Damn Peaceniks!

Glenn Greenwald is one of several “progressive” (USA-ian for “Social-Democratic”) commentators who have been debating Juan Cole on his tempestuous “Open Letter to the Left”.   Greenwald’s “Question of Juan Cole” takes what Cole says seriously, and applies serious criticism to the Professor’s unabashed endorsement of a U.S./NATO air war to oust Gadaffi.   The more I read, the more convinced I am that Cole is not engaging in an intra-Left debate, or even having a Hitchens Moment (a full-on defection from his principles) as some US anti-war activists have claimed.

Cole wants to go to war because he is having a strong emotional reaction to oppression. I empathize, but that’s not analysis.

He’s not interested in the Left, except that he sees the Left as the primary impediment to what he wants done.  So he belittles and abuses leftists who oppose this war with “walk and chew gum” insults, insinuations we’re Stalinist ‘tankies’ defending the suppression of Prague Spring, or nationalistic “isolationists” like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact era Communist Party cadres.

But in the touchstones of his arguments — formal legality, individual morality as definitional of leaders of states, historical exceptionalism, rejection of motivations for imperial action beyond surface ideologies or party labels –  Professor Cole reveals himself is a centrist Obama-Clinton Democrat.

If a self identified centrist supporter of “benign imperial intervention” said all this we’d ignore it.  It might even harden opposition from the Left.  So Cole frames this as the plea of a Leftist, trying to bring us back to that magical time before we became knee-jerk ideologues, when we still (apparently) believed in imperial powers enforcing decisions of the handpicked capitalist Security Council through multi-billion dollar airborne defense systems.

Cole points to the Spanish Civil War as our inspiration.  Where powerful foreign militaries used state-of-the-art air power and blockades to shift the tide of civil war to those which might best benefit future investments.  (Oh wait, that was the Luftwaffe.)  He appeals — as a friend and comrade, mind  — to our shared better nature.

Greenwald doesn’t peg him so, but he asks the right question: how does the Professor — who’s opinions are only really of interest in that they are informed by his education and analysis — decide when a war is “justifiable”.

…regarding his test for whether war is justifiable…[Cole says] “My reply would be simple. If you are arguing for war, you don’t have to ask all these fancy questions. There are really only two questions you have to answer. The first is, would you yourself be willing to die fighting for this cause you have espoused? The second is, would you be willing to see your 18-year-old son or daughter killed for this cause?”

Related articles

• Question for Juan Cole (salon.com)
• Misinformed Commentary: A Response to Juan Cole From the Left | The Tomathon (tomathon.com)
• Juan Cole’s Open Letter to the Left on Libya (marccooper.com)
• ‘Interventions’ (hughgreen.wordpress.com)
• African Cabbie vs Juan Cole: “The French Cannot Be Trusted In Africa” vs. “Libya 2011 Is Not Like Iraq 2003? (jackandjillpolitics.com)
• A Really Progressive Alternative in Libya (radcontra.wordpress.com)
• Saad’s Revolution: Cole at Truthdig | Informed Comment (juancole.com)
• Answer to Glenn Greenwald | Informed Comment (juancole.com)
• Scarborough Hits Liberals For Libya Hypocrisy (huffingtonpost.com)
• An Open Letter to the Left on Libya | Informed Comment (juancole.com)
• Tom is Moving in on Libya (indigenist.blogspot.com)
• Libyan rebels on the run and US not far behind (thewesternexperience.com)
• Democracy Now: Juan Cole on the Protests in Egypt (crooksandliars.com)
• Dear Left: Re. Libya, Why Do You Think Obama Will Do What You Want Done? [Mike the Mad Biologist] (scienceblogs.com)

As I write this, Saif Gaddafi is speaking to a Libyan people who have seemed to have already moved past his father’s regime.  His late and desperate attempt to scare his countrymen into rejecting a revolution which has engulfed his nation touched one element with which, seemingly, those opposing him might agree.  He blamed “crimes” on “Africans, paid by criminals” to kill Libyans.

There is a very widespread and dangerous trope being played upon when Libyans accuse Gaddafi’s crimes of being committed by “African Mercenaries”, hints of which are being picked up in the foreign media.

CNN has just prominently shown a Libyan woman, tear stained, crying out on the newly liberated streets of Egypt.  She calls for justice for her people, for the killing to end, begs Obama to intervene, and then repeats “Gaddafi is killing us with his Africans!”  She is not alone in arranging this revolution between the Libyan people on one side, and Gaddafi, his family, and dark-skinned “outsiders” on the other.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the use of a map, Libyans are Africans.  But Africans here means “black people” and there is a very long very pernicious racism in their part of the world towards “black Africans”, not unlike that in my part of the world.  When I see tweets like the following, I cringe.  I also see a history of fear and contempt slipping out in a time of unparalleled suffering.

Gadafi is ordering african mercenaries to break into homes in #Benghazi to RAPE Libyan women in order to detract men protesters! #Libya #Feb

20 February 2011 3:04 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@khalidAlotaibi

Khalid Alotaibi

In all honesty, I support the people of Libya’s righteous anger against the brutal Gaddafi regime.  It will not be going out on a limb at this point to say they will succeed, and that the entire region (including Tchad, Mali, & Niger) will be better off without Gaddafi’s almost constant destabilization of his African neighbors.

But like much of northern Africa, in Libya there is a long history of fear, hatred, and oppression based on skin color.  There is a distinct minority of “black” Libyans whose slave origins mean they are still regarded with contempt by some, as there is a large number of political and economic refugees in what is a relatively prosperous state.

#Libya @CNN @CBC. Confirmed the African mercenaries were raised in campus around Sabha and West Mountain since childhood as salves.

19 February 2011 11:14 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@AlMingar

MR KANADA

Foreign Fighters

And while oppression organized by skin color has a long history,  the Gaddafi regime has contributed a different angle to this prejudice: the foreign fighter.  Since the early 70s, Libya has offered aid, by degrees of openness, to revolutionary and opposition groups in most every corner of the world.  Begun as an extension of Soviet Cold War policy, Gaddafi’s involvement with foreign dissident groups — funded by the oil boom of the 1970s — has extended beyond ideology or geopolitics.  For those of us who remember the Cold War, it’s easy to see a degree of hysteria — almost equal to today’s anti-Islamist hysteria in the west — in the views current in the 1980s that Gadaffi was behind most every threat, from Belfast to Managua.   But to whatever small degree his support was really effective, most  every African nation has seen some of it’s citizens trained in Libyan camps.

Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, Moses Blah, Blaise Compaore trained in Libya.   Future Malian and Nigerien Tuareg rebels trained in Libya in the late 70s, recruited from refugees fleeing famine and oppression.  The band Tinariwen actually formed in one such camp.

Libya has developed a sophisticated infrastructure to support rebel groups, based around Tripoli’s “Al-mathaba al-alamiyya…” — “World Center for the fight against Imperialism Racism and Fascism“.  While support offered to leftist militants from Palestine, the Provisional IRA in Ireland, Nicaragua, and, the ANC fighting Apartheid South Africa,  may represent an ideology which matches the admirable title (at least to this leftist), most “Al-mathaba” operations have taken “anti-imperialism” to rather vaguely coincide with Gaddafi and the Libyan elite’s nationalist expansion.

The most famous local manifestation of this was surely the 1970s & 80s Tchadian war. Libya was early to bankroll FROLINAT  and it’s splits. The Soviets (most notably the GDR) helped early in this process, as part of a strategy against the undoubtedly neocolonial French supported government in Tchad.  But Libya had nationalist motivation, in particular the desire to expand control over the Uranium rich Aozou Strip. Gaddafi’s support at times made Hissène Habré and Goukouni Oueddei almost entirely creatures of Libyan policy.  Habré, now endlessly awaiting trial in Senegal for his brutality as Tchadian president, saw the flexibility of Gaddafi’s support, when Goukouni was in turn supported as insurgent leader against Habré’s government.  The U.S. backed Libyan dissidents were later set up in mirror image camps until ejected by a Tchadian ideological shift in 1991.

Since, Libya has most notably hosted Sudanese, Liberian, Sierra Leonian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Tunisian, Egyptian, Tuareg, and Somali rebel groups. There is, in this, little discernible ideological continuity apart from a desire to maintain Libya as a player to be courted by leaders of every troubled nation in the area.

But note from the list above, dissidents hosted in the past by Gaddafi are as likely to be “white” Arabs as “Black Africans.”

RT @iyad_elbaghdadi: Reports that "African mercenaries" are from Chad, Niger, Uganda, Mali, and Burkina Faso #Libya #Feb17

19 February 2011 1:45 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@feld_art

Frank

RT @alithelady: RT @KCDalis: @samiyusuf African mercenaries infiltrate every city in Libya, carrying swords to kill. http://mtw.tl/lvjmgt

18 February 2011 1:10 pm via m.tweete.netReplyRetweetFavorite

@_iima

Halimatu Syadiah

Current numbers are even harder to discern.  Tchadian and Sudanese rebels must be the largest groups still in the country.  But even these are not huge contingents: a few hundred at most.  Some blurry photos and one video show two dozen yellow capped men identified as “African Mercenaries.” Little can actually be discerned from the photos, but assuming the poster is accurate, and these are “black Africans”, and they are working with the security forces, and they are armed, they might be wearing the yellow turbans favored by some Tchadian and Sudanese ethnic Zaghawa and some of the Darfuri Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels.  But that is a lot of ifs.

Foreign Migrants

Large numbers of “Africans” seen in Libyan cities are much more likely to be foreign workers and those trying to reach Europe.  Libya has alternated in support and oppression directed to refugees passing into their country from the south.  These are not all “Black Africans”, but include South Asians and others, many trafficked from Nigeria, through Niger via a brutal desert crossing.  West Africans are periodically outraged by news stories of migrants deported by force, or simply dumped in the desert by Libyan government.  More scandalous are stories of robbery, abuse, and even killing by criminal gangs and (less frequently, but more disturbing) by xenophobic Libyans. Many migrants are locked up in camps across Libya, kept in conditions unmonitored by outsiders.

This has played into some of the “African Mercenary” rumors of the last few days, with reports of ever increasing amounts paid to migrants by Libyan security forces to carry out crimes against civilians.

No one should doubt that there are dark skinned men in the Libyan security forces.  Despite the unspoken assumptions of some Libyans, most are surely their fellow Libyans.  There are also, undoubtedly, foreign born guerrillas under arms in Libya, or former fighters long ago enrolled in the security services.  But again, these cannot be a large number.

Who Pulls the Trigger?

Reports of “African Mercenaries” have become, since 17 February, a staple of Libyan revolutionaries’ news feeds.  We have seen reports, repeated as fact, that almost every time Libyans have been massacred by the state security forces, “Africans” have been to blame.  “Africans” are said to have been flown into Benghazi and Tripoli to protect them for the state, 1300 by one rumor.  A widely quoted report comes from a revolutionary in Ajdabiya  saying: “The regime has sent African forces into the city but we are here waiting in the square of the martyrs. Everyone here is ready to defend the city against the mercenaries. We’ve discovered that these African mercenaries are going to land at Zouitina airport. I can assure you that everybody here is ready to fight against these traitors and African mercenaries.”  Not that he has seen any, but he believes they are coming none the less.

RT @LibyanThinker: URGENT!!! From contact in the Army: So far, 1300 African Mercenaries have arrived in #Libya to date. Cant' the World .

19 February 2011 11:40 pm via iTweet.netReplyRetweetFavorite

@raulrodriguezxD

Raul Rodriguez

Photos and videos, many horrific, have been provided of a handful (I have seen five total) dead uniformed soldiers with varying degrees of dark skin.  This is hardly proof of the hysterical rhetoric built around thousands of black Africans raping women and murdering protesters.

More reports, including those showing troops attacking civilians, point to the Army and the internal security forces. The Security Battalions (‘Kataeb al Amn’) include forces directly under the command of Colonel Massud Abdul Hafiz al-Gaddafi. Not only are these groups well armed and trained, they are carefully chosen for loyalty and ideologically motivated. If there is any truth in the “African Mercenaries” rumors, Tchadians or other former foreign guerrillas, long ago integrated into these internal security forces, would be cause. But the Libyan military and security establishment is gigantic: 50,000 regular troops and almost as many reserves, bolstered by recent spending sprees on Russian and other western equipment. It strains credulity that a few hundred, even a few thousand, “black African” mercenaries would be able to enforce submission upon the Libyan people without the participation of these forces.

On twitter, users have dubbed stories of “African Mercenaries” “Confirmed” after Al Arabiya – and later Al Jazeera – reported as unconfirmed the same stories of “African Mercenaries” twitter users had earlier broadcast.  A news agency, I should remind readers, cannot “confirm” a story by reporting that you are saying it.  It would need multiple individual, reliable, first hand sources providing consistent stories of having seen the original event themselves.  We only have inconsistent third hand reports so far.

And this is not the first time recently we have heard such stories.

In Bahrain, where the military opened fire on unarmed protesters with assault riffles, anti-aircraft weapons, and helicopter fire, some locals have accused “Iraqi”, Pakistani” or other mercenaries of having infiltrated the army.  In the recent massacres on Guinea Conakry and Abidjan, victims have blamed Liberian mercenaries for having murdered and raped protesters.  Again and again, as here in Libya, we hear the cry that “no fellow countryman would do this!”  “Gaddafi couldn’t get Libyans to kill Libyans, so he brought Mercenaries”, not Arab mercenaries, not western mercenaries, but those people who resemble the “lowest”, most “foreign” of our fellow citizens.  There have, just today, been a couple of isolated reports that North Koreans were shooting protesters in Libya, but such reports have not gotten the traction that the “African Mercenaries” have.  I must ask why this is?

Flawed Evidence

Apart form those mentioned above, the photographic evidence for “African Mercenaries” include these photos on Flickr.

I cannot help but note some possible problems with images from Libya that are said to be of an identity card carried by a Guinean captured or killed in Benghazi.  The reports are the man was fighting with Libyan government forces against citizens. That there is no direct evidence linking the man on the card with violence might be the first question.

I am not an expert but I am tempted to refer to that old internet meme: “This picture is shopped, I can tell from some of the pixels…” Honestly, my observations are no proof either way, but it raises enough questions to suggest that someone better qualified in photographic forensics should look at these images.

A %600 blowup of the bottom of one of these photos (click for larger)

Note the circled areas in one section of one of the pictures I examined.

1) Unnatural distinct blur marks, the largest in a square shape.
2) Red stamp patterns that don’t conform consistently to the fold mark.
3) The text has been sharpened.  It is dark, consistent, and the background between letters is pixelated, different from the background in other parts of the card, which is smooth.  This may merely be artifacts of a sharpening attempt so the text was made legible.  Or it is an artifact from pasting.
4) This same text lines do not conform to the card where bent.  All such text lines are parallel to one another, where the other text is skewed..
5) Artifacts where the background bleeds through the fingers which are supposed to be in front of it.

All this said, A Guinean legally in Algeria would be expected to carry a consular id card.  Guinean and Canadian government sources confirm this type of ID is issued by Guinean embassies abroad.

NEW! #Gaddafi has given the African Mercenaries full freedom in raping Libyan women. #Libya

19 February 2011 7:57 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@LibyanThinker

The Libyan Thinker

Stabbed in the Back

Everything alleged by the photographer above may be true.  But I hesitate as these stories play into a natural combination of nationalism, existing social prejudices (of low class “slave” “Blacks”) and fears (of foreign looking immigrants, familiar to xenophobic discourse in Europe and America).  They are understandable, but should they go unchallenged in the lore of this revolution, the new Libya being build risks becoming a no less cruel and unjust place, if for a smaller part of its citizens, adjudged outsiders and traitors by their skin color.

African mercenaries now in #Benghazi #Libya sources in Libya say they're chasing and killing people with knives and swords. We only fear God

17 February 2011 10:26 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@AliLePointe

Jibreel

These phobias of the “other” neglect the horrible reality that Libyans have lived for the last four decades.  They have been oppressed, murdered, tortured and exploited by their fellow Libyans.  It has been said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ (A mangled false quotation of Edmond Burke, but I digress.)

The quote perhaps survives because it speaks to what Europe learned in the 20th century: oppressive states survive by fear and collusion.

The most dramatic example of this, the murder of 12 million Jews and others by Nazi Germany in the 1940s, provides some of the most despairingly stark lessons.  For decades, scholars sought some explanation, some psychological profile of those who carried out this mass murder.  I come back again and again to writers like Tim Mason, an historian of resistance and collaboration with the Nazis, and his despair in finding so much of the latter.  Or Chris Browning, whose book “Ordinary Men” showed those who took part in war crimes were neither born monsters, warped sociopaths, or cold ideologues, but victims of the pedestrian social pressures to conform, turned to the most extreme ends.

Libyans: your fellow citizens have enabled this regime to oppress you for so many years. You must come to terms with this in the aftermath of this revolution, or it will be no revolution at all.

But you have already learned the converse: you have the power to stop this oppression.  You are doing it now, and the world, awed by the bravery and audacity in the Arab world this year, stand now amazed by your fearlessness.

But Libyans, you do yourself an injustice with these fears directed at “Africans”. You, in more than one sense, are these Africans.  You cannot build a society of justice by until you learn this.

UPDATE 2011-02-21 23:49 EST

Please take a look at this VERY useful article focusing on color politics in Libya in the light of these events: Gaddafi is killing us with his Africans! by N. Thompson, published at “My Weku” Magazine, 2011-02-21 A useful look at the immigrant condition in Libya from 2000: Ethnic violence and mass deportations of immigrants in Libya By Trevor Johnson, WSWS 28 October 2000

And please read and support http://www.libyafeb17.com/ : sometimes hard to watch, but vital news from inside Libya, as the people try to get free.

Related articles

• Libya Must End Racism Against Black African Migrants and Others UN Watch Written Statement, UN Human Rights Council 13th Session, 16 February 2010
• Libya: ‘Beaten and deported to the Sahara’ Article translated from the Italian by Francesca Megna, published first on 18. Dec 2009 by :: fortresseurope.blogspot.com.
• Migrant Workers From Ghana Who Fled Libya Cite Racism Los Angeles Times
• Racism: Arab-Black African Relations in North Africa Noah Bassil, Khaldoun, 2008
• Losing Libya – Blog – The Arabist (arabist.net)
• Libyan troops defect amid crackdown – Aljazeera.net (news.google.com)
• Benghazi defies Gaddafi (independent.co.uk)
• Libya: US accuses Britain of legitimising Gaddafi (telegraph.co.uk)
• Tony Blair our very special adviser by dictator Gaddafi’s son | Mail Online (dailymail.co.uk)
• LENIN’S TOMB: Libya’s uprising (leninology.blogspot.com)
• Demonstrations in solidarity with the Libyan people February 19th, 2011 ” Enough!Khalas (enoughgaddafi.com)

Uri Davis, born to Czech And British Jews in Palestine is now on Palestine’s governing council.  Is he a contemporary Yossel Mashel Slovo?

Jeune Afrique’s Nicolas Marmié makes the comparison between Uri Davis, recently elected to Fatah‘s Revolutionary (sic) Council, and the great leader of the South African Communist party Joe Slovo. Of course,  the SACP was allied against racial oppression from before Slovo’s joining in the 1940s, and it was 33 years from his co founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 to the first free elections in 1994. Even if the comparison is apt, Israel has a long way to go.  But more than timelines, Davis is trying to cross a divide much deeper than even South African Apartheid. Uri Davis, born in Palestine to parents married in Palestine in 1939, has had to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim woman to really be accepted also shows the gulf between these cultures.

Perhaps the much vilified comparison of political and state Zionism with Apartheid masks the fact that the divisions between the peoples of Israel/Palestine is even deeper than that in South Africa. Religion, language, messianic nationalism, and the constant appeals to competing victimhood make a wound seemingly impossible to heal.

Uri Davis, a self described “Palestinian Hebrew”  (prior to his pro-forma conversion a “anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew”) is at least making a start, while most Israelis have spent the last thirty years with their heads in the sand.  That won’t stop a return to something that looks more like a pre-Nakba society, but just keeps us stuck in a bloody morass.  Davis knows this too well.

The attempts to Bantustanize the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupied in 1967 will fail in Palestine just as it has failed in South Africa. One simply mourns the bloodshed that this entails and the suffering in the first instance inflicted against the indigenous people.[2004 interview]

Like Joe, he’s the face of the future.  You can demonize it (like Slovo, universally despised by Apartheid government and media), you can ignore it, you can even slow it to a crawl, but no one can stop it.

• Why Israeli Jew Uri Davis joined Fatah to save Palestine. Peter Beaumont. The Observer, Sunday 23 August 2009.
• The lonely struggle of Uri Davis. Seth Freedman. guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 September 2009
• Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography of ANC leader Joe Slovo. (1997)
• Against Israeli Apartheid. Desmond Tutu & Ian Urbina.  July 15, 2002 edition of The Nation.
• Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. A book by Ben White.
• http://www.israeli-occupation.org/
• http://www.anc.org.za/people/slovo.html
• http://www.uridavis.info/