Ah, Britain. GREAT Britain. It’s things like Comic Relief that make us great, that show our true spirit of generosity and kindness, not to mention irony. We spend a billion pounds bombing Libya - killing tens of thousands of people and destroying the African country that has achieved most in terms of poverty alleviation - and then we devote an entire evening of prime-time television to raising money to tackle poverty in Africa. Pats on the back all round. May our consciences rest easy tonight. As a friend said, “It’s like stabbing a person a thousand times, and then donating a pint of blood for their surgery.”

So France (with US and British support) has invaded Mali to put a stop to an uprising of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb - an organisation closely affiliated with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which France enthusiastically supported in the takeover of Libya. This is after the west didn’t lift a finger in response to last year’s coup that overthrew Amadou Toumani Touré. To paraphrase Marvin Gaye, what the f*** is going on?

It’s very difficult to find reliable analysis on this issue right now, but a few things seem clear:

1) France’s main target is not Mali but neighbouring Algeria, which after Libya’s fall is the last remaining resistant state in North Africa. Although Algeria has made plenty of compromises with the west for the sake of preserving stability in a hostile world, it remains a block to neocolonial ambitions in Africa, and continues to operate in a way that is not at all acceptable to the West (for example having a largely nationalised economy, rejecting normalised relations with Israel, and being the biggest sponsor of the African Union). Forcing AQIM to focus their efforts on Algeria would be a major strategic victory for Algeria’s erstwhile coloniser, France.

2) The French/US/British intervention is at least partly designed to pre-empt an African response to the Mali crisis, thereby further disempowering the African Union and promoting the strategic objectives of Africom.

3) Mali has a whole lot of gold, uranium and salt. Control of these resources is of course an important long-term objective over which the imperialist countries compete.

4) This madness would not have been possible when Gaddafi was alive. The overthrow of the Libyan Jamahiriya opened the floodgates for a new wave of militarised colonialism in Africa.

The following article is based on a speech I gave at Brunel University at the invitation of the Brunel Socialist and Progressive Society.

There is currently a very serious threat of war against Iran and Syria. Algeria, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere are also on the ‘hit list’. The key issue for the anti-war movement in the west is, obviously, what can we do to prevent wars of imperialist aggression taking place?

With that question in mind, we need to review the recent history of an African nation that goes by the name of Libya - until quite recently known as the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In March last year, the United Nations Security Council established a “no fly zone” - which it turns out is ruling class slang for “brutal war of aggression” - ostensibly to prevent the Libyan government from killing unarmed protestors. A year later, I believe it is fair to say that the results of that war have been nothing short of tragic.

Disaster in Libya

It was supposedly a war to save lives, and yet the most reliable estimate we have to date says that 50,000 people have died that wouldn’t otherwise have died. And don’t forget Libya’s population is only 6 million. In Britain, with a population of around 60 million, the proportional number of deaths would be half a million.

Tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned and tortured by militias associated with the ruling National Transitional Council - “the rebels”. The people we were told were the “good guys”. And I’m not inventing scare stories - this has all been has been widely documented.

Over the course of the year - and reports of this started to emerge as early as February 2011, before the ‘no fly zone’ was even being discussed - Libya has witnessed widespread lynching and torture of black Libyans and sub-Saharan migrant workers, who have been targeted because of the colour of their skin. We’ve seen the videos of so-called ‘rebels’ caging black Africans like animals in a zoo, force feeding them cotton flags. We’ve seen reports of black Libyans being forced to climb up a pole shouting ‘Monkey need banana’. In 2011! Arab supremacists and militant religious sectarians, wholly supported by the western intelligence agencies and the reactionary feudal monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, lynching black Libyans whilst claiming to be fighting for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. In 2011! If this were happening in Mississippi, everyone would be shouting about it, and yet it’s barely reported.

The war has created an estimated 700,000 refugees - over 10% of the population.

So much of Libya’s infrastructure has been destroyed, experts who know the country well have described it having been “bombed into the stone age”. Libya is a technically advanced country. The Great Man-Made River, for example, is considered as an amazing feat of engineering - it’s the largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts in the world, tapping into water underneath the Sahara and using it to irrigate farms and supply drinking water. So NATO bombed it. To prevent the killing of unarmed protestors, presumably.

There is an on-going civil war. And there is the very real threat of the country being balkanised, with the oil-rich east becoming a nice, small, manageable little statelet totally subservient to the whims of the western ruling classes.

Shock doctrine

Important gains in social welfare, education, housing, women’s rights are in the process of being reversed, as an inevitable outcome of the “shock therapy” that Libya has been, and is being, subjected to. I’m sure many of you have read Naomi Klein’s book ‘The Shock Doctrine’, where she discusses how natural disasters, wars, coups, famines - any kind of large-scale ‘shock’ - have been used by the free market fundamentalists to implement their neoliberal policies. This is what happened in Chile in the wake of the Pinochet coup. This is what happened in Iraq in the aftermath of the war.

Chile in the era before the coup - when it was led by the progressive, socialist-oriented government of Salvador Allende - had a strong emphasis on social welfare programmes, nationalisation, limits to foreign investment, limited engagement with the global markets, high level of spending on education, and so on. The CIA-backed coup opened the way for all that to be reversed, for the economy to be fully opened up to foreign investment and the global market, for privatisation, for the dismantling of the welfare system. The result was of course a massive polarisation of wealth - the creation of a handful of incredibly rich people acting on behalf of western corporate interests, and the terrible impoverishment of vast masses of people at the bottom of the economic heap.

Iraq is a similar story. Oil accounts for well over 70% of Iraq’s economy. In 1972, the property of the multinational oil companies was confiscated and the oil was nationalised in order that oil profits would remain in Iraq and could be used to support the various social welfare projects that were considered to be the best in the Middle East (the campaign to eradicate illiteracy even won Saddam Hussein a UNESCO prize!). The US and British occupiers made sure all that came to an end. In 2008, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Total came back to Iraq to claim what they consider to be their birth-right - Iraq’s vast oil reserves.

Libya had the highest Human Development Index of any country in Africa. It had the lowest infant mortality rate in Africa. The highest literacy rate in Africa. The highest life expectancy in Africa. Free, universal education and healthcare. Subsidised fuel and housing. And this in a country which, 60 years ago, was one of the poorest countries in the world. Whatever your view of Muammar Qaddafi or the record of the Libyan Jamahiriya, these are facts that are not disputed. And, just like in Chile, and just like in Iraq, Libya also had very tight restrictions on foreign investment. And it is perfectly obvious that all this will be broken up, the shock doctrine will be applied - and indeed is being applied - and the quality of life for the average Libyan will continue in free-fall for a long time.

And the repercussions will extend beyond Libya. Another major goal of the war against Libya was to cut it out of the resistant Global South in general, and out of an emerging Africa in particular. To put an end to its leadership of the African Union; to put an end to its role in developing the Africa Investment Bank; to put an end to its role in developing the single African currency; to put an end to its role in supporting anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. Some people forget that Libya was a major supporter of the ANC and PAC in South Africa, SWAPO in Namibia, MPLA in Angola, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the PLO, the American Indian Movement, and more.

So you can see from looking at imperialist intervention in Chile, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere that there’s a clear pattern. And guess what: Iran also has a highly developed welfare system, a tendency towards nationalisation, restrictions on foreign investment, prioritisation of education, prioritisation of healthcare, fuel subsidies, a record of support for resistance movements such as Hezballah and Hamas, and so on. Oh, and so does Syria. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what the corporate vultures and geostrategists of North America and Western Europe have in mind for these countries.

Moving beyond the demonisation campaigns

Too many of us weren’t able to predict what would happen in Libya if the government fell. If we’re honest, we should have seen it coming. After all, Iraq is a very clear parallel, and that is still in recent memory - the Iraq war started in 2003, nine years ago.

So one aspect of defending Iran and Syria from imperialist war and interference is to have a clear understanding of what is likely to happen if their governments are defeated. Will these governments be replaced by more progressive forces? Will the people’s lives improve? Or is the western empire positioned to impose its own will? What is the reality of political power on the ground? These are questions that people need to ask. Otherwise, we are reduced to a very naive, very childish narrative. Iran is bad. Syria is bad. Iraq was bad. Libya was bad. Ahmadinejad - bad. Assad - bad. Saddam - bad. Qaddafi - bad. And since we have defined these political movements and personalities as being absolutely bad, then we have to conclude that anything is better. This is the precise purpose of the demonisation and slander campaigns - to make us unquestioningly support any alternative to the status quo. And even if we are peace-loving people who oppose war and don’t like bombs, we’re inevitably a bit weak, lacklustre, ambivalent in our opposition to war when we feel that the outcome of war will at least include getting rid of something that was absolutely bad, absolutely evil.

Just look at Iraq: a sectarian civil war, a million dead, several million displaced, depleted uranium poisoning, the destruction of the national infrastructure, the sell-off of the economy, the collapse of the education and healthcare systems, the huge rise in infant mortality. And yet there’s still this sentiment around even progressive circles in the west that, well, anything is better than Saddam. And it turns out that anything is not better than Saddam; that, for all its faults, Iraq under Ba’athist rule was a hundred times better off than it is today.

A responsibility to develop our understanding

A related point here is that we need to be much more clued up than we are. Ignorant humanitarians are so easily manipulated. We need a decent base level of understanding about the situations in Iran and Syria now. Part of the problem with the Libya situation was that nobody knew a bloody thing about Libya, and therefore we were so open to being manipulated by the emotional pleas and sophisticated lies of the media. There were stories about using “African mercenaries”. There were stories of using “rape as a weapon of war”. There were stories about “slaughter from the air”. Most people swallowed this nonsense because their understanding was based purely on the mainstream narrative. Don’t be caught out like that! Study Iran, study Syria; seek out different perspectives; build a decent base of understanding that you can use to filter the nonsense that comes flying at all of us every day via the global mass media. If more people don’t do this, if more people aren’t ready to actively counter the disinformation campaigns, frankly we have no hope of developing an effective anti-war strategy.

Be a voice of the voiceless

The other thing we need to do, which many feel uncomfortable with, is give a voice to the people and countries under attack. With Libya, there was a total blackout on pro-Libyan voices, combined with blind support for the Benghazi opposition, whose links with the CIA and reactionary social base were definitely a taboo, not to be mentioned at any cost. Outside Russia Today, the media completely ignored those within and outside Libya who supported the Libyan state. And shamefully, the left-wing and supposedly anti-war media contributed to this blackout.

Present the whole picture

There was complete silence in relation to positive characteristics of Libya under Qaddafi. There was complete silence in relation to positive characteristics of Iraq under Saddam. These days there is complete silence in relation to positive characteristics of Iran and Syria. I can understand this silence coming from the imperialist press, which has a very clear agenda, but it’s an extraordinary contradiction coming from supposedly progressive, radical, left forces. It’s like people consider themselves Marxists but haven’t understood even the most basic elements of Marxist philosphy - for example, that all phenomena have both positive and negative characteristics, and that nothing can be properly understood without thoroughly assessing both its positive and negative aspects.

How many leftists dared to suggest that perhaps Libya was worth defending on the basis of its exceptionally high level of social welfare? Or on the basis of its role in promoting African unity? Not many.

As anti-war activists, it is crucial that we reflect on all this. Because the non-stop negativity about these countries and movements in the crosshairs of imperialism prevents us from building up a mass anti-war sentiment. Even among people who are anti-war, we end up with a feeling that “ok, we’re opposed to NATO bombing, but we’re not actually motivated to do anything to prevent it.”

Playground politics

To use an analogy from the school playground: Let’s say Andy wants to beat up Ravi. We don’t like Andy, because he’s the neighbourhood bully. So the natural thing for us to do is to come to Ravi’s defence. But if all we have heard about Ravi is that he is not a good guy, then we’re not motivated to do anything for him, and Andy gets away with his bullying. Andy’s spread all these rumours about Ravi, and these made us forget that, even if Ravi is far from being an angel, he did actually help defend some other kids when Andy was bullying them, so the least we can do now is close ranks with Ravi against the neighbourhood bully.

We have to learn to recognise that propaganda war is a step towards military war. We can’t join in with the propaganda war and then say that we oppose military war. That simply doesn’t make sense!

Promote peaceful solutions

The other thing we can do is promote peaceful solutions that respect the sovereignty and wishes of the countries under attack. Regarding Libya, the African Union made important and useful proposals in terms of bringing about a peaceful negotiated settlement between the different sides of the crisis. Hugo Chavez and others made similar offers. These were ignored by the western warmongers, and they were also ignored by most of us. In Syria, the government made a significant concession in the form of a whole new constitution - read both the old and the new constitutions and you’ll see that the differences are far from trivial. It’s obviously meant as a peace offering of sorts, but it has been dismissed by the western warmongers, and again, it also gets dismissed by western leftists who claim to stand for peace! So we are left with the idea that Assad is a demon, Qaddafi is a demon, Ahmadinejad is a demon, and there is nothing they can do that will promote peace; ie, regime change is needed; ie, oh dear, we’re on the same side as Hillary Clinton and William Hague!

Understanding the meaning of unity

My final point is that we need to get our heads around the concept of unity and what it really means. It doesn’t mean coordinating action with all those people who have exactly the same ideas as you. On the contrary, it means putting certain differences aside in the pursuit of common goals. This is something that actual anti-imperialist leaders on the ground understand much better than we do. From an ideological point of view, there are huge differences between, say, Hugo Chavez - a socialist President of a liberal democracy; Fidel Castro - a communist of the old guard; and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - a radical Islamist and Iranian nationalist. And yet they have a strong sense of unity that is built on a framework of anti-imperialism and mutual support.

The biggest enemy - the real enemy in the world - is imperialism. The ruling classes of Western Europe and North America. “The Empire”, if you will. The task of defeating this empire requires a very broad-based unity. Sometimes that means coming to terms with differences that seem very great and concerns that seem very serious. This is especially true when we’re talking about developing unity with large, established movements - and states - that wield actual political power and that are involved in actual physical struggles against imperialism and zionism. In such cases we really have to learn to lose our sense of purism and be ready to deal with stuff that looks pretty ugly to our pampered western eyes. Given that we haven’t ourselves built an effective movement against imperialism, we must at least recognise that this process of building an effective movement against imperialism, or building an independent, pro-poor, non-aligned nation, is an incredibly difficult task in the context of global imperialist domination. Frankly, it cannot be achieved without painful compromises and, dare I say it, a certain amount of political repression of one’s enemies.

For example, Palestinians caught collaborating with Mossad have traditionally been treated very harshly. Collaborators with the security services in apartheid South Africa were not exactly treated with kid gloves by the liberation movement there. When the alternative is to allow people to sabotage and destroy your liberation movement, choices are limited. Global imperialist domination forces compromise and repression on revolutionary movements and on independent countries that refuse to go along with its rule. The compromises and the repression are symptoms of the problem; not causes. The cause is imperialist domination. Every country in the world would be run in a very different way if it weren’t for the concentration of political, economic, military and cultural power in the hands of the western imperialist power structure.

So this has to be our focus if we are to build a meaningful, broad based unity against imperialist war. To quote Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party: “there can be no real freedom until the imperialist - world-enemy-number-one - has been stripped of his power”.

We should be clear that our loyalties are with the anti-imperialist world; our loyalties are with the Global South; and we stand united against that world-enemy-number-one of imperialism.

Hunting for ammunition in a recent Facebook discussion with John Rees, I took some time to look back through Counterfire’s articles on Libya over the past eight months. Once you strip away the veneer, what emerges is a fairly clear picture of that organisation helping to manufacture the public’s consent for the brutal colonial war against Libya. 

Although the following comments are specific to Counterfire, I believe they apply in equal measure to the Socialist Workers Party and various other left-wing organisations in the west. I am publishing them here in the hope that readers will look deeper into the situations developing in Syria, Iran, Algeria, South Africa and elsewhere, develop a genuine anti-imperialist analysis, and start to build a meaningful anti-war movement.

—

A western-inspired civil war took place in Libya, with one side backed by NATO’s bombs, money, soldiers, planners and intelligence services. Counterfire chose to support the ‘rebels’ and never stopped doing so. They never gave much of a reason as to why they supported the rebels, and there was certainly no effort to explain the rebels’ composition and motivations, but it seemed to be a given that, in this situation of civil war, the bulk of the British left would support the side opposing the state. 

Even though the links between the ‘rebels’ and western intelligence agencies were known from the beginning, Counterfire chose to ignore this. No mention was made of longstanding US/French/British plans to inspire a coup in Libya. No mention was made of the profound differences between Egypt/Tunisia and Libya in terms of social welfare, political systems, food security, foreign policy or anything else. 

Within days of things kicking off in February, it became abundantly clear that the imperialist powers were united in their wish to get rid of Qaddafi and to use the rebellion as cover to accomplish this task. Therefore from the beginning the Libya situation had the character of a classic colonialist war. At no point did Counterfire call for the defeat of the invading forces; at no point did they guide their readers to the obvious conclusion that, faults notwithstanding, Libya ruled by Qaddafi was a zillion times better than Libya ruled by Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama. While serious anti-imperialists were putting aside their differences with Qaddafi, closing ranks and supporting the Libyan state and people against NATO terror, Counterfire were contributing to the case for war. 

It’s fine and great and ever-so-lovely to hide behind the line that “we never wanted intervention”, but is it not clear that, by joining in with the exaggerations about the repression, and by throwing out ill-researched slanders about Qaddafi, Counterfire (along with Socialist Workers Party, Stop the War Coalition and so many others) contributed to manufacturing the public’s consent for this colonial war? 

As late as 16 March, Counterfire positively quoted [National Transitional Council chair] Mustafa Abdul Jalil’s outright lies about the democratic nature of the NTC, and were claiming that “the Libyan revolution has produced a model of popular power that reaches beyond the bourgeois forms emerging in Cairo and Tunis” [!!]. Counterfire continued to join the mainstream press in hugely exaggerating the extent of the state’s repression against the demonstrations (bizarrely, it was left for Amnesty, HRW and The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn to counter the ridiculous press bias on this). Counterfire took on terminology like “Gaddafi’s onslaught” and came out with embarrassing nonsense such as “Now that Qaddafi’s forces are advancing, the calls for intervention are louder, more out of desperation than pro-western ideology.”

In August, we read: “There will be no tears for the end of the Gaddafi regime if that is indeed what we are watching. The Gaddafi regime was a brutal dictatorship and it deserved to be overthrown just as much as that of Ben Ali’s in Tunisia or Mubarak’s in Egypt.” 

This is unpardonable clap-trap. Libya was one of the poorest countries in the world pre-1969. It developed the highest HDI in Africa, highest per capita income in Africa, life expectancy of 75, excellent healthcare and education systems, food security, decent housing, no starvation, women’s rights, secular policy… all this apparently means nothing to the ‘socialists’ of Counterfire? Not to mention support for national liberation movements in Palestine, Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere, and being the driving force of African unity for the last 20 years. Do you know how the Libyan government responded to the food crisis? By abolishing taxes on food. Can you name any other government that did that? Ironically, many of things Counterfire claims to fight for in Britain (eg free tertiary education and healthcare) already existed in Libya! There are rivers of tears over the end of the Qaddafi regime, especially from the black Libyan communities, who received great support under Qaddafi and who are now being subjected to rape, murder and humiliation. But I suppose these are not the type of people that western lefties typically care about. 

Is there any analysis from Counterfire as to how their favourite “model of popular power” turned into a bunch of racist murdering thugs that whip a black man and force him to climb a pole shouting “Monkey needs a banana”?! Or is this the sort of uncomfortable question Counterfire prefer not to ask? 

On 22 August they were asking an infinitely simpler question: “So the question now posed is this: in whose interest will the new rulers of Libya act?” 

What an amazing example of political leadership, asking a question for which the answer was 100% clear and known to everyone with half a brain. By even asking the question, Counterfire lent credibility to the idea that the NTC might stop being fascist racist pro-imperialist thugs and turn overnight into the democratic socialists people so desperately wish they would be. Again, Counterfire’s voice contributed to the dominant imperialist narrative. 

Counterfire on 5 April: “The West did not need a revolution to get a regime that was willing to do their bidding in Tripoli because they already had one. It was headed by Gaddafi. By 2011 Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist rhetoric had been in cold storage for many, many years… Gaddafi has become a close ally of western imperialism” 

This is frankly embarrassing. People should really at least consider doing some research before committing pen to paper. Have the writers at Counterfire read or watched Qaddafi’s speeches of recent years? For example this speech at the Arab League.

Certainly Libya compromised with the US, France, Italy and Britain. It saw what happened to Iraq and it wanted to avoid the same fate. Eight years later we can call that an error of judgement, albeit an understandable one. Meanwhile, Counterfire failed to mention that Libya had recently made foreign oil firms agree to a much lower share of crude oil production (50% down to 27%); that it had refused to sign the US military charter for Africa; that no foreign firm could undertake business in Libya without at least a 35% share owned by a Libyan individual or company; that plans were underway to introduce the gold dinar (single currency for Africa); that it continued to lead the international campaign for reparations for slavery and colonialism; and numerous other unambiguously anti-imperialist measures of recent years. 

Counterfire said: “The Transitional National Council in Benghazi thought that it could deal with the imperialists on its own terms, asking for only so much air-cover as would allow them to complete their revolution”.

This is investing the ‘rebels’ with a stupidity and naiveté of which they are not possessed. EVERYBODY, including the US defence secretary (who stated it explicitly), knew what was meant by ‘no fly zone’. Numerous independent investigations have failed to find any proof that the demonstrators needed air cover; they didn’t. What the rebels ‘needed’ was for NATO to destroy the Libyan state and infrastructure in order to create a power vacuum the ‘rebels’ could take advantage of. 

Counterfire have repeatedly claimed that banners saying “No Western Intervention, We Can Do it Alone” were displayed all over Benghazi. While it’s a charming idea, I don’t believe it’s actually true. I have looked fairly thoroughly at the reports from Benghazi and I’ve only ever seen ONE banner saying anything like that (the one that always appears on the Counterfire website). Interestingly, it’s a very professional-looking banner. Meanwhile I’ve seen dozens of pictures of pro-west banners. I don’t think Counterfire have given too much coverage to this picture, for example (the “fantastic four” of Susan Rice, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama).

I would have thought that Counterfire might at least have attempted to give a little bit of balance to their analysis, but sadly this was not forthcoming. 

Did Counterfire ever mention important achievements of the post-1969 period (which are confirmed by UN, the World Health Organisation, etc)? 

Did Counterfire ever mention the massive pro-Qaddafi demonstrations (of over a million people)?

Did Counterfire ever call clearly for the DEFEAT of NATO forces in Libya?

Did Counterfire ever mention the fact that the flag adopted by the rebels represented the totally subservient feudal backwardness of King Idris? 

Did Counterfire ever seek to understand the reasons why such widely respected anti-imperialist left leaders such as Chávez, Castro, Morales and Ortega spoke out in support of the Libyan government? Or does the editorial staff at Counterfire place more value in the words of William Hague?

Did Counterfire ever mention the prominence among the rebels of CIA-funded salafi sects that have been organising against Qaddafi for decades (offended not by lack of democracy but by his dislike for religious extremism)?

Did Counterfire ever support efforts led by Venezuela and South Africa to bring about a mediated solution to the conflict? (I doubt it, because Counterfire’s preferred outcome was the removal of Qaddafi, which was not the likely outcome of dialogue)

When did Counterfire first mention the lynching of black Libyans and migrant labourers, which had occurred from the very start of the rebellion? 

Counterfire’s position on Libya, like that of the western left in general (with a handful of honourable exceptions) has been an utter mess, and has contributed significantly to the fact that the British anti-war movement has been dead in relation to Libya. Cameron and co have conducted a vicious, genocidal colonial war, with the near-total complicity of the British people. There has been a total failure of leadership, and the left needs to consider its role in that.

The following interview was conducted via email with Asari Sobukwe, a well-known Pan-African socialist and organiser with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and AJAMU. 

Given that relations between Libya and the west seemed to be getting better over the last decade or so, why do you think NATO went to war against Libya?

That was just a smoke screen. NATO and the West have permanent interests but not permanent friends. They wanted access to the oil revenues in Libya and a friendlier leadership towards racist and zionist Israel. The West tricked the Libyan government (Socialist Jamahiriya) under Qaddafi, making him believe that they would leave his revolution alone if he worked with them and gave some contracts to western nations. However, the Libyan Socialist Jamahiriya continued to finance the integration of the African continent; finance the first African satallite system; advocate that oil should be sold in another currency; financed the African Monetary Bank – all this could not be tolerated by the West.

Qaddafi tends to be looked upon favourably within Africa; why is that?

Because of his commitment to the unification of the African continent. He has been calling on African governments to implement Nkrumah’s vision for a liberated continent, and his government has done a lot to finance projects of African unity and empowerment.

What was Gaddafi’s record like in terms of helping to improve the living standards of the Libyan people?

Libya was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1969. It is now 53rd in human development index, the highest in Africa. Education is universal, health is free, housing is provided for all and subsidised, petrol is cheap and infrastructure was excellent until destroyed by 20,000+ NATO bombs!

If Gaddafi was popular within Libya, why was there an uprising against him?

There are always those who oppose any leaders or President. Obama’s standing is at an all time low; Sarkozy is very unpopular and Cameron had to form a coalition to get the PM seat. If NATO supported the youth and all the disgruntled (those uprising in Tottenham and across Britain; the anti-capitalist protesters; the students; the pensioners and public sector workers), then maybe Britain would have a major rebel uprising. 

The mainstream press talks about Qaddafi as a dictator. Is that a fair characterisation? Did the Libyan Jamahiriya have any elements of democracy?

Yes, they had the Peoples Assemblies across the country. In fact Qaddafi was the figure head rather then the President.

Is it true that Qaddafi considered himself the ‘king of kings’ of Africa? Was his Pan-Africanism tainted by personal ambition?

No this is nonsense. How can Qaddafi have ruled over 54 African nations? Where is the evidence for this? He was motivated by a vision to unite Africa. He offered to give up Libyan sovereignty for a united Africa. This was also offered before to Egypt, when he first came to power.

Did Qaddafi perpetrate massacres against innocent Libyans? What about Abu Salim prison?

I understand there were contradictions on human rights but this need investigating. Allegations of human rights abuses could have been investigated by the African Union. NATO and the west cannot be judge and jury - they aren’t in a position to lecture anyone on human rights. What about the mass killings of the British and US Governments of African and other people. What about the march tomorrow (Sat 29th Oct) on deaths in police custody, which largely affect the African/Caribbean community in Britain? What about all the human rights of us in the UK? What about the poor housing; poor education; high unemployment and incarceration in prisons and mental institutions. We have a long list of human rights violations in Britain, France and the US.

In fact the recent UN report on human rights in Libya praised the government for its work on improving human rights. 

How do you think Qaddafi will be remembered within Africa and among the diaspora?

He will be remembered as a serious revolutionary Pan-Africanist, socialist and internationalist. he supported the various struggles on the African continent including the ANC, for which Mandela personally thanked him. He also supported the Palestinians, the Irish Republican struggle and many others. He threw out the British, French and US military bases in Libya; he nationalised the oil and used it to develop the country and support African development and integration.

He will be remembered as a true hero of the African liberation struggle, for advancing a country under socialism and a fighter for injustice worldwide.

A simple guide to colonialism in the 21st century.

• Countries A, B and C want to dominate the world’s resources and labour. Country D wishes to develop independently. Irreconcilable contradiction. 
• A, B and C have money, weapons, media and experience. They might for example stir up conflict between D and E in order to weaken and destabilise D. 
• They will almost certainly sponsor unrest within D, sending money and offering training to groups that are favourable to A-B-C aims.
• They might apply economic sanctions against D, the effect of which would be to weaken it and to encourage discontent among its population.
• Like anywhere else, D is a complex country with its own problems and contradictions. A, B and C will find a way to exploit these. 
• A, B and C have the clout to ask the ‘international’ financial institutions to apply loan conditions of privatisation and deregulation.
• Unemployment, rising prices, increasing inequality will help a lot should A, B and C decide to take things to the next level.
• Just as social unrest is kicking off in D due to years of neoliberal reform, A, B and C find a way to get weapons to opposition groups.
• The destabilisation is backed by a wide-ranging campaign of criminalisation, demonisation and character assassination of D’s leaders.
• Naturally, D’s government isn’t going to sit back and be overthrown. So it comes down hard on the attempts to destabilise/overthrow it. 
• A, B and C now cry out about D’s human rights abuses. Suddenly well-meaning people everywhere are calling for D’s government to be taken out. 
• Having ensured an absolute minimum of resistance at home, A, B and C go to war to topple D and establish a client state (that recognises I).
• Human rights abuses in D increase massively under an unpopular, incompetent, kleptocratic administration. But they go largely unreported. 
• D goes from being relatively affluent to being a failed state. It sees starvation, illiteracy and sectarian killings for the first time in decades.
• Next year, A, B and C will use the same strategy against E and F. By then, everyone will have forgotten the lessons of D.

This evening I went to a protest outside Parliament demanding an end to the bombing of Libya. The protest was organised jointly by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War Coalition. 

It was wack. These two enormous left-wing organisations were not able to organise more than around 35 people to protest in London against our government’s participation in the brutal assault on Libya.

Why has the anti-war movement developed so little momentum in opposing war in Libya? Two million marched against the war in Iraq; how come a protest against the war in Libya can’t muster more than 35? 

I think there are a few reasons. Surely the most important is that the British ruling class is united in its wish to get rid of Gaddafi and get its hands on more of Libya’s oil. A very significant section of the British ruling class was opposed to the war in Iraq, for a number of reasons. This division gave huge impetus to the anti-war movement, as the Stop the War Coalition found for itself a powerful ally in the liberal press. In my opinion, it is crucial that the anti-war movement reflect seriously on whether it became too reliant on that ally (one whose support was always going to be shaky and unreliable).

Second, there has been an incredibly effective campaign of demonisation waged against Gaddafi and his government. This character assassination has not been limited to the lunatic right-wing press but has also found its way into ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ media. And, even though the reporting of Gaddafi’s alleged crimes has been shown by such respectable organisations as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to be totally biased and untrustworthy, very few have had the decency to retract the lies they were spouting just a few weeks ago. Again, there is a lesson that needs to be learnt: we need to instinctively distrust what the imperialist press is telling us. There were character assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, Samora Machel, Ho Chi Minh and many others - when are we going to learn to understand that this criminalisation and demonisation is part of the west’s foreign policy propaganda? 

Third, there was significant confusion about the situation in Libya. Lots of people thought the uprising was simply an extension of what was going on in Egypt (as it was painted in the press), and therefore afforded the so-called rebels uncritical support. Very few people managed to look into or understand the significance of the rebels’ links with western intelligence agencies. 

Fourth, people were caught off-guard by the idea of a no-fly zone. We were fooled into supporting a war on the basis that we were simply preventing Gaddafi from “bombing his own people”. Hopefully we have all learnt now that ‘no-fly zone’ is another way of saying ‘vicious bombardment of civilians’. 

Fifth, there was a major failure of leadership on the part of the resistance movements that have been leading the struggle against imperialism in the Middle East for many years. As a result, a lot of good anti-imperialists fell for NATO’s divide-and-rule game.

Lastly, the existence of George W Bush as US President was curiously effective in terms of galvanising resistance to the empire. Obama doesn’t do that job anywhere near as well (which is no doubt part of why he got to be President!).

Incidentally, the most passionate of the protestors this evening were the 7-8 Libyans that attended. In a rather alarming (but not untypical) example of the western left’s patronising attitude, a Stop the War officer asked them to put away their pictures of Muammar Gaddafi. Now, you may or may not like Gaddafi, but how can you ask Libyan patriots, protesting against the bombing of their country, to stop expressing support for their head of state? Gaddafi is the symbolic head of the resistance to this modern-day crusade, and on that basis he deserves the support of all those that oppose the war. I am not demanding you take a position on the nature of Libya’s political system, or on Gaddafi’s role within Middle Eastern politics over the decades, but surely it is uncontroversial to support those leading the resistance to colonial war?! Otherwise what is the meaning of this popular expression, ‘anti-imperialist unity’? I would posit that Stop the War are overly concerned about scaring off liberal ‘supporters’ (who have already shown their true colours). 

There are a lot of lessons for us to learn from all this, and I hope people will take the time to engage in some critical self-reflection. Without that, there is no hope of moving forward.