Regime Change: The Libya reality

and economic matters.
It has become apparently clear that this was a typical regime change parcel packaged as international concerns for the ordinary citizens of Libya. It was the desire to loot oil packaged and repackaged as the introduction of democracy, good governance and accountability, which was in dearth in 40 years of Gaddafi’s rule in Libya.
The statement that NATO’s invasion of Libya prevented Gaddafi’s aggression against Benghazi is unsupported and false and was meant to justify a war against the Libyan leader. Yet, France and its allies abused the resolution to topple Gaddafi, creating a civil war that is raging on right now.
In the end of 2011 the Swiss “Sonntags Zeitung” published an interview with the former President of the Libyan “League for Human Rights” Mr Soliman Bouchuiguir in which he confessed that the report on the crimes of Gaddafi’s regime (mass murders and rapes, bombing of civilians and using of mercenaries,) passed by him to the “Court of Human Rights” in February 2011, were unsubstantiated.
So were the previously published facts of supposedly 16 000 killed, 12 000 wounded and hundreds missing in Libya. The sad story, neither CHR, nor the UN Security Council, took the time to question this LHR data while passing a decision concerning the government in Libya.
Even the “International Criminal Court” failed to authenticate this information and by not doing so issued warrants for the arrest of Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and the chief of the Libyan Secret Police Mr A as-Senus practically on grounds of rumours.
The United States and its Western allies have successfully adopted a scheme for unleashing wars against hostile governments like the one that was in Libya.
Supplying media with obviously false information they managed to create a justification for an aggression. The matching situation now takes place in Syria.
NATO is trying to silence the fact that civilian causalities actually took place during its air strikes in Libya.  Only in the first days of its operations 90 civilians (including 3 minors) were killed and more than 150 wounded. NATO’s air strikes inflicted serious damage to the country infrastructure, the reconstruction of which will be both time-consuming and financially demanding.
It is essential for the ICC to conduct an unprejudiced investigation of the cases of violation of the provisions of International Law that transpired in Libya.
The president of South Africa Mr Jacob Zuma has already called for such an action on behalf of the AU but he might be covering up for the blunder he made at the UN security council.
Except for President Mugabe, who seemed to be the only one gifted with hindsight, the current crop of African leaders, were only shocked to see Libya degenerating into war, as at first they never saw the regime change reality, behind the NATO intervention.
The rest of the African leaders could not figure out how the UN resolution on Libya would impact on African Governance and deal a blow to the continent’s right to self determination.
As I write today, war is raging on in Libya and the new leaders are failing to stamp their authority, and neither has Nato proved helpful. Only last week Libyan troops intervened to end fighting between rival tribes in the eastern desert, a rare example of the government in Tripoli trying to impose its authority over the fractious country. Dozens of people have been killed over the past month in the city of Al Kufra, near Libya’s borders with Chad, Sudan and Egypt, after a long-standing rivalry between two tribes erupted into violence.
The fighting was a fresh challenge for Libya’s new leadership which took over after the overthrowing Gaddafi, but has struggled to restore stability, hampered by the lack of an effective national army. Armed forces chief of staff Yousef al-Mangoush said the intervention in Al Kufra showed the national army, which has only taken shape in the past few weeks, was now capable of enforcing law and order. “Units of the national army are now in Kufra inside the airport and will enter vital areas in the city in order to secure the city,” he told a news conference. Now the army actually exists and its units are present and have secured the airport and the region. . . (It) will do everything in its power to solve this problem.”
But that seems not true. The country is in trouble, unity is far away from being reached and full-scale war is on the brink of starting. Representatives of the two rival tribes in Al Kufra, the Tabu and Zwai, confirmed that there was a halt in the fighting. “The (national army) commandos have taken control of the region,” Adelbari Idriss, from the Zwai tribe, said by telephone.
Members of the two tribes said that they were using the restored calm to try to fly people wounded in the conflict to hospitals in the capital, Tripoli. Members of the Tibu ethnic group are mainly found in Chad but also inhabit parts of southern Libya. The Zwai tribe accused the Tibu of attacking Al Kufra, backed by mercenaries from Chad. The Tibu said it was they who came under attack. The region has a history of violence involving tribes.

l Professor Amitai Chiku is a political science lecturer at Makerere University, Tanzania. Day Africa.com