"...The killings were pitiless.
They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.
Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli...
The atrocities have apparently not been confined to Tripoli: Amnesty International has reported similar violence in the coastal town of Zawiyah, much of it against men from sub-Saharan Africa who, it has been claimed, were migrant workers..."
I don't think an honest observer of any civil war should expect that the victors will, in a perfect deviation from the perfect track record of human perfidy, behave as if the vanquished are actually members of the human race. People who win wars tend to act with the temporary impunity which victory confers upon the victors.*
This isn't to suggest that the coalition of throatslitters, bankers, smugglers, regime defectors, university professors and lawyers who make up the Transitional National Council and its armed faction are actually the victors of the Libyan contest.
The clear winners will eventually emerge, and they will likely sail or march under the flags of ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BHP Billiton, Total SA and Areva.
But, in the meantime, the super noble Freedom and Democracy™ rebels (beloved of muscular liberal interventionists who will never actually have to visit Tripoli) who think they've won themselves their own private Idaho are busy renationalizing Libyan jobs:
* - An observation, one hopes, which informs my own ambiguous relationship with the image of the French Doctor's Remedy...
To quote Aaron aaron from Lenin's tomb:
ReplyDeleteIt was certainly correct to support the military struggle of the USSR under Stalin against Hitler's Germany -- or, if it had come to that, against Churchill's England or Roosevelt's USA. In that case, it was a matter of supporting even a bureaucratic socialist state against capitalist restoration.
And I support any direct actions against legitimate military targets of the imperialist powers grouped in NATO, whether those actions are directed by Qaddafi or Qaeda.
Please help me by reading my appeal on my profile
ReplyDeleteMajid,
ReplyDeleteDone.
JM,
Unsure as to your point.
"Freedom and Democracy"
ReplyDeleteAnd Whisky!!!!