Muammar Gaddafi was born in a
Bedouin tent near Sirte around 1942 to a poor family. Living through the last
years of Italian colonial rule and Libya’s somewhat reluctant monarchy
following its independence at the behest of the Great Powers in 1952, Gaddafi
grew up in a time that the country’s political unity was still subversive to
regional competition between Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan. Being a rural
Bedouin himself, he abhorred regionalism and developed an ideology embroiled
with nationalism and anti-imperialism. Amid a bloodless coup on 1 September 1969 that overthrew
King Idris, the 27-year-old Gaddafi and his fellow Free Officers rose to power.[1]
Unlike many Western-backed Middle Eastern rulers that have large amounts of
natural resources at their disposal, the Revolutionary Command Council was
willing to put the huge oil revenues, which skyrocketed after OPEC’s 1973
boycott, to the country’s internal development. As a result, Libya grew from one of the poorest nations
in the world during the 1950s to the country with the highest living standard
in Africa.[2] National expenditures on literacy, health care and
education expanded rapidly under Gaddafi, while the government raised minimum
wages and provided interest-free loans and subsidies for farming and the
construction of houses.[3] By
2009, all in stark contrast to many African nations that are stuck in the
Western orbit, life expectancy at birth had risen to 72.3 years, youth literacy
to 99.9% and infant mortality had dropped to 14 per 1000 births.[4] A most
indicative example of the employment of oil income to national development was
the Great Man-made River (GMR) project, an impressive irrigation system
that solved the problem of water supply through the construction of a huge
network of pipelines that transports water from the country’s southern desert
ground reserves to the coastal cities, where most Libyans live. According to a
BBC 2006 article, “it is impossible not to be impressed with the scale of the
project,” and “Libyans like to call it ‘the eighth wonder of the world’.”[5] Indicative of NATO’s war crimes in
Libya, the “humanitarian” interventionists deliberately bombed critical GMR
water installations, thereby disrupting the nation’s water infrastructure and
leaving millions of Libyans without potable water to this day. According to
investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, this amounts to a potential genocidal
strategy.[6]
More relevant to the story,
however, is the fact that Gaddafi was willing to commit his country’s resources
to the international cause of pan-Arabism. The new Libyan leader had an
unlimited admiration for Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and he spoke about
combining their strength to deter the imperial powers: “Tell President Nasser
we made this revolution for him. He can take everything of ours and add it to
the rest of the Arab world’s resources to be used for the battle [against
Israel, and for Arab unity].”[7] Regarding the fact that Egypt and Syria had
already foregone a short-lived political union from 1958 to 1961, this
potential should not be underestimated. His hero died within a year after the
coup, however, and Egypt’s next president, Anwar Sadat, was less concerned with
Arab unity. Consequently,
Gaddafi became the self-appointed guardian of Nasser’s legacy, nurturing the
notion of pan-Arabism as one of the cornerstones of the Libyan revolution.[8]
This made him an obvious target of the oligarchs seeking Western hegemony over
the Third World, and therefore, he had to be demonized.
Despite the nationalization of
some American and British oil interests in 1973, the Libyan government showed
no inclination towards an open confrontation with the West in the first years
after the coup.[9] Gradually, however, as Gaddafi openly voiced his support for
Palestinian resistance against Zionism, the Irish Republican Army’s struggle
against British rule and the African National Congress’ battle against
apartheid, the US started accusing Libya of supporting terrorism. It was only
after Libya was accused of being directly involved in a series of terrorist
attacks in Europe in the 1980s, though, that the US successfully managed to
isolate the Libyan government from the international community.
While the Carter administration
put the Libyan government on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, it was
under Reagan that the situation escalated towards confrontation. In August
1981, the US’s Sixth Fleet shot down two Libyan jet fighters over the Gulf of
Sirte, a territory regarded by Libya as its territorial waters but which
Washington viewed as an international waterway. Although Reagan’s anti-Gaddafi rhetoric
intensified, all Libyan crude oil exports to the US were embargoed, and
American citizens were prohibited from traveling to Libya; the US remained
unsuccessful in aggravating its NATO allies in Europe to jump on the bandwagon.
That changed when Yvonne Fletcher, a London policewoman, was killed during a
small anti-Gaddafi protest in St James Square on 17 April 1984. Although nobody
was ever convicted, the British government and mass media outlets were quick to
ascribe the murder to personnel at the Libyan embassy, located on the first
floor at 5 St James. Ironically, it was a British two-part documentary aired
on Channel 4 in 1996, which cites key witnesses, pathologists,
gun specialists, audio experts, ex-intelligence officers and plot insiders,
that eventually destroyed the official narrative.[10] The documentary revealed that an anti-Gaddafi
terrorist organisation named al-Burkan, which was planning a coup
against the Libyan leader, had infiltrated the embassy and that there were
indeed 11 shots fired from there, but that the 12th bullet that killed Fletcher
came from somewhere else on the square and was fired with a different kind of
gun. Because the bullet entree angle was 60 degrees from the horizontal - not
15 degrees, what it should have been if the bullet originated from the embassy
- the shot must have come from a far higher building. Drawing on two years of extensive research, the
documentary makers unravel “a sinister plot” involving al-Burkan and German gun
traffickers but also the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, all of
whom conspired to discredit Gaddafi and pave the way for regime change in
Libya. Indeed, a month after the incident, al-Burkan and others tried to
overthrow the Gaddafi government, but the coup attempt was beaten back by the
Libyan army.
In early 1986, Reagan warned that
the US would take additional steps to confront the Libyan government if needed.
Not long after that, on 4 April, a bomb explosion at La Belle discotheque in
West Berlin frequented by American servicemen killed three people and injured
200. Two weeks later, the US bombed Tripoli and Benghazi claiming that it had
irrefutable evidence that Libya was responsible for the discotheque bombing,
leaving at least 15 Libyan citizens dead. The main target was the Libyan
leader’s headquarters. Gaddafi made it out alive, but his 15-month-old adopted
daughter was killed in the attack on his residence, and two of his young sons
were injured. The man charged with having masterminded the
discotheque bombing
was Yasser Chraidi, pictured above,
a driver at the Libyan embassy in East Berlin at the time. 10 years after the
bombing, Chraidi - who in the meantime had moved to Lebanon - was extradited to
German authorities, but a Berlin judge found the evidence presented by the
prosecution so weak that he threatened to release Chraidi within three weeks
unless more proof was presented. Exactly on the last day of these three weeks,
Musbah Eter, pictured above, one of the
perpetrators that provided the operating instructions for the bomb used in the
attack, confessed after having made a deal with the German prosecutors: in
exchange for immunity, he incriminated Chraidi. A 1998 documentary aired on German television channel
ZDF, however, discovered that although Eter indeed worked for the Libyan
embassy in East Berlin in 1986, he paid regular visits to the US embassy and
was most likely a CIA agent. Furthermore, ZDF asserted that members of a
professional group of terrorists led by a certain
Mahmoud Abu Jaber, pictured above, were involved in the attack,
too, but had barely been bothered by the prosecution and had lived safely in
other countries since the discotheque bombing. ZDF interviewed Abu Jaber’s
right-hand man Muhammed
Amairi and his lawyer in Norway as part of the preparation for the
documentary. Amairi stopped the interview when he was asked what secret service
he had been working for, but his lawyer continued the conversation. “Was Amairi
a Mossad agent?”, ZDF asked. “He
was a Mossad man,” the lawyer answered.[11]
Despite the alleged involvement
of the Libyan government in state sponsored terrorist attacks on European soil,
Washington’s European allies remained reluctant to imposing economic sanctions.
On 21 December 1988, however, Pan Am flight 103 flying from Frankfurt to New
York via London exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie shortly after it
took off at London Heathrow. In late 1991, The US and UK formally accused two
Libyan security officials of masterminding the attack in which all 259
passengers, most of them American and British, were killed. What followed was a
series of UN Security Council resolutions demanding the extradition of the
suspects. When Libya rejected these demands as a violation of its national
sovereignty, the Security Council and the US congress both imposed severe
sanctions on Libya. After many countries worldwide started to oppose the
sanctions and the Organisation of African Unity in 1998 announced that its
members would no longer enforce the UN sanctions unless America and Britain
agreed to hold the trial of the Lockerbie suspects in a neutral country, the
US, UK and Libya came to the agreement to hold a trial in The Hague in the
Netherlands. The verdict acquitted one of the two suspects but found the other,
Abdel Basset Ali Muhammad
al-Megrahi, pictured above, guilty.[12]
It turns out that one of the key prosecution witnesses at al-Megrahi’s
trial, a Maltese shopkeeper who identified al-Megrahi as buying clothes from
him that were found in the suitcase which allegedly carried the bomb, was paid
$2 million by the US Department of Justice.[13] The
shopkeeper also failed several times to identify al-Megrahi, only “recognising”
him after having seen his photo in a magazine and being shown the same photo in
court.[14] In addition, a
chief Scottish investigator declared in 2005 that the main piece of evidence,
the bomb timer, had been planted at the crime scene by a CIA agent.[15] In
2007, the expert who had analysed the bomb timer for the court admitted that he
had lied at the trial, had manufactured the timer himself and had given it to a
Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never
tested for residue of explosives, although it was the only evidence of possible
Libyan involvement.[16] Finally, a London Heathrow airport security guard
revealed that Pan Am’s luggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the
flight, which suggests that the bomb was planted at Heathrow, not by al-Megrahi
in Malta from where it would have had to bypass the security systems of two
additional airports and in total would have travelled on three different planes
before exploding.[17]
There are several theories about
who exactly was responsible for the terrible crime. Some put forward
circumstantial evidence that the bombing was a retaliatory attack by Iran and
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command in reaction
to the shooting down of an equally large Iranian plane over the Persian Gulf by
a US warship a couple months earlier;[18] others suspect CIA and/or Mossad
involvement.[19] But many
are certain of one thing: al-Megrahi was innocent, and Libya was not responsible.
This includes Hans Köchler, an Austrian professor who was appointed by the UN
as international observer at the trial in The Hague, who called the trial “a
spectacular miscarriage of justice.”[20]
From the 1990s onwards,
reconciliation gradually gained the upper hand over animosity. Libya suffered
badly under the Washington-led isolation and was therefore willing to make
concessions. After the Libyan government in 1999 agreed to hand over the two
Lockerbie suspects and concurred with paying compensation to the relatives of
Yvonne Fletcher and the victims or UTA flight 722 - a French airliner downed in
a similar manner as Pan Am flight 103 in 1989 of which Libya was also (in all
likelihood falsely)[21] accused - the US acquiesced to the suspension of the UN
sanctions. In exchange for Libya paying compensation to the Lockerbie victims
as well - but not accepting responsibility - and agreeing to give up its
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, the UN sanctions were officially
lifted in 2003, and the US promised to suspend its own sanctions, most of which
were lifted in 2004. Finally, during a 2006 trip to the country, Congressman Tom Lantos met with
Gaddafi and announced that Libya had been removed from the US list of sponsors
of terrorism.
Mutual distrust lingered on,
however. Although the isolation was over in official terms, bilateral relations
remained cumbersome. Clear from a statement he made in 1999, Gaddafi remained
hostile to the dominant American worldview: “America unfortunately treats us as
if the world was the way it used to be [before the fall of the Soviet Union].
Some analysts call this a new colonialism. But colonialism is colonialism, and
it is always unjust. It is how we were treated by the Italians, Algeria by the
French, India by the British. This is imperialism, and we seem to be
entering a new imperialist era. The cause of our conflict with America is
not that we attacked them. We have never attacked an American target. America
started the aggression against us right here in the Gulf of Sirte. When we
defended ourselves, they attacked us in these very tents. We were bombed by
missiles in our own territorial waters. In 1986 our own children were killed.
No one can bring my daughter back to me. Then Lockerbie came along. Now
we would like this chain of events to be over. But America does not want to
turn the page. We shall, however, show courage and be patient, and
America will be the loser.”[22] (emphasis added)
Gaddafi’s reservations about
reconciliation - he often appeared to show regret for some of the compromises
he made for which Libya received very little in return, especially giving up
his WMD program as a deterrent to Western aggression - were likely not
unfounded. In a 2007 interview, retired four-star US General Wesley Clark revealed that
several Middle Eastern countries, including Libya, were already on the
Pentagon’s imperialist drawing board in the immediate wake of 9/11: “I [General
Clark] came back to see him [a general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], and by
that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said: ‘Are we still going to war
with Iraq?’ And he said: ‘Oh it is worse than that.’ He reached over on his
desk and picked up a piece of paper. He said: ‘I just got this down from upstairs [meaning the Secretary
of Defense’s office] today. This is a memo that describes how we are going to
take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’”[23]
Flash forward to 2011. With the
adoption of UN Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973 in March, NATO
embarked on a seven months-long military adventure under the guise of
“protecting civilians,” leaving behind a trail of destruction with Sirte bombed
back to the stone ages. After Operation Unified Protector had officially come
to an end on 31 October 2011, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen
concluded that “we have carried out this operation very carefully, without
confirmed civilian casualties,”[24] and NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu claimed
that “no target was approved or attacked if we had any evidence or reason to
believe that civilians were at risk.”[25] UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon,
too, rejected claims that NATO had exceeded its mandate, asserting that
“Security Council resolution 1973, I believe, was strictly enforced within the
limit, within the mandate.”[26] That this is categorically false is
substantiated even by the most pro-interventionist institutions that
investigated NATO’s military campaign in retrospect. Human Rights Watch,[27]
Amnesty International[28] and the New York Times[29] have all amply
documented NATO airstrikes in which, if not deliberately at least knowing full
well the likelihood of “collateral damage,” numerous civilians were killed. A
report published by Middle Eastern human rights groups after a fact-finding
mission to Libya even implicated NATO in war crimes, referring to “a NATO
attack on 15 September which resulted in the death of 57-59 individuals, of
whom approximately 47 were civilians.” The report described how two jeeps
carrying combatants were destroyed by NATO air fire in Sirte, after which a
large crowd of civilians flocked to the scene in an attempt to rescue survivors
and retrieve the dead. Five minutes later, a third missile targeted the
exclusively civilian crowd, killing 47 of them.[30] NATO’s operational media
update for 15 September noted the destruction of the two armed vehicles but
made no mention of the large swathes of civilians it had just slaughtered.[31]
The above-mentioned 15 September
attack does not only illustrate the ruthlessness of NATO’s military campaign,
it also signals its importance as a necessary accessory to the advances of the
rebel fighters, especially in the final battle of the war in Sirte. Whereas the
insurgents were allowed to freely move tanks into place to surround and enter
the last Gaddafi stronghold, any attempt by government forces to move as much
as a jeep was met with NATO air fire. So when a convoy of 75 vehicles leaving
the scene of the battle was intercepted and attacked by a US predator drone and
French jets on the morning of 20 October, NATO did not elaborate on how the
convoy was posing a threat to the local population. Although “an intelligence
breakthrough” allowed NATO forces to pinpoint Gaddafi’s location a week prior
to the attack according to the Telegraph,[32] the military alliance
supposedly did not know the Libyan leader was in one of the convoy trucks
fleeing Sirte.
The Telegraph had
previously already reported that SAS commandos (British special forces)
“dressed in Arab civilian clothing and wearing the same weapons as the rebels
[...] were spearheading the hunt for Col Muammar Gaddafi.”[33] As NATO had
repeatedly bombed Gaddafi compounds during the war (and as we have seen above,
before the war, too), and as the US government internally discussed covert
action to assassinate Gaddafi as early as 1969 according to the memoirs of
Henry Kissinger,[34] this means that Western involvement in Gaddafi’s brutal
murder in the streets of Sirte is at least plausible. Indeed, according to
Mahmoud Jibril, pictured above, then
interim prime minister of the rebel-led National Transition Council, “it was a
foreign agent who mixed with the revolutionary brigades to kill Gaddafi.”[35]
Either way, the Western war hawks probably did not mourn the death of the
Libyan leader, judging from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first
reaction to the death of Gaddafi. Followed by an arrogant laugh, she concluded:
“We came, we saw, he died.”[36]
Notes
[1] Maximilian
Forte, Slouching towards Sirte: NATO’s war on Libya and Africa (Montreal:
Baraka Books, 2012), 35-41.
[2] “The standard of
living in Libya - compilation of data, studies, articles and videos,” Global
Civilians for Peace in Libya, 09.11.2011, http://globalciviliansforpeace.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/the-standard-of-living-in-libya/.
[3] Dirk
Vandewalle, A history of modern Libya, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 87-95.
[4] “The standard of
living in Libya.”
[5] John Watkins,
“Libya’s thirst for ‘fossil water’,” BBC, 18.03.2016, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4814988.stm.
[6] Nafeez Ahmed, “War
crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure,” Truth
Out, 30.05.2015, http://truth-out.org/news/item/30999-war-crime-nato-deliberately-destroyed-libya-s-water-infrastructure.
[7] Mohammed
Heikal, The road to Ramadan (New York: Quadrangle / New York
Times Company, 1975), 70.
[8] Vandewalle, A
history of modern Libya, 79.
[9] Vandewalle, A
history of modern Libya, 128-30.
[10] Murder in
St James’s, produced and directed by Richard Belfield (Channel 4:
Dispatches, 1996), available in full at http://sott.net/article/236576-Murder-in-St-James-Square-The-Death-of-Yvonne-Fletcher.
[11] “German TV
exposed CIA, Mossad links to 1986 Berlin disco bombing,” Word Socialist
Web Site, 27.08.1998, http://wsws.org/en/articles/1998/08/bomb-a27.html.
[12] Vandewalle, A
history of modern Libya, 167-9.
[13] Gordon Rayner,
“Lockerbie bombing: are these the men who really brought down Pan Am
103?”, Telegraph, 10.03.2014, http://telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10688179/Lockerbie-bombing-are-these-the-men-who-really-brought-down-Pan-Am-103.html.
[14] Robert McFadden,
“Megrahi, convicted in 1988 Lockerbie bombing, dies at 60,” New York
Times, 20.05.2012, http://nytimes.com/2012/05/21/world/africa/abdel-basset-ali-al-megrahi-lockerbie-bomber-dies-at-60.html.
[15] “Police chief -
Lockerbie evidence was faked,” Scotsman, 28.08.2005, http://scotsman.com/news/police-chief-lockerbie-evidence-was-faked-1-1403341.
[16] McFadden,
“Megrahi.”
[17] McFadden,
“Megrahi.”
[18] Rayner,
“Lockerbie bombing;” Alexander Zaitchik, “The truth about the Lockerbie bombing
- and the censored film that dared to reveal it,” Alternet,
15.12.2014, http://alternet.org/world/truth-about-lockerbie-bombing-and-censored-film-dared-reveal-it;
John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, “Flight from the truth,” Guardian,
27.06.2001, http://theguardian.com/uk/2001/jun/27/lockerbie.features11.
[19] “What if they are
innocent?”, Guardian, 27.04.1999, http://theguardian.com/uk/1999/apr/17/lockerbie;
Maidhc Ó’Cathail, “Deception over Lockerbie,” Global Research,
27.12.2009, http://globalresearch.ca/deception-over-lockerbie/15362;
Cem Ertür, “Propaganda alert: the Lockerbie bombing. Who was behind it? Libya,
Iran … or the CIA?”, Global Research, 12.10.2014, http://globalresearch.ca/deception-over-lockerbie/15362.
[20] “UN Observer:
Lockerbie trial a US/UK CIA fake “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” William
Bowles, 14.10.2005, http://williambowles.info/spysrus/lockerbie.html.
[21] Pierre Péan, “Les
preuves trafiquées du terrorisme Libyen,” Monde Diplomatique, March
2001, http://monde-diplomatique.fr/2001/03/PEAN/6174.
Translated to English: Pierre Péan, “Tainted evidence of Libyan
terrorism,” UNA Bombers, http://unabombers.com/TheTaintedEvidence.htm.
[22] Quoted in
Forte, Slouching towards Sirte, 79.
[23] Amy Goodman,
interview with Wesley Clark, Daily Show, Democracy Now, 02.03.2007,
available online: “Gen. Wesley Clark weighs presidential bid: ‘I think about it
every day’,” Democracy Now, 02.03.2007, http://democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bid.
[24] Rachel Shabi,
“NATO accused of war crimes in Libya,” Independent, 19.1.2012, http://independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/nato-accused-of-war-crimes-in-libya-6291566.html.
[25] Human Rights
Watch, Unacknowledged deaths: civilian casualties in NATO’s air
campaign in Libya, 13.05.2012, http://hrw.org/report/2012/05/13/unacknowledged-deaths/civilian-casualties-natos-air-campaign-libya.
[26] Shabi, “NATO
accused of war crimes in Libya.”
[27] Human Rights
Watch, Unacknowledged deaths.
[28] Amnesty
International, Libya: the forgotten victims of NATO airstrikes,
March 2012, http://amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/mde190032012en.pdf.
[29] C.J. Chivers and
Eric Smith, “In strikes on Libya by NATO, an unspoken civilian toll,” New
York Times, 17.12.2011, http://nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html?pagewanted=all.
[30] Palestinian
Center for Human Rights, Arab Organization for Human Rights and International
Legal Assistance Consortium, Report of the Independent Civil Society
Fact-Finding Mission to Libya, 44-6, January 2012, http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/2012/FFM_Libya-Report.pdf.
[31] NATO, NATO
and Libya: operational media update for 15 September, http://nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2011_09/20110916_110916-oup-update.pdf.
[32] Thomas Harding,
“Col Gaddafi killed: convoy bombed by drone flown by pilot in Las Vegas,” Telegraph,
20.10.2011, http://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8839964/Col-Gaddafi-killed-convoy-bombed-by-drone-flown-by-pilot-in-Las-Vegas.html.
[33] Thomas Harding,
Gordon Rayner and Damien McElroy, “Libya: SAS leads hunt for Gaddafi,” Telegraph,
24.08.2011, http://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8721291/Libya-SAS-leads-hunt-for-Gaddafi.html.
[34] Bill van Auken,
“The murderer calls for an investigation into the crime,” SWAPO,
24.10.2011, http://swapoparty.org/the_us_and_gaddafi.html.
[35] Peter Allen,
“Gaddafi was killed by French secret serviceman on orders of Nicolas Sarkozy,
sources claim,” Daily Mail, 30.09.2012, http://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210759/Gaddafi-killed-French-secret-serviceman-orders-Nicolas-Sarkozy-sources-claim.html.
[36] “Hillary Clinton
on Gaddafi: We came, we saw, he died,” Youtube channel of FederalJacktube6,
20.10.2011, consulted on 14.02.2017, http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y.
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