Ghaddafi's death. A critic of the former Libyan leader breaks his silence

By Aroun Rashid Deen NY, USA

How history has come to pass, again,ghoulishly! This time, its victim: the self-proclaimed king of Sub-Saharan Africa, the flamboyant narcissist, Muammar Ghaddafi. History – in its chilling form – is not going to end with him because man, in his stubbornness to want to hold on to absolute power at all times at all costs, gets blinded, dumbed and deafened by Power-Absolute.

The video clip of a bloodied and dying Muammar Ghaddafi being bludgeoned is disturbing enough to rattle the very foundation of human conscience. The scene of his captors – Libyan revolutionary fighters – gloating as he faces death, horribly, brings to mind the scene in Homer’s The Iliad, where Achilles kills Hector and drags his body behind his chariot around Troy. It also reminds us of the delight taken by a mob of drunken and drug-induced Liberian rebels, led by a war-lord Prince Johnson, as they were slaying then-Liberian President Samuel Doe while cameras were rolling. The dying Samuel Doe lay naked, crying for mercy as he was stabbed to death and mocked.

What is troubling in this instance about Ghaddafi, as it was with Saddam Hussein, Samuel Doe and, to a lesser degree, Laurent Gbagbo of Cote D’Ivoire and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, is that we are witnessing the deadly blow of Power-Absolute being inflicted on its abuser. It always comes at a time when all that is left of man is the bare state of weakness, emptiness and irrelevance; features that also define us as mortal, but which we almost always brush aside or ignore once we command some level of political authority.As the distinguished French philosopher, Christian-thinker and essayist Simone Weil puts it in The Iliad: in the process of killing someone else we actually are killing ourselves. And as we witness the brutality on Ghaddafi that may have led to his death, we also actually witness ourselves, helplessly doomed, being killed.

I despise Ghaddafi – even in death – because of his role in the wars that brought about the brutal deaths of millions of Sierra Leoneans and Liberians and the devastation that those wars have brought to both countries. And what’s more, he was never held accountable for his actions.By the same token, I find no pleasure in witnessing his brutal death. Those who broadcast it on television or print it on their newspapers, however,should not be criticized as insensitive to its gruesome nature. They are just performing a responsibility they hold to the public.The alleged execution of the Libyan dictator has drawn worldwide concern and criticism not so much because he died but because of the brutal circumstances in the moments leading to his death – and witnessed by millions worldwide. Seeing, they say, is believing. However, seeing in this circumstance goes beyond believing. The savagery of what we witnessed is troubling.

With Ghaddafi abandoned, stripped of everything but his mere mortal self, what we see in that last moment is not a ‘powerful’ ruler but a representative of all of us – human beings – with our own blood spilling. This might account for the reason why some of us, despite our curiosity, turn away the moment we see it. But such brutal killings are

being carried out every day in the secret dungeons that also define the misguided absolute power of the Moammar Ghaddafis, the Hosni Mubaraks, the Samuel Does and the Saddam Husseins. Many have perished in the most gruesome ways at the hands of all these terrible men. Dictators often perceive their citizens as sub-human. In the early days of the protest-turned-revolt in Libya, Ghaddafi referred to the protestors as rats and cockroaches who would be tracked down, house to house, and crushed. The irony, of course, is that in the end is it Ghaddafi himself who, in an attempt to escape the rebels, was reduced to crawling in a drainage pipe, the home of rats and cockroaches.

Obsessed by the hunger for absolute power, dictators continuously mistake their authority for power. While they are only temporarily entrusted with the custody of authority, power is in the hands of the people, always. Authority is the legitimate consent that the governed entrust to the governor to rein as a leader, regardless of how that leader comes into the position. The people are the power. And when leaders try to wrest that power from the people at all costs, they end up hurting the very people who are the true custodians of absolute power. There is a limit to how much a leader can impose his will on the people, because only the governed have the ability to impose their will on the leader – as we have seen with all of the fallen men mentioned above.When a once great leader disgracefully succumbs, alas, people tend to wonder, with a troubled feeling of disbelief, why that is. History, as always, is merely at work.

The fall of Muammar Ghaddafi must serve as a warning to all leaders, be they autocratic, totalitarian or so-called democratic. History cannot be more clear: When leaders resort to devilish acts to cling to their authority, they end up making of their subjects the very devils who would eventually deliver them to their graves. Leaders of all nations great and small: You have been warned!

Aroun Rashid Deen is a freelance journalist. He lives in New York, USA

ard228@nyu.edu

Libya Needs Cancer of Gaddafi Removed, But U.S. More Slasher Than Surgeon

                                 

The Security Council voted late Thursday by 10 votes to zero, but with five abstentions, for a resolution that authorized military action to protect civilians. The resolution included many understandable reservations and cautions, bearing in mind the US record. Not least it precluded foreign occupation.

We can accept that a patient with a brain tumour might desperately need surgery, but there is still cause for alarm if Jack the Ripper offers to operate. Both method and motive are open to question.

So while no person with a conscience wants Gaddafi to win his sanguinary battle of repression against his own people, there are more than enough doubts that the US is the appropriate specialist to call. However, like Jack the Ripper - they do have the knives.  We should avoid the reflexive binary positions both of those who support any intervention in an Arab country and those who equally obdurately oppose any intervention by any Western power, anywhere.

In fact, ever since the 2005 General Assembly when Kofi Annan steered the UN General Assembly into accepting that that the Security Council’s remit over threats to peace and security extended to what was happening inside sovereign nations, there is legal grounds for Security Council intervention.

There is clearly present need, unless the world is prepared to stand by and watch massacres of disloyal Libyans. And of course, one of the problems with the US as a self-appointed instrument in this case is that Washington seems neutral about not dissimilar events in Bahrain, Yemen or even in Gaza, preferring to arm the perpetrators and provide some measure of diplomatic protection. The sudden US rediscovery of Libyan tyranny is also somewhat problematic, as indeed are its previous military attacks on Libya.

Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN spoke eloquently, and from her previous record, probably sincerely, about the need for intervention. However, a few weeks before she had with deep insincerity cast a veto expressing her own and American opinion on Israel’s repression and breaches of international law in the West Bank!

Even accepting the motive, method is a problem. Consistently in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the US has shown a predilection for high technology ariel warfare and shown a propensity to risk civilian life rather put its own military at risk. Even in Kosovo,  which most of the locals consider gratefully to have been a “good” war, President Clinton’s refusal to countenance ground forces or risk American casualties by bombing from below  15,000 feet incurred unnecessary casualties and eroded international support, while not frightening Serb leader Milosevic in the slightest.

In Libya, it might be different. Clearly identifiable columns of government forces trailing along the few passable roads along the coast would make an easily identifiable targets. But US over-caution, in wanting to take out Libya’s negligible air defences before acting could easily involve serious mistakes and casualties. No one who saw the WikiLeaks video of the helicopter gunning down journalists in Baghdad is going take the sensitivity of the US military for granted. We do not want Benghazi destroyed to save it.

On the positive side, decisive intervention would send a clear message to Gaddafi’s forces, largely one might presume motivated by fear of reprisals from the regime that there were speedier and worse consequences than that, or indeed an eventual trip to International Criminal Court in The Hague.  

As to motive, one of the reasons that Russia has been reluctant to consider a military option, apart from its own bugbears like Chechnya, has been Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s personal experience of American arrogance in times past. Moscow supported intervention against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and then as UN Ambassador he was consistently snubbed and humiliated by the US and UK as they pursued the resolutions, the sanctions, the air strikes and the rest, far beyond the intention of the resolutions or the will of the majority of the Security Council.

So, immediate surgery is needed. It would be best to find a more trusted surgeon, but if Jack the Ripper has the only scalpels, what do you do? 

Just before the vote I suggested that there are two elements that should be considered in any such UN resolution, both to get Russian and maybe even Chinese support, and to reassure many others around the world. 

The first is to ensure a sunset clause. Any mandate for military action should have precise limitations both about the nature of operations and a time limit. It should return to the Council within days or weeks for a renewal of authority. Secondly, there is a need  to ensure that there is some element of shared control over operations. After the Rwanda and Srebrenica debacles no one, including the UN Secretariat itself, would or should entrust this task to international civil servants. But a subcommittee of the Security Council, or even a revival of the long somnolent UN Military Staff Committee, of representatives of the Permanent Five members should provide some reassurance against irrational exuberance on the part of the  Pentagon. The machinery is there just waiting reactivation. Indeed the Pentagon has a Military Staff Committee whose purpose is to liaise with the UN body. 

It is possible that these might have averted some of the abstentions, but certainly the language of the resolution, invoking constant reporting to and monitoring by the Security Council and the Secretary General, averted the otherwise inevitable vetoes. Ban Ki Moon’s principled stands on the region’s regimes over the last few months, for which he has had insufficient credit, suggests he will certainly take the job seriously. 

Those who are opposed to intervention on principle will of course continue to do so. But the Libyan opposition, who have asked for help, are the ones who will pay the price for others’ high-mindedness.  Pragmatic mandates could help.

source:fpif.org