[D66] The slaughter in Sirte

[Antid Oto]

The slaughter in Sirte
3 October 2011

NATO countries led by the US, Britain, and France are committing terrible war
crimes in the Libyan city of Sirte. In their frenzied drive to crush all
remaining resistance in the North African state, NATO and its proxy militia
forces aligned with the National Transitional Council are unleashing
indiscriminate military force, killing civilians and destroying buildings and
infrastructure throughout the urban centre.

Numerous civilian refugees who have managed to escape the siege have reported
seeing schools, hospitals, homes, and other civilian buildings destroyed by NATO
bombs. Air raids are now taking place around the clock. Anti-Gaddafi militiamen
are firing rockets, mortar rounds and tank shells, without even pretending that
they are aiming at any particular targets within the city of 100,000 people.
Sirte is suffering from severe shortages of food, water and medicine supplies,
further fuelling the humanitarian crisis. Children, the elderly and other
vulnerable people are especially affected.

The violence underscores the predatory economic and geostrategic calculations
behind the regime-change campaign spearheaded by US President Barack Obama,
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Washington and its European allies aim to seize control of Libya’s lucrative oil
reserves, at the same time reasserting their dominance in North Africa and
countering the challenge posed to their interests by the revolutionary uprisings
in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia.

The slaughter in Sirte further exposes the “humanitarian” pretext for the war.
Last March the imperialist governments and their mouthpieces in the media
claimed, without evidence, that Gaddafi’s forces were on the verge of committing
a massacre in Benghazi. Now in Sirte, NATO is perpetrating an actual bloodbath
on the city’s population in an attempt to overcome the resistance in one of the
last pro-Gaddafi strongholds.

Unsurprisingly, the various media pundits and political figures in the US and
Europe who backed the war on the basis of “protecting civilians”—including
various so-called “lefts” such as Professor Juan Cole and the Nation
magazine—are now uniformly silent amid the unfolding slaughter.

According to estimates previously released by the National Transitional Council
(NTC), by early September 30,000 people had been killed and 50,000 wounded in
the war. The toll continues to escalate. According to NATO’s publicly released
figures, their bombers recorded 121 separate “key hits” in Sirte in the last two
weeks of September alone. These air strikes are being conducted on the basis of
limited or no intelligence and therefore can only be described as indiscriminate
and in blatant contravention of international law.

Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in Sirte, though the exact number
remains unclear. According to the Red Cross, about 18,000 have left the city.
The local population, however, has been swelled by a recent influx of refugees
from surrounding areas. This includes a significant number of dark-skinned
Libyan families from Tawargha, a town that has been devastated and depopulated
by the NTC militias that conducted a murderous racist pogrom there in August and
early September.

The people of Sirte are being subjected to a brutal collective punishment for
their bitter and determined opposition to the NTC and the NATO intervention. The
city is also symbolically identified with the deposed regime. It is Gaddafi’s
birthplace and childhood home, and his former legislative body, the General
Peoples Congress, convened in Sirte.

For the US, British, and French governments, the destruction serves as a warning
to the entire Libyan population—any resistance to the post-Gaddafi order that is
to be established under NATO auspices will confront violent repression.

There is a definite parallel between the situation in Sirte and the brutal US
offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah during November-December 2004. About
10,000 US troops and marines levelled the city of 250,000 people,
indiscriminately bombing homes, factories and mosques. The operation was
intended to crush the Sunni insurgency against the illegal occupation by
terrorising the entire Iraqi people. As is now the case in Sirte, the fighting
in Fallujah was less a war or battle than it was an outright massacre, with a
vastly outnumbered and lightly armed group of resistance fighters overcome by
the world’s most destructive and technologically advanced ground and air forces.

NATO’s conduct of the war in Libya during what appears to be its final stages is
also undoubtedly intended to send a signal to governments throughout the Middle
East and internationally. In March, Sarkozy made this clear in no uncertain
terms, declaring: “Every ruler should understand, and especially every Arab
ruler should understand, that the reaction of the international community and of
Europe will from this moment on each time be the same.”

Exactly one hundred years ago, on October 3, 1911, Italian forces began a naval
bombardment of Tripoli, as part of their drive to annexe the Ottoman provinces
of Tripolitania, Fezzna and Cyrenaica, which constitute present-day Libya. The
Italian campaign quickly extended from an assault on the Ottoman military forces
to a campaign of indiscriminate reprisal attacks and massacres against the local
population who rose up against the colonial forces. The Italo-Turkish war, which
ended in October 1912, featured a one-sided utilisation of modern military
technology, including the world’s first aerial reconnaissance flights and
bombing raids.

Lenin described the war as a “perfected, civilised bloodbath.”

None of these words would need to be revised to describe what is now unfolding
in Libya. The re-emergence of nakedly colonial-style operations in the
twenty-first century is an expression of the deepening crisis of the world
capitalist order. The American ruling elite desperately seeks to use its
military dominance as a means of offsetting its rapidly eroding economic
position. At the same time, the European imperialist powers see an opportunity
to regain lost influence in their former colonies, opening up new export markets
and securing access to lucrative natural resources.

Even before the fighting has finished, various politicians and accompanying
corporate bagmen from the US and Europe have rushed to Tripoli. Everyone is
scrambling to secure their cut, above all of the North African state’s enormous
oil reserves—recently described by the US ambassador there as the Libyan “jewel
in the crown.”

As in the period prior to 1914, humanity confronts a descent into imperialist
barbarism. A struggle against war and militarism requires the building of an
independent political movement of the working class based on a socialist and
internationalist program to abolish the profit system.

Patrick O’Connor

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o03.shtml