U.S. Prepares to Make Its Lunge at Libya’s Oil Fields
Printer-friendly version
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The U.S. government and media, are making all the familiar noises preliminary to an invasion of Libya. It is amazing how arch villains think themselves heroes. “The U.S. is the last country in a moral position to criticize Khadafi for his treatment of Arab civilians. Remember Fallujah.” Meanwhile, Americans express little concern that “hundreds of Black migrant workers have already been killed by anti-Khadafi forces.”
U.S. Prepares to Make Its Lunge at Libya’s Oil Fields
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“It is time for the American anti-war movement to remember who is the biggest enemy of peace on planet Earth.”
American progressives and peace forces have been in a state of joyous delirium in recent weeks as they experienced vicarious, televised popular victories in Tunisia and Egypt. Watching unarmed crowds achieve tentative victories against entrenched, U.S.-backed regimes produced a kind of giddiness on this side of the ocean – an otherworldly feeling that somehow, the foreign outposts of U.S. empire might suddenly disintegrate by popular demand. But now, the U.S. naval war machine lies off the coast of Libya, and it is time for the American anti-war movement – such as it is – to remember who is the biggest enemy of peace on planet Earth: U.S. imperialism.
It is certainly not Muamar Khadafi, no matter what you think of him. And the conflict that is raging in Libya seems in important ways very much unlike the events in Tunisia and Egypt. The anti-Khadafi forces were armed from almost the very beginning of the uprising, and included elements of the military. Unlike the opponents of Egypt’s President Mubarak, we know very little about who these rebel Libyans are – except that they have been getting lots of material help from the Americans and the French and other Europeans. It is also becoming clearer by the day that a vicious, racist pogrom is raging against the 1.5 million sub-Saharan Black African migrant workers who do the hard jobs in Libya, work that is rejected by the relatively prosperous Libyans. Hundreds of Black migrant workers have already been killed by anti-Khadafi forces – yet the U.S. corporate media express absolutely no concern for their safety. One western report noted that large numbers of Black Africans were seized in Benghazi, and were assumed to have been hanged. That is a war crime, whether these men were soldiers or migrant workers, but the western correspondent seemed unconcerned. One suspects there are many atrocities occurring in the rebel-held areas of Libya, especially against people that are not members of the locally dominant tribe. Benghazi is not Tahrir Square, in Cairo.
“A vicious, racist pogrom is raging against the 1.5 million sub-Saharan Black African migrant workers who do the hard jobs in Libya.”
How convenient that most of the Libyan voices we hear on corporate media call for armed western intervention. How in synch with the increasing American and European threats of “no-fly zones” and amphibious naval actions – all, of course, for humanitarian reasons, rather than having something to do with the fact that Libya is a major producer of some of the world’s sweetest crude oil.
American United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who is at least as warlike as Condoleezza Rice, is visibly eager to invade Libya under humanitarian pretexts. The U.S. is the last country in a moral position to criticize Khadafi for his treatment of Arab civilians. Remember Fallujah, the Iraqi city of a quarter million people that the U.S. leveled after first bombing its hospitals, inflicting many thousands of casualties. If most Americans don't remember Fallujah, the Arab world certainly does.
Many Americans that claim to be anti-war are actually just looking for a U.S. military action that is to their liking. Fortunately, the United National Anti-War Committee, UNAC, understands that U.S. imperialism is the ultimate enemy of peace, and says “no” to the U.S. invasion of Libya.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialise correctly.
- Login or register to post comments
Email this page- Printer-friendly version
Comments
I wonder what year the military song starting with "From the
halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our countries battles, on the land and on the sea." I learned that as a little kid in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marines? ** That song was old when I was young. American militarism/empire with the same old language ... Noam Chomsky has a good 3 part article/interview on Znet on American Empire. www.zcommunications.org/znet The "play" on language in media is topsy turvy "reality": propaganda big time. This commentary by GF goes well with his blog entry on top of page, where I have earlier comment relating to this.
**Update: answer to my own question - Source: wikipedia. The song is the "official Anthem" of the U. S. Marines, the oldest military song of U.S. military; in Aug. 1891 the U.S. Marines took out a copyright on the song, which has expired.
An article by Seamus Milne
Here is a good article by Seamus Milne on the possibility of a Western military intervention. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/02/intervention-libya-poison-arab-revolution
The unholy alliance between Qaddafi and the European Union
In 2003, the Berlusconi government signed a secret agreement with Libya to take back “illegal” immigrants. Italy renovated a refugee camp in the north of the country and established two new camps in the south, in the middle of the desert. Italy also provided 100 inflatable boats, three coaches, six off-road vehicles, night vision devices, underwater cameras, 12,000 blankets and 6,000 mattresses. The Italian government was fully aware that the Libyan authorities did not treat refugees with kid gloves, since the deliveries also included 1,000 body bags.
The close collaboration with Libya was remarkable because the Gaddafi regime had been regarded as a pariah internationally since 1992 and was made respectable again particularly by the efforts of the Italian government and then the EU as a whole. Moreover, Libya also had a very bad reputation regarding the protection of refugees.
The country is home to some 2 million refugees and migrant workers from all over Africa, but the government has never signed the Geneva Conventions and has also refused to cooperate with the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). Refugees and migrant workers are exposed to cruel persecution in Libya and are completely unprotected legally in relation to the security authorities.
As early as 2000, racist pogroms claimed the lives of some 150 black Africans. Conditions are appalling in the 15 refugee camps in the country, in which up to 60,000 refugees are crammed. There are not enough beds or food for the inmates. Migrants are subjected to torture and ill treatment, and expulsions are carried out regardless of the legal situation of those affected.
Living conditions in the camps were so catastrophic that in some cases inmates gave their last belongings to the guards to be able to escape. For many, the journey to Niger ended with death in the desert. Human rights groups say there have been more than 1,600 deaths in the Sahara.
Despite this, since 2003 Italy has regularly flown refugees who were stranded on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa back to Libya. Between 2003 and 2005, it also provided finance for the Libyan authorities for an additional 60 deportation flights with which refugees were subsequently deported from Libya to other countries. The close collaboration at an economic level and in stemming the flow of refugees led Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to praise Gaddafi in October 2004 as “a good friend and freedom-loving prime minister” at the inauguration of a gas pipeline from Libya to Italy.
But such ties were developed not only by the Italian government. The Maltese and German governments also began to court Gaddafi, in the hope of completing lucrative contracts for their domestic economies and to intensify cooperation in stemming the flow of refugees. To that end, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) visited Libya in 2004.
In October 2004, the European Union lifted its arms embargo on Libya, saying the same day that it wanted to work more closely with Tripoli in the field of migration control. The same year, an EU Commission “technical mission” visited Libya and inspected border controls and refugee camps. Although it criticized the prevailing conditions of detention, it proposed to intensify collaboration, which manifested itself initially in supplies and training for Libyan border guards.
In 2007, a delegation from the European border agency Frontex visited Libya. Its report once again documents massive human rights violations. Nevertheless, Frontex recommended the supply of command posts, radar surveillance, patrol boats and other equipment to Libya.
In the same year, the EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Libya, which was praised enthusiastically by then EU commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner: “Our agreement will not only strengthen relations between the EU and Libya, but will also contribute much to current Libyan policy, and consolidate its position in the international community.”
However, the framework agreement envisaged in the Memorandum of Understanding has still not been realised. So far, only the Italian coast guard has conducted joint patrols off the Libyan coast. This has repeatedly resulted in refugee boats being fired upon.
Nevertheless, in recent years, the EU has invested about €60 million in Libya in order to perfect its ability to stem the flow of refugees from North Africa. However, more ambitious actions are planned. For instance, a radar- and satellite-based border control system was to be built on Libya’s southern borders with Chad and Niger, with the cost of €300 million being divided between Italy and the EU. Implementation will be undertaken by the Finmeccanica group, the largest Italian defence contractor.
The EU’s anti-asylum policy, conducted in cooperation with the Libyan regime, has cost the lives of thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean and in the deserts of Libya. The responsibility for this lies primarily with the European governments. They have not only looked on as the Gaddafi regime harassed migrants and refugees, tortured and sent them to certain death, but have also supported the government in Tripoli logistically and financially.
Full:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/euli-m05.shtml
A whitewash of Muammar Qaddafi's dictatorship
Mr Ford,
Your article is a long whitewash of Qaddafi, eagerly portraying his opponents as racists while making no mention whatsoever of either the anti-black pogroms in his so called Jamahiriya or of his anti-immigrant alliance with EU and Berlusconi. You also remain silent on the dictator's alliance with Tony Blair and G.W. Bush in the war on terror, his embrace of neo-liberalism, or his use of Libyan oil money to promote his brand of political thuggery across Africa.
You claim "we know very little about who these rebel Libyans are – except that they have been getting lots of material help from the Americans and the French and other Europeans" whereas, on the contrary, we all know that it is Qaddafi who has aligned himself with Washington, and whose forces have been armed and trained by the European powers.
Given that while a significant part of the Black American left, as you call it, has aligned itself with a snake oil salesman of Kenyan origin, BAR consistently chooses to remain aloof from his corrupt and degraded politics, your claim that purported significant support for Qaddafi among Black Americans somehow justifies BAR's pro-Qaddafi coverage of the Libyan uprising is a strange one indeed.
Regrettably, with the long history of oil money being used by various emirs, monarchs and dictators, including Qaddafi himself, to pollute political discourse across the Arab world and beyond, in your patently dishonest coverage of the Libyan uprising thus far, you have left BAR open to charges, rightly or wrongly, of political corruption.
An article opposing U.S.intervention
Libyan rebel denounces possible Western intervention. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/01/libya-revolution-no-fly-zone
These Rebels are foreign agents
It is a pretension. They are saying that to deflect accusations that it is an imperialist design. This uprising and the unanimous support it is getting from the West say everything about it. It is not a revolution. How could former guys who worked for Gaddaffi all of a sudden become revolutionaries wanting his overthrow? They are the same people asking for western help. What is that help in exchange for? I really hope Gaddaffi can knock them out. Obama sitting at the white house and giving George-Bush-like threats is a disgrace to all the people who supported this man. Obama calls the violence 'unacceptable'. I guess his killing of innocents in Afghanistan is acceptable. I just cannot wait to unleash my verbal venom on any black person who blather those unwholesome approval on Obama's policies. I mean how low and brazen could this man get? The Libyan situation is an internal crisis. Whether Gaddaffi is a dictator or not is not the business of the West. The knew he was a dictator when they enriched themselves off him. At the same time, the Saudis have been in power for 60 years but that is okay.
There's a fly in the ointment
Gaddaffi is no angel, a brutal dictator is he, but US "Humanitarian" Intervention is a bloody and foolish proposition. The US could give a shit about Libyans, it's all about the oil and keeping Black Africans from migrating to Europe. From Pepe Escobar at Asia Times:
NATO intervention, if it happens, will be sold to the whole planet as the return of humanitarian imperialism. From the point of view of NATO/ Pentagon/European Union public relations purposes, that's another cakewalk. Former terrorist Gaddafi has now been rebranded as "the new Hitler", after Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia (as well as Saddam Hussein in Iraq; make it history repeating itself as farce for the fifth time). And Gaddafi is a much easier sell; the total terrorist freak show package.
Cui bono?
There's no question Gaddafi and his gang are practicing "human-rights abuses" in Libya. But what about those tens of thousands killed by the Pentagon from Baghdad to Fallujah and beyond? Were they inhuman, and holders of no rights, by any chance?
Moreover, the same enlightened West that's now so worried about the people of Libya did not give much of a damn to the people of Egypt until it was absolutely certain that Mubarakism was gone. (Gaddafi by the way was perfectly aligned with Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi in the early days of Tahrir Square).
While he was servicing the masters, the walking terrorist freak show with his portable tent and Ukrainian nurses could not be a better friend. He merrily embraced neo-liberalism; he opened up the energy holy grail to European corporations (BP, Repsol, Total, ENI); he lavishly bought their weapons (Italy, France, UK and Germany were the top four providers); he got the US$70 billion of the Libyan Investment Authority to prop up European businesses; and most of all he put a lid over the migratory flux from the Maghreb and black Africa towards Europe.
And what about then-US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in 2008 extolling the US and Libya's permanent shared interests, including "human rights and democracy"?
The problem now is that the West is simply clueless on what post-Gaddafi Libya could turn out to be. The "rebels" include everyone from progressive, secular intellectuals to hardcore Islamists and neo-liberal-addicted businessmen. Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt - which can be monitored and even relatively tamed by Washington/Brussels.
Libya without Gaddafi could be a complex collection of clannish tribes with no experience of Western-style political culture slouching towards "anarchy". Thus the reasoning for a NATO intervention; so "we", the enlightened, can control those barbarians' worst impulses, facilitate an "orderly transition" (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, anyone?) and profit from their energy wealth. Besides, the Mediterranean is a NATO lake already.