The West is silent as Libya falls into the abyss
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=168602#168602
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-is-silent-as-liby
a-falls-into-the-abyss-9833489.html
World View: In 2011, there was jubilation at
Gaddafi's demise. Not any more: the aftermath of
foreign intervention is calamitous and bloody
Remember the time when Libya was being held up by
the American, British, French and Qatari
governments as a striking example of benign and
successful foreign intervention? It is worth
looking again at film of David Cameron
grandstanding as liberator in Benghazi in
September 2011 as he applauds the overthrow of
Muammar Gaddafi and tells the crowd that "your
city was an example to the world as you threw off
a dictator and chose freedom".
Mr Cameron has not been back to Benghazi, nor is
he likely to do so as warring militias reduce
Libya to primal anarchy in which nobody is safe.
The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse
off today than they were under Gaddafi,
notwithstanding his personality cult and
authoritarian rule. The slaughter is getting
worse by the month and is engulfing the entire country.
"Your friends in Britain and France will stand
with you as you build your democracy," pledged Mr
Cameron to the people of Benghazi. Three years
later, they are words he evidently wants to
forget, since there was almost no reference to
Libya, the one military intervention he had
previously ordered, when he spoke in the House of
Commons justifying British airstrikes against Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq.
The foreign media has largely ceased to cover
Libya because it rightly believes it is too
dangerous for journalists to go there. Yet I
remember a moment in the early summer of 2011 in
the frontline south of Benghazi when there were
more reporters and camera crews present than
there were rebel militiamen. Cameramen used to
ask fellow foreign journalists to move aside when
they were filming so that this did not become too
apparent. In reality, Gaddafi's overthrow was
very much Nato's doing, with Libyan militiamen mopping up.
Human rights organisations have had a much better
record in Libya than the media since the start of
the uprising in 2011. They discovered that there
was no evidence for several highly publicised
atrocities supposedly carried out by Gaddafi's
forces that were used to fuel popular support for
the air war in the US, Britain, France and
elsewhere. These included the story of the mass
rape of women by Gaddafi's troops that Amnesty
International exposed as being without
foundation. The uniformed bodies of government
soldiers were described by rebel spokesmen as
being men shot because they were about to defect
to the opposition. Video film showed the soldiers
still alive as rebel prisoners so it must have
been the rebels who had executed them and put the blame on the government.
Foreign governments and media alike have good
reason to forget what they said and did in Libya
in 2011, because the aftermath of the overthrow
of Gaddafi has been so appalling. The extent of
the calamity is made clear by two reports on the
present state of the country, one by Amnesty
International called "Libya: Rule of the gun –
abductions, torture and other militia abuses in
western Libya" and a second by Human Rights
Watch, focusing on the east of the country,
called "Libya: Assassinations May Be Crimes Against Humanity".
The latter is a gruesome but fascinating account
of what people in Benghazi call "Black Friday,"
which occurred on 19 September this year, the
most deadly day in a three-day assassination
spree in the city, in which "the dead included
two young activists, members of the security
services, an outspoken cleric and five other
civilians". The activists were Tawfiq Bensaud and
Sami Elkawafi, two men aged 18 and 19, who had
campaigned and demonstrated against militia
violence. Among others who died was a prominent
cleric, Seikh Nabil Sati, who was murdered, as
well as a young man, Abdulrahman al-Mogherbi, who
was kidnapped at the cleric's funeral and later found dead.
Their murders brought to 250 the number of
victims of politically motivated killings this
year in Benghazi and Derna, the major cities in
eastern Libya. This is not counting the far
larger number who have died in military
operations between the different militias or the
battles that have raged in and around Tripoli.
Without the rest of the world paying much
attention, a civil war has been raging in western
Libya since 13 July between the Libya Dawn
coalition of militias, originally based in
Misrata, and another militia group centred on
Zintan. A largely separate civil war between the
forces of retired General Khalifa Haftar and the
Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries is
being fought out in the city. Government has
collapsed. Amnesty says that torture has become
commonplace with victims being "beaten with
plastic tubes, sticks, metal bars or cables,
given electric shocks, suspended in stress
positions for hours, kept blindfolded and shackled for days."
It is easy enough to deride the neo-imperial
posturing of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy,
or to describe the abyss into which Libya has
fallen since 2011. The people whom that
intervention propelled into power have reduced a
country that had been peaceful for more than half
a century to a level of violence that is
beginning to approach that of Syria, Iraq and
Afghanistan. Whatever Western intentions, the
result has been a disaster. In Libya, as in Syria
today, Western intervention was supposedly in
support of democracy, but was conducted in
alliance with the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Gulf who had no such aims.
The temptation is to say that foreign
intervention invariably brings catastrophe to the
country intervened in. But this is not quite
true: US air strikes in defence of the Syrian
Kurds at Kobani and the Iraqi Kurds in their
capital Erbil are justifiable and prevent
massacres by Isis. But the drawback is that
foreign intervention is always in the interests
of the country intervening. These may, for a
time, coincide with the real interests of the
country where the foreign intervention is taking
place, but this seldom lasts very long.
This is the lesson of recent foreign
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
Syria. Most Afghans wanted the Taliban out in
2001 but they did not want the warlords back,
something the Americans found acceptable. The US
would fight the Taliban, but not confront the
movement's sponsors in Pakistan, thereby dooming
Afghanistan to endless war. In Iraq in 2003, many
Iraqis welcomed the US-led invasion because they
wanted the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, but they
did not want a foreign occupation. The Americans
did not want the fall of Saddam to benefit Iran,
so they needed to occupy the country and install their own nominees in power.
In all three cases cited above, the West
intervened in somebody else's civil war and tried
to dictate who won. There was a pretence that the
Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad were
demonically evil and without any true supporters.
This foreign support may give victory to one
party in a civil war, as in Libya, which they
could not win by relying on their own strength.
In Iraq, the beleaguered Sunni could not fight a
US-backed Shia government so it needed to bring
in al-Qaeda. Thus the conditions were created that eventually produced Isis.
<http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-is-silent-as-libya-falls-into-the-abyss-9833489.html>http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-is-silent-as-liby
a-falls-into-the-abyss-9833489.html
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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