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(HERALD) Libya: One year after the rebellion

Libya: One year after the rebellion
Dr Mumba Gandiya

Tomorrow, it will be exactly one year after the United Nations sealed the fate of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, by proclaiming a war that started disguised as superintending over a no-fly zone to save the ordinary people of Libya.

This war has largely proved to be the West’s huge cheat on African politics and murder with actual intent. On March 17, 2012, UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was passed, imposing a no-fly zone over Libya.

The accusations were that Gaddafi had bombed his own people from air and land, used foreign mercenaries, ordered the use of rape as a weapon, and killed by the thousands.

To date another country is under a similar threat. Sanctions against Syria and looming prospects of an intervention into the country are drawing ever more parallels with the war in Libya and this has inspired this article. But as it turned out in Libya the “facts” used to wage a “humanitarian war” on Tripoli, underwent almost no verification.

To date, no tangible evidence has been given to prove that Gaddafi committed the crimes but the whole world was tricked by Nicholas Sarkozy that Gaddafi was about to strike Benghazi, hence the people needed to be saved from his savagery.

Last week, international filmmaker and independent journalist Julien Teil concluded that up to now there is no evidence to justify the humanitarian war in Libya.

In the beginning of this story, we got some allegations that have been looked at and send to the UN Human Rights Council and those allegations had never been verified or checked. And these had been used also as material for the ICC case against Libya.

Now one year down the line, Gaddafi is dead after a brutal murder and no one can prove there was bombing. All I know is that there is no evidence of bombing.

I happened to come across a statement by the one who went to the UN Human Rights Council, Sliman Bouchuiguir. Sliman Bouchuiguir was the former Secretary General of the Libyan League for Human Rights and is now the Libyan ambassador to Switzerland in Bern.

On February 25 last year, he went to the UN Human Rights Council to present his organisation’s allegations of crimes against Gaddafi’s government. In that session, a decision was taken to freeze Libya’s membership of the Council. He underlined the number of deaths — 6 000, including 3 000 in Tripoli alone.

When a journalist asked Bouchuiguir how these claims can be verified, he pointed to the former rebels — now Libya’s government — as his source.

“I got that information from the Libyan Prime Minister. Mr Mahmoud of the Warfallah Tribe who was on the other side of the National Transitional Council was the one who gave me these numbers,” he stated.

Yet there are still those who defend the Libyan intervention, like a former French intelligence officer.

We clearly have in this case the fog of war. It is very likely that some crimes attributed to Gaddafi were false or exaggerated yet on June 27, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Ocampo Moreno’s request for arrest warrants for Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his intelligence chief was granted.

Some of us had the fortune of going through the pages of the arrest warrant application, most of which were redacted. Among the pages open to the public were lists of articles to support the case, one of which was Bouchuiguir’s February 25 speech — the one based on information Bouchuiguir himself said he got from the NTC, with no evidence or documents to back the staggering numbers. But those who raised questions risked being accused of taking the side of a man seen as a brutal dictator, already labelled by some world powers as “the bad guy”.

I think that was absurd.

If you are against declaring war on a country, it is not because you like the government.

l Dr Mumba Gandiya is a Zambian political analyst, who once worked in Libya. Day Africa.com

Labels: ICC, LIBYA, MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, NATO, WAR CRIMES

posted by MrK @ 5:54 PM