all political experts shrugged.

Sadat? Who the hell is that? He was considered a nonentity, an eternal No. 2, one of the least important members of the group of “free officers” that was ruling Egypt.

In Egypt, a land of jokes and jokers, witticisms about him abounded. One concerned the prominent brown mark on his forehead. The official version was that it was the result of much praying, hitting the ground with his forehead. But the real reason, it was told, was that at meetings, after everyone else had spoken, Sadat would get up and try to say something. Nasser would good-naturedly put his finger to his forehead, push him gently down and say: “Sit, Anwar!”

To the utter amazement of the experts – and especially the Israeli ones – this “nonentity” took a huge gamble by starting the 1973 October War, and proceeded to do something unprecedented in history: going to the capital of an enemy country still officially in a state of war and making peace.

Abbas’ status under Yasser Arafat was not unlike Sadat’s under Nasser. However, Arafat never appointed a deputy. Abbas was one of a group of four or five likely successors. The heir would surely have been Abu Jihad, had he not been killed by Israeli commandoes in front of his wife and children. Another likely candidate, Abu Iyad, was killed by Palestinian terrorists. Abu Mazen (Abbas) was in a way the choice by default.

Such politicians, emerging suddenly from under the shadow of a great leader, generally fall into one of two categories: the eternal frustrated No. 2 or the surprising new leader.

The Bible gives us examples of both kinds. The first was Rehoboam, the son and heir of the great King Solomon, who told his people: “my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions”. The other kind was represented by Joshua, the heir of Moses. He was no second Moses, but according to the story a great conqueror in his own right.

Modern history tells the sad story of Anthony Eden, the long-suffering No. 2 of Winston Churchill, who commanded little respect. (Mussolini called him, after their first meeting, “a well-tailored idiot.”). Upon assuming power, he tried desperately to equal Churchill and soon embroiled Britain in the 1956 Suez disaster. To the second category belonged Harry Truman, the nobody who succeeded the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt and surprised everybody as a resolute leader.

Abbas looked like belonging to the first kind. Now, suddenly, he is revealed as belonging to the second. The world is treating him with newfound respect. Nearing the end of his career, he made the big gamble.

BUT WAS it wise? Courageous, yes. Daring, yes. But wise?

My answer is: Yes, it was.

Abbas has placed the quest for Palestinian freedom squarely on the international table. For more than a week, Palestine has been the center of international attention. Scores of international statesmen and -women, including the leader of the world’s only superpower, have been busy with Palestine.

For a national movement, that is of the utmost importance. Cynics may ask: “So what did they gain from it?” But cynics are fools. A liberation movement gains from the very fact that the world pays attention, that the media grapple with the problem, that people of conscience all over the world are aroused. It strengthens morale at home and brings the struggle a step nearer its goal.

Oppression shuns the limelight. Occupation, settlements, ethnic cleansing thrive in the shadows. It is the oppressed who need the light of day. Abbas’ move provided it, at least for the time being.

BARACK OBAMA’s miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States.

The Arab Spring may have been a last chance for the US to recover its standing in the Middle East. After some hesitation, Obama realized that. He called on Mubarak to go, helped the Libyans against their tyrant, made some noises about Bashar al-Assad. He knows that he has to regain the respect of the Arab masses if he wants to recover some stature in the region, and by extension throughout the world.

Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the US has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff.

All for reelection.

IT WAS also a crime against Israel.

Israel needs peace. Israel needs to live side by side with the Palestinian people, within the Arab world. Israel cannot rely forever on the unconditional support of the declining United States.

Obama knows this full well. He knows what is good for Israel, even if Netanyahu doesn’t. Yet he has handed the keys of the car to the drunken driver.

The State of Palestine will come into being. This week it was already clear that this is unavoidable. Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch.

Mahmoud Abbas – Abu Mazen, as the Palestinians call him – will be remembered. The “plucked chicken” is soaring into the sky.

By Abu Mazen

24 September 2011

 

 

A Victory for the Libyan People?: The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya

Since Colonel Gaddafi has lost his military hold in the war against NATO and the insurgents/rebels/new regime, numerous talking heads have taken to celebrating this war as a “success”. They believe this is a “victory of the Libyan people” and that we should all be celebrating. Others proclaim victory for the “responsibility to protect,” for “humanitarian interventionism,” and condemn the “anti-imperialist left”. Some of those who claim to be “revolutionaries,” or believe they support the “Arab revolution,” somehow find it possible to sideline NATO’s role in the war, instead extolling the democratic virtues of the insurgents, glorifying their martyrdom, and magnifying their role until everything else is pushed from view. I wish to dissent from this circle of acclamation, and remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya—and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favoured peaceful, non-militarist solutions.

These top ten myths are some of the most repeated claims, by the insurgents, and/or by NATO, European leaders, the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and even the so-called “International Criminal Court”—the main actors speaking in the war against Libya. In turn, we look at some of the reasons why these claims are better seen as imperial folklore, as the myths that supported the broadest of all myths—that this war is a “humanitarian intervention,” one designed to “protect civilians”. Again, the importance of these myths lies in their wide reproduction, with little question, and to deadly effect. In addition, they threaten to severely distort the ideals of human rights and their future invocation, as well aiding in the continued militarization of Western culture and society.

1. Genocide.

Just a few days after the street protests began, on February 21 the very quick to defect Libyan deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, stated: “We are expecting a real genocide in Tripoli. The airplanes are still bringing mercenaries to the airports”. This is excellent: a myth that is composed of myths. With that statement he linked three key myths together—the role of airports (hence the need for that gateway drug of military intervention: the no-fly zone), the role of “mercenaries” (meaning, simply, black people), and the threat of “genocide” (geared toward the language of the UN’s doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect). As ham-fisted and wholly unsubstantiated as the assertion was, he was clever in cobbling together three ugly myths, one of them grounded in racist discourse and practice that endures to the present, with newer atrocities reported against black Libyan and African migrants on a daily basis. He was not alone in making these assertions. Among others like him, Soliman Bouchuiguir, president of the Libyan League for Human Rights, told Reuters on March 14 that if Gaddafi’s forces reached Benghazi, “there will be a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. That’s not the only time we would be deliberately reminded of Rwanda. Here was Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire, the much worshipped Canadian force commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in 1994, currently an appointed senator in the Canadian Parliament and co-director of the Will to Intervene project at Concordia University. Dallaire, in a precipitous sprint to judgment, not only made repeated references to Rwanda when trying to explain Libya, he spoke of Gaddafi as “employing genocidal threats to ‘cleanse Libya house by house’”. This is one instance where selective attention to Gaddafi’s rhetorical excess was taken all too seriously, when on other occasions the powers that be are instead quick to dismiss it: U.S. State Department spokesman, Mark Toner waved away Gaddafi’s alleged threats against Europe by saying that Gaddafi is “someone who’s given to overblown rhetoric”. How very calm, by contrast, and how very convenient—because on February 23, President Obama declared that he had instructed his administration to come up with a “full range of options” to take against Gaddafi.

But “genocide” has a well established international legal definition, as seen repeatedly in the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, where genocide involves the persecution of a “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Not all violence is “genocidal”. Internecine violence is not genocide. Genocide is neither just “lots of violence” nor violence against undifferentiated civilians. What both Dabbashi, Dallaire, and others failed to do was to identify the persecuted national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and how it differed in those terms from those allegedly committing the genocide. They really ought to know better (and they do), one as a UN ambassador and the other as a much exalted expert and lecturer on genocide. This suggests that myth-making was either deliberate, or founded on prejudice.

What foreign military intervention did do, however, was to enable the actual genocidal violence that has been routinely sidelined until only very recently: the horrific violence against African migrants and black Libyans, singled out solely on the basis of their skin colour. That has proceeded without impediment, without apology, and until recently, without much notice. Indeed, the media even collaborates, rapid to assert without evidence that any captured or dead black man must be a “mercenary”. This is the genocide that the white, Western world, and those who dominate the “conversation” about Libya, have missed (and not by accident).

2. Gaddafi is “bombing his own people”.

We must remember that one of the initial reasons in rushing to impose a no-fly zone was to prevent Gaddafi from using his air force to bomb “his own people”—a distinct phrasing that echoes what was tried and tested in the demonization of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. On February 21, when the first alarmist “warnings” about “genocide” were being made by the Libyan opposition, both Al Jazeera and the BBC claimed that Gaddafi had deployed his air force against protesters—as the BBC “reported”: “Witnesses say warplanes have fired on protesters in the city”. Yet, on March 1, in a Pentagon press conference, when asked:  “Do you see any evidence that he [Gaddafi] actually has fired on his own people from the air? There were reports of it, but do you have independent confirmation? If so, to what extent?” U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied, “We’ve seen the press reports, but we have no confirmation of that”. Backing him up was Admiral Mullen: “That’s correct.  We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever”.

In fact, claims that Gaddafi also used helicopters against unarmed protesters are totally unfounded, a pure fabrication based on fake claims. This is important since it was Gaddafi’s domination of Libyan air space that foreign interventionists wanted to nullify, and therefore myths of atrocities perpetrated from the air took on added value as providing an entry point for foreign military intervention that went far beyond any mandate to “protect civilians”.

David Kirpatrick of The New York Times, as early as March 21 confirmed that, “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior”. The “vastly inflated claims” are what became part of the imperial folklore surrounding events in Libya, that suited Western intervention. Rarely did the Benghazi-based journalistic crowd question or contradict their hosts.

3. Save Benghazi.

This article is being written as the Libyan opposition forces march on Sirte and Sabha, the two last remaining strongholds of the Gaddafi government, with ominous warnings to the population that they must surrender, or else. Apparently, Benghazi became somewhat of a “holy city” in the international discourse dominated by leaders of the European Union and NATO. Benghazi was the one city on earth that could not be touched. It was like sacred ground. Tripoli? Sirte? Sabha? Those can be sacrificed, as we all look on, without a hint of protest from any of the powers that be—this, even as we get the first reports of how the opposition has slaughtered people in Tripoli. Let’s turn to the Benghazi myth.

“If we waited one more day,” Barack Obama said in his March 28 address, “Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”. In a joint letter, Obama with UK Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy asserted: “By responding immediately, our countries halted the advance of Gaddafi’s forces. The bloodbath that he had promised to inflict on the citizens of the besieged city of Benghazi has been prevented. Tens of thousands of lives have been protected”. Not only did French jets bomb a retreating column, what we saw was a very short column that included trucks and ambulances, and that clearly could have neither destroyed nor occupied Benghazi.

Other than Gaddafi’s “overblown rhetoric,” which the U.S. was quick to dismiss when it suited its purposes, there is to date still no evidence furnished that shows Benghazi would have witnessed the loss of “tens of thousands” of lives as proclaimed by Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy. This was best explained by Professor Alan J. Kuperman in “False pretense for war in Libya?”:

“The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially—including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which together have a population greater than Benghazi….Khadafy’s acts were a far cry from Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Bosnia, and other killing fields….Despite ubiquitous cellphones equipped with cameras and video, there is no graphic evidence of deliberate massacre….Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The ‘no mercy’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those ‘who throw their weapons away’. Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight ‘to the bitter end’”.

In a bitter irony, what evidence there is of massacres, committed by both sides, is now to be found in Tripoli in recent days, months after NATO imposed its “life-saving” military measures. Revenge killings are daily being reported with greater frequency, including the wholesale slaughter of black Libyans and African migrants by rebel forces. Another sad irony: in Benghazi, which the insurgents have held for months now, well after Gaddafi forces were repulsed, not even that has prevented violence: revenge killings have been reported there too—more under #6 below.

4. African Mercenaries.

Patrick Cockburn summarized the functional utility of the myth of the “African mercenary” and the context in which it arose: “Since February, the insurgents, often supported by foreign powers, claimed that the battle was between Gaddafi and his family on the one side and the Libyan people on the other. Their explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money”. As he notes, black prisoners were put on display for the media (which is a violation of the Geneva Convention), but Amnesty International later found that all the prisoners had supposedly been released since none of them were fighters, but rather were undocumented workers from Mali, Chad, and west Africa. The myth was useful for the opposition to insist that this was a war between “Gaddafi and the Libyan people,” as if he had no domestic support at all—an absolute and colossal fabrication such that one would think only little children could believe a story so fantastic. The myth is also useful for cementing the intended rupture between “the new Libya” and Pan-Africanism, realigning Libya with Europe and the “modern world” which some of the opposition so explicitly crave.

The “African mercenary” myth, as put into deadly, racist practice, is a fact that paradoxically has been both documented and ignored. Months ago I provided an extensive review of the role of the mainstream media, led by Al Jazeera, as well as the seeding of social media, in creating the African mercenary myth. Among the departures from the norm of vilifying Sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans that instead documented the abuse of these civilians, were the Los Angeles Times, Human Rights Watch which found no evidence of any mercenaries at all in eastern Libya (totally contradicting the claims presented as truth by Al Arabiya and The Telegraph, among others such as TIME and The Guardian). In an extremely rare departure from the propaganda about the black mercenary threat which Al Jazeera and its journalists helped to actively disseminate, Al Jazeera produced a single report focusing on the robbing, killing, and abduction of black residents in eastern Libya (now that CBS, Channel 4, and others are noting the racism, Al Jazeera is trying to ambiguously show some interest). Finally, there is some increased recognition of these facts of media collaboration in the racist vilification of the insurgents’ civilian victims—see FAIR: “NYT Points Out ‘Racist Overtones’ in Libyan Disinformation It Helped Spread”.

The racist targeting and killing of black Libyans and Sub-Saharan Africans continues to the present. Patrick Cockburn and Kim Sengupta speak of the recently discovered mass of “rotting bodies of 30 men, almost all black and many handcuffed, slaughtered as they lay on stretchers and even in an ambulance in central Tripoli”. Even while showing us video of hundreds of bodies in the Abu Salim hospital, the BBC dares not remark on the fact that most of those are clearly black people, and even wonders about who might have killed them. This is not a question for the anti-Gaddafi forces interviewed by Sengupta: “‘Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries,’ shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed?” Recent reports reveal the insurgents engaging in ethnic cleansing against black Libyans in Tawergha, the insurgents calling themselves “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin,” vowing that in the “new Libya” black people from Tawergha would be barred from health care and schooling in nearby Misrata, from which black Libyans had already been expelled by the insurgents. Currently, Human Rights Watch has reported: “Dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans face particular risks because rebel forces and other armed groups have often considered them pro-Gadhafi mercenaries from other African countries. We’ve seen violent attacks and killings of these people in areas where the National Transitional Council took control”. Amnesty International has also just reported on the disproportionate detention of black Africans in rebel-controlled Az-Zawiya, as well as the targeting of unarmed, migrant farm workers. Reports continue to mount as this is being written, with other human rights groups finding evidence of the insurgents targeting Sub-Saharan African migrant workers. As the chair of the African Union, Jean Ping, recently stated: “NTC seems to confuse black people with mercenaries. All blacks are mercenaries. If you do that, it means (that the) one-third of the population of Libya, which is black, is also mercenaries. They are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them”. (To read more, please consult the list of recent reports that I have compiled.)

The “African mercenary” myth continues to be one of the most vicious of all the myths, and the most racist. Even in recent days, newspapers such as the Boston Globe uncritically and unquestioningly show photographs of black victims or black detainees with the immediate assertion that they must be mercenaries, despite the absence of any evidence. Instead we are usually provided with casual assertions that Gaddafi is “known to have” recruited Africans from other nations in the past, without even bothering to find out if those shown in the photos are black Libyans. The lynching of both black Libyans and Sub-Saharan African migrant workers has been continuous, and has neither received any expression of even nominal concern by the U.S. and NATO members, nor has it aroused the interest of the so-called “International Criminal Court”. There is as little chance of there being any justice for the victims as there is of anyone putting a stop to these heinous crimes that clearly constitute a case of ethnic cleansing. The media, only now, is becoming more conscious of the need to cover these crimes, having glossed them over for months.

5. Viagra-fueled Mass Rape.

The reported crimes and human rights violations of the Gaddafi regime are awful enough as they are that one has to wonder why anyone would need to invent stories, such as that of Gaddafi’s troops, with erections powered by Viagra, going on a rape spree. Perhaps it was peddled because it’s the kind of story that “captures the imagination of traumatized publics”. This story was taken so seriously that some people started writing to Pfizer to get it to stop selling Viagra to Libya, since its product was allegedly being used as a weapon of war. People who otherwise should know better, set out to deliberately misinform the international public.

The Viagra story was first disseminated by Al Jazeera, in collaboration with its rebel partners, favoured by the Qatari regime that funds Al Jazeera. It was then redistributed by almost all other major Western news media.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, appeared before the world media to say that there was “evidence” that Gaddafi distributed Viagra to his troops in order “to enhance the possibility to rape” and that Gaddafi ordered the rape of hundreds of women. Moreno-Ocampo insisted: “We are getting information that Qaddafi himself decided to rape” and that “we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government”. He also exclaimed that Viagra is “like a machete,” and that “Viagra is a tool of massive rape”.

In a startling declaration to the UN Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice also asserted that Gaddafi was supplying his troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape. She offered no evidence whatsoever to back up her claim. Indeed, U.S. military and intelligence sources flatly contradicted Rice, telling NBC News that “there is no evidence that Libyan military forces are being given Viagra and engaging in systematic rape against women in rebel areas”. Rice is a liberal interventionist who was one of those to persuade Obama to intervene in Libya. She utilized this myth because it helped her make the case at the UN that there was no “moral equivalence” between Gaddafi’s human rights abuses and those of the insurgents.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also declared that “Gadhafi’s security forces and other groups in the region are trying to divide the people by using violence against women and rape as tools of war, and the United States condemns this in the strongest possible terms”. She added that she was “deeply concerned” by these reports of “wide-scale rape”. (She has, thus far, said nothing at all about the rebels’ racist lynchings.)

By June 10, Cherif Bassiouni, who is leading a UN rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the Viagra and mass rape claim was part of a “massive hysteria”. Indeed, both sides in the war have made the same allegations against each other. Bassiouni also told the press of a case of “a woman who claimed to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse”. However, his teams asked for those questionnaires, they never received them—“But she’s going around the world telling everybody about it…so now she got that information to Ocampo and Ocampo is convinced that here we have a potential 259 women who have responded to the fact that they have been sexually abused,” Bassiouni said. He also pointed out that it “did not appear to be credible that the woman was able to send out 70,000 questionnaires in March when the postal service was not functioning”. In fact, Bassiouni’s team “uncovered only four alleged cases” of rape and sexual abuse: “Can we draw a conclusion that there is a systematic policy of rape? In my opinion we can’t”. In addition to the UN, Amnesty International’s Donatella Rovera said in an interview with the French daily Libération, that Amnesty had “not found cases of rape….Not only have we not met any victims, but we have not even met any persons who have met victims. As for the boxes of Viagra that Gaddafi is supposed to have had distributed, they were found intact near tanks that were completely burnt out”.

However, this did not stop some news manufacturers from trying to maintain the rape claims, in modified form. The BBC went on to add another layer just a few days after Bassiouni humiliated the ICC and the media: the BBC now claimed that rape victims in Libya faced “honour killings”. This is news to the few Libyans I know, who never heard of honour killings in their country. The scholarly literature on Libya turns up little or nothing on this phenomenon in Libya. The honour killings myth serves a useful purpose for keeping the mass rape claim on life support: it suggests that women would not come forward and give evidence, out of shame. Also just a few days after Bassiouni spoke, Libyan insurgents, in collaboration with CNN, made a last-ditch effort to save the rape allegations: they presented a cell phone with a rape video on it, claiming it belonged to a government soldier. The men shown in the video are in civilian clothes. There is no evidence of Viagra. There is no date on the video and we have no idea who recorded it or where. Those presenting the cell phone claimed that many other videos existed, but they were conveniently being destroyed to preserve the “honour” of the victims.

6. Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

Having asserted, wrongly as we saw, that Libya faced impending “genocide” at the hands of Gaddafi’s forces, it became easier for Western powers to invoke the UN’s 2005 doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. Meanwhile, it is not at all clear that by the time the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 that the violence in Libya had even reached the levels seen in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. The most common refrain used against critics of the selectivity of this supposed “humanitarian interventionism” is that just because the West cannot intervene everywhere does not mean it should not intervene in Libya. Maybe…but that still does not explain why Libya was the chosen target. This is a critical point because some of the earliest critiques of R2P voiced at the UN raised the issue of selectivity, of who gets to decide, and why some crises where civilians are targeted (say, Gaza) are essentially ignored, while others receive maximum concern, and whether R2P served as the new fig leaf for hegemonic geopolitics.

The myth at work here is that foreign military intervention was guided by humanitarian concerns. To make the myth work, one has to willfully ignore at least three key realities. One thus has to ignore the new scramble for Africa, where Chinese interests are seen as competing with the West for access to resources and political influence, something that AFRICOM is meant to challenge. Gaddafi challenged AFRICOM’s intent to establish military bases in Africa. AFRICOM has since become directly involved in the Libya intervention and specifically “Operation Odyssey Dawn”. Horace Campbell argued that “U.S. involvement in the Libyan bombing is being turned into a public relations ploy for AFRICOM” and an “opportunity to give AFRICOM credibility under the facade of the Libyan intervention”. In addition, Gaddafi’s power and influence on the continent had also been increasing, through aid, investment, and a range of projects designed to lessen African dependency on the West and to challenge Western multilateral institutions by building African unity—rendering him a rival to U.S. interests. Secondly, one has to ignore not just the anxiety of Western oil interests over Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” (threatening to take back what oil companies had gained), an anxiety now clearly manifest in the European corporate rush into Libya to scoop up the spoils of victory—but one has to also ignore the apprehension over what Gaddafi was doing with those oil revenues in supporting greater African economic independence, and for historically backing national liberation movements that challenged Western hegemony. Thirdly, one has to also ignore the fear in Washington that the U.S. was losing a grip on the course of the so-called “Arab revolution”. How one can stack up these realities, and match them against ambiguous and partial “humanitarian” concerns, and then conclude that, yes, human rights is what mattered most, seems entirely implausible and unconvincing—especially with the atrocious track record of NATO and U.S. human rights violations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and before that Kosovo and Serbia. The humanitarian angle is simply neither credible nor even minimally logical.

If R2P is seen as founded on moral hypocrisy and contradiction—now definitively revealed—it will become much harder in the future to cry wolf again and expect to get a respectful hearing. This is especially the case since little in the way of diplomacy and peaceful negotiation preceded the military intervention—while Obama is accused by some of having been slow to react, this was if anything a rush to war, on a pace that by very far surpassed Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Not only do we know from the African Union about how its efforts to establish a peaceful transition were impeded, but Dennis Kucinich also reveals that he received reports that a peaceful settlement was at hand, only to be “scuttled by State Department officials”. These are absolutely critical violations of the R2P doctrine, showing how those ideals could instead be used for a practice that involved a hasty march to war, and war aimed at regime change (which is itself a violation of international law).

That R2P served as a justifying myth that often achieved the opposite of its stated aims, is no longer a surprise. I am not even speaking here of the role of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in bombing Libya and aiding the insurgents—even as they backed Saudi military intervention to crush the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain, nor of the ugly pall cast on an intervention led by the likes of unchallenged abusers of human rights who have committed war crimes with impunity in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I am taking a narrower approach—such as the documented cases where NATO not only willfully failed to protect civilians in Libya, but it even deliberately and knowingly targeted them in a manner that constitutes terrorism by most official definitions used by Western governments.

NATO admitted to deliberately targeting Libya’s state television, killing three civilian reporters, in a move condemned by international journalist federations as a direct violation of a 2006 Security Council resolution banning attacks on journalists. A U.S. Apache helicopter—in a repeat of the infamous killings shown in the Collateral Murder video—gunned down civilians in the central square of Zawiya, killing the brother of the information minister among others. Taking a fairly liberal notion of what constitutes “command and control facilities,” NATO targeted a civilian residential space resulting in the deaths of some of Gaddafi’s family members, including three grandchildren. As if to protect the myth of “protecting civilians” and the unconscionable contradiction of a “war for human rights,” the major news media often kept silent about civilian deaths caused by NATO bombardments. R2P has been invisible when it comes to civilians targeted by NATO.

In terms of the failure to protect civilians, in a manner that is actually an international criminal offense, we have the numerous reports of NATO ships ignoring the distress calls of refugee boats in the Mediterranean that were fleeing Libya. In May, 61 African refugees died on a single vessel, despite making contact with vessels belonging to NATO member states. In a repeat of the situation, dozens died in early August on another vessel. In fact, on NATO’s watch, at least 1,500 refugees fleeing Libya have died at sea since the war began. They were mostly Sub-Saharan Africans, and they died in multiples of the death toll suffered by Benghazi during the protests. R2P was utterly absent for these people.

NATO has developed a peculiar terminological twist for Libya, designed to absolve the rebels of any role in perpetrating crimes against civilians, and abdicating its so-called responsibility to protect. Throughout the war, spokespersons for NATO and for the U.S. and European governments consistently portrayed all of the actions of Gaddafi’s forces as “threatening civilians,” even when engaged in either defensive actions, or combat against armed opponents. For example, this week the NATO spokesperson, Roland Lavoie, “appeared to struggle to explain how NATO strikes were protecting civilians at this stage in the conflict. Asked about NATO’s assertion that it hit 22 armed vehicles near Sirte on Monday, he was unable to say how the vehicles were threatening civilians, or whether they were in motion or parked”.

By protecting the rebels, in the same breath as they spoke of protecting civilians, it is clear that NATO intended for us to see Gaddafi’s armed opponents as mere civilians. Interestingly, in Afghanistan, where NATO and the U.S. fund, train, and arm the Karzai regime in attacking “his own people” (like they do in Pakistan), the armed opponents are consistently labeled “terrorists” or “insurgents”—even if the majority of them are civilians who have never served in any official standing army. They are insurgents in Afghanistan, and their deaths at the hands of NATO are listed separately from the tallies for civilian casualties. By some magic, in Libya, they are all “civilians”. In response to the announcement of the UN Security Council voting for military intervention, a volunteer translator for Western reporters in Tripoli made this key observation: “Civilians holding guns, and you want to protect them? It’s a joke. We are the civilians. What about us?”

NATO has provided a shield for the insurgents in Libya to victimize unarmed civilians in areas they came to occupy. There was no hint of any “responsibility to protect” in these cases. NATO assisted the rebels in starving Tripoli of supplies, subjecting its civilian population to a siege that deprived them of water, food, medicine, and fuel. When Gaddafi was accused of doing this to Misrata, the international media were quick to cite this as a war crime. Save Misrata, kill Tripoli—whatever you want to label such “logic,” humanitarian is not an acceptable option. Leaving aside the documented crimes by the insurgents against black Libyans and African migrant workers, the insurgents were also found by Human Rights Watch to have engaged in “looting, arson, and abuse of civilians in [four] recently captured towns in western Libya”. In Benghazi, which the insurgents have held for months now, revenge killings have been reported by The New York Times as late as this May, and by Amnesty International in late June and faulted the insurgents’ National Transitional Council. The responsibility to protect? It now sounds like something deserving wild mockery.

7. Gaddafi—the Demon.

Depending on your perspective, either Gaddafi is a heroic revolutionary, and thus the demonization by the West is extreme, or Gaddafi is a really bad man, in which case the demonization is unnecessary and absurd. The myth here is that the history of Gaddafi’s power was marked only by atrocity—he is thoroughly evil, without any redeeming qualities, and anyone accused of being a “Gaddafi supporter” should somehow feel more ashamed than those who openly support NATO. This is binary absolutism at its worst—virtually no one made allowance for the possibility that some might neither support Gaddafi, the insurgents, nor NATO. Everyone was to be forced into one of those camps, no exceptions allowed. What resulted was a phony debate, dominated by fanatics of one side or another. Missed in the discussion, recognition of the obvious: however much Gaddafi had been “in bed” with the West over the past decade, his forces were now fighting against a NATO-driven take over of his country.

The other result was the impoverishment of historical consciousness, and the degradation of more complex appreciations of the full breadth of the Gaddafi record. This would help explain why some would not rush to condemn and disown the man (without having to resort to crude and infantile caricaturing of their motivations). While even Glenn Greenwald feels the need to dutifully insert, “No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi,” I have known decent human beings in Nicaragua, Trinidad, Dominica, and among the Mohawks in Montreal who very much appreciate Gaddafi’s support—not to mention his support for various national liberation movements, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Gaddafi’s regime has many faces: some are seen by his domestic opponents, others are seen by recipients of his aid, and others were smiled at by the likes of Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. There are many faces, and they are all simultaneously real. Some refuse to “disown” Gaddafi, to “apologize” for his friendship towards them, no matter how distasteful, indecent, and embarrassing other “progressives” may find him. That needs to be respected, instead of this now fashionable bullying and gang banging that reduces a range of positions to one juvenile accusation: “you support a dictator”. Ironically, we support many dictators, with our very own tax dollars, and we routinely offer no apologies for this fact.

Speaking of the breadth of Gaddafi’s record, that ought to resist simplistic, revisionist reduction, some might care to note that even now, the U.S. State Department’s webpage on Libya still points to a Library of Congress Country Study on Libya that features some of the Gaddafi government’s many social welfare achievements over the years in the areas of medical care, public housing,  and education. In addition, Libyans have the highest literacy rate in Africa (see UNDP, p. 171) and Libya is the only continental African nation to rank “high” in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Even the BBC recognized these achievements:

“Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints. Life expectancy is in the seventies. And per capita income—while not as high as could be expected given Libya’s oil wealth and relatively small population of 6.5m—is estimated at $12,000 (£9,000), according to the World Bank. Illiteracy has been almost wiped out, as has homelessness—a chronic problem in the pre-Gaddafi era, where corrugated iron shacks dotted many urban centres around the country”.

So if one supports health care, does that mean one supports dictatorship? And if “the dictator” funds public housing and subsidizes incomes, do we simply erase those facts from our memory?

8. Freedom Fighters—the Angels.

The complement to the demonization of Gaddafi was the angelization of the “rebels”. My aim here is not to counter the myth by way of inversion, and demonizing all of Gaddafi’s opponents, who have many serious and legitimate grievances, and in large numbers have clearly had more than they can bear. I am instead interested in how “we,” in the North Atlantic part of the equation, construct them in ways that suit our intervention. One standard way, repeated in different ways across a range of media and by U.S. government spokespersons, can be seen in this New York Times’ depiction of the rebels as “secular-minded professionals—lawyers, academics, businesspeople—who talk about democracy, transparency, human rights and the rule of law”. The listing of professions familiar to the American middle class which respects them, is meant to inspire a shared sense of identification between readers and the Libyan opposition, especially when we recall that it is on the Gaddafi side where the forces of darkness dwell: the main “professions” we find are torturer, terrorist, and African mercenary.

For many weeks it was almost impossible to get reporters embedded with the rebel National Transitional Council in Benghazi to even begin to provide a description of who constituted the anti-Gaddafi movement, if it was one organization or many groups, what their agendas were, and so forth. The subtle leitmotif in the reports was one that cast the rebellion as entirely spontaneous and indigenous—which may be true, in part, and it may also be an oversimplification. Among the reports that significantly complicated the picture were those that discussed the CIA ties to the insurgents (for more, see this, this, this, and that); others highlighted the role of the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and USAID, which have been active in Libya since 2005; those that detailed the role of various expatriate groups; and, reports of the active role of “radical Islamist” militias embedded within the overall insurgency, with some pointing to Al Qaeda connections.

Some feel a definite need for being on the side of “the good guys,” especially as neither Iraq nor Afghanistan offer any such sense of righteous vindication. Americans want the world to see them as doing good, as being not only indispensable, but also irreproachable. They could wish for nothing better than being seen as atoning for their sins in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a special moment, where the bad guy can safely be the other once again. A world that is safe for America is a world that is unsafe for evil. Marching band, baton twirlers, Anderson Cooper, confetti—we get it. 

9. Victory for the Libyan People.

To say that the current turn in Libya represents a victory by the Libyan people in charting their own destiny is, at best, an oversimplification that masks the range of interests involved since the beginning in shaping and determining the course of events on the ground, and that ignores the fact that for much of the war Gaddafi was able to rely on a solid base of popular support. As early as February 25, a mere week after the start of the first street protests, Nicolas Sarkozy had already determined that Gaddafi “must go”. By February 28, David Cameron began working on a proposal for a no-fly zone—these statements and decisions were made without any attempt at dialogue and diplomacy. By March 30, The New York Times reported that for “several weeks” CIA operatives had been working inside Libya, which would mean they were there from mid-February, that is, when the protests began—they were then joined inside Libya by “dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers”. The NYT also reported in the same article that “several weeks” before (again, around mid-February), President Obama Several “signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels,” with that “other support” entailing a range of possible “covert actions”. USAID had already deployed a team to Libya by early March. At the end of March, Obama publicly stated that the objective was to depose Gaddafi. In terribly suspicious wording, “a senior U.S. official said the administration had hoped that the Libyan uprising would evolve ‘organically,’ like those in Tunisia and Egypt, without need for foreign intervention”—which sounds like exactly the kind of statement one makes when something begins in a fashion that is not “organic” and when comparing events in Libya as marked by a potential legitimacy deficit when compared to those of Tunisia and Egypt. Yet on March 14 the NTC’s Abdel Hafeez Goga asserted, “We are capable of controlling all of Libya, but only after the no-fly zone is imposed”—which is still not the case even six months later.

In recent days it has also been revealed that what the rebel leadership swore it would oppose—“foreign boots on the ground”—is in fact a reality confirmed by NATO: “Special forces troops from Britain, France, Jordan and Qatar on the ground in Libya have stepped up operations in Tripoli and other cities in recent days to help rebel forces as they conducted their final advance on the Gadhafi regime”. This, and other summaries, are only scratching the surface of the range of external support provided to the rebels. The myth here is that of the nationalist, self-sufficient rebel, fueled entirely by popular support.

At the moment, war supporters are proclaiming the intervention a “success”. It should be noted that there was another case where an air campaign, deployed to support local armed militia on the ground, aided by U.S. covert military operatives, also succeeded in deposing another regime, and even much more quickly. That case was Afghanistan. Success.

10. Defeat for “the Left”.

As if reenacting the pattern of articles condemning “the left” that came out in the wake of the Iran election protests in 2009 (see as examples Hamid Dabashi and Slavoj Žižek), the war in Libya once again seemed to have presented an opportunity to target the left, as if this was topmost on the agenda—as if “the left” was the problem to be addressed. Here we see articles, in various states of intellectual and political disrepair, by Juan Cole (see some of the rebuttals: “The case of Professor Juan Cole,” “An open letter to Professor Juan Cole: A reply to a slander,” “Professor Cole ‘answers’ WSWS on Libya: An admission of intellectual and political bankruptcy”), Gilbert Achcar (and this especially), Immanuel Wallerstein, and Helena Sheehan who seemingly arrived at some of her most critical conclusions at the airport at the end of her very first visit to Tripoli.

There seems to be some confusion over roles and identities. There is no homogeneous left, nor ideological agreement among anti-imperialists (which includes conservatives and libertarians, among anarchists and Marxists). Nor was the “anti-imperialist left” in any position to either do real harm on the ground, as is the case of the actual protagonists. There was little chance of the anti-interventionists in influencing foreign policy, which took shape in Washington before any of the serious critiques against intervention were published. These points suggest that at least some of the critiques are moved by concerns that go beyond Libya, and that even have very little to do with Libya ultimately. The most common accusation is that the anti-imperialist left is somehow coddling a dictator. The argument is that this is based on a flawed analysis—in criticizing the position of Hugo Chávez, Wallerstein says Chávez’s analysis is deeply flawed, and offers this among the criticisms: “The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya” (yes, read it again). Indeed, many of the counterarguments deployed against the anti-interventionist left echo or wholly reproduce the top myths that were dismantled above, that get their geopolitical analysis almost entirely wrong, and that pursue politics focused in part on personality and events of the day. This also shows us the deep poverty of politics premised primarily on simplistic and one-sided ideas of “human rights” and “protection” (see Richard Falk’s critique), and the success of the new military humanism in siphoning off the energies of the left. And a question persists: if those opposed to intervention were faulted for providing a moral shield for “dictatorship” (as if imperialism was not itself a global dictatorship), what about those humanitarians who have backed the rise of xenophobic and racist militants who by so many accounts engage in ethnic cleansing? Does it mean that the pro-interventionist crowd is racist? Do they even object to the racism? So far, I have heard only silence from those quarters.

The agenda in brow-beating the anti-imperialist straw man masks an effort to curb dissent against an unnecessary war that has prolonged and widened human suffering; advanced the cause of war corporatists, transnational firms, and neoliberals; destroyed the legitimacy of multilateral institutions that were once openly committed to peace in international relations; violated international law and human rights; witnessed the rise of racist violence; empowered the imperial state to justify its continued expansion; violated domestic laws; and reduced the discourse of humanitarianism to a clutch of simplistic slogans, reactionary impulses, and formulaic policies that privilege war as a first option. Really, the left is the problem here?

By MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE

31 August 2011

@ Counterpunch

Maximilian Forte is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His website can be found at http://openanthropology.org/ as can his previous articles on Libya and other facets of imperialism.

 

A President who is helpless in the face of Middle East reality

Obama’s UN speech insists Israelis and Palestinians are equal parties to conflict

Today should be Mahmoud Abbas’s finest hour. Even The New York Times has discovered that “a grey man of grey suits and sensible shoes, may be slowly emerging from his shadow”.

But this is nonsense. The colourless leader of the Palestinian Authority, who wrote a 600-page book on his people’s conflict with Israel without once mentioning the word “occupation”, should have no trouble this evening in besting Barack Hussein Obama’s pathetic, humiliating UN speech on Wednesday in which he handed US policy in the Middle East over to Israel’s gimmick government.

For the American President who called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, an end to the theft of Arab land in the West Bank – Israeli “settlements” is what he used to call it – and a Palestinian state by 2011, Obama’s performance was pathetic.

As usual, Hanan Ashrawi, the only eloquent Palestinian voice in New York this week, got it right. “I couldn’t believe what I heard,” she told Haaretz, that finest of Israeli newspapers. “It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel. There wasn’t one word of empathy for the Palestinians. He spoke only of the Israelis’ troubles…” Too true. And as usual, the sanest Israeli journalists, in their outspoken condemnation of Obama, proved that the princes of American journalists were cowards. “The limp, unimaginative speech that US President Barack Obama delivered at the United Nations… reflects how helpless the American President is in the face of Middle East realities,” Yael Sternhell wrote.

And as the days go by, and we discover whether the Palestinians respond to Obama’s grovelling performance with a third intifada or with a shrug of weary recognition that this is how things always were, the facts will continue to prove that the US administration remains a tool of Israel when it comes to Israel’s refusal to give the Palestinians a state.

How come, let’s ask, that the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, flew from Tel Aviv to New York for the statehood debate on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own aircraft? How come Netanyahu was too busy chatting to the Colombian President to listen to Obama’s speech? He only glanced through the Palestinian bit of the text when he was live-time, face to face with the American President. This wasn’t “chutzpah”. This was insult, pure and simple.

And Obama deserved it. After praising the Arab Spring/Summer/ Autumn, whatever – yet again running through the individual acts of courage of Arab Tunisians and Egyptians as if he had been behind the Arab Awakening all along, the man dared to give the Palestinians 10 minutes of his time, slapping them in the face for daring to demand statehood from the UN. Obama even – and this was the funniest part of his preposterous address to the UN – suggested that the Palestinians and Israelis were two equal “parties” to the conflict.

A Martian listening to this speech would think, as Ms Ashrawi suggested, that the Palestinians were occupying Israel rather than the other way round. No mention of Israeli occupation, no mention of refugees, or the right of return or of the theft of Arab Palestinian land by the Israeli government against all international law. But plenty of laments for the besieged people of Israel, rockets fired at their houses, suicide bombs – Palestinian sins, of course, but no reference to the carnage of Gaza, the massive death toll of Palestinians – and even the historical persecution of the Jewish people and the Holocaust.

That persecution is a fact of history. So is the evil of the Holocaust. But THE PALESTINIANS DID NOT COMMIT THESE ACTS. It was the Europeans – whose help in denying Palestinian statehood Obama is now seeking – who committed this crime of crimes. So we were then back to the “equal parties”, as if the Israeli occupiers and the occupied Palestinians were on a level playing ground.

Madeleine Albright used to adopt this awful lie. “It’s up to the parties themselves,” she would say, washing her hands, Pilate-like, of the whole business the moment Israel threatened to call out its supporters in America. Heaven knows if Mahmoud Abbas can produce a 1940 speech at the UN today. But at least we all know who the appeaser is.

By Robert Fisk

23 September 2011

@ The Independent

 

A Formal Funeral For The Two-State Solution

The Palestinian Authority’s bid to the United Nations for Palestinian statehood is, at least in theory, supposed to circumvent the failed peace process. But in two crucial respects, the ill-conceived gambit actually makes things worse, amplifying the flaws of the process it seeks to replace. First, it excludes the Palestinian people from the decision-making process. And second, it entirely disconnects the discourse about statehood from reality.

Most discussions of the UN bid pit Israel and the United States on one side, fiercely opposing it, and Palestinian officials and allied governments on the other. But this simplistic portrayal ignores the fact that among the Palestinian people themselves there is precious little support for the effort. The opposition, and there is a great deal of it, stems from three main sources: the vague bid could lead to unintended consequences; pursuing statehood above all else endangers equality and refugee rights; and there is no democratic mandate for the Palestinian Authority to act on behalf of Palestinians or to gamble with their rights and future.

Underscoring the lack of public support, numerous Palestinian civil society organizations and grassroots leaders, academics, and activists have been loudly criticizing the strategy. The Boycott National Committee (BNC) — the steering group of the global Palestinian-led campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel that has been endorsed by almost 200 Palestinian organizations — warned in August that the UN bid could end up sidelining the PLO as the official representative of all Palestinians and in turn disenfranchise Palestinians inside Israel and the refugees in the diaspora. A widely disseminated legal opinion by the Oxford scholar Guy Goodwin-Gill underscored the point, arguing that the PLO could be displaced from the UN by a toothless and illusory “State of Palestine” that would, at most, nominally represent only Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Others, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement — an international coalition of young Palestinians — declared that it stood “steadfastly against” the UN bid because it could jeopardize “the rights and aspirations of over two-thirds of the Palestinian people who live as refugees in countries of refuge and in exile, to return to their original homes.” Many, like the PYM, fear that unilaterally declaring a state along 1967 borders without any other guarantees of Palestinian rights would effectively cede the 78 percent of historic Palestine captured in 1948 to Israel and would keep refugees from returning to what would then be recognized de facto as an ethnically “Jewish state.”

Of course, there may be no clearer evidence of the distance between the UN bid and the actual will of the Palestinians than the secrecy of the process. Today, just days before the application is filed with the UN, the Palestinian public remains in the dark about exactly what the PA is proposing. No draft text has been shared with the Palestinian people. Instead the text is being negotiated with the Palestinian Authority’s donors as if they, not the Palestinian people, are its true constituency.

More fundamentally, though, the entire discussion of statehood ignores the facts on the ground. For starters, the PA fails the traditional criteria for statehood laid out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: it controls neither territory nor external borders (except for the tiny enclaves it polices under the supervision of Israeli occupation forces). It is prohibited under the 1993 Oslo Accords from freely entering into relations with other states. As for possessing a permanent population, the majority of the Palestinian people are prohibited by Israel from entering the area on which the PA purports to claim statehood solely because they are not Jews (under Israel’s discriminatory Law of Return, Jews from anywhere in the world can settle virtually anywhere in Israel or the occupied territories, while native-born Palestinian refugees and their children are excluded). The PA cannot issue passports or identity documents; Israeli authorities control the population registry. No matter how the UN votes, Israel will continue to build settlements in the West Bank and maintain its siege of Gaza. As all this suggests, any discussion of real sovereignty is a fantasy.

Nor is the strategy likely to produce even formal UN membership or recognition. That would require approval by the Security Council, which the Obama administration has vowed to veto. The alternative is some sort of symbolic resolution in the UN General Assembly upgrading the status of the existing Palestinian UN observer mission — a decision with little practical effect. Such an outcome will hardly be worth all the energy and fuss, especially when there are other measures that the UN could take that would have much greater impact. For example, Palestinians would be better off asking for strict enforcement of existing but long ignored Security Council resolutions, such as Resolution 465, which was passed in 1980 and calls on Israel to “dismantle the existing settlements” in the occupied territories and determines that all Israel’s measures “to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity” and are flagrant violations of international law.

Ultimately, any successful strategy should focus not on statehood but on rights. In its statement on the UN bid, the BNC emphasized that regardless of what happens in September, the global solidarity struggle must continue until Israel respects Palestinian rights and obeys international law in three specific ways: ending the occupation of Arab lands that began in 1967 and dismantling the West Bank wall that was ruled illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice; removing all forms of legal and social discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and guaranteeing full equal rights; and offering full respect for Palestinian refugee rights, including the right of return. Palestinians and Israelis are not in a situation of equals negotiating an end to a dispute but are, respectively, colonized and colonizer, much as blacks and whites were in South Africa. This truth must be recognized, and pushing for such recognition would resonate far more with the Palestinian public than empty statehood talk.

Indeed, such a strategy has worried Israel enough that it has enlisted the U.S. in the fight against what Israeli leaders term “delegitimization.” “Delegitimizers” are supposedly not seeking justice and full human and political rights for Palestinians, but rather seeking the collapse of Israel — much like East Germany or apartheid South Africa — through political and legal assaults. According to Israel and groups supporting it in the United States, virtually all Palestine solidarity activism, especially BDS, is “delegitimization.” Some Israelis, including even former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have warned that fighting a movement calling for universal civil and political rights would only make Israel look more, not less, like an apartheid state, worsening its situation. But Israeli elites have come up with no plausible response to the reality that within a few short years — because of Palestinian population growth and Israeli settlement construction — a Jewish minority will be ruling over a disenfranchised and subordinated Palestinian majority in a country that cannot be partitioned.

These, then, are the lines along which the battle for the future of Palestine are going to be fought, no matter how many U.S. envoys head to Ramallah and Jerusalem to try to revive negotiations in which no one believes. Meanwhile, the UN bid should be seen not as the means to give birth to the Palestinian state but as the formal funeral of the two-state solution and the peace process that was supposed to bring it about.

By Ali Abunimah

20 September 2011

@ Foreign Affairs

Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He co-founded the Electronic Intifada and is a policy adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.