Without a central government with any real power,
Libya is breaking into pieces. And all this is happening nearly three
years after Muammar Gaddafi’s counteroffensive to suppress the uprising
in Benghazi. With the US keeping its covert involvement in the Libyan
events, NATO launched a war in which rebel militiamen played a secondary
role which led to the overhrow of the Gaddafi regime and to the killing
of Gaddafi.
The past weeks offer have shown that
leaders and countries which were full of enthusiasm in 2011, when the
war in the supposed interest of the Libyan people broke out, have little
interest in the developments in Libya now. Initially, US President
Barack Obama spoke proudly of his role in the prevention of a “massacre”
in Benghazi at that time. But neither Washington nor London or Paris
voiced any protest after the militiamen, backed by NATO, opened fire on a
demonstration against America’s presence in Tripoli in November last
year in which at least 42 protesters were killed.
Coincidentally,
it was last week that Al-Jazeera broadcast the final episode in a
three-year investigation of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people
. For years this was considered to be Gaddafi’s greatest crime but the
documentary proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Libyan intelligence
officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of carrying out the bombing,
was innocent. Iran, acting through the Palestinian Front for the
Liberation of Palestine – General Command, ordered the blowing up of Pan
Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane
by the US navy carrier in 1988.
As you know, journalists
say that if you want to find out government policy, imagine the worst
thing they can do and then assume they are doing it.
However,
the NATO countries that overthrew Gaddafi – and by some accounts gave
the orders to kill him – did not do that because he was a tyrannical
leader. It was rather because he pursued a nationalist policy backed by
big money which was at odds with western policies in the Middle East.
This is equally true of Western and Saudi intervention in Syria.
Libya
is breaking apart. Its oil exports have fallen from !.4 million barrels
a day in 2011 to 235,000 barrels a day. Militia s hold 8,000 people in
prisons, many of whom say they have been tortured. “The longer Libyan
authorities tolerate the militias acting with impunity, the more
entrenched they become, and the less willing to step down,” said Sarah
Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights
Watch.
It is a sorrowful fact that the militias in Libya
are getting stronger. Libya is a country where ethnic warlords are
often simply well-armed racketeers using their power and taking
advantage of the absence of an adequate police force. Nobody is safe in
the country: the head of Libya’s military police was killed in Benghazi
in October while Libya’s first post-Gaddafi prosecutor general was shot
dead in Derna on February 8. It often happens that the motives for
killings are obscure.
Western and regional governments
are responsible for much that has happened in Libya, but so too should
the media. The Libyan uprising was reported, mainly, as a clash between
good and evil. Gaddafi and his regime were demonized and his opponents
were treated with a lack of skepticism.
Can anything
positive be learned from the Libyan experience ? Of importance here is
that demands for civil, political and economic rights, which were at the
centre of the Arab Spring uprisings, mean nothing without a nation
state to guarantee them; otherwise, national loyalties will find
themselves in a state of sectarian, regional and ethnic feud.
“Freedom
under the rule of law is almost unknown outside nation-states,” writes a
British politician, journalist and author, Daniel Hannan MEP, in a
succinct analysis of why the Arab Spring failed. “Constitutional liberty
requires a measure of patriotism, meaning a readiness to accept your
countrymen’s disagreeable decisions, and to abide by election results
when you lose,” he added in conclusion.
Voice of Russia, Independent