[D66] NATO prepares bloodbath in Sirte

[Antid Oto]

Kijk Bakker: hier een merkwaardige observatie van het rode kruis:

http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/5444/De-opstand-in-Libie/article/detail/2941361/2011/10/02/Situatie-in-belegerd-Sirte-afschuwelijk.dhtml

On 2-9-2011 9:05, Antid Oto wrote:
> NATO prepares bloodbath in Sirte
> 1 September 2011
>
> Nearly six months after securing a United Nations Security Council resolution
> authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya and the use of “all necessary measures… to
> protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack,” the US
> and its NATO allies, former colonial powers, are mounting a barbaric siege of a
> major population center that threatens to produce civilian casualties on a mass
> scale.
>
> In their breathless promotion of the “final battle” to realize the real US-NATO
> aim in Libya—regime-change—few in the Western media have bothered to consider
> the fact that the major imperialist powers are carrying out precisely the kind
> of act they claimed their war was designed to prevent.
>
> Gaddafi’s troops were marching on Benghazi, the world was told, and only a
> “humanitarian” intervention by NATO could save the city’s innocent population.
> Now the “rebels” are encircling Sirte, led by British and Qatari special forces
> troops, intelligence operatives and mercenary military contractors, while the
> city’s population is being pounded by NATO bombs and cut off from food, fuel and
> all basic supplies.
>
> The sheer contempt shown by the US and the Western European powers for legality
> and world public opinion is breathtaking. The pretense that NATO is acting under
> the terms of the UN resolution that provided a fig leaf for its intervention is
> more than absurd; it has become obscene.
>
> One has to go back to the crimes of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s to
> search for parallels to such a siege: the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish
> Civil War, the siege of Leningrad and the Warsaw Ghetto.
>
> NATO warplanes have over the past few days conducted scores of air strikes
> against Sirte, the town of Bani Walid to its west and the roads linking the two.
> While there have been no independent reports from Sirte, the spokesman for the
> Gaddafi regime, Moussa Ibrahim, reported that the continuous bomb and missile
> attacks have killed 1,000 people in the city and left many more wounded.
>
> Part of this ferocious air assault is aimed at assassinating Colonel Muammar
> Gaddafi, who is believed by some to have taken refuge in the city or its
> surrounding area. Western special forces are reportedly on the ground hunting
> for Gaddafi, while an array of US spy planes have been deployed to pinpoint his
> whereabouts.
>
> The NATO-led rebels have taken up positions on the main coastal highway both
> east and west of Sirte, with orders to stay in place until the NATO blitzkrieg
> has sufficiently annihilated the city’s defenders.
>
> The National Transitional Council (NTC), the self-appointed body of ex-Gaddafi
> ministers, Western intelligence assets, Islamists and tribal functionaries that
> has been recognized by the major powers as the legitimate government of Libya,
> has announced a surrender-or-die ultimatum to the city. If a surrender is not
> forthcoming by Saturday, they say, the city will be subjected to military assault.
>
> “We have been given no indication of a peaceful surrender,” an NTC military
> spokesman, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, told a press conference in Benghazi. “We
> continue to seek a peaceful solution, but on Saturday we will use different
> methods against these criminals.”
>
> “Sometimes to avoid bloodshed you must shed blood, and the faster we do this the
> less blood we will shed,” said Ali Tarhouni, the deputy head of the NTC.
>
> The Western media is justifying a bloodbath in advance, reporting that the
> “rebels” have “unfinished business” or “scores to settle” with Sirte’s
> defenders, which are said to include army units involved in the attacks on
> Misrata and Benghazi. The city is also Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his
> tribe, the Gaddafifahs.
>
> The criminal methods employed by NATO and its “rebel” proxies—the bombing of
> cities, attempted assassinations, massacres and the lynching of black
> sub-Saharan African immigrant workers—are in sync with the aim of the war:
> imperialist conquest.
>
> Having supported the Western-backed dictatorships of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in
> Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt against popular revolts until the bitter end,
> the US and its NATO allies decided to intervene in Libya, which lies
> strategically between these two countries. They set about hijacking the
> anti-Gaddafi demonstrations that broke out last February and fomenting a civil
> war as a vehicle for direct NATO intervention. To this end, British and French
> special forces units were deployed on the ground in Libya well before any UN
> resolution was ever discussed.
>
> This intervention was never about protecting the civilian population. Tellingly,
> a spokesman for the NTC Wednesday estimated that the total number of Libyans
> killed in the last six months—both civilians and combatants—has risen to over
> 50,000. If one were to accept as good coin the pretense that NATO waged its war
> for the purpose of saving human lives, it would have to be judged a colossal
> failure. This war has produced far more carnage than any repression that
> preceded it.
>
> The goal of the NATO war is to install a puppet regime in Tripoli that will be a
> more pliant tool of the Western governments and energy conglomerates. Ruling
> circles in Washington, London, Paris and Rome are salivating over the prospect
> of turning the clock back 42 years to the days when the corrupt monarchy of King
> Idris let Standard Oil write Libya’s petroleum laws and provided military bases
> to both the US and Britain.
>
> Consolidating such neocolonial aims will no doubt entail an even greater amount
> of bloodshed in suppressing popular opposition within Libya.
>
> The crimes being carried out against the people of Libya and the threat of a far
> wider conflagration that is inherent in the inter-imperialist tensions over who
> will control the country’s oil wealth pose the urgent necessity of a new antiwar
> movement, based on the working class and a socialist perspective.
>
> The struggle against war must be joined with the fight against the assault on
> jobs, living standards and basic social and democratic rights taking place in
> virtually every country. It must be consciously directed against the source of
> both militarism and the unfolding social counterrevolution—the capitalist profit
> system.
>
> Bill Van Auken
>
> http://wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s01.shtml
>