[Debate] Aijaz Ahmad: Libya Recolonised

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://bit.ly/vmHgAr>
Libya recolonised

AIJAZ AHMAD

FROM Kabul in October 2001 to Tripoli in October 2011, a decade of
unremitting planetary warfare has seen countries devastated and
capitals occupied over a vast swathe of territory from the Hindu Kush
to the northern end of Africa's Mediterranean coast. Within the Arab
world, this ultra-imperialist offensive of Euro-American predators may
yet move on to Syria as well – and beyond that to Iran at some future
date. For now, in any case, the occupation of Libya by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) clients and corporations marks
the vanquishing of the spirit of rebellion that was ignited in
neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year and has been under
attack ever since. For much of Africa, though, this may yet be merely
a beginning of a new conquest by the Euro-American consortium that may
ravage the continent even more ferociously than did the famous
“Scramble for Africa” that was sanctified in Berlin at the end of the
19th century.

Humanitarian interventionism

Afghanistan was invaded in the name of “War on Terror” plus human
rights. Iraq was invaded in the name of “War on Terror” plus nuclear
non-proliferation plus human rights. Libya is the first country that
has been invaded almost exclusively in the name of human rights. In
the very early days of hostilities in Libya, President Barack Obama
said dramatically that if NATO had waited “one more day, Benghazi
could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region
and stained the conscience of the world”. His senior aides claimed
that the imminent “massacre” could have led to the death of one lakh
people, and this is what got repeated ad nauseum on U.S. television
channels as well as in all the halls of power where the option of
human rights interventionism got discussed with a view to obtaining a
United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution. This was a
bare-faced lie, very much in the mould of the lie about Iraq's
purported nuclear weapons that was brandished around by Obama's
predecessor, President George Bush Jr. It was on the basis of such
disinformation that Resolutions 1970 and 1973 were passed in the
Security Council, invoking the dubious principle of the
“responsibility to protect”, which was inserted into the duties of the
U.N. as late as 2005, after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were
already afoot.

This was the time when the Bush administration was openly claiming in
international fora, including at the U.N. itself, that (a) in this Age
of Terror the U.S. reserved the right of pre-emptive military attack
against any state that the U.S. considered a threat to its national
security, and that (b) in the conditions of the “War on Terror” many
aspects of the Geneva Conventions were no longer applicable. This
discourse of the right to pre-emptive invasion was then supplemented
by the discourse of the benign nature of the empire itself, in the
shape of human rights interventionism. The claim now was that the
“international community” – as defined by Euro-American powers – had
the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any sovereign
country if “massacre” or “genocide” was imminent. The NATO bombings in
Libya that began in the third week of March were the first that had
ever been authorised by the Security Council in its entire history on
this dubious principle of human rights interventionism. Nicolas
Sarkozy, the French President, was in his own way quite right when he
asserted in the early hours of March 25: “It's a historic moment… what
is happening in Libya is creating jurisprudence… it is a major turning
point in the foreign policy of France, Europe, and the world”
(emphasis added).

No credible evidence has ever emerged to support Obama's claim that a
massacre (of up to 100,000) was imminent in Benghazi, and no massacres
ensued in the rebellious cities and towns that Qaddafi's troops did
occupy in the earlier stages of the fighting. On the contrary, there
is incontrovertible evidence of massacres at the hands of NATO's
mercenaries. Neighbouring countries, such as Niger, Mali and Chad,
have reported the eviction of some three lakh black African residents
from Libya as NATO's local allies and clients rolled on towards
Tripoli under the devastating shield of NATO's own 40,000-plus
bombings over large parts of Libya. Together with these mass evictions
of workers and refugees from neighbouring countries – whom the Qaddafi
regime had welcomed to make up for labour shortages in an expanding
economy – there are also credible reports of lynchings and massacres
of black Libyans themselves. The scale of these depredations is yet
undetermined but it is already clear that upwards of 50,000 have died
as a result of the war unleashed by NATO with the collusion of the
Security Council, and half a million or more have been rendered
homeless, mostly at the hands of NATO-armed “rebels” who have now been
appointed as the new government of the country. Neither the Security
Council nor NATO commanders nor, indeed, President Obama – the first
black President in the history of the U.S. and himself the son of a
Kenyan father – has seen it fit to take up the “responsibility to
protect” these hapless people, most of them black Africans, even
though several heads of African states have protested, including the
very pro-U.S. President of Nigeria.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the liberal discourse of human
rights in our time is that this doctrine is utilised in country after
country to justify imperialist interventionism in the affairs of the
sovereign countries of the tricontinent in direct violation not only
of the United Nations Charter and the Westphalian order of
nation-states as such but, even more fundamentally, of the very spirit
and practices of the anti-colonial movements that fought to dismantle
the colonial empires of yesteryear. The right to independent
nationhood is inseparable from the right to choose one's own
government without foreign interference. In virtually every country of
Latin America over the past half a century, peoples have fought
against the most brutal kinds of dictatorship but without ever asking
for a foreign intervention. For three simple reasons: (1) it is only
the people themselves, in their collectivity, who have the right to
change their government; (2) it would be hard to find a dictator,
including Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, who has not colluded with
imperialism at one point or another; and (3) a military intervention
is always, without exception, the intervention of the strong against
the weak – always, without exception, in pursuit of the interests of
those who intervene.

Given this basic principle, the issue of Qaddafi's dictatorial rule is
just as irrelevant today as was the nature of Saddam Hussein's rule in
the past; and as irrelevant as would be the dictatorial temper of
Bashar al-Asad in Syria or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran in case of
invasions yet to come. We shall come to the paradoxical character of
the Qaddafi regime, and it cannot be anyone's case that Qaddafi was
some sort of liberal democrat. It needs to be said, though, that he
was no more dictatorial than most rulers of Africa and the Arab world,
most notably the friends of the West in Saudi Arabia and the whole
complex of various emirates in the Gulf. His authoritarianism was
indeed ferocious. However, if matters are viewed from the perspective
of the well-being of the Libyan people, we shall also have to concede
that Qaddafi built the most advanced welfare state in Africa – just as
Iraq was the most advanced welfare state in the Arab East, Saddam's
authoritarianism notwithstanding. Dismantling of the welfare state –
and privatisation and corporatisation of the national assets – is in
fact the filthy underbelly of this human rights imperialism. If human
rights were even remotely the issue in such interventionism, Saudi
Arabia would be the logical first target. And, why should there not be
a NATO occupation of Israel, immediately, for protecting the human
rights of the Palestinian people and the implementation of numerous
Security Council resolutions?

In reality, the great crusade for human rights and democracy in Libya
was conducted by NATO with the aid of, among others, personnel from
Qatar and the Emirates, just as NATO's own Islamists in Turkey have
joined hands with Saudi Arabia in providing weapons to the Muslim
Brotherhood and its allies in Syria against the Assad regime in the
name of democracy and human rights.

Empire goes where oil is

The Security Council resolution that authorised NATO's “humanitarian
intervention” in Libya was well reflected in a secret proposal to the
French government by the National Transitional Council (NTC) in the
early days of the “rebellion”, which offered to France 35 per cent of
Libya's gross national oil production “in exchange”, in the words of
the proposal, for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC.
The French government, of course, denied it when the French newspaper
Liberation published the communication. This coyness of the
conspirators was not to last long. On October 21, less than 24 hours
after the announcement of Qaddafi's assassination, Britain's new
Defence Minister, Philip Hammond, announced that the United Kingdom
had presented to the NTC a “request” for a licence to drill for oil.
He then added:

“Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect
there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get
involved in the reconstruction of Libya…. I would expect British
companies, even British sales directors, [to be] packing their
suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the
reconstruction of that country as soon as they can.”

As the U.S. Ambassador, Gene Cretz, unfurled the flag over the
American Embassy in Tripoli, at its reopening ceremony on September
22, he was equally upbeat:

“We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural
resources, but even in Qaddafi's time they were starting from A to Z
in terms of building infrastructure and other things. If we can get
American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do
everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the
situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”

Referring to the Italian oil company, the Foreign Minister of Italy,
Franco Frattini, added his own gleeful chime to this triumphalist
chorus: “Eni will play a No.1 role in the future.” Qatar, whose overt
and covert contribution to the NATO offensive was very considerable
indeed, is already handing oil sales in eastern Libya and will also be
entering the distribution of the spoils of war from a position of
strength. The New York Times noted: “Libya's provisional government
has already said it is eager to welcome Western businesses (and)…
would even give its Western backers some ‘priority' in access to
Libyan business.” That was accurate. “We don't have a problem with
Western countries like Italians, French and U.K. companies,”
Abdeljalil Mayouf, a spokesman for the NTC-controlled oil company,
Agogco, was quoted by Reuters as saying, “but we may have some
political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

Libya's 46 billion barrels of oil make it home to Africa's largest
proven deposit of conventional crude, though Nigeria and Angola
dispute this Libyan pre-eminence. Before the civil war began in
earnest in February, Libya was pumping about 1.6 million barrels a
day, most of which went to southern Europe, whose refineries were
tailored to refine Libya's light, high-quality crude. By contrast,
Saudi crude is heavier and unsuitable for many of those refineries,
while Libya's geographical proximity also makes it much more
attractive. Almost 70 per cent of Libya's oil went to four countries,
Spain, Germany, France and Italy, even before the NATO war, and
oil-producing regions were of course the first to be secured as NATO
started bombing its way to victory. The oil industry's biggest
players, meanwhile, are ready to reclaim their old concessions and get
new ones. The vast Ghadames and Sirte basins, largely off limits to
foreign oil companies since Qaddafi came to power 42 years ago, are
now expected to be privatised and opened to foreign corporations. The
same applies to Libya's offshore oil and gas resources.

The loss of political sovereignty thus leads necessarily to great
curtailment of economic sovereignty as well.

African Union vs “The international Community”

At a meeting between the two parties on June 15 this year, some three
months after NATO initiated its aerial bombings of Libya, the High
Level Ad hoc Committee of the African Union (A.U.) handed over to the
Security Council a letter spelling out the A.U. position on the Libyan
crisis. Now, even after the fall of Tripoli and the assassination of
Qaddafi, the contents of that communication are worth re-visiting if
we wish to assess the great gap of perceptions and prescriptions, on
issues of interventionism, between nation-states of the tricontinent
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those institutions of “the
international community” whose task it is to justify Euro-American
interventionism. We shall first offer a series of quotations from that
key document:

1. “Whatever the genesis of the intervention by NATO in Libya, the
A.U. called for dialogue before the U.N. Resolutions 1970 and 1973 and
after those resolutions. Ignoring the A.U. for three months and going
on with the bombings of the sacred land of Africa has been
high-handed, arrogant and provocative.”

2. “An attack on Libya or any other member of the African Union
without express agreement by the A.U. is a dangerous provocation…
sovereignty has been a tool of emancipation of the peoples of Africa
who are beginning to chart transformational paths for most of the
African countries after centuries of predation by the slave trade,
colonialism and neocolonialism. Careless assaults on the sovereignty
of African countries are, therefore, tantamount to inflicting fresh
wounds on the destiny of the African peoples.”

3. “Fighting between government troops and armed insurrectionists is
not genocide. It is civil war…. It is wrong to characterise every
violence as genocide or imminent genocide so as to use it as a pretext
for the undermining of the sovereignty of states.”

4. “The U.N. should not take sides in a civil war. The U.N. should
promote dialogue…. The demand by some countries that Col. Muammar
Qaddafi must go first before the dialogue is incorrect. Whether
Qaddafi goes or stays is a matter for the Libyan people to decide. It
is particularly wrong when the demand for Gaddafi's departure is made
by outsiders…. Qaddafi accepted dialogue when the A.U. mediation
committee visited Tripoli on April 10, 2011. Any war activities after
that have been provocation for Africa. It is an unnecessary war. It
must stop…. The story that the rebels cannot engage in dialogue unless
Qaddafi goes away does not convince us. If they do not want dialogue,
then, let them fight their war with Qaddafi without NATO bombing…. The
externally sponsored groups neglect dialogue and building internal
consensus and, instead, concentrate on winning external patrons.”

It goes without saying that the A.U. is by no means a conglomeration
of radicals; it is a conservative grouping of state governments, most
of whom are, in one way or another, allied with the West; many of the
heads of states participating in A.U. proceedings at any given time
are venal, corrupt, authoritarian or worse. That is, however, no more
relevant than the personal venality of Sarkozy or Silvio Berlusconi or
any other Western leader. The point, rather, is that the A.U.'s is the
only united voice through which African states speak and that the
principles and points of fact raised here are unexceptionable.

The very first point is that the Security Council, NATO or any other
conglomeration of states and institutions simply have no right to
represent themselves as “the international community” when what they
say and do is opposed by the united voice of the African state system.
The second point is that the issue of state sovereignty is posed in
Africa and Asia not only in European, Westphalian terms, but, far more
sensitively and explosively, in the perspective of the recently won
and still very fragile independence of states after a long history of
colonial predation. Further, the A.U. letter rejects the position –
enunciated by Obama, his NATO allies and the Security Council – that
there was any genocide or imminent genocide in Libya. Rather, it
speaks strictly of a “civil war” between “government troops and armed
insurrectionists”, calls upon the U.N. not to take sides in the “civil
war” and goes on then to contemptuously dismiss the “externally
sponsored groups” and their “demands” that are designed for “winning
external patrons”.

The most important practical point in any case is that Qaddafi had
accepted the principle of negotiation and arbitration by the A.U. as
early as April 10, after which the A.U. quite rightly demanded that
NATO stop its military mission and the U.N. concentrate on
facilitating negotiations under A.U. auspices. A significant section
of the letter laid out an elaborate plan for negotiations, for
policing of violence inside Libya by an A.U. brigade as had been done
in Burundi, and for conflict resolution processes using the principles
of “provisional immunity” during the peace negotiations, and for the
establishment of truth and reconciliation bodies for reconciliation
after peace has been re-established.

None of it was heeded, precisely because the voice of reason had come
from the weak, while the will for intervention and regime change had
come from self-appointed masters of the universe.

Civilisation and the ecstasy of conquest

In the moment of victory, President Obama was relatively more measured
in his words than many other Western leaders. The fall of Libya to
40,000-plus NATO bombings was proof, he said, that “we are seeing the
strength of the American leadership across the world”. And he was not
entirely mistaken in taking the credit. The Security Council
resolution that authorised NATO operations would have been
inconceivable without the coercive powers of the U.S. Obama's cavalier
condoning of assassination and extra-judicial execution, as displayed
to the world in the cases of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki among
others, was part of the implicit licence to kill the unarmed Qaddafi
as well. Less than 48 hours before Qaddafi was actually assassinated,
Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, was on a triumphant
visit to Tripoli, the Libyan capital now occupied by NATO and its
local clients, and said unambiguously: “We hope he [Qaddafi] can be
captured or killed soon.” Incitement to murder could hardly be couched
in words more stark.

This issue of an authorised assassination should detain us somewhat,
for it does impinge upon the imperial duplicity of the human rights
discourse. Details of Qaddafi's death and burial are still unclear. We
do know that the town of Sirte, to which he had retreated during the
siege of Tripoli, was devastated by hundreds of aerial bombings by
NATO with the single-minded intent to kill him and those close to him.
We also know that he was leaving Sirte in a convoy when the convoy too
was bombed; the French claimed that it was their Rafale fighter jet
that disabled his vehicle; the Americans claimed that it was the work
of one of their Predators. The main point is that he was captured
alive and unarmed by NATO's mercenaries on the ground, kicked around,
beaten and killed. Considering how many American, French, British,
Qatari and other special forces have been there, commanding the Libyan
“rebels”, it is significant that the body of the dead man was never
taken away from the milling “rebels”. Christof Heyns, the U.N. Special
Rapporteur, seems to be clear on this point: “The Geneva Conventions
are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed
wilfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war
crime, something that should be tried.”

The complication, however, is that the Western alliance had previously
announced an award of $20 million to anyone who kills (or helps
kill/capture) Qaddafi. So, here is a test for Western values: should
the man who killed Qaddafi be tried in a court of law? Should he be
awarded $20 million and celebrated as a hero? Or should he be allowed
to slip out of the grip of the law, history and public memory – and
settled, with a handsome settlement, in Miami, southern California or
a villa on the Rhine?

Qaddafi's own tribe issued this statement: “We call on the U.N., the
Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International to
force the [National] Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs'
bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial
ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules.” But there was
no such luck! NATO's mercenaries displayed Qaddafi's body, along with
that of his son Mutassim, naked to the waist, in freezers in a meat
store in Misrata, inviting souvenir photographs.

Human rights imperialism seems to be inventing a brand new
entertainment industry: that of necrophilic tourism.

Be that as it may. President Obama is right in claiming that the event
proved “the strength of American leadership”. U.S. Special Forces and
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) teams were on the ground since
before the beginning of the rebellion and made sure that those who
were destined to be NATO's mercenary army on the ground were armed
from the start; they were then joined by their French and British
counterparts and backed by armed groups from Qatar, the Emirates and
the like. Bombings were left largely to the Franco-British component
of NATO but much of the high electronics and infrastructural
nitty-gritty was handled by the U.S. forces: collecting electronic
intelligence and smashing the Libyan anti-aircraft systems, for
example, and blockading the coast. NATO warplanes used U.S. bases for
refuelling and these bases supplied munitions when their European
counterparts ran low. In an important sense, the military operation in
Libya was a highly successful experiment in an assault coordinated
between AFRICOM – the U.S. Command for the control of Africa – and its
European partners.

If President Obama was cryptic, his icy Vice President, Joe Biden, was
precise: “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a
single life. This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the
world as we go forward than it has been in the past.” By “life”, Biden
obviously means American life, considering that even the most
conservative estimates suggest that the war in Libya has led to the
loss of at least 50,000 lives, mostly at the hands of NATO bombers and
their local allies.

More broadly, what is at issue is a U.S. objective, first conceived
during the Vietnam War, to develop an “automated battlefield” with
technologies so advanced that wars may be won and entire countries
conquered without any significant ground deployment. Across the
Atlantic, that same idea was invoked by people like Paddy Ashdown, who
once served for four years as E.U. High Representative in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, who said that from now on the West should adopt
the “Libyan model” of intervention rather than the “Iraqi model” of
massive invasion.

This kind of hard-boiled Anglo-Saxon pragmatism can easily be
translated by an ambitious politician like Nicolas Sarkozy, the
current French President, into the sophistries of a high-minded Gallic
discourse on history and civilisation. Pierre Lévy, a former editor of
L'Humanité, recently recalled a passage from a speech Sarkozy
delivered in 2007 in which he glorified “the shattered dream of
Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the great
schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, the fallen glory of
Louis XIV and Napoleon…” and then went on to declare that “Europe is
today the only force capable of carrying forward a project of
civilisation.” This claim to a unique civilisational mission then led
quickly to an ambition to conquer: “I want to be the President of a
France which will bring the Mediterranean into the process of its
reunification after 12 centuries of division and painful conflicts….
America and China have already begun the conquest of Africa. How long
will Europe wait to build the Africa of tomorrow? While Europe
hesitates, others advance.”

Lévy then goes on to quote Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a senior leader of
the Socialist Party (much in the news recently for alleged sexual
misdemeanours), who matched Sarkozy's bombast with his own desire for
a Europe stretching “from the cold ice of the Arctic in the North to
the hot sands of the Sahara in the South (…) and that Europe, I
believe, if it continues to exist, will have reconstituted the
Mediterranean as an internal sea, and will have re-conquered the space
that the Romans, or Napoleon more recently, attempted to consolidate.”

In this world view, then, NATO is seen as having inherited a mission
from the Roman Empire and the Napoleonic conquests, which then
involves the “re-conquest” of North Africa. It was, after all, only
about 50 years ago that France finally relinquished its claim that
Algeria was not a foreign colony but an “outlying province” of France
itself. What is very striking in any case is how closely the rhetoric
of “civilisation” is woven into the rhetoric of “conquest” and even
“re-conquest.”

Obama, Africa and the Imperial Project

Poor little “Olde Europe”! Even in its wildest civilisational ravings,
all it can imagine is the re-conquest of its colonial empire in North
Africa. By contrast, the U.S. knows how to get directly to the point.
In the second week of October, when the war against Libya had been won
but Qaddafi yet not assassinated, President Obama announced: “I have
authorised a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to
central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces…. On October
12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate
combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional
forces will deploy…. These forces will act as advisers to partner
forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony
and other senior leadership of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]….
Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of
these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central
African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

So, in the wake of the Libyan conquest, U.S. troops are to be
immediately deployed to countries across the middle of Africa, in four
countries and in cooperation with regimes that have hideous records of
dictatorship and human rights abuses, not the least on the part of
Uganda's “President-for-life”, Yoweri Museveni. Obama justified this
newly minted “humanitarian mission” in Uganda in the name of
eliminating the LRA. This is odd. The LRA has actually been around for
almost a quarter century and has never been weaker than it is today.
Why, suddenly, such an operation across a huge part of Africa? Paul
Craig Roberts, a former Under Secretary of State for Treasury under
President Ronald Reagan (and thus not a left-winger by a long shot),
put the matter succinctly: “With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start
on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral
investments…. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of
infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases.”

Even this recent deployment may be just the tip of an oncoming
iceberg. For many years now, the U.S. has been building up a special
Command for Africa, the AFRICOM, in tandem with CENTCOM that is
responsible for operations in the Middle East (West Asia). As part of
this imperial mission in Africa, the U.S. is actively engaged in
training the militaries of Mali, Chad, Niger, Benin, Botswana,
Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zambia,
Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana, Malawi and Mauritania. Together
with other NATO countries, the U.S. has staged numerous military
exercises in Africa with the ostensible purpose of preparing
contingency plans for “protecting energy supplies” in the Niger delta
and the Gulf of Guinea. Aside from Libya, major oil producers in the
region include Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea,
Chad and Mauritania. All these, and many others besides, are to be
“protected” – pretty much on the “Libyan model” if need be.

This is not the place to go into details. Suffice it to say that the
fall of Libya is likely to serve as the first major step in the
offensive to capture Africa's plentiful natural resources. In the
fullness of time, as multiple insurgencies and bloodlettings are let
loose across the continent, we are likely to see the erection of many
new bases for the AFRICOM-NATO combine, very much on the model of Iraq
and Afghanistan. The objective is not only to reserve African
resources for the Euro-American imperium as much as possible but also
to deny those resources to China, which gets about one third of its
oil from Africa – Angola and Sudan in particular – in addition to
important materials like platinum, copper, timber and iron ore. Some
75 Chinese companies were working in Libya with 36,000 personnel, not
so much in the oil sector as in infrastructural development projects;
and China accounted for about 11 per cent of Libya's pre-war exports.
It evacuated its personnel and complained that NATO had unilaterally
changed the U.N. resolution from protecting civilians to regime
change.

The U.S. would like to see this eviction of China from Libya to become
permanent and for such evictions to be repeated across Africa. Will
that happen? Too soon to tell. The U.S. has the military might and the
impatient arrogance of a declining superpower, but China is the one
that has the cash and the almost glacial patience of a rising economic
power. A confrontation is on, and it will take decades to settle.

Conclusion

Major issues pertaining to the significance of the Libya war have not
been addressed here: the meaning of all this for the so-called “Arab
Spring”; the nature of the fallen Qaddafi regime; the likely
composition of the emerging dispensation; the social disintegration
and multiple internal conflicts that are now likely to ensue; the
destabilisation and the prospect of multiple civil wars across the
Sahel region caused by the war on Libya; and so on. Other contributors
to this issue of Frontline may clarify these issues, or this author
may return to them in a future contribution.

So, let me conclude this piece by noting that Qaddafi did leave a
brief will, and it is important that we recall some of his last words:

“Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained
over and sold out our cause in return for a personally secure and
stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be
at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour.
Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future
generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and
selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember
forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise.”

That is true. Friendly African countries had offered him safe
sanctuaries, while some European countries would have preferred to
have him as a neutralised client rather than a celebrated martyr in
(at least parts of) Libya. Offers were indeed made. Given the choices,
he preferred to die. In that brief will, he also expressed a simple
wish:

“Should I be killed, I would like to be buried, according to Muslim
rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my
body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and
relatives. I would like that my family, especially women and children,
be treated well after my death.”

In Islamic custom, the stipulation that the body be washed and wrapped
in a fresh shroud is lifted in the case of martyrs. Right or wrong,
Qaddafi did think of his own impending death as martyrdom. We may not
think so, but many others probably will. Qaddafi was quite largely a
buffoon, in many ways brutish, more so as he grew older and more
egomaniacal, but not everyone is going to forget that he also had a
visionary side to him and built for his people the most advanced
welfare state on the continent. His is a contradictory legacy. We have
described earlier in this piece what the winners did to his corpse.
Not just the members of his own family or his tribesmen, but many,
many others might not so easily forget all that.
-- 
Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://mrzine.org/>