adminHorace Campbell Correspondent
The hysteria over the possible deployment of Western troops to West Asia and North Africa is again on the rise.
With every passing day there is some new headline about rape, mutilations, be-headings and mass killings by ISIS.
For the last nine months the news about these killings came out of Syria and Iraq, but in the week of February 15, there was the video clip of the beheading of 21 Egyptian workers in Libya.
The Pope has called the be-headings, “barbaric assassinations.”
Naturally, the world vented and there was righteous outrage all around.
What was missing, however, was a sober analysis of what created the conditions for this so-called “Islamic State” to grow in the Levant and now to appear in Libya.
In light of the be-headings the governments of France and Egypt called for urgent discussions in the UN Security Council in order for the UN to lift the arms embargo against Libya. From Italy, Western news sources are calling for an attack on ISIS in Libya before it reaches Europe.
At the same moment while the Egyptians were soliciting political support from Europe for its intervention in Libya, the government of Qatar, which has been waging a proxy war with Saudi Arabia and Egypt in Libya, withdrew its ambassador from Egypt.
Using the news organisation Al Jazeera to bring out its point of view, Qatar’s foreign ministry said Doha had expressed reservations over the raids, stressing the need for “consultations before any unilateral military action against another member state.” The Qatari government was protesting the bombing of innocent civilians in Libya.
Some diplomats at the United Nations claim that the government of Egypt led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is seeking the green-light from the United Nations for more open military intervention in Libya.
The Egyptian military leadership has been involved on one side of the widening wars in North Africa and West Asia for sometime, having participated in bombing of some factions in Libya last year.
The beheading of 21 Egyptian workers in the town of Sirte in Libya has been the new reason used by General Sisi to launch a new wave of air strikes in Libya. Yet, although the beheadings had taken place in Sirte, the aerial bombings took place in Dernia, the seat of that faction of Libyan society that had been manipulated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since the wars in Afghanistan in the eighties.
Although this inconsistency in the actions of the government of Egypt has been glossed over by the Western mainstream media, these same vehicles of militarism expressed shock at the news of the beheading of Coptic Christians in Libya, and the rise of the so-called Islamic State in Libya.
Where was this media when there was the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha? How did this same media act as cheerleaders for the NATO intervention in 2011? The same Western states and their strategic think tanks that drove the wars in Iraq and the intervention in Libya cannot give leadership in the United Nations over the questions of peace and reconciliation. Angola, China, Malaysia and Venezuela will stand condemned in the court of progressive public opinion if these countries in the UN Security Council allow the world to be rail-roaded into another UN supported deployment of troops to support Western military and economic interests in Libya.
This writer is calling for an international commission that can document the role of NATO, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with a view to setting the conditions for an international force to intervene in Libya to disarm the militias. Such an international force would exclude members of NATO and the current combatants in Libya: Qatar, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
The politics of retrogression in Libya and Egypt has descended to such a state and the peoples do need peace.
Yet the nature of the political and economic crisis in Egypt is in many ways even more dire to the point where Egyptian workers will still go to Libya to eke out a livelihood.
Many from the progressive movements have retreated from a clear position of support for the Egyptian workers and their allies who want peace.
Everyone knows that the people of Libya need peace, but at this moment, the peoples of Egypt and North Africa who are feeling the heel of the repression of the Egyptian junta, also need peace. The Security Council of the United Nations must not be rail-roaded to place the Western-backed forces in charge of Libya.
There should be clear opposition to the proxy wars in Libya and for the UN to expose and expel Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia from their mischief-making in Libya.
Western media have been most silent on the fact that it was the reckless NATO intervention of March 2011 that set in motion the warfare and killings that plague Libya today. Investigative journalists such as Patrick Cockburn have exposed the billionaires in the Gulf who bankroll the salaries of up to 100,000 fighters.
Officials of the State Department are fully aware that Gulf states have an interest in facilitating or turning a blind eye to terrorist financing.
Those members of the current Security Council of the United Nations this year, such as Malaysia, Angola and Venezuela cannot allow themselves to be rail-roaded by the members of NATO who authored the plans that gave birth to the present quagmire.
Before NATO’s intervention, Libya’s civil war was on the verge of ending, at the cost of barely 1,000 lives.
Since then, however, Libya has suffered at least 10 000 additional deaths from conflict. In other words, NATO’s intervention appears to have increased the violent death toll more than tenfold. — Pambazuka News.
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