How Might Things Move Forward in Libya?

Yash Tandon

26 May 2011

opinion

NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) sustained assault on Libya ought to lead to calls for its leaders’ prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC), writes Yash Tandon, though ‘we know this will not happen’. A new regime run by ‘the people’, Tandon stresses, will merely see itself at the service of empire, helping to ensure access to oil, shore up Europe against refugees and bolster the region against forces deemed threatening such as Hamas and Iran; the challenge remains for Libyans themselves to sort out their differences and unite.

I ended the last column ‘Whose dictator is Gaddafi?’ with the question: what now? How might things move forward in Libya? Before I deal with the question it is important to remind ourselves that Libya is a neocolonial state, and Gaddafi has objectively been a neocolonial dictator for global finance capital, even though subjectively he was and is anti-imperialist. The empire might have accommodated him, and indeed did rehabilitate him after his turnaround in 1999, over a decade ago, but the ‘Arab spring’ upset the programme of the empire, and it had to quickly take a u-turn and ditch Gaddafi.

So what now? The empire, with the connivance of sections of the Libyan population, had hoped to get rid of Gaddafi quickly. The limited ‘United Nations’ no-fly zone operation has metamorphosed into a ‘NATO’ (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) military operation, which is now in violation of its original mandate. The empire, in its hubris and delusion, had imagined for a while that the UN might extend its authority to allow ‘boots on the ground’. But this failed. Russia and China, who have veto power in the Security Council, argue that the NATO countries have gone far beyond their mandate. Gaddafi, the empire’s erstwhile dictator in Libya, whom they cuddled and kissed after 1999 turn around, has proven to be more resilient than expected. He is back on his anti-imperialist nationalist trail. The imperial war machine has failed to dislodge him.

Since March 2011 NATO has so far flown over 6,000 sorties into Libya, 2,400 of which involving bombing strikes. This is a staggering number by any measure. Faced with a protracted war, the empire is now using subterfuge, deceit and double-speak to illegally extend its military operation in Libya. It kills individuals targeted from the air but nonetheless denies doing so and continues to play the myth that it is only ‘protecting the civilians’. This is a blatant lie. It brazenly bombed Gaddafi’s personal compound in Tripoli on 22 March, hoping to kill him. Like in the case of Osama bin Laden, the empire has an awesomely simplistic and gruesome military strategy – cut off the head of the snake and the rest of the body will slither or wither away. During the 22 March bombing, however, the empire succeeded only in killing some of Gaddafi’s children, in what can without fear of contradiction be described as a criminal act. This ought to motivate Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the ICC (the International Criminal Court) to investigate and charge NATO leaders for criminal acts. Of course, we know this will not happen. In the international arena impunity has only one face, the imperial face.

So back to the question: what now of Libya?

Although it sounds like a cliché, it is a truism that ‘the future of Libya lies in the hands of the people of Libya’. Even the empire hypocritically endorses the principle – it has to, or else it will have no legitimacy, no excuse, for its action in Libya. But the fact of the matter is that the empire cannot allow self-determination to its neocolonies. That, by definition, would be the end of the neocolonies, and hence the death of the empire. The empire must divide and rule.

In Libya it has actively encouraged a section of the people to fight a proxy war for the empire. To put it starkly, Benghazi (a province) is fighting a war against Tripoli (the centre) on behalf of the empire. The French were active in Benghazi even before the UN Security Council resolution, and were the first imperial country to recognise the National Transitional Council (NTC) at Benghazi. But few countries have followed suit, and so, technically, the Gaddafi regime remains the only legally constituted actor in the conduct of Libya’s diplomatic relations. Against him, the empire uses ‘the people’ as an ideological metaphor to describe the entire ‘nation’ that is supposed to have revolted against Gaddafi. This is another myth. The media story, for example, that ‘the pro-democracy fighters in Misurata are engaged in trench warfare against Gaddafi’ is a loaded expression. It is aimed at conveying the message that the ‘pro-democracy’ forces are holding out against the dictator. It is also aimed to prepare the psychological and political ground to justify the empire’s open and clandestine military support to ‘the people’. The question to then ask is ‘which people’? Who among the NTC at Benghazi represent the ‘people’? The ‘people’ is a simplified presentation of a complex reality, because there must be people even in Benghazi who must have realised by now that they are hostages of the empire, that they cannot run the show on their own without the empire. But these ‘rebels among the rebels’ (if this is what they may be called) are probably marginalised by the coalition of political forces around the NTC at Benghazi. It is a complex issue; not as simple as the empire and its media makes out to be.

The hard reality is that as long as the empire dictates the terms and means of engagement with Gaddafi, ‘the people’ will never determine their future. It is as simple as that. When a nation has surrendered its sovereignty to the empire, it can recover it only when it liberates itself from the empire. When the streets revolted against the regime of Gaddafi, it was also revolting against the imperial order. But now the situation is out of the people’s control. The empire has taken over the task of removing Gaddafi from power and, apparently, helping ‘the people’ to put in power a more ‘democratic regime’. This new regime, the empire will make sure, is bound so tightly to the apron strings of the empire that it continues to service the empire’s economic and strategic interests in the region – including access to oil, stopping the inflow of boatloads of refugees to Europe and, above all, the protection of Israel, the empire’s outpost in the region against threats posed by, for example, Hamas, Syria and Iran.

So, then, back to the question: what is the possible way forward for the nation of Libya? Here, it might be helpful for the nation (a better term than ‘people’) to take a leaf from the experience of the nation of Palestine to move forward in their struggle for national self-determination. Palestine is an occupied nation. The people of Palestine cannot negotiate with Israel as long as their lands are occupied. And yet, this is what the empire has been encouraging the Palestinians to do for the last 60 years. It is an impossible situation. How can Palestine negotiate as an equal when it is occupied? The empire has come in to ‘mediate’ but it is not a neutral mediator. It is not an honest broker. Countries like Norway that have brokered negotiations between Palestine and Israel act as surrogates of the empire, in fact, as an integral part of the imperial system. The so-called Oslo Accord mediated by Norway, for example, was a partisan process on behalf of collective imperialism.

As Ziyad Clot, one-time adviser to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), says: ‘The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, was instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions among Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months in Ramallah confirmed that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests’ (Ziyad Clot, ‘Why I blew the whistle about Palestine’, The Guardian, Saturday 14 May 2011).

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