Awaiting More Doses of Col. Gaddafi’s "African Solution" Medicine

16 May 04

The Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, is sparing no time in fully utilising what many call his “rehabilitation” by powerful western countries. He paid the Americans, the French and the British for their citizens killed in attacks he has accepted were Libya’s making.  He has dismantled his “weapons of mass destruction.” For these “magnanimous” acts, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Tripoli to thank the man they once called an evil pariah and to assure him he was now part and parcel of the civilised world. President George W. Bush sent his emissaries to begin talks about more cooperation, now that Gaddafi is a good man. Libya is now good for business with the west.

So Col Gaddafi has turned his attention to Africa, weak and divided Africa, where the lasting effects of his medecine can be seen in Liberia and Sierra Leone, amongst others.

Col. Gaddafi’s new global image as a respectable, born-again statesman now frees his hands to deliver the finishing blow to West Africa, a place still far from recovering from his handiwork. It was in Libya that Charles Taylor and the late Foday Sankoh trained to transform the region into a hole of death, an enclave of ever-increasing numbers of refugees cared for largely by non-Africans, the outsiders he wants out.  Now, with shaky disarmament proceeding in Liberia as Cote d’ Ivoire remains effectively partitioned, Col Gaddafi wants “foreigners” out of the continent so that African solutions to African problems, that song of terror that one of his foot soldier Charles Taylor sang until child soldiers drove him from Monrovia, can be applied to the misery of millions who see no foreigners, only hands of salvation strengthened by relief and humanitarian organisations.

The Libyan leader is leaving no doubts that the doses of Libyan medicine applied to hapless Liberia are now packaged for sick Cote d’Ivoire. He says President Laurent Gbagbo is a victim of “adventurers”, and that as an elected president, he should be allowed to proceed with ruling the country regardless. This is despite UN Human Rights Commission findings that Gbagbo’s private militias were responsible for the butchering of about 120 people (not the 37 he claimed) and hundreds wounded not only in the streets when they demonstrated on 25 March, but in their homes.  The fact of the matter is that without the “foreigners”, the French troops (that Gbagbo recently begged to intervene in calming the situation in Abidjan) and the UN, Cote d’Ivoire’s flames would have been larger than they are now.

The Libyan’s position is particularly worrying for Liberia, because Charles Taylor remains well and free. With Col. Gaddafi’s African solutions, the UN Court, effectively paralysed in getting Charles Taylor to stand justice, should be folding-up to leave and let Taylor face the African Solution.  Under the right conditions, he could receive support from the man who made him in the 1980s, Gaddafi, to fulfil his prophesy, “God willing, I shall return.”

The Libyan has also spoken for the millions of black Africans in the Sudan living under Arab terror. Anyone who has seen the horrors of Sudan, how Sudanese Arab militiamen, backed their government, according to many human rights reports and that of the UN, are hunting down black Africans like animals as the world watches would wonder why such inhumanities. But the Libyan is using different lenses in correctly saying that Africans (and the world) would not have known about the killings if the super powers were not around, and he should added, if the global media did not exist.  Mr. Gaddafi says the problem is all tribal, and that the UN should not get involved in a tribal business. Indeed it is tribal—between the Arab tribe and the African tribe. Agreeing with the Libyan, in whose country hundreds of Africans were killed years ago, is the so-called African Union. The Union, which was formed with promises it would intervene in African countries guilty of human rights abuses, refused to drop Sudan from the UN Human Rights Commission despite demands from US and others. The one country that expressed anger at this decision was the United States. All Africa agreed that Sudan, despite vivid television images and reports of over a million African driven from their land because it contains oil the Arabs want, was shinning star for human rights.

With Col. Gaddafi now an accepted member of the club, it seems he can do what he wants with Africa, feeble, confused and helpless/ Cry the beloved continent.

--Tom Kamara

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