Libya: “Humanitarian war” is creating a humanitarian crisis

The irony of this supposedly “humanitarian war” in Libya is that it is creating a humanitarian crisis. This is a farce which is happening with the servile complicity of the mainstream Western media. I am actually quite shocked at how our media and politicians can repeatedly lie to us about what is really happening. Do they expect us to believe that dropping hundreds of bombs will not kill any civilians? That defies logic no matter how accurate or sophisticated these NATO missiles are. Also, do they expect us to believe that Gadhafi has no support in his own country?

A sanitised version of events is clearly being presented by the Western media, as well as Qatar’s Al Jazeera, to keep this war going and justify its goals. NATO has already strayed well beyond its stated objectives of protecting the civilian population of Libya in accordance with UN resolution 1973. France recently admitted it has been secretly arming the Libyan rebels – clearly taking sides and supporting regime change when UN resolution 1973 forbids that. Stories of Gadhafi’s men using Viagra to gang rape women have been denied by Amnesty International.

What is going on is the complete plunder of Libya, a resource rich country that had higher living standards than some European countries before this conflict began. Billions of dollars of Libyan assets have already been seized illegally by the US and the European Union. NATO bombs have not only hit military targets, they have increasingly hit economic ones too like the Libyan Mint which prints dinars; and there has been collateral damage. According to the Libyan Ministry of Health, after the first 100 days of NATO bombing, 6,121 people were either killed or injured. The conflict is also creating a refugee crisis.

If NATO thought they will be seen as liberators by the Libyan people, nothing could be further from the truth. On Friday 17 June one million Libyans marched in Tripoli in support of Gadhafi. That’s a substantial number of people in a country of only 6 million people. Why wasn’t this news covered by the mainstream Western press? There is no national uprising against Gadhafi. Tripolitania - Western Libya - has rallied behind Gadhafi.

Who are the Libyan “rebels”?

So this begs the question, who are the Libyan “rebels” NATO is supporting? They are a motley crew of Al-Qaeda infested mercenaries who have long resented Gadhafi’s control over Cyrenaica (Eastern Libya). African American US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who recently visited Libya, was shocked to discover that these "racist" rebels were mercilessly killing and driving out black African migrants. Already gruesome videos of black Africans being lynched by the rebels are circulating on the internet, and yet there’s a silence in the mainstream media about these atrocities.

According to an Eritrean priest, Don Mussie Zerai, President of the Habeshia Agency for the Development Cooperation, 800 Africans were massacred in Misrata alone. He said black Libyans risk an ethnic cleansing action because of the determination against them by Libyans of Arab origin that sympathise with the rebels, who attack them as though they were Gaddafi's mercenaries. He decried the ongoing indifference to this carnage despite previous reports and warned that "hundreds of thousands of Darfur Sudanese," also trapped in Libya, risk "being crushed by this intolerance that is spreading in the territories occupied by the rebels."

Does the West really think the rebels can govern Libya? That would mean the subjugation of Tripolitania and a great deal of bloodshed. The best way out is a ceasefire and a demilitarisation of the conflict. That is what the African Union (AU) want. The AU has already said Gaddafi "can no longer lead Libya", but that does not mean that the AU - unlike NATO – wants regime change straight away. The BRICS prefer the AU approach of a negotiated settlement. NATO just seems to want to keep bombing.

Al Qaeda

As reported in the Telegraph in March, Al Qaeda then issued a call then to its supporters to back the Libyan rebellion. Now that NATO is supporting the Libyan rebels, the United States is allying itself with Al Qaeda linked elements despite spending over $1 trillion dollars trying to fight Al Qaeda over the last ten years – a case of our enemy’s enemy is our best friend. The danger of course is that in the long run such tactics are likely to backfire. I’m inclined to agree with Magdi Allam, a high profile Italian politician and convert to Catholicism, who says:

“The only real certainty is that the Islamists will win and that consequently, the populations of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean will be increasingly submitted to shariah…an outcome exactly the opposite of the official proclamations of Sarkozy and Obama and their excessive use of catchphrases such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’”