Desperate West

NATO fails to remove Muammar Qaddafi in spite of fighting its longest war.

WITH the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) undeclared war on Libya entering its fourth month, there are signs of growing desperation in the West. This has been NATO's longest military campaign so far. Its war against Yugoslavia was over in 79 days. Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia was a much stronger military power than Libya. Yet NATO, after more than 5,000 air strikes on Libyan military personnel and facilities, has not been able to dislodge Muammar Qaddafi.

In the last week of June, French Defence Ministry officials acknowledged that they had airdropped hundreds of tonnes of weaponry for use by the rebels in Libya soon after the United Nations Security Council authorised the setting up of a no-fly zone over the North African country. The weapons included anti-tank rockets and light armoured vehicles. The rebels used these initially to launch a counter-attack on government forces. Hundreds of French and British military officers are imparting training to the rebel forces in the rebel-controlled parts of Libya.

The West had expected a cakewalk for the rebels within weeks, but despite all the help, overt and covert, the military situation has reached a stalemate. In fact, according to reports in the American media, the rebels have lost more ground since the NATO intervention began.

A.U.'s criticism

The African Union (A.U.), which has been demanding a peaceful settlement to the crisis in Libya from the outset, has strongly criticised the French government's supply of arms to the rebels in defiance of U.N. Resolution 1973. South African President Jacob Zuma had warned the West against overstepping the U.N. mandate imposing a no-fly zone. Speaking a few days ahead of a special A.U. ministerial meet on Libya, Zuma said that the U.N. Resolution was not intended to authorise a campaign for regime change or political assassination.

The A.U. has been making repeated attempts to bring the conflict to a negotiated end, but all its attempts have been thwarted by the Western-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi. The rebels still hope that French President Nicolas Sarkozy will find a way for them to reach the capital, Tripoli.

Most African leaders have reasons to view the Libyan situation with alarm. The realisation has now dawned on them that colonial powers are back on the continent with a vengeance.

France even kept its NATO partners in the dark about its covert activities in Libya. Sarkozy, the primary instigator of NATO's Libyan misadventure, is desperate to see Qaddafi removed by hook or by crook before his country celebrates Bastille Day on July 14.

NATO has tried on several occasions in the past three months to liquidate Qaddafi. It killed his youngest son and three grandchildren when their residential compound was bombed on April 30. On June 20, another NATO attack, on a house owned by a close associate of Qaddafi, killed 19 civilians, including nine children. NATO military planners probably expected Qaddafi to be in the compound.

Mike Turner, a U.S. Congressman and member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the American media that he had been told by the NATO Joint Operations Commander in May that the NATO forces had been actively engaged to kill Qaddafi. Despite evidence, the Obama administration still insists that it is not targeting Qaddafi.

Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas is preparing to file a case in Europe against the indiscriminate bombing. NATO was supposed to defend civilians; instead NATO is bombarding Libyan civilians who happen to reside in areas controlled by Qaddafi's forces, he told the media in Tripoli at the conclusion of a fact-finding mission to Libya.

The war in Libya is becoming increasingly unpopular in Europe and the U.S. As a result of their massive bombing campaign, the French and the British have run short of munitions and cash. The outgoing U.S. Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, in a speech at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, was very critical of the role played by key alliance members such as Germany, Turkey and Spain, who have preferred to sit out on the Libya operations.

The Americans are picking up the bulk of the monetary tab being incurred in the military campaign. The Obama administration faces stiff opposition from both the Republicans and the Democrats in the U.S. Congress to the Libya operations. The fighting in Libya has caused the loss of 1.5 million barrels of oil a day from the global market, contributing significantly to the rise in the price of oil. The oil price rise, besides impacting on developing countries, has slowed down the U.S. economy.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has called for the cessation of the bombing campaign, which has increasingly targeted the civilian populace. Frattini has called for urgent humanitarian aid to be delivered to cities such as Tripoli which are under the control of the government forces. Italy, along with the U.S., France and the United Kingdom, is spearheading the NATO military campaign against the Libyan government. Right-wing parties such as the Northern League, which is a key partner in the Italian government, are against the NATO-led war, mainly because it has precipitated a new refugee influx from Libya into their country.

ICC warrant

In the last week of June, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has acted as a handmaid of the West on the African continent, was once again brought into the picture. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's chief prosecutor, whose term is coming to an end, issued formal warrants of arrest against Qaddafi, his second son Seif al-Islam al Qaddafi, and the country's intelligence chief Abdullah al-Sanussi, holding them guilty of war crimes.

But after a summit in Equatorial Guinea, A.U. leaders issued a statement on July 1 that member-countries would not execute the ICC warrant against Qaddafi. They said the warrant seriously complicates the efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Libya.

The West had threatened to use the ICC in its efforts to coerce Qaddafi to capitulate and hand over the government to the rebels. Moreno-Ocampo told the media that the ICC would take action against other senior Libyan officials if they did not cooperate in the execution of the arrest warrant.

Other rulers in the region backed by the West, including those in countries such as Israel, Yemen and Bahrain, are guilty of committing much bigger war crimes than those for which Qaddafi stands accused. WikiLeaks recently released diplomatic cables showing Moreno-Ocampo's eagerness to cover up American war crimes in Iraq.

Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaaim, while dismissing the charges against Qaddafi, described the ICC as a political court which serves its European paymasters.

The eminent expert on international law Richard Falk questioned the motives behind the ICC decision. Are we now to expect that whenever NATO has recourse to war the political leader heading the opposition will be charged with international crimes while the fighting ensues? How convenient! Lawfare in the service of warfare, observed Falk in a recent article. Milosevic was indicted during the NATO-led war in Yugoslavia.

Falk went on to add that the motivations of the West were more sinister as it wanted criticisms to be deflected from NATO's own lawlessness in the Balkan war, the Iraq war and now in the war against Libya.

The Libyan government has said that it intends to prosecute NATO in international courts for the Western military alliance's repeated attempts to physically eliminate Qaddafi and members of his family. Qaddafi's daughter Aisha is suing NATO in a Brussels court for the targeted assassinations of her daughter along with her brother and his two sons with a missile attack.

Before the arrest warrant against Qaddafi was issued, scurrilous stories were bandied about by the ICC and NATO about the Libyan government using rape as a weapon of war. Moreno-Ocampo went to the extent of saying that he had personal knowledge of Col. Qaddafi himself ordering mass rape and authorising the distribution of Viagra to Libyan army units. Amnesty International has found no evidence of mass rape committed by government soldiers.

Similar allegations were made before NATO went to war in Yugoslavia. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, the fabricated stories spread by the Western media about Kuwaiti babies being snatched from incubators and killed helped solidify public opinion in favour of the first Gulf War. Stories about rampant rape by Libyan troops are part of the propaganda unleashed to prepare the public in Western Europe and the U.S. for a possible ground invasion of Libya.

President Barack Obama no longer pretends that the NATO operations are being undertaken to protect civilians. He says that the goal is to finally free the Libyan people after 40 years of tyranny. At the beginning of the NATO military action against Libya in late March, Obama had declared that broadening of the military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

At the same time, the Obama administration is telling the American people that their country is not at war in Libya. It released a report, United States Activities in Libya, which claimed that the U.S. forces are not involved in sustained fighting or exchange of fire with enemy forces in Libya. It is indeed a fact that no Americans have been killed so far, but hundreds of Libyan civilians have been killed by American missile and drone attacks.