Tobruk is several hundred miles away from Benghazi, the first large epicenter of the revolt, and even farther from Tripoli, the Libyan capital. But local activists felt wired into the revolutions going on far beyond the borders of their nation, even though foreign newspapers were never for sale in Gaddafi’s Libya and websites were often blocked, says Gamal Shallouf, a marine biologist who has joined the newly fledged opposition. While the Internet has been down here since the revolution started, the regime’s inability to shut down new-media innovations entirely has been key to spreading Libya’s revolt.
“Generally, in Libya before this, there was no media,” explains Shallouf. “So if Tobruk made a revolution, [the government] would spend three to five days killing us and finish the revolution. Nobody in [larger nearby communities and cities] al-Baida or Darna or Benghazi would have heard about it. But now with al-Jazeera and Facebook and the media, all of Libya hears about the revolution and is with the revolution. They know about it. They think, ‘I am Libyan, this is my family, so I will go to the street to fight for them.’ ”
He and fellow Libyans had followed the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings on al-Jazeera and satellite Arabic-language news channels. He did his best, along with other Libyan activists, to internally circulate the videos he saw so that other Libyans could get a glimpse of what was happening on either side of their closed-off country. “After I got videos from the Internet, we sent them from Bluetooth to Bluetooth. Mostly videos of fighting in Egypt. I felt two things when I saw these videos: I felt sad. And then I wanted to make a revolution!”
The UN Security Council just issued a Presidential Statement on Libya — a collective act of hand-wringing that serves as a substitute for a course of action. With so much concern, so many calls and its limp-wristed urging, this statement could have been written by President Obama himself.
The members of the Security Council expressed grave concern at the situation in Libya. They condemned the violence and use of force against civilians, deplored the repression against peaceful demonstrators, and expressed deep regret at the deaths of hundreds of civilians. They called for an immediate end to the violence and for steps to address the legitimate demands of the population, including through national dialogue.
The members of the Security Council called on the Government of Libya to meet its responsibility to protect its population. They called upon the Libyan authorities to act with restraint, to respect human rights and international humanitarian law, and to allow immediate access for international human rights monitors and humanitarian agencies.
The members of the Security Council called for international humanitarian assistance to the people of Libya and expressed concern at the reports of shortages of medical supplies to treat the wounded. They strongly urged the Libyan authorities to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian and medical supplies and humanitarian workers into the country.
The members of the Security Council underlined the need for the government of Libya to respect the freedom of peaceful assembly and of expression, including freedom of the press. They called for the immediate lifting of restrictions on all forms of the media.
The members of the Security Council stressed the importance of accountability. They underscored the need to hold to account those responsible for attacks, including by forces under their control, on civilians.
The members of the Security Council expressed deep concern about the safety of foreign nationals in Libya. They urged the Libyan authorities and all relevant parties to ensure the safety of all foreign nationals and facilitate the departure of those wishing to leave the country. The members of the Security Council will continue to follow the situation closely.
Maybe a Resolution will come later this week, but even if it does, it’s hard to imagine it will have any immediate impact on the bloodshed in Libya.
A sterner message is coming from eastern Libya or “Free Libya” as it is now being called, where captured mercenaries are being executed.
While foreign governments are focused on evacuating their own nationals, they might consider offering free passage to any of the remaining mercenaries to head back to Chad, Darfur or wherever else they came from — the sooner they pack their bags and get out, the better for everyone.
There are reports in the Arabic press that Egyptian officials have notified Tripoli that Egypt could intervene to protect the estimated two million Egyptians resident in Libya.
One of the strongest calls for action coming out of Washington came from Senator John Kerry:
The Qadhafi government’s use of deadly force against its own people should mean the end of the regime itself. It’s beyond despicable, and I hope we are witnessing its last hours in power. Libyans should have the opportunity to choose leaders who respect their basic rights. The question now is what can be done to send that message clearly and effectively. While it’s true that America has less influence in Tripoli than elsewhere in the region, we’re not without options, particularly in partnership with the broader international community. World leaders must together put Colonel Qadhafi on notice that his cowardly actions will have consequences. First, while Qadhafi himself is irredeemable, his senior military commanders need to know that their acquiescence in atrocities could open them to future international war crimes charges. Second, all American and international oil companies should immediately cease operations in Libya until violence against civilians ceases. The Obama administration also should consider reimposing U.S. sanctions that were lifted during the Bush era. Third, United Nations leadership is on the line. Libya’s mission to the U.N. bravely condemned their own government. … Fourth, the Arab League and African Union have an opportunity to create a new precedent in response to the crisis in Libya.
The most pointed message so far, however, has come from the leading Sunni scholar and TV preacher Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. In an interview on Al Jazeera yesterday, he said:
The truth is that I do not want to say anything to Al-Gaddafi, because one should only address people who are reasonable. People who are not reasonable should not be addressed. That man is no longer reasonable. He has been crazy for a long time….
Therefore, I address the Libyan army, which is definitely endowed with faith, manliness, and honor. They must not attack their own people. Who would kill their own people?! Would you sacrifice an entire people for the sake of a madman?! . . .
I hereby issue a fatwa to the officers and soldiers who can kill Mu’ammar Al-Gaddafi: Whoever among them can fire a bullet at him, thus relieving the country and the people of him, should do so. This man wants to annihilate the people, so I am protecting the people.
I rule that whoever can fire a bullet, and relieve us, as well as Libya and its great people, of this man’s evil and danger, should do so.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has vowed to fight on and die a “martyr”, calling on his supporters to take back the streets from protesters demanding his ouster, shouting and pounding his fist in a furious speech on state TV.
Gaddafi, clad in brown robes and turban, spoke on Tuesday from a podium set up in the entrance of a bombed-out building that appeared to be his Tripoli residence hit by US air raids in the 1980s and left unrepaired as a monument of defiance.
“I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents … I will die as a martyr at the end,” he said.
“I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired … when I do, everything will burn.”
He called on supporters to take to the streets to attack protesters. “You men and women who love Gaddafi …get out of your homes and fill the streets,” he said. “Leave your homes and attack them in their lairs … Starting tomorrow the cordons will be lifted, go out and fight them.”
“From tonight to tomorrow, all the young men should form local committees for popular security,” he said, telling them to wear a green armband to identify themselves. “The Libyan people and the popular revolution will control Libya.”
Ben Wedeman, the first Western television correspondent to enter and report from Libya during the current crisis, describes what he saw.
“Your passports please,” said the young man in civilian clothing toting an AK-47 at the Libyan border.
“For what?” responded our driver, Saleh, a burly, bearded man who had picked us up just moments before. “There is no government. What is the point?” He pulled away with a dismissive laugh.
On the Libyan side, there were no officials, no passport control, no customs.
I’ve seen this before. In Afghanistan after the route of the Taliban, in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Government authority suddenly evaporates. It’s exhilarating on one level; its whiff of chaos disconcerting on another.
The scene on the Libyan side of the border was jarring. Men – and teenage boys – with clubs, pistols and machine guns were trying to establish a modicum of order.
Hundreds of Egyptian workers were trying to get out, their meager possessions – bags, blankets, odds and ends – piled high on top of minibuses.
Egyptian border officials told us that 15,000 people had crossed from Libya on Monday alone.
“Welcome to free Libya,” said one of the armed young men now controlling the border.
“Free Libya” was surprisingly normal, once we got out of the border area. We stopped for petrol – there were no lines – and saw some stores were open. The electricity was working. The cell phone system is still functioning, though you can’t call abroad. The internet, however, has been down for days.
On the other hand, we did see regular groups of more armed young men in civilian clothing, stopping cars, checking IDs, asking questions. All were surprised, but happy, to see the first television news crew to cross into Libya since the uprising began February 15.
They were polite, if a tad giddy. Having thrown off the yoke of Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year rule (longer than most Libyans have been alive), it’s understandable.
Lisa Goldman in Tel Aviv spoke to “Ali,” a friend who lives in Sarraj, a suburb of Tripoli that is located 10 kilometers west of the city’s center.
Ali and his neighbors take turns patrolling the neighborhood around the clock, to protect it from roaming mercenary soldiers; but otherwise they stay at home. Since Qaddafi’s regime enforced a strict ban on civilians owning firearms, they are using makeshift weapons to protect themselves. Ali said he is armed with a crowbar. The mercenaries, Ali said, are everywhere. They come mostly from Chad and Darfur.
Q: What is the situation with the army? Are Libyan soldiers attacking demonstrators, helping or staying neutral? Do you know if soldiers are defecting to the opposition? If yes, are they doing so in significant numbers?
A: The Libyan army is one of the poorest and most neglected security sector in the government. They are poorly fed , equipped, trained and paid. They are mostly ceremonial and Qaddafi does not trust them. So what we have here are private battalions with each of his sons owning the one named for him. So for example his son Khamees has a battalion belonging to him calling it “Kateebit Khamees.” Each is placed in private super huge barracks situated strategically around Tripoli for situations like these. These battalions are well-equipped, trained and paid and are extremely loyal not to the country but to the leader of their battalion.
So to answer your question the regular army is non-compliant and has mostly sided with the people. Remember they are poorly-equipped and so can be of only limited help. However, the battalions belonging to the regime itself are very much in the fight and are killing people wholesale. Still their numbers are not so great to cover this huge country so it seems they are complemented by mercenaries.
Abdelrazeg El-Murtadi Suleiman Gouider, the Libyan UN Mission’s legal adviser speaking to Nizar Abboud:
What do you do when your friend is blind drunk, slurring, staggering and boisterous as they fumble for their car keys? Do you cheer them on, slap them on their back and hand them another shot of whiskey? Of course not, no matter how much they may protest. And when it comes to America’s friendship with Israel, what is true for the ethics of bars holds true for international politics as well.
Israel is America’s obnoxious drunk friend. And for over half a century, America has been Israel’s bartender and enabler: each year dumping billions of dollars in military aid that is used to oppress Palestinians, handing out bribe money to Arab tyrants in exchange for the suppression of their people’s outrage and, most importantly, protecting Israel from the UN Security Council despite repeated, flagrant violations of international law. On Friday, America did it again by vetoing a Security Council resolution that would have declared Israel’s settlements illegal… all other members of the council, longstanding friends of Israel included, had voted in favor of the reprimand.
In the last thirty days, the power dynamics of the Middle East have changed irrevocably. Israel’s biggest ally in the region has been toppled, popular movements are sweeping neighboring countries and a new mood of self-governance has captured the imagination of the world’s citizens. It is time for Israel to sober up and face the reality that their aggressive militarism won’t work any more. Only America has the power to grab Israel’s car keys.
Palestinians are planning a “day of rage” on Friday in response to the US wielding its veto against a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
The US decision to use its veto has sparked a furious reaction in the West Bank and Gaza.
Anti-US rallies took place in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem, Tulkarem and Jenin this weekend after the 14-1 vote on the resolution, in which the US stood alone against the rest of the security council, including Britain, Germany and France. It voted in contradiction of its own policy.
In Gaza, Hamas described the US position as outrageous and said Washington was “completely biased” towards Israel.
Ibrahim Sarsour, an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said it was time to tell the US president, Barack Obama, to “go to hell”.
“Obama cannot be trusted,” he wrote in an open letter to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. “We knew his promises were lies. The time has come to spit in the face of the Americans.”
On January 27, Raymond Davis, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier, shot and killed two Pakistani citizens in that nation’s second-largest city, Lahore, using a semi-automatic Glock pistol. Davis claims he acted in self-defense when they attacked his car to rob him — both of the dead were armed and had lengthy records of petty crimes — but each was shot five times, and one was killed after Davis was safely back in his car and the victim was fleeing. After shooting the two dead, Davis calmly photographed their bodies and then called other Americans stationed in Pakistan (likely CIA officers) for assistance; one of the Americans’ Land Rovers dispatched to help Davis struck and killed a Pakistani motorcyclist while speeding to the scene. The Pakistani wife of one of Davis’ victims then committed suicide by swallowing rat poison, saying on her deathbed that she had serious doubts that Davis would be held accountable.
For reasons easy to understand — four dead Pakistanis at the hands of Americans, two of whom (at least) were completely innocent — this episode has become a major scandal in that nation. From the start, the U.S. Government has demanded Davis’ release on the grounds of “diplomatic immunity.” But the very murky status of Davis and his work in Pakistan has clouded that claim. The State Department first said he worked for the consulate, not the embassy, which would make him subject to weaker immunity rights than diplomats enjoy (State now says that its original claim was a “mistake” and that Davis worked for the embassy). President Obama then publicly demanded the release of what he absurdly called “our diplomat in Pakistan”; when he was arrested, Davis “was carrying a 9mm gun and 75 bullets, bolt cutters, a GPS unit, an infrared light, telescope, a digital camera, an air ticket, two mobile phones and a blank cheque.” Late last week, a Pakistani court ordered a three-week investigation to determine if Davis merits diplomatic immunity, during which time he will remain in custody. And now it turns out, according The Guardian last night, that “our diplomat” was actually working for the CIA.
Pakistani prosecutors accuse the spy of excessive force, saying he fired 10 shots and got out of his car to shoot one man twice in the back as he fled. The man’s body was found 30 feet from his motorbike.
“It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat,” a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.
The Pakistani government is aware of Davis’s CIA status yet has kept quiet in the face of immense American pressure to free him under the Vienna convention. Last week President Barack Obama described Davis as “our diplomat” and dispatched his chief diplomatic troubleshooter, Senator John Kerry, to Islamabad. Kerry returned home empty-handed.
Many Pakistanis are outraged at the idea of an armed American rampaging through their second-largest city. Analysts have warned of Egyptian-style protests if Davis is released. The government, fearful of a backlash, says it needs until 14 March to decide whether Davis enjoys immunity.
A third man was crushed by an American vehicle as it rushed to Davis’s aid. Pakistani officials believe its occupants were CIA because they came from the house where Davis lived and were armed.
The US refused Pakistani demands to interrogate the two men and on Sunday a senior Pakistani intelligence official said they had left the country. “They have flown the coop, they are already in America,” he said.
ABC News reported that the men had the same diplomatic visas as Davis. It is not unusual for US intelligence officers, like their counterparts round the world, to carry diplomatic passports.
The US has accused Pakistan of illegally detaining him and riding roughshod over international treaties. Angry politicians have proposed slashing Islamabad’s $1.5bn (£900m) annual aid.
But Washington’s case is hobbled by its resounding silence on Davis’s role. He served in the US special forces for 10 years before leaving in 2003 to become a security contractor. A senior Pakistani official said he believed Davis had worked with Xe, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.
Pakistani suspicions about Davis’s role were stoked by the equipment police confiscated from his car: an unlicensed pistol, a long-range radio, a GPS device, an infrared torch and a camera with pictures of buildings around Lahore.
“This is not the work of a diplomat. He was doing espionage and surveillance activities,” said the Punjab law minister, Rana Sanaullah, adding he had “confirmation” that Davis was a CIA employee.
A number of US media outlets learned about Davis’s CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration. A Colorado television station, 9NEWS, made a connection after speaking to Davis’s wife. She referred its inquiries to a number in Washington which turned out to be the CIA. The station removed the CIA reference from its website at the request of the US government.
Does being known as the Prince of Darkness lower or raise your status as an image consultant? I guess it just depends on the client. Laura Rozen reports:
One of the more unlikely image-mongers that has worked to burnish Qadhafi’s and Libya’s image never registered with the Justice Department. Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, the former Reagan-era Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chairman of the Defense Policy Board, traveled to Libya twice in 2006 to meet with Qadhafi, and afterward briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits, according to documents released by a Libyan opposition group in 2009.
Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.
The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.
The Monitor Group did not return phone calls left at its Boston offices Monday. But Monitor describes, in a series of documents published by the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition in 2009, an “action plan” to “introduce and bring to Libya a meticulously selected group of independent and objective experts” to travel to Libya, meet senior officials, hold lectures and workshops, and promote the image of Libya and its controversial ruler.
The unfolding situation in Libya has been horrible to behold. No matter how many times we warn that dictators will do what they must to stay in power, it is still shocking to see the images of brutalized civilians which have been flooding al-Jazeera and circulating on the internet. We should not be fooled by Libya’s geographic proximity to Egypt and Tunisia, or guided by the debates over how the United States could best help a peaceful protest movement achieve democratic change. The appropriate comparison is Bosnia or Kosovo, or even Rwanda where a massacre is unfolding on live television and the world is challenged to act. It is time for the United States, NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League to act forcefully to try to prevent the already bloody situation from degenerating into something much worse.
By acting, I mean a response sufficiently forceful and direct to deter or prevent the Libyan regime from using its military resources to butcher its opponents. I have already seen reports that NATO has sternly warned Libya against further violence against its people. Making that credible could mean the declaration and enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya, presumably by NATO, to prevent the use of military aircraft against the protestors. It could also mean a clear declaration that members of the regime and military will be held individually responsible for any future deaths. The U.S. should call for an urgent, immediate Security Council meeting and push for a strong resolution condeming Libya’s use of violence and authorizing targeted sanctions against the regime. Such steps could stand a chance of reversing the course of a rapidly deteriorating situation. An effective international response could not only save many Libyan lives, it might also send a powerful warning to other Arab leaders who might contemplate following suit against their own protest movements.
There has been a sort-of coalescing around the idea that a No Fly Zone is useful way to intervene to stop the killing. I am not so sure. While it is true that some of the slaughter has been perpetrated by Libyan air force, air assets alone are not responsible for the killing. If Qaddafi and his inner circle are intent on violently suppressing this revolt, they will use their superior ground forces as well.
A No Fly Zone is a humanitarian half measure. It would let the international community say that it is doing something, but there is very little a No Fly Zone can actually do to stop ongoing slaughter. Using Lynch’s comparisons to slaughters of the 1990s, people need to ask themselves: would a no-fly zone have stopped the Machete wielding Interhamwe from perpetrating the Rwandan genocide? Definitely not. In Bosnia, there was an effective NATO enforced no fly zone over in 1995 when Srebrenica occurred. During the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, as NATO was bombing Serbia, Serb forces accelerated their ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. No Fly Zone’s may be good at enforcing a stalemate like interwar Iraq, but it is lousy at preventing slaughter.
This is not to say there is no utility in trying to enforce one over Libya—as Marc Lynch says, it could be one of several demonstrations of the resolve of the international community (along with multilateral sanctions and, perhaps, a Security Council referral to the ICC.) But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that a no-fly zone is an effective humanitarian response to a mass slaughter event. It is a gesture. Not a response.
If stopping a slaughter is our top priority, then a more robust response is probably required. That means not just preventing airplanes and attack helicopters from flying over Libya, but defeating the Libyan military infrastructure that is perpetrating the violence. The word for that is war.
At a moment of crisis — a moment when there are global expectations that an American president might act or at least speak out in a decisive way — Barack Obama goes missing.
At the height of Israel’s war on Gaza, when Iran’s Green Movement was being crushed, and when Mubarak’s thugs were attacking peaceful protesters in Egypt, what did Obama do? He monitored the situation. And at the darkest hour, he took cover and had nothing to say.
The Obama administration expressed fears Libya could be headed for civil war, as a decade of U.S. diplomatic outreach to Col. Moammar Gadhafi still appeared to leave Washington with little influence in the north African country.
U.S. officials Monday appealed for end of violence in Libya, amid signs of splits inside Col. Gadhafi’s military and diplomatic corps. The State Department, meanwhile, ordered its embassy staff out of Tripoli.
“It’s a deteriorating situation, and you can’t rule out at this stage a civil war,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on Libya. “We don’t have significant influence over the events, given the regime seems willing to do anything to survive.”
Only yesterday, the administration was clinging onto the fanciful possibility that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi might be offering some kind of “meaningful reform.”
Now, as observers (and Libyans) start calling for intervention, it’s not clear whether there’s an effective form this could take and even less clear that an international consensus will emerge, least of all inside the UN Security Council.
Yet if Obama breaks his silence, he could say this: “Libya’s fate is in the hands of the Libyan people and I join with Yusuf al-Qaradawi in hoping this crisis reaches a swift and decisive conclusion.”
Update — Gadaffi’s insanely desperate and brutal effort to hold on to power has reached a new extreme: the Libyan air force is now reported to be bombing Tripoli!
Al Jazeera Arabic is speaking to a political activist in Tripoli, who tells us there are airstrikes “all over Tripoli”.
There is death, fear – and women are crying everywhere. The strikes are concentrated against areas that sent large number of protestors to the streets and there are cars full of foreign fighters firing on people.
He says at least 250 people were killed in the past 24 hours alone and is calling for international help. He tells us Tripoli is “under siege by foreign fighters” – that water and electricity have been cut and there is a shortage of food and medical supplies. “It is a genocide,” he says.
A rapidly growing succession of Libya’s ambassadors have resigned in protest against Gadaffi’s actions: UK (ambassador and embassy staff); India; Arab League; China (senior diplomat); Bangladesh; Indonesia; EU…
Original post follows:
In one of the latest developments, Reuters reports that Libya’s justice minister has resigned in protest at “excessive use of violence against protesters.” The best way to follow the rapidly changing events in Libya is through Twitter #Feb17 and #Libya.
On Monday, reports from Tripoli suggested the streets were mainly quiet, with government forces still patrolling Green Square after crushing protests in what witnesses called a “massacre”.
It followed a night of violence between supporters of Col Gaddafi and anti-government protesters.
Libya’s envoy to the Arab League, Abdel Moneim al-Honi, announced he was “joining the revolution” and its ambassador to India, Ali al-Essawi, told the BBC he was resigning in protest against his government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators.
Mohamed Bayou, who until a month ago was chief spokesman for the Libyan government, said the leadership was wrong to threaten violence against its opponents.
“I hope that [Saif Gaddafi] will… change his speech to acknowledge the existence of an internal popular opposition, to enter into dialogue with them regarding thorough changes in the Libyan system,” Mr Bayou said in a statement obtained by the Reuters news agency that appeared to indicate disagreement within the ruling elite.
In another blow to Col Gaddafi’s rule, two tribes – including Libya’s largest tribe, the Warfla – have backed the protesters.
With Tripoli in ferment, the government has already lost control of much of the east of the country, says the BBC’s Jon Leyne in neighbouring Egypt.
It is beginning to look like just a matter of time before Col Gaddafi’s rule finally collapses, adds our correspondent. However Libyans are worried about how much more violence lies in store in the days ahead.
Mapping Violence Against Pro-Democracy Protests in Libya:
The crushing of protests in Benghazi and elsewhere bears the hallmark of [Muammar Gaddafi’s] instinctive brutality when faced with challenges to his rule, analysts say.
In the 1980s he sent hit squads to murder exiled “stray dogs” who challenged the revolution. Islamist rebels at home were crushed in the 1990s and in 1996 1,000 prisoners were gunned down in an infamous prison massacre.
“For Gaddafi it’s kill or be killed,” said opposition writer Ashour Shamis. “Now he’s gone straight for the kill.”
The uprisings in neighbouring countries do not appear to have shaken his resolve to stay in power. He sent messages of support to Tunisia’s Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali and to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak before they stepped down.
Regime survival has marked Gaddafi’s moves in recent years – from the handover of the Lockerbie bombing suspects to the surrender of his WMD programme after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No-one expects him to give up peacefully. He may make gestures such as promising closer consultation or boosting investment in housing and social services, but that seems unlikely to satisfy protesters after such brutality towards ordinary Libyans.
“Gaddafi will find it hard to make concessions in order to survive,” said Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Libya. “The attitude of the regime is that it’s all or nothing.”
In a televised speech, Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said on Sunday evening: “We will keep fighting until the last man standing, even to the last woman standing.”
“We are analyzing the speech of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to see what possibilities it contains for meaningful reform,” a U.S. official said in Washington, Reuters reports.
In an indication that the Obama administration is poised to challenge Gaddafi with the toughest language it’s capable of deploying, after President Obama on Friday said he was “deeply concerned” by reports of violence from Libya and elsewhere in the region, the State Department now says it is “gravely concerned.”
How much further can US “concern” be ratcheted up?
Maybe Washington is preparing to move into a new and dangerous rhetorical dimension. Maybe Obama’s concern is about to escalate to the level of distress, or even deeply distressed.
Perhaps it’s time to warn the Libyan leader that if he doesn’t stop slaughtering his own people, then Obama will get very upset.
Saudi Arabia said Sunday that it stands ready “with all its capabilities” to shore up Bahrain’s ruling royal family if a standoff with the Shiite-led opposition is not resolved soon, underscoring the kingdom’s deep concern about its neighbor’s ongoing political crisis.
Sunni-led Saudi Arabia props up Bahrain’s al-Khalifa family with cash and has long sought to prevent the tiny Persian Gulf state – with its majority Shiite population – from falling into Iran’s orbit. With dwindling oil resources, Bahrain relies heavily on Saudi Arabia for money and security.
It was unclear whether the Saudi comments indicated that the country was contemplating possible action in Bahrain or were merely meant to express growing anxiety among Saudi leaders. But some regional experts have long warned that a concerted Shiite challenge to the monarchy in Bahrain might prompt intervention from Saudi Arabia, which has its own restive Shiite minority population. The two countries are connected by a causeway.
And let’s suppose that in the coming days or weeks, Saudi forces (which they would no doubt describe with some anodyne phrase such as “peacekeeping forces” or “military assistance”) invade Bahrain.
Hand-wringing in Washington and other Western capitals will surely become frenzied in a decisive moment when Obama and his allies will be forced to show the world whether they truly stand for or against democracy.
Gulf states could go as far as using military intervention to prevent a regime change in Bahrain to block the tide of protests there from reaching their countries, analysts say.
A spread of the Shi’ite protests in Bahrain into the rest of the energy-rich Gulf states would be a major strategic victory for neighbouring Shi’ite Iran, they said on Thursday.
Foreign ministers of the six-nation alliance of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which Bahrain is a member, affirmed at a meeting in Manama on Thursday their political, economic, security and defence support for Bahrain.
“Gulf states cannot accept a fundamental and radical change in Bahrain. The demand for constitutional monarchy cannot be imposed without [natural] political development that takes its due course,” Saudi political analyst Dakheel al-Dakheel said.
“This will create a state of political and security confusion in Bahrain that opens the door for Iranian and non-Iranian interference, which will not be acceptable to Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia,” said Dakheel.
In agreement with Gilles Kepel who has dubbed events unfolding across the Middle East as the “Arab democratic revolution,” David Hirst writes:
[S]ome now say, this emergence of democracy as an ideal and politically mobilising force amounts to nothing less than a “third way” in modern Arab history. The first was nationalism, nourished by the experience of European colonial rule and all its works, from the initial great carve-up of the “Arab nation” to the creation of Israel, and the west’s subsequent, continued will to dominate and shape the region. The second, which only achieved real power in non-Arab Iran, was “political Islam”, nourished by the failure of nationalism.
And it is doubly revolutionary. First, in the very conduct of the revolution itself, and the sheer novelty and creativity of the educated and widely apolitical youth who, with the internet as their tool, kindled it. Second, and more conventionally, in the depth, scale and suddenness of the transformation in a vast existing order that it seems manifestly bound to wreak.
Arab, yes – but not in the sense of the Arabs going their own away again. Quite the reverse. No other such geopolitical ensemble has so long boasted such a collection of dinosaurs, such inveterate survivors from an earlier, totalitarian era; no other has so completely missed out on the waves of “people’s power” that swept away the Soviet empire and despotisms in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In rallying at last to this now universal, but essentially western value called democracy, they are in effect rejoining the world, catching up with history that has left them behind.
If it was in Tunis that the celebrated “Arab street” first moved, the country in which – apart from their own – Arabs everywhere immediately hoped that it would move next was Egypt. That would amount to a virtual guarantee that it would eventually come to them all. For, most pivotal, populous and prestigious of Arab states, Egypt was always a model, sometimes a great agent of change, for the whole region. It was during the nationalist era, after President Nasser’s overthrow of the monarchy in 1952, that it most spectacularly played that role. But in a quieter, longer-term fashion, it was also the chief progenitor, through the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, of the “political Islam” we know today, including – in both the theoretical basis as well as substantially in personnel – the global jihad and al-Qaida that were to become its ultimate, deviant and fanatical descendants.
But third, and most topically, it was also the earliest and most influential exemplar of the thing which, nearly 60 years on, the Arab democratic revolution is all about. Nasser did seek the “genuine democracy” that he held to be best fitted for the goals of his revolution. But, for all its democratic trappings, it was really a military-led, though populist, autocracy from the very outset; down the years it underwent vast changes of ideology, policy and reputation, but, forever retaining its basic structures, it steadily degenerated into that aggravated, arthritic,deeply oppressive and immensely corrupt version of its original self over which Hosni Mubarak presided. With local variations, the system replicated itself in most Arab autocracies, especially the one-time revolutionary ones like his, but in the older, traditional monarchies too.
And, sure enough, Egypt’s “street” did swiftly move, and in nothing like the wild and violent manner that the image of the street in action has always tends to conjure up in anxious minds. As a broad and manifestly authentic expression of the people’s will, it accomplished the first, crucial stage of what surely ranks as one of the most exemplary, civilised uprisings in history. The Egyptians feel themselves reborn, the Arab world once more holds Egypt, “mother of the world”, in the highest esteem. And finally – after much artful equivocation as they waited to see whether the pharaoh, for 30 years the very cornerstone of their Middle East, had actually fallen – President Obama and others bestowed on them the unstinting official tributes of the west.
These plaudits raise the great question: if the Arabs are now rejoining the world what does it mean for the world? Will the adoption of a fundamental western value make it necessarily receptive to western policies or prescriptions? Probably not. Democracy itself, let alone Arab resentment over the west’s long record of upholding the old, despotic order, will militate against that.
As unrest spreads across Libya, The Guardian reports:
In fast-moving developments after midnight, demonstrators were reported to be in Tripoli’s Green Square and preparing to march on Gaddafi’s compound as rumours spread that the leader had fled to Venezuela. Other reports described protesters in the streets of Tripoli throwing stones at billboards of Muammar Gaddafi while police used teargas to try to disperse them.
“People are in the street chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great) and throwing stones at photos of Gaddafi,”an expatriate worker told Reuters by telephone from Tripoli. “The police are firing teargas everywhere, it’s even getting into the houses.”
Libya’s extraordinary day overshadowed drama elsewhere in the region. Tensions eased in Bahrain after troops withdrew from a square in Manama occupied by Shia protesters. Thousands of security personnel were also deployed in the Iranian capital, Tehran, to forestall an opposition rally. Elsewhere in the region unrest hit Yemen, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait and Algeria.
But the eyes of the world were on Benghazi and elsewhere in eastern Libya where shocked witnesses spoke of “massacres” and described corpses shot in the head, chest or neck piling up in hospitals running short of blood and medicines.
According to a Reuters report, Libyan soldiers said they had defected and were joining the protests.
An intelligence source reported that 150 soldiers and officers who disobeyed orders and refused to shoot at protestors would be executed.
Estimates of the total number of fatalities over six days of unprecedented unrest ranged from 233 – the latest figure given by Human Rights Watch – to 285. But some opposition sources gave figures as high as 500.
In the last few hours Al Jazeera reported on its Libya live blog:
Libya’s ambassador to China, Hussein Sadiq al Musrati, has just resigned on air with Al Jazeera Arabic. He called on the army to intervene, and has called all diplomatic staff to resign.
He made claims about a gunfight between Gaddafi’s sons and also claimed that Gaddafi may have left Libya. Al Jazeera has no confirmation of these claims.
Libya’s ambassador to the Arab League has resigned amid unrest in the country. Abdel Elhuni said he quit because he cannot be part of a regime that kills innocent people.
Appearing on Libyan state television early on Monday morning, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi said his father is in the country and backed by the army. “We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet.”
Seif al-Islam said his father was leading the fight, although he added that some military bases, tanks and weapons had been seized.
“We are not Tunisia and Egypt,” the younger Gaddafi said, referring to the successful uprisings that toppled longtime regimes in Libya’s neighbours
He acknowledged that the army made mistakes during protests because it was not trained to deal with demonstrators but added that the number of dead had been exaggerated, giving a death toll of 84.
Human Rights Watch put the number at 174 through Saturday, and doctors in the eastern city of Benghazi said more than 200 have died since the protests began.
In recent years, from Burma, to Afghanistan and Zimbabwe – even in Iran and North Korea – my colleagues have been on the frontline, eyewitness to events making headlines around the globe. In Libya this weekend, we’ve been forced to rely on others’ eyewitness accounts. The geography of the country – much of it is barren desert – means it’s simply not practical for us to enter Libya “under-cover”. Add to that, the ruthlessness of the Libyan authorities, and the scale of violence, and you’ll understand why – just a week after covering Egypt’s own convulsions – Jon Leyne is reporting developments from Cairo.
When violence was last visited on Tripoli and Benghazi, the BBC was there to witness events. Famously, Norman Tebbit condemned Kate Adie’s reporting of the US airstrikes on Libya on April 1986. Twenty five years later, the protests – and the authorities’ response – are taking place with no international reporters present.
The BBC and other news organisations are relying on those on the ground to tell us what’s happening. Their phone accounts – often accompanied by the sound or gunfire and mortars – are vivid. However, inevitably, it means we cannot independently verify the accounts coming out of Libya. That’s why we don’t present such accounts as “fact” – they are “claims” or “allegations”.
It’s just two and a half years since Muammar Gaddafi was welcomed in from the cold in what was then heralded as a victory for real politik.
There haven’t been too many opportunities to say this, but the Bush Administration scored an unqualified success in the Middle East on Friday. In the highest-level U.S. visit to Libya since John Foster Dulles held talks with King Idris Senussi in 1953, Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice arrived in Tripoli and met with the country’s revolutionary leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The talks mark the final step in a remarkable rapprochement that offers an example of how violent disputes in the troubled region can be settled through diplomacy rather than war.
Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister hand – al-Qa’ida’s hand, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah’s bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.
Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the “stable” dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West’s hypocrisy that they didn’t want America on their side. “The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers,” an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. “Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side.” At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. “We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,” a medical orderly told me on Friday. “And now Obama wants to be on our side?”
The events of the past two months and the spirit of anti-regime Arab insurrection – for dignity and justice, rather than any Islamic emirate – will remain in our history books for hundreds of years. And the failure of Islam’s strictest adherents will be discussed for decades. There was a special piquancy to the latest footage from al-Qa’ida yesterday, recorded before the overthrow of Mubarak, that emphasised the need for Islam to triumph in Egypt; yet a week earlier the forces of secular, nationalist, honourable Egypt, Muslim and Christian men and women, had got rid of the old man without any help from Bin Laden Inc. Even weirder was the reaction from Iran, whose supreme leader convinced himself that the Egyptian people’s success was a victory for Islam. It’s a sobering thought that only al-Qa’ida and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators, believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of pro-democracy protesters.
After the battle for Tahrir Square, the conceptual grid that Western officials have used to divide the Islamic world into friends and enemies, moderates and radicals, good Muslims and bad Muslims has never looked more inadequate, or more irrelevant. A ‘moderate’ and ‘stable’ Arab government, a pillar of US strategy in the Middle East, has been overthrown by a nationwide protest movement demanding democratic reform, transparent governance, freedom of assembly, a more equitable distribution of the country’s resources and a foreign policy more reflective of popular opinion. It has sent other Arab governments into a panic while raising the hopes of their young, frustrated populations. If the revolution in Egypt succeeds, it will have swept away not only a corrupt and autocratic regime, but the vocabulary, and the patterns of thought, that have underpinned Western policy in the greater Middle East for more than a half century.
The fate of Egypt’s revolution – brought to a pause by the military’s seizure of power on 11 February, after Mubarak’s non-resignation address to his ‘children’ – remains uncertain. Mubarak is gone, but the streets have been mostly cleared of protesters and the army has filled the vacuum: chastened, yet still in power and with considerable resources at its disposal. Until elections are held in six months, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will be ruling by decree, without the façade of parliamentary government. The parliament, voted into office in rigged elections, has been dissolved, a move that won wide support, and a new constitution is being drafted, but it’s not clear how much of a hand the opposition will have in shaping it. More ominously, the Supreme Council has vowed to punish anyone it can accuse of spreading ‘chaos and disorder’. The blunt rhetoric of its communiqués may be refreshing after the speeches of Mubarak, his son Gamal and the industrialists who dominated the ruling National Democratic Party, with their formulaic promises of reform and their talk of the nobility of the Egyptian people but ten days ago in Tahrir Square the protesters said – maybe even believed – that the army and the people stood together. Today the council’s communiqués are instructions, not proposals to be debated, and it has notably failed to answer the protesters’ two most urgent demands: the repeal of the Emergency Law and the release of thousands of political prisoners.
The Egyptian revolution has captivated audiences and inspired a sense of endless new possibilities. Whether it is a “new dawn” or “a dividing point in history” (as I heard it described by Jordanians and Palestinians across the political spectrum), Egyptians are seen as having brought down a rotten system as they begin to write their own future. The only question is how other Arabs (and maybe even Iranians) can join them.
I am not yet so sure.
It is not that the old regime still remains (though it does; the junta and the cabinet are both still staffed by pre-revolutionary appointees and only vague hints of a cabinet reshuffle have been floated). It is clear that real change of some kind will take place. But the shape of the transition has not yet been defined. A more democratic, pluralistic, participatory, public-spirited, and responsive political system is a real possibility. But so is a kinder, gentler, presidentially-dominated, liberalized authoritarianism. In this post, I will discuss the state of play in Egypt; in future writings I hope to explore the implications for other regimes in the region.
The danger of indefinite military rule in Egypt is small. While pundits have often proclaimed the military to be the real political power in Egypt since 1952, in fact the political role for the military has been restricted for a generation. And there is no sign that the junta wants to change that for long. It is order, not power that they seem to seek. When the generals suspended the constitution, most opposition elements saw that as a positive step because it made possible far-reaching change, and I think that was a correct political judgment. (The suspension led to odd headlines in international press referring to Egypt as now being under martial law. But Egypt has been under martial law with only brief interruptions since 1939. It was not the generals who placed Egypt under martial law; that step was taken by King Faruq.)
But if the suspension of the constitution allowed the possibility of fundamental change, it did not require it. Indeed, the transition as defined by Egypt’s junta seems both extremely rushed and very limited.
He organized his first demonstration while still a student in 1998, then got arrested and tortured by Egyptian police two years later at age 23. Now he has seen the fall of the president he spent his adult life struggling against.
For 33-year-old activist Hossam el-Hamalawy, though, Egypt’s three-week youth revolution is by no means over — there remains a repressive state to be dismantled and workers who need to get their rights.
“The job is unfinished, we got rid of (Hosni) Mubarak but we didn’t get rid of his dictatorship, we didn’t get rid of the state security police,” he told The Associated Press while sipping strong Arabic coffee in a traditional downtown cafe that weeks before had been the scene of street battles.
The activism career of el-Hamalawy typifies the long, and highly improbable, trajectory of the mass revolt that ousted Mubarak, Egypt’s long-entrenched leader. Once a dreamer organizing more or less on his own, el-Hamalawy’s dreams suddenly hardened into reality. The next step, he says, is the Egyptian people must press their advantage.
“This is phase two of the revolution,” said el-Hamalawy, who works as a journalist for an English-language online Egyptian paper and runs the Arabawy blog, a clearing house for information on the country’s fledgling independent labor movement — a campaign that has become increasingly assertive since the fall of the old government.
For years, activists in Egypt planted seeds — sometimes separately, sometimes in coordination — building networks and pushing campaigns on specific causes. They fought lonely fights: anti-war protests here, labor strikes there, an effort to raise awareness about police abuse, another to organize “Keep Our City Clean” trash collection.
Then one day in late January, it all came together for them. They were part of a movement, hundreds of thousands strong.
For three weeks, el-Hamalawy fought regime supporters and manned the barricades in Tahrir Square, but unlike the youth leaders who have come to prominence in the aftermath of the uprising, he refuses to talk to the generals now ruling Egypt and fears the uprising’s momentum is being lost as everyone waits for the military to transition the country to a new government.
This weekend, a new member enrolled in Likud – and not just in the ruling party, but in its most hawkish wing. Located somewhere between Tzipi Hotovely and Danny Danon, U.S. President Barack Obama bypassed Dan Meridor and Michael Eitan on the right and weakened their position.
The first veto cast by the United States during Obama’s term, a veto he promised in vain not to use as his predecessors did, was a veto against the chance and promise of change, a veto against hope. This is a veto that is not friendly to Israel; it supports the settlers and the Israeli right, and them alone.
The excuses of the American ambassador to the UN won’t help, and neither will the words of thanks from the Prime Minister’s Office: This is a step that is nothing less than hostile to Israel. America, which Israel depends on more than ever, said yes to settlements. That is the one and only meaning of its decision, and in so doing, it supported the enterprise most damaging to Israel.
Moreover, it did so at a time when winds of change are blowing in the Middle East. A promise of change was heard from America, but instead, it continued with its automatic responses and its blind support of Israel’s settlement building. This is not an America that will be able to change its standing among the peoples of the region. And Israel, an international pariah, once again found itself supported only by America.
This should have disturbed every Israeli. Is that what we are? Alone and condemned? And all for the continuation of that worthless enterprise? Is it really worth the price? To hell with the UN and the whole world is against us?
We can’t wrap ourselves in this hollow iron dome forever. We must open our eyes and understand that if no country, aside from weakening America, supports this caprice of ours, then something fundamental is wrong here.
Israel, which is condemned by the entire world but continues merrily on its way, is a country that is losing its connection to reality. It is also a country that will ultimately find itself left entirely to its fate. That is why America’s decision harmed Israel’s interests: It continued to blind and stupefy Israel into thinking it can go on this way forever.
In 1969, the United States voted with the rest of the Security Council to condemn Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and plans to build Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. The Security Council “urgently calls once more upon Israel to rescind forthwith all measure taken by it which may tend to change the status of the City of Jerusalem.” And it explicitly mentioned expropriation of land.
Several days earlier, the US ambassador the United Nations had said in a speech to the UN:
The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the 1967 war, like all other areas occupied by Israel, is occupied territory and hence subject to the provisions of international law governing the rights and obligations of an occupying Power. Among the provision of international law which bind Israel, as they would bind any occupier, are the provisions that the occupier has no right to make changes in law or in administration other than those which are temporarily necessitated by his security interests, and that an occupier may not confiscate or destroy private property. The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by the immediate needs of the occupation. I regret to say that the actions by Israel in the occupied portion of Jerusalem present a different picture, one which gives understandable concern that the eventual disposition of East Jerusalem may be prejudiced, and that the private rights and activities of the population are already being affected and altered. (Cited in Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem, by Amir S. Cheshin, Bil Hutman, and Avi Melamed (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999), pp. 46-7.
I should point out that this statement was made before a single Jewish settlement had been built outside of Jerusalem. The censure was in reaction to Israel construction of Jewish settlements over the Green Line in East Jerusalem – settlements that are now the “neighborhoods” of Ramot Eshkol and Ma’a lot dafna, East Talpiyot and Neveh Ya’akov.
Around 3,000 Palestinians gathered in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday to protest the US veto that nixed a Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements.
The crowd massed in Manara Square, a central traffic circle in the West Bank city, waving banners and shouting slogans against the American administration.
“Obama, you despicable man, we want self-determination!” shouted the demonstrators, many of them members of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party.
While the Palestinians continue to express their anger over the US veto against a UN vote condemning Israel’s settlement construction policy, new details have surfaced regarding the pre-veto discussions. Fatah elements claimed Saturday that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened to halt financial aid should the Palestinian Authority not withdraw its draft from the Security Council’s agenda. Nevertheless, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stressed that the PA will not boycott the US.
A senior Fatah element told the Palestinian news agency Sama that Clinton threatened Abbas on Friday to cancel US aid. According to the source, US President Barack Obama told Abbas on Thursday night that no other American president has promoted the Palestinian issue more vigorously.
The Obama administration — which has yet to find a Bush policy it’s unwilling to promote — is continuing the practice of ideological exclusion (a Soviet-style policy of excluding political critics from entering the US). Omar Barghouti, author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, has been refused a visa for his upcoming speaking tour. He writes:
Ms. Clinton can sing the tunes of freedom all she wants when watching the news of Arab popular revolts from Morocco to Bahrain, but she is not fooling any average-intelligence person in the Arab world. US policy, especially after the veto cast yesterday against the most benign UN Security Council resolution, simply reiterating universal, long-held facts that Israel’s colonial settlements are illegal and thwart just peace, is being exposed to the new generation of restive, fearless, freedom-aspiring Arab youth as the main cause of their oppression, of buttressing and protecting the tyrants that have denied them all freedoms for decades. It has long been exposed, too, as the key partner of Israel in its occupation, colonialism and apartheid. Without US largess, Israel’s multi-tiered system of racist and colonial oppression cannot possibly survive.
Dozens of protesters were reported killed by sniper fire from security forces in Benghazi, Libya’s second city, yesterday when violence flared again as crowds clashed after funerals for people killed in fighting on Friday. “Dozens were killed. We are in the midst of a massacre here,” one eyewitness reported.
Clashes were reported in the town of al-Bayda, where dozens of civilians were said to have been killed and police stations came under attack. In all, the death toll was reported to have reached 120. Doctors from Aj Jala hospital in Benghazi confirmed 1,000 people had been injured. (The Independent)
Reports of intense Benghazi violence
Benghazi, about 1,000 km (600 miles) from Tripoli, has been the main focus of the demonstrations against Col Gaddafi’s 42-year rule.
Troops opened fire on people attending a funeral there on Saturday, killing 15, both the Associated Press news agency and al-Jazeera television said.
But an eyewitness told Reuters news agency that many more had actually died.
“Dozens were killed… not 15, dozens,” the unnamed eyewitness said, adding that he had helped take victims to a local hospital.
A Benghazi resident told the BBC that security forces inside a government compound had fired on protesters with mortars and 14.5mm machine guns – a heavy machine gun typically produced in the former USSR.
They were, he said, machine-gunning cars and people indiscriminately. “A lot [of people] have fallen down today,” he added. (BBC)
Libyan protesters risk ‘suicide’ by army hands
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is confronting the most serious challenge to his 42-year rule as leader of Libya by unleashing his army on unarmed protesters.
Unlike the rulers of neighbouring Egypt, Gaddafi has refused to countenance the politics of disobedience, despite growing international condemnation, and the death toll of demonstrators nearing 100.
The pro-government Al-Zahf al-Akhdar newspaper warned that the government would “violently and thunderously respond” to the protests, and said those opposing the regime risked “suicide”.
William Hague, the UK’s foreign secretary, condemned the violence as “unacceptable and horrifying”, even as the Libyan regime’s special forces, backed by African mercenaries, launched a dawn attack on a protest camp in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
Britain is scrambling to extricate itself from its recently cosy relationship with Gaddafi, initiated by then prime minister Tony Blair in 2004. That rapprochement saw Libya open its doors to British oil companies in exchange for becoming a new ally in the “war on terror” while Britain sold Gaddafi arms. (The Guardian)
Unrest encircles Saudis, stoking sense of unease
The Saudi and pan-Arab news media have been cautiously supportive of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, with a number of opinion articles welcoming the call for nonviolent change. That may change now that protests and violence have seized Bahrain, which lies just across a 15-mile causeway from the Saudi border. Bahrain is a far more threatening prospect, in part because of the sectarian dimensions of the protests. Bahrain’s restive population is mostly Shiite, and is adjacent to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, an important oil-producing area where the Shiite population has long complained of unfair treatment by the puritanical Saudi religious establishment. They feel a strong kinship with their co-religionists across the water.
“The Bahrain uprising may give more courage to the Shia in the Eastern Province to protest,” said one Saudi diplomat. “It might then escalate to the rest of the country.”
Most analysts say that is unlikely. Although Saudi Arabia shares many of the conditions that bred the democracy uprisings — including autocracy, corruption and a large population of educated young people without access to suitable jobs — its people are cushioned by oil wealth and culturally resistant to change.
Moreover, analysts tend to agree that Saudi Arabia would never allow the Bahraini monarchy to be overthrown. Ever since Bahrain began a harsh crackdown on protesters on Thursday, rumors have flown that Saudi Arabia provided military support or guidance; however, there is no evidence to support that. In recent days, the deputy governor of the Eastern Province, Saud bin Jalawi, spoke to Shiite religious leaders and urged them to suppress any rebellious sentiment, according to Saudi news media reports.
“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Rutgers University. “It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.” (New York Times)
How Mideast autocrats win friends and influence people in Washington
Shortly after 20 Shiite opposition leaders, including clerics and human rights activists, were arrested on the eve of elections in Bahrain last September, U.S. State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley was asked about the situation, including allegations of police torture, “given the close relations between Bahrain and the United States.”
Crowley responded, “We are in touch with Bahraini authorities and have expressed our concern. At the same time, we have confidence as Bahrain evolves that you don’t have to make a choice between security and democracy, and that this is the message that we’re sending to the government.”
When asked whether the State Department believes Bahraini government claims that those opposition figures were plotting a coup against the royal family, Crowley dismissed the allegation, saying, “I don’t know that we’re aware of any information along those lines…”
Bahrain’s state media covered the same press briefing with a slightly altered response from Crowley. Their headline read, “America: Bahrain evolves in security and democracy,” with an accompanying story reporting the “spokesman stressed that the United States has confidence that Bahrain is evolving in the fields of development, security and democracy.”
Control of the state media is not the only way the oil-rich island kingdom polishes its reputation. A month before the arrests, one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms began working for Bahrain.
Qorivs, a lobbying and public relations giant with a roster of high-profile clients from Intel and the Washington Post to Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea, began work under a subcontract with Britain’s Bell Pottinger. Among its goals: to position Bahrain as a key ally in the war on terror and as an advocate for peace in the Middle East. As part of its work, Qorvis pitched major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, reports O’Dwyer’s PR Daily. (Huffington Post)
When Bahrain’s army opened fire on unarmed protesters yesterday there was little reason to suppose that this was anything other than a cold and calculated show of force. The lesson from Cairo for many Arab leaders was that a regime that is timid about killing its own people will quickly fall. Political dissent cannot be crushed by thugs marauding on camels and horses. The decisive message comes as a government’s marksman steadies his sight with a protester’s head fixed in the cross-hairs. There was nothing random about this act of violence:
But then comes the stunningly eloquent Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, expressing remorse about the tragic events of recent days.
Are we to supposed that an army captain at Pearl Roundabout was responsible for yesterday’s bloodshed. Or was it that Crown Prince Salman’s consternation was not in response to recklessness in the lower ranks but because the Al Khalifa royal family was under pressure from a higher level?
Rumours burned like petrol in Bahrain yesterday and many medical staff were insisting that up to 60 corpses had been taken from Pearl Square on Thursday morning and that police were seen by crowds loading bodies into three refrigerated trucks. One man showed me a mobile phone snapshot in which the three trucks could be seen clearly, parked behind several army armoured personnel carriers. According to other demonstrators, the vehicles, which bore Saudi registration plates, were later seen on the highway to Saudi Arabia. It is easy to dismiss such ghoulish stories, but I found one man – another male nurse at the hospital who works under the umbrella of the United Nations – who told me that an American colleague, he gave his name as “Jarrod”, had videotaped the bodies being put into the trucks but was then arrested by the police and had not been seen since.
Why has the royal family of Bahrain allowed its soldiers to open fire at peaceful demonstrators? To turn on Bahraini civilians with live fire within 24 hours of the earlier killings seems like an act of lunacy.
But the heavy hand of Saudi Arabia may not be far away. The Saudis are fearful that the demonstrations in Manama and the towns of Bahrain will light equally provocative fires in the east of their kingdom, where a substantial Shia minority lives around Dhahran and other towns close to the Kuwaiti border. Their desire to see the Shia of Bahrain crushed as quickly as possible was made very clear at Thursday’s Gulf summit here, with all the sheikhs and princes agreeing that there would be no Egyptian-style revolution in a kingdom which has a Shia majority of perhaps 70 per cent and a small Sunni minority which includes the royal family.
At a town-hall-style meeting in Bahrain two months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got a pointed question from a member of Bahrain’s Parliament: was the United States letting Bahrain, a Persian Gulf ally, off the hook for a string of arrests of lawyers and human rights activists?
The moderator rebuked the questioner for “hijacking the mike,” but Mrs. Clinton replied anyway. “I see the glass as half full,” she said, pointing to Bahrain’s recent elections. “I think the changes that are happening in Bahrain are much greater than what I see in many other countries in the region and beyond.”
When it came to Bahrain, Mrs. Clinton was not the only American diplomat who tended to see the glass as half full. Her rosy assessment, which seems incongruous in light of the army’s bloody crackdown on protesters, illustrates how the United States government has overlooked recent complaints about human rights abuses in a kingdom that is an economic and military hub in the Persian Gulf.
And it leaves the White House once again scrambling to deal with an Arab ally facing a tide of popular discontent. In this case, its calculations are complicated by signs that Bahrain is being pressed by its neighbor Saudi Arabia, the most strategically important country in the region.
In cables made public by WikiLeaks, the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly characterized Bahrain as more open and reform-minded than its neighbors, and pushed back when human rights groups criticized the government.
In a January 2010 cable, the American Embassy in Bahrain criticized the human rights group Freedom House for downgrading Bahrain’s rating from “partly free” to “not free” in its global survey of political rights and civil liberties. The cable asserted that Freedom House had been successfully lobbied by a radical Shiite movement, known as Haq, which rejects the government’s reform efforts.
Another cable passed along doubts about a Human Rights Watch report that said the police were using torture in interrogations — saying it relied heavily on allegations made by members of the same group — though the embassy did urge the Bahraini authorities to undertake a “timely and credible” investigation.
“The embassy was feeding this happy talk for years,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. “Bahrain was moving on a genuine reform path for several years, but it did a significant U-turn in the last year, and I think the U.S. government was well behind the curve.”
“Torture is back in the repertoire of Bahrain’s security services,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The return of torture is especially distressing since Bahrain showed the political will a decade ago to end this scourge.”
Bahrain’s reversion to these discredited practices has come with rising political tensions. Street demonstrations by young men from the country’s majority Shia Muslim population protesting alleged discrimination by the Sunni-dominated government have deteriorated with increasing regularity into violent confrontations with security forces. Arrests have often followed. Security officials appear to be using painful physical techniques to elicit confessions from many of those arrested.
These techniques include electro-shock devices, suspension in painful positions, and beatings. Some of those who were detained reported that security officials threatened to kill or rape them or members of their families. Many were subjected to more than one of these practices.
A month later, the State Department’s annual report on human rights downplayed the torture allegations and seemed to insinuate that the victims’ credibility should be questioned. The report repeatedly cited official denials of the use of torture as though such denials constituted some form of evidence. It also repeatedly referred to rioters using Molotov cocktails — as though anyone engaged in political violence should expect to become a target of violence when held in detention, or, that anyone who riots can’t be trusted.
There are indications that the Obama administration did not simply view Bahrain in the way its rulers wanted the kingdom to be seen. State Department cables revealed by WikiLeaks to the Daily Telegraph, show in detail the administration’s interest in the power dynamics within the royal family and perhaps expose the US government’s desire to manipulate how the Al Khalifa family exercises its power.
To the extent that the US feels empowered and entitled to control other states, it would seem inevitable that a transition to democracy in those states would be regarded as a threat to American interests.
The US State Department secretly asked its diplomats in Bahrain to report any “derogatory” information about two of the King’s sons and evidence of “rivalry” with senior members of the ruling royal family, leaked documents show.
The office of Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wanted to know if Prince Nasir bin Hamad al Khalifa or Prince Khalid bin Hamad al Khalifa took drugs, drank alcohol or “caused problems” within the monarchy.
Embassy staff in the Bahraini capital of Manama were also asked whether the princes had any friends among the country’s Shia Muslim majority, which is behind this week’s protests against the minority rule of the Sunni regime.
Prince Nasir, 23, who is serving in the Bahrain Defence Force, and Prince Khalid, 21, are King Hamad’s sons by his second wife and there have been fears in the region that hardliners from neighbouring countries might try to influence them.
Another cable reveals that the princes’ father, King Hamad, saw Bahrain’s strategic relationship with the US as so indispensable that he wanted to be sure the US Fifth Fleet would remain for decades:
He said he wanted to ensure a U.S. naval presence in Bahrain “for the next fifty years” and wondered aloud what kind of commitment Bahrain could offer that would serve this purpose. He suggested, for example, that Bahrain could increase production of crude or refined products to meet the Navy’s fuel requirements.
As an extra incentive, Bahrain considered offering the US Navy long-term fuel contracts at a fixed price. And keep in mind that Bahrain is a relatively minor oil producer.
Meanwhile, Eric Avebury provides some political background on the tiny Gulf state.
Bahrain is an hereditary dictatorship masquerading as a parliamentary democracy. The state has been ruled by the al-Khalifa family since the end of the 18th century, and still today all ministers are appointed by the King, who chooses 80 per cent from his near relations. The Prime Minister, who is the King’s uncle, has occupied the post since 1971, when Bahrain got its independence.
The al-Khalifas are Sunnis, but the majority of the population was Shia, at least until very recently. The regime has engaged in long-term demographic engineering, by granting citizenship, jobs and housing to Sunni immigrants. At the same time a clandestine organisation headed by another relative, Shaikh Ahmed bin Ateyatalla Al Khalifa, works to ensure that the Shia remain powerless, economically and politically. Gerrymandering at the last election saw to it that although 60 per cent of the votes were for Shia candidates, only 16 of them were elected to the lower house of parliament.
Thousands of joyous Bahrainis retook a major square in the heart of the island nation’s capital Saturday — a dramatic turn of events two days after security forces ousted demonstrators from the spot in a deadly attack.
The sight of citizens streaming into Pearl Roundabout came as the Bahrain royal family appealed for dialogue to end a turbulent week of unrest and the crown prince ordered the removal of the military from the Pearl Roundabout, a top demand by opposition forces.
Pearl Roundabout, scene of such tragedy, now is again center of jubilation, cheering and honking. I don’t see any police/ Wow! I’m awed to watch the courage of Bahrainis. Such guts. And it worked: they have reclaimed a place stained with blood/ Delirious joy in #Bahrain “Martyrs’ Roundabout,” as it’s now called. People kissing ground. But the firecrackers make me jump/ Congrats to #Bahrain crown prince, presumably responsible for decision not to shoot protesters today. Hope he prevails/ People Power, 1; King, 0, in #Bahrain. But it’s not over yet. Lots of small children in roundabout. Let’s pray army doesn’t attack/ People still pouring into “Martyrs’ Roundabout” from every direction, say they won’t leave. Mixed views on whether attack will come.
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