THE
ROVING EYE 'Brother' Gaddafi, you're going
down By Pepe Escobar
You know the fat lady is about to sing
when a dictator unleashes hell from above over his
own unarmed, civilian compatriots, and bombs parts
of his capital city. That's a bridge too far even
by the unspeakable standards of Western-backed
dictators in the Arab world.
You know the
(ghastly) show may be over when Sheikh Yousef
al-Qaradawi, one of the most popular Sunni
authorities in the world, not least because of his
weekly show on al-Jazeera, issues a fatwa -
"I am issuing a fatwa now to kill [Muammar]
Gaddafi. To any soldier, to any man who can pull
the trigger and kill this man to do so" - and then
prays live, on al-Jazeera, for the end of the
Libyan dictator ("O Lord save
the Libyans from this pharaoh." When he finishes,
the al-Jazeera anchor says "Amen").
You
know the bells are ringing when your "Abu Omar
Brigade", responsible for your protection, is
still on a rampage; but your ambassadors around
the world defect en masse; your own deputy
ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Omar
al-Dabashi, says your government is carrying out
genocide; your fighter pilots refuse to bomb your
cities; your military officers, in a statement,
ask all members of the army to head to Tripoli and
depose you; a coalition of Islamic leaders tells
all Muslims it is their duty to rebel against you
because of your "bloody crimes against humanity";
and to top it off, people are calling for a
"million man march" following the Egyptian model.
And what about the Maltese Falcons? In a
day of volcanic activity, it's hard to beat the
spectacular defection of two colonels of the
Libyan Air Force, who flew their Mirages to Malta.
They had refused to bomb protesters in Benghazi,
telling Maltese authorities they had come so close
to carrying out their mission that they could see
the crowds on the ground. They also passed
"classified" information about what the Libyan
military has been up to.
And all this in
just one day - Monday.
It was not enough
to deploy "black African" mercenaries in a
shoot-to-kill rampage in Benghazi. Already on
Sunday, Sheikh Faraj al-Zuway, leader of the
crucial al-Zuwayya tribe in eastern Libya, had
threatened to cut oil exports to the West within
24 hours unless what he called the "oppression of
protesters" in Benghazi was stopped.
Akram
Al-Warfalli, a leader of the al-Warfalla tribe,
one of Libya's biggest, in the south of Tripoli,
had told al-Jazeera Gaddafi is "no longer a
brother, we tell you to leave the country". The
500,000-strong Berber, Tuaregs from the southern
desert, are also against him. When you have four
of your key tribes - the spine of your system -
marching on Tripoli to get rid of you, you better
watch out.
History may eventually register
how Gaddafi's appalling 41-year rule in Libya (he
was already in power when "Tricky Dicky" Richard
Nixon was the United States president) virtually
collapsed in only 24 hours. There will be blood -
a lot of blood; but "brother" is about to go down.
'Rivers of blood will run through
Libya' The beginning of the end was
classic Arab dictator stuff; Saif al-Islam
al-Gaddafi, looking like an upscale bouncer in
suit and tie, went on Libyan state TV on Sunday
night instead of his father to deliver a
threatening/repellent/pathetic speech that only
infuriated the Libyan masses even more, after six
days of protests in the historic Cyrenaica region.
After threatening to "eradicate the
pockets of sedition" (echoes of Iran's leadership
eradicating protests last week) Gaddafi's
"modernizing" son said Libyans risked igniting a
civil war in which Libya's oil wealth "will be
burned".
In 2009, Said received a PhD from
the London School of Economics (LSE) with a thesis
titled "The Role of Civil Society in the
Democratization of Global Governance Institutions:
From 'Soft Power' to Collective Decision-Making".
Last year he delivered a lecture about it at the
LSE (listen to it here.)
Isn't wonderful that the ghastliest
dictators in the world may send their offspring to
the best schools in the world where they can
appease the West's false consciousness while back
at home they openly threaten their own people and
go for sniper fire, automatic weapons and heavy
artillery against their unarmed compatriots?
It's doubtful the LSE taught Saif how to
ignite a flash civil war with just a rant. But
that's what he accomplished.
Libyan writer
Faouzi Abdelhamid - comparing the name Saif
al-Islam ("sword of Islam") with Saif al-I'dam
("sword of execution") came out all guns blazing,
calling the whole Gaddafi clan criminals and
thieves; "You don't even have the right of living
among us as ordinary citizens, because you're
guilty of high treason".
By the time Saif
was delivering his threats, the eastern city of
Benghazi had already fallen to the protesters.
Tripoli was next, on Monday. With the regime
blocking all phone lines, all day Monday
occasional, frantic tweets relayed all sorts of
terrifying rumors and facts - inevitably clouded
by the ominous sound of live ammunition.
Helicopters raining bullets down on people in the
streets below. Fighter jets launching strikes.
Snipers firing from building tops.
Schools, government offices and most
stores in Tripoli were closed, with armed
"Revolutionary Committees", ie regime thugs,
patrolling the streets hunting for protesters in
Tripoli's old city. According to Salem Gnan, a
London-based spokesman for the National Front for
the Salvation of Libya, 80 people may have died
when protesters surrounded Gaddafi's residence and
were shot at from inside the compound.
As
the People's Hall - where the parliament meets
when it is in session in Tripoli - was set on fire
and all cities south of Tripoli were progressively
being "liberated", al-Jazeera managed to trace the
source of jamming of its Arabsat satellite
frequency to a Libyan intelligence building south
of the capital.
Ahmed Elgazir, a
human-rights researcher with the Libyan News
Center (LNC) in Geneva, later told al-Jazeera he
got a call for help from a woman witnessing a
massacre in progress on a satellite phone.
Eyewitnesses reported to Agence France-Presse
another "massacre" in the Fashloum and Tajoura
districts of Tripoli. By late Monday night, the
(unconfirmed) death toll in Tripoli alone had
reached at least 250.
Among Libyans,
virtually all information all around the country
was and remains word of mouth. But tweets that
reached al-Jazeera or the BBC also emphasized a
profound disgust with the deafening silence of the
"international community" ("Are we only worth
mentioning when it has to do with oil and
terrorism?")
Round up the oily
condemnations Said "international
community" indeed started noticing when the Libyan
Quryna newspaper reported protests had broken out
in the northern city of Ras Lanuf, whose oil
refinery processes 220,000 barrels a day.
Yes, apart from Gaddafi's antics, Libya
registers in the West because it exports 1.7
million barrels of oil a day. Its gross domestic
product is US$77 billion - number 62 in world
rankings; that theoretically implies a per capita
income of over $12,000 a year, more, for instance,
than BRIC member Brazil. But profound inequality
is the norm; roughly 35% of Libyans live below the
poverty line, and unemployment is running at an
unbearable 30%. The oil wealth stays in
Tripolitania. Eastern Libya - Cyrenaica - where
the anti-Gaddafi revolution started, is dirt poor.
In the high-stakes front, the Libyan
Investment Authority (LIA) - also owner of a
London-based hedge fund - has invested more than
$70 billion around the world. It's a major
shareholder, for instance, in the Financial Times,
Fiat and one of Italy's top soccer clubs,
Juventus. LIA invests - and plans to invest -
billions in Britain.
Cue to the European
Union (EU) foreign ministers issuing the usual,
bland, bureaucratic condemnation. At least Italian
Prime Minister, "bunga bunga" idol and close
Gaddafi pal Silvio Berlusconi, who had said
earlier he didn't want to "disturb" his friend,
had to qualify the massacre of civilians as
"unacceptable" and profess he was "alarmed". To
see Berlusconi literally kissing Gaddafi's hands,
go here
No less than 32% of Libya's oil exports go to
Italy.
Then there's another classic -
Washington's deafening silence. US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton issued the standard bland
condemnation. Libyan-American scientist and
activist Naeem Gheriany told the Institute for
Public Accuracy the Barack Obama administration
"says it's 'concerned' about the situation -
there's no real condemnation in spite of the dire
situation. People are being massacred in the
hundreds, Gaddafi is reportedly using
anti-aircraft guns to shoot people. In a few days,
more people in Libya have apparently been killed
than in weeks in Iran, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and
even Egypt (which has a much larger population)
... Even the oil cannot justify this silence."
Not to mention that Washington and Gaddafi
have been the best "war on terror" pals. Captured
al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi - the
object of a Central Intelligence Agency
"rendition" to former Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak and Omar "Sheikh al-Torture" Suleiman, who
duly tortured him into confessing to a
non-existent Saddam-al-Qaeda weapons of mass
destruction connection that then-secretary of
state Colin Powell used as "intelligence" at his
United Nations speech in February 2003 - was later
tracked in Libya by Human Rights Watch just to end
up his life as an alleged "suicide".
Milan villa or The Hague?
Libyan opposition writer Ashour Shamis has
remarked, "For Gaddafi it's kill or be killed".
The family told Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, "We
will all die on Libyan soil." That means Gaddafi
and a row of hated offspring.
Son Khamis -
the commander of an elite special forces unit,
trained in Russia - is the mastermind of the
repression in Benghazi. Son Saadi is, or was there
too, alongside the head of military intelligence,
Abdullah al-Senussi.
Son Muatassim is
Gaddafi's national security adviser and, until
now, possible successor. In 2009, he tried to set
up his own special forces unit to erode Khamis's
power.
Son Saif, the "modernizer" with an
LSE diploma, cuts no mustard with the regime's old
guard and the dreaded "Revolutionary Committees".
Son Saadi is basically a thug fond of
raising hell across nightclubs in Europe. Same
applies to son Hannibal.
It all looks and
sounds like a cheap blood-splattered gangster
movie. What to make of Gaddafi's bizarre 20-second
appearance on state TV early this Tuesday ("I'm in
Tripoli, not in Venezuela"), clutching an
umbrella, sitting inside a cream-colored microvan
and sporting a winter hat with ear flaps, with no
clue of what is going on? (After all he was
supporting his pals, Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben
Ali, and to Mubarak, until the very end). He
defined TV channels - such as al-Jazeera - as
"dogs" (in the 1980s he had already used hit
squads to murder exiled "stray dogs" who
challenged his revolution).
Still, Gaddafi
should not be underestimated. He controls all the
hardware - defense, security, foreign affairs.
Plus all those "black African"
mercenaries/exterminators paid in gold. Yemen's
Ali Abdullah Saleh said Yemen was not Egypt or
Tunisia. Gaddafi said Libya was not Egypt or
Tunisia. Mubarak said Egypt was not Tunisia.
They were all wrong; the entire Arab world
now is Tunisia. The Libyan masses hate "their"
leader. Even fellow Arab dictators - with the
exception of the House of Saud - hate him. He has
few expat options. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez would
be crazy to offer him asylum and forever destroy
his "champion of the poor" credibility.
Well, there's always Berlusconi. Nice
villa near Milan, great pasta, and he can pitch
his Bedouin tent in the luxurious gardens. And if
Berlusconi is sent to jail in his
"Rubygate"-related trial in April, Gaddafi may
even move up to the main residence. But, after you
bombed your own citizens from the air, and hired
mercenaries to shoot them, there is only one
choice destination: the International Criminal
Court in The Hague.
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