[D66] NATO declares formal end to criminal war on Libya

[Antid Oto]

NATO declares formal end to criminal war on Libya
1 November 2011

NATO formally ended its seven-month predatory war against Libya at midnight
Monday, having achieved its aim of regime change and opened up the country to
what its imperialist member states hope will be the unrestrained exploitation of
Libya’s huge energy resources by Western oil companies.

Speaking in Tripoli at a joint news conference with Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of
the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC), Monday, NATO’s secretary
general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, described the war as “a successful chapter in
NATO’s history,” claiming that it had created “a new Libya based on freedom,
democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

“Free Libya” lies in ruins. Much of its infrastructure has been destroyed and
whole cities, like Sirte, the target of a barbaric NATO siege that ended barely
one week ago, have been turned into ghost towns.

The war was launched in March of this year based on Resolution 1973, pushed
through the United National Security Council on the false pretense that it was
needed to authorize the imposition of a no-fly zone and other measures to
protect civilians from repression by the Gaddafi regime.

At the time, the US and the Western European powers, echoed by the media and a
whole layer of human rights organizations, liberal academics and pseudo-left
groups, claimed that such an authorization was required to forestall an imminent
massacre of thousands in the eastern city of Benghazi, the center of opposition
to Gaddafi.

There was no evidence substantiating the claims of an imminent massacre. But the
intervention launched in the name of saving human lives served to unleash a
bloodletting in Libya that has surpassed even the worst predictions of those
proclaiming the need for an immediate “humanitarian” military intervention.

Now all of them have blood on their hands, from academic scoundrels like
Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, who declared himself ready to
serve NATO, to pseudo-left groups like the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France,
which tried to paint the imperialist intervention as a “revolutionary process.”
The Libya war has made it clear that an entire layer of ex-lefts and so-called
liberals have become a vital constituency for imperialism, willing to justify
and celebrate mass murder in the interests of their own ruling elites.

According to the estimates given by the NATO-backed NTC, anywhere between 30,000
and 50,000 Libyans have lost their lives in the last eight months. Another
50,000 are said to have been wounded. Many of these dead and wounded are victims
of the relentless bombing campaign by NATO, which flew some 26,000 sorties
during the war, demolishing entire buildings, with their residents buried in the
rubble.

Others have died in bitter fighting between NATO-backed “rebels”—armed, trained
and led by special forces units and intelligence operatives from France,
Britain, the US and Qatar—and forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime. Still more
have been massacred in tribal revenge killings. In Sirte alone, hundreds of
bodies have been discovered over the past week in mass graves or left out in the
open to rot, many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and bullet
holes in their heads. In Sirte, the predictions of the Western powers of a
massacre in Libya have been fully realized, but it is NATO and its local agents
that have carried it out.

As Rasmussen was extolling the virtues of a “free Libya” based on “human rights
and the rule of law,” Human Rights Watch issued a report providing a chillingly
detailed account of the mass racist pogroms that have been carried out against
black-skinned Libyans and immigrant workers from elsewhere in Africa.

The report centers on the fate of the people of Tawergha, a predominantly black
town of 30,000 south of Misrata, whose residents have been ethnically cleansed
from the area, many of them murdered, detained and tortured at the hands of
NATO-backed militias for their suspected sympathy for Gaddafi. Tawergha has been
emptied of its inhabitants, its buildings vandalized, burned and looted, and its
residents still hunted down wherever they go.

The report describes the brutal fate of a number of Tawerghans who were tortured
to death with whips, clubs, electric shock and other means of inflicting agony.

One man, who survived, described his ordeal: “They told me to confess that I
raped five people. I don't know why five people. They hung me with a pole
between my legs and my arms. They beat me up. They used a whip for horses and
told me to confess... That lasted five hours. They whipped me on my feet, my
legs, my hands. There were lots of different people in civilian clothes. They
were taking turns. The investigator was giving orders. After I was beaten, I
passed out for five minutes. When I woke up they were standing over me, spitting
and cursing at me, and saying, ‘We will send you back to Africa.’”

Human Rights Watch said that the scars all over the man’s body substantiated his
account.

Others who had fled Tawergha described being hunted down by militiamen in the
places they had taken refuge, with the gunmen calling them “slaves” and “monkeys.”

No one knows with any certainty how many have been killed in this manner or
exactly how many thousands more are still being held in makeshift prison camps
run by the NATO-backed “rebel” torturers.

One thing is certain, the gruesome lynch mob murder of Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi, the singular event that led to NATO’s declaration of “mission
accomplished” was no aberration. The frenzied beating and torture, which as cell
phone videos have made clear, included the sodomizing of Gaddafi with a knife,
followed by his cold-blooded execution, was representative of the brutal methods
employed by NATO-backed forces against thousands of Libyans.

A regime that takes power on such foundations can only be one of continued
violence and repression that will make a mockery of Rasmussen’s invocations of
“freedom” and “human rights.” Dominated by ex-Gaddafi ministers and long-time
assets of Western intelligence agencies, the task posed to such a regime by its
US and NATO masters is that of turning back the clock 42 years to the days of
King Idris, when the US and British military combined with Big Oil effectively
ran the country.

While NATO has declared an end to its intervention, the rape of Libya by the
major Western powers has only begun. Qatar’s senior military commander reported
last week that these powers have already set in motion the establishment of a
“new alliance to continue supporting Libya.”

A critical role that NATO has played in the Libyan intervention was that of
mediating the conflicting interests of rival imperialist powers— the US, France,
Britain, Italy— all bent on securing the largest share possible of the country’s
oil wealth at the immediate expense of the two powers that they aim to freeze
out of North Africa: China and Russia. Whether the new alliance announced by the
Qatari general can contain the tensions generated by the scramble for Libya’s
resources remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, the NATO intervention for regime change in Libya has
ushered in a new period of imperialist plunder, driven by the profound crisis of
world capitalism and pointing inevitably toward new and far deadlier world
conflagrations.

The struggle against the immense and growing threat posed by imperialist war can
be waged only to the extent that it is based upon the independent political
mobilization of the working class on an international scale in the struggle for
the socialist transformation of society.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pers-n01.shtml