Barefaced scramble for Africa again

Nerun Yakub Thinking sections across the world watch with utter dismay the continuing scramble of the Euro-American consortium to reserve African resources for themselves, now that the spectacularly eccentric, authoritarian nationalist, Muammer Qaddafi of Libya, has been done in --- in the most barefaced and barbaric manner --- on October 20. As one observer noted last month, 'NATO went into the war with the putative aim of upholding the Geneva Conventions --- to prevent the massacre of civilians by a state.... the war ended with the violation of those very conditions ..' (Vijay Anand, Frontline, 18 Nov 2011) It remains to be seen what the lessons from the next regime change operations of the Anglo-Saxon imperialists --- ongoing in Syria ---- would be. The North Atlantic and Gulf-Arab controlled media, including their illustrious leaders, greeted the gruesome and grisly desecration of the captured man with drunken glee. One need not be an unqualified admirer of the Libyan nation-builder to be revulsed at the dastardly machinations, media manipulations and gross violation of internationally recognised norms. The cell video of the obscene moment, that was immediately uploaded on the internet, showed ' ... Qaddafi bloodied but alive ---- pushed around, thrown on to the bonnet of a car to be paraded ... Qaddafi pleaded, 'Don't you know that what you are doing is wrong? ...' The baying rebels paid no heed and their 'civilized' Euro-American sponsors couldn't care less. For to abide by Article 13 of the Geneva Conventions and stop the berserk anti-Qaddafi captors from doing what they did ( they are said to have even sodomised him with the sharp end of their weapon ) would have meant letting let him live to go through the ' legal process of arrest, trial and judiciously decided punishment' ---- as the office of the UN Special Rapporteur (on protecting human rights while countering terrorism ), had advised, soon after the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May. That would have inconvenienced the aggressors. The next image was that of a bloodier Qaddafi, dead, with a bullet in the head, shot point blank. Despite the fact that Qaddafi had become an ally of the West in the 'War against Terror,' hostilities inside Libya started being ochestrated, with covert elements from the US-NATO alliance operating on Libyan soil, many, many months before the actual rebellion erupted. And the backbone of the 'pro-democracy' elements was reportedly formed with al-Qaeda affiliates, the very same against whom the West's ' War on Terror' game plan had been set up! And the pretext for the so called humanitarian intervention itself was based entirely on a lie, courtesy Barack Obama. As early as February, the US President declared that if NATO had waited 'one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.' This was repeated over and over again on TV channels and all the halls of power until Resolutions 1970 and 1973 were passed in the UN Security Council, invoking the dubious principle of the 'responsibility to protect'. According to media reports (not embedded in the NATO-US circuit), there was no credible evidence that a 'massacre' of a 100,000 was imminent in Benghazi. Nor were there any such massacres in the other rebellious areas under Qaddafi's troops. Writes Aijaz Ahmed in Frontline, Nov 18, 2011, 'On the contrary, there is incontrovertible evidence of massacres at the hands of NATO's mercenaries. Neighbouring countries, such as Niger, Mali and Chad, have reported the eviction of some 300,000 black African residents from Libya as NATO's local allies and clients rolled on towards Tripoli under the devastating shield of NATO's own 40,000 plus bombings over large parts of Libya .......... there are also credible reports of lynchings and massacres of black Libyans themselves.The scale of these depredations is yet undetermined but it is already clear that upwards of 50,000 have died as a result of the war unleashed by NATO with the collusion of the Security Council, and half a million or more have been rendered homeless, mostly at the hands of NATO-armed 'rebels' ...........' (Libya recolonised) The US-NATO combine is now set on employing the 'Libyan model' on other targets ---- that is, using deadly fire power from above, together with local proxy forces down below, with minimal cost to the NATO states themselves. Bashar-al-Assad's Syria is the immediate candidate. Here, as John Cherian of the same journal writes,'Washington is openly supporting the opposition, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, in its ongoing efforts to topple the government. It has roped in its regional allies --- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar --- to keep funds and arms flowing to the Syrian opposition. The objective seems to be to stoke a civil war and then intervene with the tried-and-tested ploy of " humanitarian intervention" or the "right to protect (R2P) doctrine" concocted by the West.' Armed adventures continue across Africa. There are more drone attacks in Somalia; special forces have been deployed in Uganda and the Kenyan armed forces have been given the green signal to go into Somalia. Analysts are sanguine that the US will soon get the new Libyan government to let them build a base within Libya to shift AFRICOM, the US Africa Command --- at present in Germany's Stuttgart ---- on to the African continent. Anti-authoritarian activists need to pause and re-think. The repercussions of externally assisted 'democracy and freedom' can be lethal when the liberal human rights discourse gets co-opted and utilised to justify imperial interventionism in the affairs of sovereign states, robbing their resources and turning them into vassals. Adrian Salbuchi, the Argentinian author, analyst and founder of the Argentine Second Republic Movement, makes plain the pattern that the US-NATO powers have been following in the past decades. 'First they target a country by calling it a rogue state; then they support local terrorists and call them freedom fighters; then they bring death and destruction upon civilians and they call it UN sanctions. Then they spread lies and call it the International Community's opinions, expressed in the Western media. Then they invade and control the country and call it liberation and finally they steal appetizing oil and call it foreign investment and reconstruction.' (Russia Today, October 21, 2011)