Editorial Comment:
This article was first published on
Libya
360° in 2011. Following the
death of Nelson Mandela and in light
of the ongoing struggle in Libya, it
is an appropriate time to read these
words again.
The Lies Behind The
West’s War On Libya
It was Gaddafi’s Libya that offered
all of Africa its first revolution in
modern times – connecting the entire
continent by telephone, television,
radio broadcasting and several other
technological applications such as
telemedicine and distance teaching. And
thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low
cost connection was made available
across the continent, including in rural
areas.
It began in 1992, when 45 African
nations established RASCOM (Regional
African Satellite Communication
Organization) so that Africa would have
its own satellite and slash
communication costs in the continent.
This was a time when phone calls to and
from Africa were the most expensive in
the world because of the annual US$500
million fee pocketed by Europe for the
use of its satellites like Intelsat for
phone conversations, including those
within the same country.
An African satellite only cost a
onetime payment of US$400 million and
the continent no longer had to pay a
US$500 million annual lease. Which
banker wouldn’t finance such a project?
But the problem remained – how can
slaves, seeking to free themselves from
their master’s exploitation ask the
master’s help to achieve that freedom?
Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the USA,
Europe only made vague promises for 14
years. Gaddafi put an end to these
futile pleas to the western
‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant
interest rates. The Libyan guide put
US$300 million on the table; the African
Development Bank added US$50 million
more and the West African Development
Bank a further US$27 million – and
that’s how Africa got its first
communications satellite on 26 December
2007.
China and Russia followed suit and
shared their technology and helped
launch satellites for South Africa,
Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second
African satellite was launched in July
2010. The first totally indigenously
built satellite and manufactured on
African soil, in Algeria, is set for
2020. This satellite is aimed at
competing with the best in the world,
but at ten times less the cost, a real
challenge.
This is how a symbolic gesture of a
mere US$300 million changed the life of
an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya
cost the West, not just depriving it of
US$500 million per year but the billions
of dollars in debt and interest that the
initial loan would generate for years to
come and in an exponential manner,
thereby helping maintain an occult
system in order to plunder the
continent.
African
Monetary Fund, African Central Bank,
African Investment Bank
The US$30 billion frozen by Mr
Obama belong to the Libyan Central
Bank and had been earmarked as the
Libyan contribution to three key
projects which would add the finishing
touches to the African federation –
the African Investment Bank in Sirte,
Libya, the establishment in 2011 of
the African Monetary Fund to be based
in Yaounde with a US$42 billion
capital fund and the Abuja-based
African Central Bank in Nigeria which
when it starts printing African money
will ring the death knell for the CFA
franc through which Paris has been
able to maintain its hold on some
African countries for the last fifty
years. It is easy to understand the
French wrath against Gaddafi.
The African Monetary Fund is
expected to totally supplant the
African activities of the
International Monetary Fund which,
with only US$25 billion, was able to
bring an entire continent to its knees
and make it swallow questionable
privatisation like forcing African
countries to move from public to
private monopolies. No surprise then
that on 16-17 December 2010, the
Africans unanimously rejected attempts
by Western countries to join the
African Monetary Fund, saying it was
open only to African nations.
It is increasingly obvious that
after Libya, the western coalition
will go after Algeria, because apart
from its huge energy resources, the
country has cash reserves of around
€150 billion. This is what lures the
countries that are bombing Libya and
they all have one thing in common –
they are practically bankrupt. The USA
alone, has a staggering debt of
$US14,000 billion, France, Great
Britain and Italy each have a US$2,000
billion public deficit compared to
less than US$400 billion in public
debt for 46 African countries
combined.
Inciting spurious wars in Africa
in the hope that this will revitalise
their economies which are sinking ever
more into the doldrums will ultimately
hasten the western decline which
actually began in 1884 during the
notorious Berlin Conference. As the
American economist Adam Smith
predicted in 1865 when he publicly
backed Abraham Lincoln for the
abolition of slavery, ‘the economy of
any country which relies on the
slavery of blacks is destined to
descend into hell the day those
countries awaken’.
Regional
Unity as an Obstacle to the Creation
of a United States of Africa
To destabilise and destroy the
African union which was veering
dangerously (for the West) towards a
United States of Africa under the
guiding hand of Gaddafi, the European
Union first tried, unsuccessfully, to
create the Union for the Mediterranean
(UPM). North Africa somehow had to be
cut off from the rest of Africa, using
the old tired racist clichés of the 18th
and 19th centuries ,which claimed that
Africans of Arab origin were more
evolved and civilised than the rest of
the continent. This failed because
Gaddafi refused to buy into it. He soon
understood what game was being played
when only a handful of African countries
were invited to join the Mediterranean
grouping without informing the African
Union but inviting all 27 members of the
European Union.
Without the driving force behind the
African Federation, the UPM failed even
before it began, still-born with Sarkozy
as president and Mubarak as vice
president. The French foreign minister,
Alain Juppe is now attempting to
re-launch the idea, banking no doubt on
the fall of Gaddafi. What African
leaders fail to understand is that as
long as the European Union continues to
finance the African Union, the status
quo will remain, because no real
independence. This is why the European
Union has encouraged and financed
regional groupings in Africa.
It is obvious that the West African
Economic Community (ECOWAS), which has
an embassy in Brussels and depends for
the bulk of its funding on the European
Union, is a vociferous opponent to the
African federation. That’s why Lincoln
fought in the US war of secession
because the moment a group of countries
come together in a regional political
organisation, it weakens the main group.
That is what Europe wanted and the
Africans have never understood the game
plan, creating a plethora of regional
groupings, COMESA, UDEAC, SADC, and the
Great Maghreb which never saw the light
of day thanks to Gaddafi who understood
what was happening.
Gaddafi,
the African Who Cleansed the Continent
from the Humiliation of Apartheid
For most Africans, Gaddafi is a
generous man, a humanist, known for his
unselfish support for the struggle
against the racist regime in South
Africa. If he had been an egotist, he
wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the
West to help the ANC both militarily and
financially in the fight against
apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon
after his release from 27 years in jail,
decided to break the UN embargo and
travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. For
five long years, no plane could touch
down in Libya because of the embargo.
One needed to take a plane to the
Tunisian city of Jerba and continue by
road for five hours to reach Ben
Gardane, cross the border and continue
on a desert road for three hours before
reaching Tripoli. The other solution was
to go through Malta, and take a night
ferry on ill-maintained boats to the
Libyan coast. A hellish journey for a
whole people, simply to punish one man.
Mandela didn’t mince his words when
the former US president Bill Clinton
said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one –
‘No country can claim to be the
policeman of the world and no state can
dictate to another what it should do’.
He added – ‘Those that yesterday were
friends of our enemies have the gall
today to tell me not to visit my brother
Gaddafi, they are advising us to be
ungrateful and forget our friends of the
past.’
Indeed, the West still considered the
South African racists to be their
brothers who needed to be protected.
That’s why the members of the ANC,
including Nelson Mandela, were
considered to be dangerous terrorists.
It was only on 2 July 2008, that the US
Congress finally voted a law to remove
the name of Nelson Mandela and his ANC
comrades from their black list, not
because they realised how stupid that
list was but because they wanted to mark
Mandela’s 90th birthday. If the West was
truly sorry for its past support for
Mandela’s enemies and really sincere
when they name streets and places after
him, how can they continue to wage war
against someone who helped Mandela and
his people to be victorious, Gaddafi?
Are Those Who Want to Export
Democracy Themselves Democrats?
And what if Gaddafi’s Libya were more
democratic than the USA, France, Britain
and other countries waging war to export
democracy to Libya? On 19 March 2003,
President George Bush began bombing Iraq
under the pretext of bringing democracy.
On 19 March 2011, exactly eight years
later to the day, it was the French
president’s turn to rain down bombs over
Libya, once again claiming it was to
bring democracy. Nobel peace
prize-winner and US President Obama says
unleashing cruise missiles from
submarines is to oust the dictator and
introduce democracy.
The question that anyone with even
minimum intelligence cannot help asking
is the following: Are countries like
France, England, the USA, Italy, Norway,
Denmark, Poland who defend their right
to bomb Libya on the strength of their
self proclaimed democratic status really
democratic? If yes, are they more
democratic than Gaddafi’s Libya? The
answer in fact is a resounding NO, for
the plain and simple reason that
democracy doesn’t exist. This isn’t a
personal opinion, but a quote from
someone whose native town Geneva, hosts
the bulk of UN institutions. The quote
is from Jean Jacques Rousseau, born in
Geneva in 1712 and who writes in chapter
four of the third book of the famous
Social Contract that ‘there never was a
true democracy and there never will be.’
Rousseau
sets out the following four conditions
for a country to be labelled a democracy
and according to these Gaddafi’s Libya
is far more democratic than the USA,
France and the others claiming to export
democracy:
1. The State: The bigger a country,
the less democratic it can be. According
to Rousseau, the state has to be
extremely small so that people can come
together and know each other. Before
asking people to vote, one must ensure
that everybody knows everyone else,
otherwise voting will be an act without
any democratic basis, a simulacrum of
democracy to elect a dictator.
The Libyan state is based on a system
of tribal allegiances, which by
definition group people together in
small entities. The democratic spirit is
much more present in a tribe, a village
than in a big country, simply because
people know each other, share a common
life rhythm which involves a kind of
self-regulation or even self-censorship
in that the reactions and counter
reactions of other members impacts on
the group.
From this perspective, it would
appear that Libya fits Rousseau’s
conditions better than the USA, France
and Great Britain, all highly urbanised
societies where most neighbours don’t
even say hello to each other and
therefore don’t know each other even if
they have lived side by side for twenty
years. These countries leapfrogged
leaped into the next stage – ‘the vote’
– which has been cleverly sanctified to
obfuscate the fact that voting on the
future of the country is useless if the
voter doesn’t know the other citizens.
This has been pushed to ridiculous
limits with voting rights being given to
people living abroad. Communicating with
and amongst each other is a precondition
for any democratic debate before an
election.
2. Simplicity in customs and
behavioural patterns are also essential
if one is to avoid spending the bulk of
the time debating legal and judicial
procedures in order to deal with the
multitude of conflicts of interest
inevitable in a large and complex
society. Western countries define
themselves as civilised nations with a
more complex social structure whereas
Libya is described as a primitive
country with a simple set of customs.
This aspect too indicates that Libya
responds better to Rousseau’s democratic
criteria than all those trying to give
lessons in democracy. Conflicts in
complex societies are most often won by
those with more power, which is why the
rich manage to avoid prison because they
can afford to hire top lawyers and
instead arrange for state repression to
be directed against someone one who
stole a banana in a supermarket rather
than a financial criminal who ruined a
bank. In the city of New York for
example where 75 per cent of the
population is white, 80 per cent of
management posts are occupied by whites
who make up only 20 per cent of
incarcerated people.
3. Equality in status and wealth: A
look at the Forbes 2010 list shows who
the richest people in each of the
countries currently bombing Libya are
and the difference between them and
those who earn the lowest salaries in
those nations; a similar exercise on
Libya will reveal that in terms of
wealth distribution, Libya has much more
to teach than those fighting it now, and
not the contrary. So here too, using
Rousseau’s criteria, Libya is more
democratic than the nations pompously
pretending to bring democracy. In the
USA, 5 per cent of the population owns
60 per cent of the national wealth,
making it the most unequal and
unbalanced society in the world.
4. No luxuries: according to Rousseau
there can’t be any luxury if there is to
be democracy. Luxury, he says, makes
wealth a necessity which then becomes a
virtue in itself, it, and not the
welfare of the people becomes the goal
to be reached at all cost, ‘Luxury
corrupts both the rich and the poor, the
one through possession and the other
through envy; it makes the nation soft
and prey to vanity; it distances people
from the State and enslaves them, making
them a slave to opinion.’
Is there more luxury in France than
in Libya? The reports on employees
committing suicide because of stressful
working conditions even in public or
semi-public companies, all in the name
of maximising profit for a minority and
keeping them in luxury, happen in the
West, not in Libya.
The American sociologist C. Wright
Mills wrote in 1956 that American
democracy was a ‘dictatorship of the
elite’. According to Mills, the USA is
not a democracy because it is money that
talks during elections and not the
people. The results of each election are
the expression of the voice of money and
not the voice of the people. After Bush
senior and Bush junior, they are already
talking about a younger Bush for the
2012 Republican primaries. Moreover, as
Max Weber pointed out, since political
power is dependent on the bureaucracy,
the US has 43 million bureaucrats and
military personnel who effectively rule
the country but without being elected
and are not accountable to the people
for their actions. One person (a rich
one) is elected, but the real power lies
with the caste of the wealthy who then
get nominated to be ambassadors,
generals, etc.
How many people in these
self-proclaimed democracies know that
Peru’s constitution prohibits an
outgoing president from seeking a second
consecutive mandate? How many know that
in Guatemala, not only can an outgoing
president not seek re-election to the
same post, no one from that person’s
family can aspire to the top job either?
Or that Rwanda is the only country in
the world that has 56 per cent female
parliamentarians? How many people know
that in the 2007 CIA index, four of the
world’s best-governed countries are
African? That the top prize goes to
Equatorial Guinea whose public debt
represents only 1.14 per cent of GDP?
Rousseau maintains that civil wars,
revolts and rebellions are the
ingredients of the beginning of
democracy. Because democracy is not an
end, but a permanent process of the
reaffirmation of the natural rights of
human beings which in countries all over
the world (without exception) are
trampled upon by a handful of men and
women who have hijacked the power of the
people to perpetuate their supremacy.
There are here and there groups of
people who have usurped the term
‘democracy’ – instead of it being an
ideal towards which one strives it has
become a label to be appropriated or a
slogan which is used by people who can
shout louder than others. If a country
is calm, like France or the USA, that is
to say without any rebellions, it only
means, from Rousseau’s perspective, that
the dictatorial system is sufficiently
repressive to pre-empt any revolt.
It wouldn’t be a bad thing if the
Libyans revolted. What is bad is to
affirm that people stoically accept a
system that represses them all over the
world without reacting. And Rousseau
concludes: ‘Malo periculosam libertatem
quam quietum servitium – translation –
If gods were people, they would govern
themselves democratically. Such a
perfect government is not applicable to
human beings.’ To claim that one is
killing Libyans for their own good is a
hoax.
What
Lessons for Africa?
After 500 years of a profoundly
unequal relationship with the West, it
is clear that we don’t have the same
criteria of what is good and bad. We
have deeply divergent interests. How can
one not deplore the ‘yes’ votes from
three sub-Saharan countries (Nigeria,
South Africa and Gabon) for resolution
1973 that inaugurated the latest form of
colonisation baptised ‘the protection of
peoples’, which legitimises the racist
theories that have informed Europeans
since the 18th century and according to
which North Africa has nothing to do
with sub-Saharan Africa, that North
Africa is more evolved, cultivated and
civilised than the rest of Africa?
It is as if Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and
Algeria were not part of Africa, Even
the United Nations seems to ignore the
role of the African Union in the affairs
of member states. The aim is to isolate
sub Saharan African countries to better
isolate and control them. Indeed,
Algeria (US$16 billion) and Libya (US$10
billion ) together contribute 62 per
cent of the US$42 billion which
constitute the capital of the African
Monetary Fund (AMF). The biggest and
most populous country in sub Saharan
Africa, Nigeria, followed by South
Africa are far behind with only 3
billion dollars each.
It is disconcerting to say the least
that for the first time in the history
of the United Nations, war has been
declared against a people without having
explored the slightest possibility of a
peaceful solution to the crisis. Does
Africa really belong anymore to this
organisation? Nigeria and South Africa
are prepared to vote ‘Yes’ to everything
the West asks because they naively
believe the vague promises of a
permanent seat at the Security Council
with similar veto rights. They both
forget that France has no power to offer
anything. If it did, Mitterand would
have long done the needful for Helmut
Kohl’s Germany.
A reform of the United Nations is not
on the agenda. The only way to make a
point is to use the Chinese method – all
50 African nations should quit the
United Nations and only return if their
longstanding demand is finally met, a
seat for the entire African federation
or nothing. This non-violent method is
the only weapon of justice available to
the poor and weak that we are. We should
simply quit the United Nations because
this organisation, by its very structure
and hierarchy, is at the service of the
most powerful.
We should leave the United Nations to
register our rejection of a worldview
based on the annihilation of those who
are weaker. They are free to continue as
before but at least we will not be party
to it and say we agree when we were
never asked for our opinion. And even
when we expressed our point of view,
like we did on Saturday 19 March in
Nouakchott, when we opposed the military
action, our opinion was simply ignored
and the bombs started falling on the
African people.
Today’s events are reminiscent of
what happened with China in the past.
Today, one recognises the Ouattara
government, the rebel government in
Libya, like one did at the end of the
Second World War with China. The
so-called international community chose
Taiwan to be the sole representative of
the Chinese people instead of Mao’s
China. It took 26 years when on 25
October 1971, for the UN to pass
resolution 2758 which all Africans
should read to put an end to human
folly. China was admitted and on its
terms – it refused to be a member if it
didn’t have a veto right. When the
demand was met and the resolution
tabled, it still took a year for the
Chinese foreign minister to respond in
writing to the UN Secretary General on
29 September 1972, a letter which didn’t
say yes or thank you but spelt out
guarantees required for China’s dignity
to be respected.
What does Africa hope to achieve from
the United Nations without playing hard
ball? We saw how in Cote d’Ivoire a UN
bureaucrat considers himself to be above
the constitution of the country. We
entered this organisation by agreeing to
be slaves and to believe that we will be
invited to dine at the same table and
eat from plates we ourselves washed is
not just credulous, it is stupid.
When the African Union endorsed
Ouattara’s victory and glossed over
contrary reports from its own electoral
observers simply to please our former
masters, how can we expect to be
respected? When South African president
Zuma declares that Ouattara hasn’t won
the elections and then says the exact
opposite during a trip to Paris, one is
entitled to question the credibility of
these leaders who claim to represent and
speak on behalf of a billion Africans.
Africa’s strength and real freedom
will only come if it can take properly
thought out actions and assume the
consequences. Dignity and respect come
with a price tag. Are we prepared to pay
it? Otherwise, our place is in the
kitchen and in the toilets in order to
make others comfortable.
h
g
