[D66] Former colonial powers send military “advisers” to Libya

[Antid Oto]

Former colonial powers send military “advisers” to Libya
21 April 2011

Following Britain’s lead, France and Italy announced Wednesday that they too
will be sending military “advisers” to anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya, bringing
the three former colonial powers back into the region they once ruled.

Like their counterparts in London, representatives of the French and Italian
governments insisted that the sole purpose of deploying military officers to
Libya was to fulfill the mandate of United Nations Resolution 1973 authorizing a
no-fly zone over the North African country as well as “all necessary measures”
to protect civilians.

This is a patent and increasingly farcical lie that only underscores the
hypocritical role played by the UN in the entire Libyan affair. Three European
powers, backed by the United States, are intervening in an ongoing civil war
with the stated aim of bringing about “regime change”, i.e., installing a more
pliant puppet government that will secure their strategic and profit interests
in Libya and the broader region.

Significantly, both France and Italy had rejected sending military contingents
into Libya up until Tuesday, when Foreign Secretary William Hague announced
Britain was sending “advisers.”

On the same day, French Foreign Minister Alan Juppe had told reporters, “I
remain absolutely opposed to a deployment of troops on the ground,” and stressed
that such a deployment would not be allowed under the UN resolution, which
includes a clause formally barring the occupation of Libya by foreign forces.

Yet on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry announced,
“France has placed a small number of liaison officers alongside our special
envoy to Benghazi who are carrying out a liaison mission with the TNC
(Transitional National Council).” She insisted that this “mission” consisted of
giving the TNC “essentially technical, logistical and organization advice to
reinforce the protection of civilians and the distribution of humanitarian and
medical aid.”

This explanation echoed that of Hague, who insisted that sending British
military advisers to Benghazi had nothing to do with “training fighting forces
or arming them or equipping them,” but merely helping the so-called rebels to
“organize themselves to protect civilian life.” He added, “It’s not boots on the
ground; it’s not fighting forces; these are not people to fight on the
battlefield. These are people to advise on organization.”

The British daily Independent described one of these organization specialists as
“one of the most battle-hardened commanders in the British Army, with extensive
experience of combat in Afghanistan,” saying he would be one of team of “armed
British troops” being dispatched to Libya. If these are not “boots on the
ground,” then perhaps these trained killers have been supplied with alternative
footwear.

Italian Defense Minister Ignazio La Rossa announced Italy’s decision to deploy
army personnel in Libya. Just a day earlier, Italy’s Chief of Staff, General
Biagio Abrate, stressed that there had been no request for Italian troops and
that the conditions did not exist inside Libya for such a deployment.

La Rossa appeared to be somewhat “off-message,” failing to insist on the wholly
humanitarian character of the advisers’ mission. “There is a clear understanding
that the rebels have to be trained,” he said. “Italy is ready to send the same
number of military staff as Britain to be instructors in Italy.”

The Italian minister’s statement makes clear the reason for the abrupt reversal
of position by both Paris and Rome. Neither were going to be outdone by the
British in a scramble for control of Libya and its rich oil and gas resources.
This competition for the “spoils” of the war in Libya will inevitably drive its
further escalation.

The decision by the three European powers to send military advisers to Libya
comes precisely one month after the US, Britain and France launched the war of
aggression against the country. Warplanes from the three nations initiated a
continuous campaign of aerial bombardments that NATO generals claim has wiped
out at least one-third of Libya’s military, presumably killing thousands of
soldiers.

Despite the destruction and bloodletting, however, the air war has failed to
dislodge the government of Muammar Gaddafi and has proved inadequate in securing
any advance by the ”rebels” who the imperialist powers are supporting.

Now these powers have determined that “advisers” must be dispatched to train and
direct the operations of an armed insurgency that they played no small role in
instigating. As in the American experience in Vietnam, the logical next step is
sending in large numbers of combat troops.

Plans are well underway for this next escalation. The European Union has drawn
up plans to send 1,000 troops into the port city of Misrata “to secure sea and
land corridors inside the country,” as an EU spokesman put it. According to the
British Guardian, this invasion force “would not be engaged in a combat role but
would be authorised to fight if they or their humanitarian wards were threatened.”

The escalating intervention by the major European powers has immense historical
significance. For the first time since World War II, Italian troops are being
sent into Libya, a territory that Italy first invaded 100 years ago. Today they
go in the name of “humanitarianism”. A century ago, Italy justified its invasion
of what were then the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in the
name of its “civilizing” mission.

For the Libyan people, this invasion produced a tragedy of genocidal
proportions. Between the onset of Italian colonization and the routing of
Italy’s army in World War II, 42 years later, fully one half of Libya’s
population was murdered, starved to death or driven into exile.

Resistance to Italian rule was met with systematic aerial bombardment—for the
first time anywhere in the world—of the civilian population. Caravans, villages
and even livestock were destroyed from the air by the Italian military, which
also employed poison gas.

The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini saw Libya as a “population colony”, along
the same lines as its ally, Nazi Germany, viewed the territories to its east as
“living room” for the German people. And it utilized similar methods. In 1930,
100,000 people, mostly from nomadic tribes, were herded into concentration
camps, where at least half of them died. A year later, the Italians captured the
leader of the anti-colonial resistance, Omar Mukhtar, and hung him before an
assembled crowed of 20,000.

Italy’s record of fascist colonialism, however, was little different in its
effect from the “democratic” variety practiced by France and Britain. In
neighboring Algeria, which France ruled from 1830 to the Evian agreement of
1962, colonialism was similarly brutal and indeed, near genocidal, in its
suppression of any resistance by the population.

On May 8, 1945, known as VE Day, for Victory in Europe, as crowds in Europe and
American celebrated the defeat of Hitler’s regime, French forces in Algeria
carried out atrocities that rivaled those of the Nazis. Popular demonstrations
by Algerians calling for independence were met with massacres that claimed the
lives of tens of thousands. Algeria’s post-colonial government estimated that a
total of 1.5 million Algerians were killed during the long struggle for
independence.

And Britain, which divided the region up with France in the Sykes-Picot
agreement of 1916 and subjugated Libya’s neighbor, Egypt, for 70 years, has a
similar record of tyranny, torture and wholesale killing throughout the Middle
East and Africa. In Kenya, it herded some 320,000 Kikuyu into concentration
camps, where thousands were killed and tortured. And it employed similar methods
in its dirty war against the independence movement in Aden until it was forced
out in 1967.

This is the real record of Libya’s would-be “liberators,” who claim to be
motivated purely by humanitarian sympathy and concern for civilian life.

They see in the Libyan intervention an opportunity for reasserting their power
in the region that they once ruled so brutally and a means of countering the
revolutionary upsurge of Arab masses.

For the past decade, US imperialism has employed its military superiority in an
attempt to counter its protracted economic decline, asserting its hegemony by
means of armed intervention over the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and
the Caspian Basin.

Under the impact of the crisis that has gripped global capitalism since the
financial crash of 2008, Washington’s erstwhile European allies are being driven
onto the same path of imperialist militarism abroad, while carrying out
unrelenting attacks on the working class at home.

The scramble for Libya, like the scramble for Africa that preceded the First
World War, is preparing the way for inter-imperialist conflicts that lead to
global conflagration. Once again, the crisis of world capitalism threatens
mankind with a catastrophe that can be prevented only through the revolutionary
struggle of the international working class for socialism.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a21.shtml