This is the sort of story it’s easy to gather around and celebrate, a heart warmer for those in the west watching the long oppressed break the bonds of oppression and join the rest of us in the proverbial land of milk and honey.
For anyone who grew up in the eighties or earlier, the toppling of “Wacky Gaddafi” is an event in and of itself. The grand old man of mid-east despots, Gaddafi was the blue print for those that followed. Before Saddam, before Ahmadinejad, there was Gaddafi. Seeing him go down, something forty years in the making, makes it all worth while for many. Surely, the new boss to come will be a shining light in Libya in contrast to Gaddafi’s black hole.
However, over the last 72 hours, the negative on the other side of the snapshot is slowly coming into focus, and it’s telling a darker story. While UN, NTC, and imperial voices from the old and new world alike preach the same sermon, that this will not turn into another quagmire in the desert, many warning signs suggest the intervention record is about to start skipping again.
The NTC, UN, and various other governments and humanitarian organizations are scrambling to reverse the humanitarian crisis in
Worse still, it could turn into a bloodbath.
An article from The Independent on Saturday indicates a growing trend of revenge killings being perpetrated by Rebel soldiers on Sub Saharan Africans within
Migrant workers have been found among the executed, and in some cases the men killed had been lynched. The rebels claim they are being killed in gunfights. This begs the question, why do so many dead men need to have their hands bound behind their backs?
In their rush to get the old boss out, did
Alternatively, did they just not care?
There is little altruism in anything the power brokers of the world do these days, if ever there was. There is money to be made here, and resources to be had. NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil has already said the new government would favour foreign countries that had supported the rebellion when discussing contracts for Libya’s oil, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.
Oil, though the favoured boogeyman of conspiracy theorists everywhere, doesn’t tell the entire story. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Britain, France and the United States extended the hand of friendship to Gaddafi and brought him “in from the cold”.
Gaddafi and the western powers had been making nice for quite some time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There was no reason for western oil interests to foment revolt for his removal as a push to get their share of Libyan oil. Their hands were already covered in it. What he may have been doing though, was working to turn the entire global economic hierarchy inside out.
Reports have surfaced suggesting Gaddafi was working toward a standard African Gold Dinar to trade in, drastically altering the value of global currencies. Gaddafi was pushing African and Arab nations to adopt this single gold dinar as a strong rival to the U.S. dollar and the euro.
A country’s wealth would no longer rely on the value of it’s currency, but on how much gold it had. Such a plan would cause havoc for the corporate elite who control the central banks of the world.
It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraqi oil would be traded in Euros, not US dollars moving forward. Within a few years, Iraq had been invaded and Hussein deposed, again under the guise of liberating a nation from an oppressive dictator.
Gaddafi may have been looking to make the monetary system carefully constructed by the executives, lawmakers, and economists of the west nearly irrelevant. That certainly sounds like a good reason to foment rebellion and get shut of the guy trying to blow your financial house down.
The new man in charge will no doubt play ball with the west, in every way they want him to. At least that’s the rationale. But in a nation of angry rebels, potentially dangerous remnants of the old regime, and tribal warlords looking after their own interests, is the reality that simple? Will the west create another frankenstein’s monster in another middle eastern nation they will eventually have to take care of some twenty or thirty years down the road? This is the strange duality of the “Arab Spring”. People long oppressed are rising up and fighting for change, for a new way of living. The problem is the men behind the curtain, and what the outcome of their long game will be.
Who’s going to be the new boss? And will he end up being the same as the old boss?
