AJE confirms Tajura (Libya) has fallen to protesters. Army now on their side.
http://www.livestream.com/libya17feb
Huge protests all over Iraq today!
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by DoYouEverWonder » Fri Feb 25, 2011 9:59 am
by vanlose kid » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:01 am
What's in a flag?
Protesters have adopted flag used after Libya won independence from Italy as symbol of their revolt.
Asad Hashim Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 15:50 GMT
The red band on the flag refers to the blood of those killed during the Libyan fight for independence from Italy [AFP]
Anti-government protesters in cities across Libya have been hoisting national flags as a sign of their revolt against Muammar Gaddafi, the man who has led the country for 41 years.
Abroad, where diplomats in several embassies have also renounced Gaddafi's leadership, the flag is also being used as a sign to show where loyalties lie.
The flag being raised, however, is not the current national flag, but one from over 40 years ago, when Libya was still ruled by a constitutional monarchy under the el-Senussi family.
It depicts three bands of green, black and red, with a white crescent and star in the centre, and was the banner under which the Kingdom of Libya won its independence from Italy on December 24, 1951.
The flag was used until 1969, when it was replaced by the pan-Arab red-white-and-black tricolour.
The red band on the 1951 flag symbolises the blood of those killed during the struggle for independence from Italy, and the green band symbolises prosperity.
The central black band appears to be a reference from the el-Senussi flag, under which King Idris I gathered Libyans together during the fight for independence.
The crescent and star are traditional symbols of Islam, the religion of most Libyans. A variation of the flag that has been used by anti-government protesters has vertical bands, and no star and crescent.
'Stolen by Gaddafi'
Libya's current flag is a monochromatic green rectangle, and is the only national flag currently in use that does not feature some form of icon, symbol or design.
It is strongly associated with Gaddafi's rule, and has been in use since 1977, when the country was declared the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya".
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Youcef Bouandel, a Libyan professor of international affairs at Qatar University, explained the significance of the protesters' choice of flag.
"This flag is the flag of Libya when it achieved its independence from the Italians ... and I think that people are saying that Libya is going to achieve its independence that was stolen by Gaddafi," he said.
Bouandel said the choice of flag did not indicate a particular predilection towards returning to a monarchical structure - as the original flag was used by the country when it was ruled by the el-Senussi family - rather it was a reaction against Gaddafi, and an expression of a desire for independence.
Protesters shows areas they claim are controlled by anti-government forces under the 1951-69 flag
"[It is] to tell him that there was a Libya before Gaddafi came to power," said Bouandel.
"He seemed to imply in his speech that he was Libya, that he made Libya ... [but they wish to say] there was a Libya that fought for its independence and that was the flag of Libya before you took power in what you called a revolution."
Analysts say that while there is the possibility of the Libyan monarchy coming back to some form of power if Gaddafi were overthrown, it remains unclear at this point how strong a possibility that is.
Awad Elfeituri, from the Libyan Information Centre, a Doha-based organisation that has been using contacts in the country to get information regarding the revolt out to the wider world, spoke to Al Jazeera about the significance of the flag.
He said that it was unlikely that protesters had chosen the flag with its ties to the monarchy in mind, as most protesters are younger than 30 years old - Gaddafi seized power in a coup d'etat 41 years ago.
Elfeituri said the choice of the older flag as a symbol of the revolution came from a sense of "nostalgia", of a longing for the "good old days", where, in particular, law and order were maintained.
He said the protesters "do not want anything to do with Gaddafi", and the green flag is closely associated with the Libyan leader.
Divisions and unity
In a speech televised on national television on February 21, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi's son, warned: "Libya is not like Egypt [referring to the revolution in that country], it is tribes and clans. It is not a society with parties. Everyone knows their duties and this may cause civil wars."
The deep tribal divisions do continue to predict loyalties in Libya, and during recent unrest several tribes have turned against Gaddafi [notably the Warfala tribe, the country's largest].
The 1951-69 flag, however, is a symbol of tribal unity, as all of the country's clans agreed to be ruled under the el-Senussi family [and an elected parliament], said Bouandel.
The flag then, appears to symbolise both independence and unity.
Interestingly, the plain green flag that Gaddafi made the national pennant in 1977 is also supposed to symbolise unity, Bouandel and Elfeituri said.
The colour green, which is closely associated with Gaddafi's government in Libya, is in the Arab world considered a colour of peace, equality and the colour of heaven, Bouandel added.
Gaddafi has also displayed a particular devotion to the colour.
His manifesto, which he quotes often, is called the Green Book and features a green cover, and during recent violence he urged his supporters to wear green armbands as a sign of where their loyalties lay.
During his address to the nation on February 22, he urged his supporters to don their green armbands and "cleanse" Libya of anti-government protesters.
ElFeituri says the colour is somewhat of an obsession with Gaddafi. In the city of Benghazi, which in recent days has become a stronghold for protesters, he had earlier reportedly "forced people to paint their walls and doors green".
The colour appears to have a deeper importance to Gaddafi than simply being a means of identification.
Bouandel narrated an anecdote to Al Jazeera, describing a function at the University of Benghazi some years ago when Gaddafi wanted to take notes of what speakers were saying.
Students present at the university offered Gaddafi a pen that wrote in red ink. He was offended by the offer, Bouandel said, asking "Since when do I use that?"
Gaddafi then demanded that a green pen be provided for him to write with.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/sp ... 88553.html
by vanlose kid » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:13 am
Libya officials bribed by Britain to help evacuate UK citizens
David Cameron urges all Britons to leave Libya, while Foreign Office describes payments to officials at Tripoli airport as 'fees for services'
Nicholas Watt and James Meikle
guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 February 2011 13.15 GMT
Britain has been paying bribes to Libyan officials at Tripoli airport to pave the way for the evacuation of British citizens from the country.
Senior government figures confirmed that payments had been made, in an apparent breach of strict British government anti-bribery rules.
The revelation emerged as David Cameron advised all Britons to leave Libya. Speaking in Downing Street, the prime minister told Britons still in Libya to leave now, pledging that "we are doing everything we can to get you out".
He said Britain had helped organise six flights out of the strife-torn country and would send other planes as necessary.
The government is also sending a second Royal Navy ship, HMS York, to the waters off Libya as HMS Cumberland makes its way towards Malta carrying refugees.
As the rescue effort continues, questions are being asked about how it has been managed. Sources claim that Britain has been forced to pay higher bribes at Tripoli airport than other countries as punishment for the UK's tough rhetoric against Libya since the violent response to the protests.
However, the Foreign Office strongly denied paying bribes. A spokesman said: "We categorically deny accusations earlier that British officials have paid bribes to Libyan officials. Officials at Tripoli airport charge fees for services, such as aircraft handling. These charges are applied to all countries and carriers seeking to fly in or out of Tripoli airport.
"In the current situation, these fees have increased. Like those countries and carriers, we have had to pay them – the alternative being to leave hundreds of British nationals stranded in Tripoli. Paying charges levied by the authorities at a foreign airport is not bribery."
But other government sources said the increase in the fees to which the FCO referred in its statement amounted to a bribe.
The payment of bribes is strictly forbidden under government guidelines on how to deal with foreign crises. Britain believes that paying bribes can encourage unlawful action against its citizens.
The Libyan authorities currently control air space over the country. But opposition forces control Libya's second city, Benghazi. This has meant that British officials have liaised with opposition forces to arrange the docking of HMS Cumberland, which is evacuating UK nationals from Benghazi. There is no suggestion that bribes have been paid in Benghazi.
Speaking after meetings of the National Security Council and Cobra emergency planning committee on Friday, Cameron said: "We will do everything we can today and tomorrow to help those people and planning is under way to do just that.
"In the last 24 hours, there have been six flights that have left Libya and that is good, and there will be more on the way if necessary. HMS Cumberland has now come out of Benghazi, bringing many, many British citizens … and we have also helped citizens of 25 other countries. I have also asked HMS York to go into the area and help out if necessary. But I would say that people do need to leave now and that is the message that I give very strongly to British citizens in Libya.
"For those in the desert, we will do everything we can and we are active on that right now to help get you out."
Up to 500 British nationals are thought to be still trapped in Libya, including some in desert oilfields.
The FCO said two chartered flights, including one chartered by BP, landed at Gatwick on Thursday, including among their passengers some who had been airlifted by an RAF Hercules to Malta. Flights chartered by the FCO landed at Gatwick and Stansted on Friday, while another plane was still on the tarmac at Tripoli airport.
It said: "The security situation at the airport has been deteriorating in recent hours and the route to the airport is becoming more precarious. We continue to monitor the situation closely. We are also aware of 42 British nationals currently on a US ferry in Tripoli harbour. We recommend that they stay on board as the route to the airport is now unsafe. Consular staff are in contact with them."
Britain was demanding tough international sanctions against Libya, Cameron added. "The message is very clear: that the violence we have seen is appalling and unacceptable. I have this very clear message for people in that regime… The world is watching you and the world will hold you to account.
"Britain, through the United Nations, is pressing for asset seizures, for travel bans, for sanctions, for all of the things that we can do to hold those people to account, including investigating for potential crimes against humanity, or war crimes, or crimes against their people.
"People working for this regime should remember that international justice has a long reach and a long memory and they will be held to account for what they do."
Asked whether military force would be considered, Cameron said: "We will do what is necessary to keep people safe and we will do what is necessary to bring our people back."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/fe ... evacuation
by justdrew » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:27 am
There are many who fear exposure of Libya’s secrets
Published on 25 Feb 2011
THERE must be a lot of people running scared as they watch events unfold in Libya.
By this I don’t just mean those unfortunate innocent civilians caught up in Colonel Gaddafi’s monstrous backlash against his own people. Think arms dealers, senior oil executives, mercenary soldiers, intelligence officials and some international politicians and you’ll get the gist of what I’m meaning.
Wednesday’s claims by Libya’s former justice minister, Mustafa Abedel-Jalil, that Gaddafi himself personally ordered the Lockerbie terrorist bombing is just the start. Whether Abedel-Jalil’s claims are ultimately borne out only time will tell. In some ways we should almost expect people like him to say such things. After all, anyone who has held high office in a state like Libya must have a well-honed sense of self preservation. In the coming weeks or months should Gaddafi find himself just another decommissioned dictator or be discovered in his Bab al-Azizia military redoubt with a bullet in his brain, there will doubtless be many of his former henchmen keen to ingratiate themselves with the world outside. Should they prove true Abedel-Jalil’s Lockerbie claims would of course be damning for many in Libya and beyond. But almost certainly they would constitute only a tiny part in the load of political dirty laundry that might be aired in Gaddafi’s wake and prove embarrassing to the international community.
by vanlose kid » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:35 am
Didn't arm protesters, Berlusconi tells Gaddafi
2011-02-24 11:10:00
Rome, Feb 24 (IANS/AKI) Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has telephoned Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi to deny that Italy had armed anti-government demonstrators with rockets.
According to a statement issued by Berlusconi's office, the call was made following a televised afternoon address by the embattled Gaddafi, in which he said he would never resign and that protesters, whom he branded 'terrorists', would be executed.
In a 20-minute phone call with Gaddafi, Berlusconi Tuesday urged the Libyan leader to avoid civil war and bring a peaceful end to the conflict, newspaper Corriere della Sera reported Wednesday.
Berlusconi 'flatly denied' that Italy had supplied rockets or any weapons to Gaddafi opponents, a charge Gaddafi also levelled at the US in a defiant speech aired on state TV Tuesday.
Corriere della Sera cited unnamed Italian government sources as saying US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had invited Berlusconi to call Gaddafi in a message relayed to him by Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini.
As recently as Saturday, Berlusconi, who in recent years has sought closer ties between Italy and Libya through a personal friendship with Gaddafi, controversially said he did not want to 'disturb' the longest-ruling Arab leader.
In the one-hour and 14-minute speech, Gaddafi, who has ruled Libya for 41 years, said he would fight with his 'last drop of blood' to retain power and pledged to deploy the army and police to impose order.
On Monday, Berlusconi joined other European Union leaders in condemning the violence against civilians in Libya in a brutal crackdown by forces loyal to Gaddafi against the revolt that began Feb 17.
Tripoli said Tuesday that 300 people had been killed in the crackdown. But a Rome-based Arab expatriate group, Arab World Communities in Italy, cited sources inside Libya as saying that 1,000 people had been killed in bombing raids.
Reports from Libya citing eyewitnesses claim heavy weaponry and foreign mercenaries have allegedly been used against civilians.
http://www.sify.com/news/didn-t-arm-pro ... bfggf.html
by Stephen Morgan » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:36 am
by vanlose kid » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:36 am
by Nordic » Fri Feb 25, 2011 3:26 pm
Libya officials bribed by Britain to help evacuate UK citizens
David Cameron urges all Britons to leave Libya, while Foreign Office describes payments to officials at Tripoli airport as 'fees for services'
by vanlose kid » Fri Feb 25, 2011 3:27 pm
The desert front - EU refugee camps in North Africa?
by Helmut Dietrich
This article first appeared in the German journal Konkret (issue 12/2004) and traces the implementation of the creation of migrant and refugee prisons, so called off-shore centres, in northern Africa, as part of the EU's globalisation of migration control. With the example of recent developments in EU and particularly German and Italian relations with Libya, the author highlights the relationship between military, economic and migration control agreements between the EU and third countries and documents the devastating effect these have for migrants and refugees caught up in the militarisation of the EU's external borders.
"How can you forget the concentration camps built by Italian colonists in Libya into which they deported your great family - the Obeidats? Why don't you have the self-confidence, why don't you refuse?" the Libyan intellectual Abi Elkafi recently asked the Libyan ambassador in Rome, who had initiated the country's orientation towards the West. "The reason I write to you are the atrocious new concentration camps set up on Libya's soil on behalf of the Berlusconi government," Elkafi wrote in an open letter.
In June 1930, Marshal Petro Badoglio, the Italian governor of Libya, ordered the internment of large parts of the then 700,000 inhabitants of Libya. Within two years, more than 100,000 people had died of hunger and disease in the desert concentration camps. Around the same time, Badoglio had fortified the 300 kilometre long Libyan/Egyptian border line with barbed wire fence. This is how the Italian colonists destroyed the Libyan resistance. For years, they had not succeeded - neither by bombing villages and oases, nor by using poison gas. The current Italian government laughs at any demand for compensation, Abi Elkafi writes.
Military camps for refugees - the reality of off-shore centres
Four years ago, the western press received first reliable reports on internment camps in Libya. In September and October 2000, pogroms against migrant workers took place in Libya and 130 to 500 sub-Saharan Africans were killed in the capitol Tripoli and the Tripoli area. To escape the persecution, thousands of builders and service sector employees from Niger, Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana fled south. Many of them were stopped at road blocks in the Sahara and taken to Libyan military camps. Le Monde Diplomatique reported on several camps in where migrants and refugees have been held since 1996 - about 6,000 Ghanaians and 8,000 people from Niger are supposed to be held in one of them alone. The Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings visited the camp to bring back some hundred compatriots. The Somali Consultative Council appealed to Gaddafi on 22 February 2004 "to unconditionally release the Somali refugees who are imprisoned in your country and who have started a hunger strike immediately and not send them back to the civil war in Somalia." In the beginning of October 2004, the Italian state TV channel RAI showed pictures from a Libyan refugee camp. Hundreds of people were depicted in a court yard, heavily guarded; the barracks apparently do not have sleeping facilities. Reports of some of the Somalis who have recently been deported to Libya confirm the existence of these camps.
Did the Libyan government originally build these camps in order to provide a labour force for major building projects in the south of the country ("greening the desert")? Or are they an attempt to fight refugees in transit? In any case, the Libyan government already announced some time ago that undocumented immigrants would be imprisoned in southern Libya and deported. In December 2004, the Libyan interior minister Mabruk announced without further explanation that Tripoli had deported 40,000 migrants in the last weeks alone.
These imprisonments and deportations have now become antecedents of the so-called off-shore centres of the European Union, propagated particularly by Germany's interior minister Otto Schily. Libya is the first non-European country which allows for its camps to be integrated into the EU's deportation policies. Together with the new airlifts to Tripoli, by which African refugees are being deported collectively from Italy since 2 October 2004, first facts of this regime have been created. At the beginning of October 2004, the designated and later suspended EU commissioner Buttiglione announced during his hearing before the European Parliament in Strasbourg that the EU did not want to create "concentration camps" in north Africa, but wanted to use the already existing camps "in which refugees are living under the most difficult circumstances." At their informal meeting in Scheveningen on 30 September to 1 October 2004, the EU's justice and interior ministers agreed in principle that the EU is striving for the creation of "reception camps for asylum seekers" in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Libya, not under supervision of the EU but of the respective countries.
Mostly unnoticed by the public, the EU states that form the EU's external borders are creating the preconditions for a new deportation regime. Whereas until recently, refugees and migrants who were stopped by border police were taken into the EU country, there are now enormous reception capacities on the Canary Islands and on the southern Italian and eastern Greek islands. This "initial reception" is no more intended to lead into European cities and the already meagre EU legal protection. The camps at Europe's peripheries are typically located near airports on former military compounds, guarded by paramilitary troops and hardly accessible even for the UNHCR. Contact to the outside world is made extremely difficult if not impossible. The facilities are secured with modern prison equipment. The Canary islands currently hold camps with altogether 1,950 places.
These camps in the Canaries, southern Italy and eastern Greece, also mark the introduction of a social change initiated by EU states: in the 1990's the boat people were welcomed by the Mediterranean population. Although the state declared a state of emergency when large refugee boats arrived and put them into stadiums, it remained a public event which attracted many inhabitants who drove to the stadium with clothes, blankets and food. With the new prison camps, the administration now systematically separates boat people from the society they arrive in and thereby creates the organisational preconditions for mass deportations to places outside the EU, far from any legal or societal control. Extraterritorial, law-free zones are being created at the fringes of Europe.
Since the beginnings of the 1990's, Western European migration and refugee strategy papers point to the EU intending to export the asylum procedures to places outside Europe. They outline a global migration control approach that ensures that refugees and unwanted migrants from Africa, Asia and South America do not reach Europe anymore. Central to this concept are camps encircling Europe.
Up to now these plans could not be implemented. German authorities unsuccessfully attempted to enforce this practise in the early 1990's after the war against Iraq, when the no-fly zone was created over Iraqi Kurdistan: they wanted to declare the area a "safe haven" for Iraqi refugees, to which they could be deported en masse. This did not succeed until the NATO war in Kosovo. Within a few weeks, the war zone was surrounded by refugee camps, thus stopping hundreds of thousands on their flight to the EU.
In the beginning of the current Iraq war, Tony Blair suggested the creation of refugee camps under the supervision of the EU but outside its territory. His "new vision for refugees", published in March 2003, foresaw returning those who would apply for asylum in the EU to outside the EU's borders. His vision was one of a 'camp universe', set up by EU officers and made up of Transit Processing Centres (TPC) in front of the gates of the EU, together with the UNHCR and the notorious International Organisation for Migration (IOM). From there they would be able to bring the refugees back to "safe" zones near their regions of origin and select a few for entry into the EU. When that plan became known to the public, it went down in a storm of protest.
Despite the public criticism, Otto Schily and Giuseppe Pisanu, the German and Italian interior ministers, developed the idea further in the summer of 2004. The European Commission together with the Strategic Committee for Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA) were to test preliminary measures of "a European asylum office with interception functions" in northern Africa (Schily in FAZ, 23.7.2004). In practise, this proposal implies that boat people coming through the Mediterranean were to be returned to camps located in Arab states - in collective procedures and without an individual check on their nationality, their flight route or reasons for flight. This practise is called refoulement and is explicitly prohibited in the Geneva Refugee Convention. EU Member States' constitutions as well as the European Convention on Human Rights prohibit refoulement as well. However, this practise not only concerns the violation of rights of asylum seekers. In internment camps or when deported to desert areas without support, migrants, no matter if they flee from poverty and hunger or for other "economic" reasons, suffer the same fate they were trying to flee. They are threatened with imprisonment, abuse and death.
Testing and developing military technology in the fight against migration
Recent international events have changed the political, military and economic situation to such an extent that desert camps have now come within Schily's and Pisanu's reach. The first barrier for unwanted refugees and migrants is Europe's external border policy. But since EU enlargement and the global "fight against terror", these policies are being formulated under different conditions. In 2001, the German and Italian interior ministries laid down their dream of an EU border police in EU documents. The plan was intended to bring the unsafe borders of certain members under centralised control. At first, the focus was on the eastern border of accession states, but the accession states were not exactly enthusiastic about the idea that especially German, together with other EU police officers, were to secure their eastern borders. They fear that a total closure of borders will create tensions with their eastern neighbours. Further, the German border guards have reaped antipathy in the local accession population in the Oder and Neiße region with their policing practises and the NS massacres committed by German troops in the Bug river region have by no means vanished from people's memories.
Politicians of the South European front states - as they are called in official EU documents - have less scruples. The anti-terrorist measures against the Arab-Muslim population has enforced a development of strong external borders. The operative core of a future EU border protection is based on the greater Mediterranean region. The Mediterranean Sea is a new challenge for the control fanatics. The goal is the 'virtual' extension of European borders to the North African coasts. Even the docking of the wooden boats is to be prevented. Furthermore, the border police long to control the Sahara-Sahel-zone, together with the military and European and American secret services, thus setting up a second 'rejection' ring around Europe. Besides stopping refugees, the oil and gas production in the desert has to be secured. Thus, the border surveillance agreement between Italy and Libya provides for an internationalised control of the 2,000 kilometres long coast line and also the 4,000 kilometres long desert border of Libya.
This can hardly be achieved by boat and jeep patrols. Control technologies tried and tested in the most recent wars will therefore also be deployed. Detection of refugees by air with optronic and radar technology is currently being tested all over the Mediterranean.
The Spanish Guardia Civil has rediscovered the surveillance tower. From above, the visual and electromagnetic identification technique can continuously and automatically scan the Straits of Gibraltar and the Moroccan coast. Other parts of the coast, due to the earth curvature, cannot be controlled by means of towers only. Nevertheless, the Canary Islands and the Spanish South Coast are equipped with the tower technology. Tests are made to link all accessible data in real time in order to identify and follow all ships in the controlled area. This technology, known as SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior), is now exported to the Greek islands.
Meanwhile, Italy is practising the use of drones, which are planned to being used in Libya's desert borders. In October 2004, the Italian air force general Leonardo Tricarico announced that Italy had purchased five predator drones for 48 million dollars from the Californian arms company General Atomic Aeronautical Systems in San Diego. The US is using predators to chase al-Qaeda; the unknown flight object can also launch rockets. Tricarico explained that the Italian air force was planning to use the drones against terrorism as well as against irregular migration. By the end of October 2004, the Italian air force were trying to detect refugee boats from the air.
Testing of the new technologies at the South European 'front' is co-ordinated by the so-called ad hoc centres of the EU preceding the future EU border agencies. Two sea surveillance centres are based in Spain and Greece, one air surveillance centre in Italy. Another one is responsible for 'risk analysis'. Taking the insurance business as an example and with the assistance of Europol, it is calculated where the greatest damage by irregular migration is imminent. There, surveillance is strengthened.
The ad hoc centres are combined in Schengen Committees, which by now should have long been subsumed within EU institutions regulated under the Amsterdam Treaty. These circles have launched new power centres to create an EU border protection within five years. Thus, SCIFA+ unifying the Schengen round with all EU border police forces was founded in 2002, and in 2003 the PCU was created - the coordinating unit of the practitioners. The latter sees itself as a crisis centre using focal points at the external borders to push through the centralised command structures, regarding the development of preventive measures and stringent controls of national border guard units as its duty.
It is hard to say whether these EU coordinated methods have failed so far, or whether they already have fatal outcomes. On the one hand, it is reported that a planned EU manoeuvre of various national naval units in the Straits of Gibraltar and around the Canary Islands was halted due to language difficulties. On the other hand, 'high tech' is regarded as a magic potion that motivates border police and marines who believe their work thereby becomes more valuable. The intensified search with technical equipment in the Straits has already forced boat people to use more dangerous waters to come to Europe. It can also be assumed that EU agencies declared the arrival of boat people on the Italian island of Lampedusa 'a state of emergency' in order to justify the need to implement extraordinary measures.
It is important to remember that according to official estimates, 400,000 to 500,000 people secretly cross the southern EU border every year. Whoever can afford it, arrives by plane with a false passport. Whoever has relatives and friends might go on one of the ferries engaged in the massive holiday traffic. Only the poor come on wooden boats. According to reliable calculations, more than 10,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea since 1992, that is since visas became obligatory for the EU's southern neighbours. The European governments, however, do not declare a state of emergency because of the huge death tolls, but because of the arrival of around 30,000 boat people per year. In late summer 2004, around 1,800 people reached the island of Lampedusa. Obviously a high figure for a small island but small compared to the Mediterranean figure as a whole. The Italian state and the EU use them as a warning to others. Deterrence is the goal.
Oil interests and migration control - the economic agenda
The second aspect which brought the Libyan desert camps within reach of Pisanu and Schily is of economic nature. Since the mid-1990's, Gaddafi has slowly opened up Libya's economy and thus the oil and gas industry to foreign investors. Besides Russia, Libya is the most important non-European oil supplier for Germany, whereas Germany is the most important goods supplier to Libya after Italy. In 2002, the German minister for trade and commerce announced an 'export offensive' in the Middle East and North Africa - implying increasing investments in the oil and gas industry in these regions. The potential gains to be made from Libya have first priority here. In the 1970's, before economic cooperation decreased, most of the German investments in North Africa and the Middle East were made in Libya. Now, the German Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industry does not only predict investment opportunities in the Libyan energy sector but also in infrastructure, telecommunication and health. Another big market is the food supply for the population, most of which has to be imported.
24 March 2004: The British prime minister Tony Blair visits Gaddafi. The Dutch-British oil company Shell receives a 165 million Euro contract to produce oil and gas in Libya, forming the basis of a "long-term strategic partnership". There is talk of a "oil against weapons" deal, because around the same time, the arms company BAE initiates talks on major business with Libya. Libyan's armed forces want new equipment. The wish list includes night vision gear and air radars.
In July 2004, Libya clears the way for the participation of foreign investors in state companies. The government decides on the privatisation of 160 state companies, 54 of which cannot only sell shares to foreign investors but can be taken over by foreign capital by allowing for majority shareholding. The plan is to privatise 360 firms until 2008. At the end of July, the WTO lobbies for the accession of Libya. In August 2004, the German government re-introduces the so-called Hermes-Bürgschaften for Libya, which allows exporting companies to insure themselves against economic and political risk scenarios (many exporting firms can only export to certain countries with this guarantee).
On 5 September 2004, the Libyan state invites numerous interested firms from all over the world for a presentation on new oil and gas fields. The neo-liberal Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanim announces that production licences will be put up for bidding in the coming months. According to recent estimates, Libya has the eighth biggest oil reserves world wide. The country currently produces 1,6 million barrels of crude oil per day. The goal is to increase production up to 2 million until 2010, with the help of numerous new foreign investments - in 1970, 3,5 million was produced per day. The low production costs and high quality of Libyan oil is attractive to foreign investors.
7 October 2004: Italian president Silvio Berlusconi visits Libya for the fourth time that year. This time to open the pipeline 'Greenstream' of the 'West Libyan Gas Project', built and operated by the Italian 'energy giant' ENI, the number one of the foreign companies active in Libya. 6.6 billion dollars were invested into the 520 kilometres long pipeline, now supplying gas from the Libyan Mellitah to Sicily. Until now, it is the biggest Mediterranean project of its kind and makes a second pipeline for Algerian gas obsolete. The day for the opening was chosen to coincide with the "day of revenge" in Libya, which celebrates the victory over colonialism since the 1970's. In consideration of Belusconi, Gaddafi renames it the "day of friendship" and declares the once despised enemy to be welcome guests.
11 October 2004: The EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxemburg resolve the political barriers to economic cooperation with Libya. The council of ministers revokes the relevant UN sanctions from 1992 and 1993. The arms embargo is also revoked by the general EU framework for arms exports to third countries. The precondition for these changes was the Libyan agreement to pay compensations for the victims of a bomb attack on a Berlin discotheque in 1986, similar to Libya taking responsibility for the attack on the Pan-Am machine which crashed over Lockerbie. Furthermore, Libya is introducing a neo-liberal market economy, as is laid down in the Euromed partnership agreements between the EU and its Mediterranean neighbouring states.
14/15 October 2004: Chancellor Schröder, accompanied by German industrialists, visits Gaddafi. Schröder signs a bilateral investment agreement and is present when oil and gas concessions are granted to the German Wintershall, a subsidiary of the BASF group, represented in the country since 1958 and one of the leading foreign producers with an investment of 1.2 billion dollars. During the chancellor's visit, the German RWE group also started business in the oil and gas production, and the German Siemens group received contracts worth 180 million. Furthermore, the German government is interested in orders for "technical material like night vision gear or thermal cameras for border protection". Germany's economic goal is to dominate the Libyan foreign investment market. When Gaddafi mentions to the chancellor that Rommel's landmines are still causing accidents and that it was high times to clear them, the German side ignores the issue without comment.
The military and migration control - the foreign policy agenda
The third reason for Schily and Pisanu to be interested in the desert is of military nature and is closely connected with border fortification, camp policy and oil and gas production: the German economy openly links economic aims in North Africa and the Middle East with its military planning, because the markets in question are said to "have specific security risks". This is why on 11 February 2005, the Federal Association for German Industry and the Federal Association of German Banks directly linked its 'Conference on Financing in the Region North Africa Middle East' to the 'Munich Security Conference', which takes place annually to enable Western states to coordinate their military policies and war tactics. In February 2005, EU foreign policy therefore joined EU strategies regarding refugees, the military and the economy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Like Pakistan and Turkey, Libya could soon be a privileged partner of the West as a stronghold against Islamism and Africa's failing states. Because of his leading role in Africa's integration and the African Union (which replaced the OAU in 2001), Gaddafi has a special influence in a lot of dependent states. This became clear during his role in freeing the hostages from Switzerland, Germany and Austria who were held in the Sahara. Negotiators and money from Libya also played a central role in the negotiations around some Western tourists, amongst them Germans, who were held by extremists on the Philippines in the summer of 2000. Now British officers will operate as consultants to the Libyan army. A military co-operation with Greece is agreed upon.
Resulting from a deal with Italy in 2003, Libya is currently purchasing boats, jeeps, radar equipment, and helicopters for border surveillance. Italian trainers and consultants are already in the country. According to press reports, Rome supplied tents and other material for three camps in Libya in the first days of August. "The camps are being set up", said Pisanu in an interview with the newspaper La Republica, "they were never under discussion". Meanwhile, the Italian navy is guarding large areas of the Libyan coast. Under pressure from Rome, Egypt is controlling the Red Sea for refugee ships. Funded with money from Italy, Tunisia is operating 13 deportation prisons of which 11 are kept secret, safe from public scrutiny. It is said that many of those refugees and migrants deported from Italy are being transported to the Tunisian-Algerian desert and abandoned there.
The German government is also responsible for arming the North African coast. According to the German defence ministry, Tunisia will receive six Albatross speed boats from the German navy. Already two years ago, it was agreed to deliver five speed boats to Egypt. In 2002, Algeria received surveillance systems at a value of 10,5 million EUR, Tunisia received communications and radar equipment for around 1 million EUR, Morocco received military trucks worth 4.5 million euro.
The Western industrial countries have described the assumed danger in and from the Mediterranean region in two scenarios: One focuses on Islamic fundamentalism, the other on uncontrolled migration. It is surprising how these two completely different social phenomena are conflated in this vision of threat. Agreements of the EU countries state that al-Qaeda and the boat people use the same North African networks. In the meantime, search units are being formed whose remits are to fight both enemies together.
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2005/mar ... -camps.htm
International appeal The European Union's extraterritorial refugee camps
aufrufe, appelle/calls, appeals
(2005)
Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie e. V.
Aquinostr. 7-11
50670 Köln
Telefon: 0049 - 221 / 972 69-20 oder -30
Telefax: 0049 - 221 / 972 69-31
email: info@grundrechtekomitee.de
appell@grundrechtekomitee.de
International appeal The European Union's extraterritorial refugee camps
We demand a public inspection of the inhumane internment camps of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean region in order to support the demand for their immediate closure.
What is this appeal about? In May this year, the EU is going to initiate its third attempt to probe the foreign policy situation to assess if it can set up extraterritorial refugee camps in northern Africa. The German interior minister Otto Schily is planning to visit the governments of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in order to clear up earlier "misunderstandings" on the matter: up to now, the governments of these countries are not willing to agree to the building of EU camps on northern African territory on a mere whim from Berlin, Rome or London. Newspapers there sarcastically report that Germany is known to be the "world champion" in the building of camps and that it really was not necessary to export that know-how. Tony Blair had voiced the idea of externalising refugee camps at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war, calling on the EU to send asylum seekers back to areas outside the EU's external borders. The EU, in accordance with his plan, would then be able to select a few asylum seekers who would be allowed to enter. In the summer of 2004, the Italian interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu, together with Otto Schily, seized Blair's proposal to avert responsibility from the EU for the thousands of deaths of boat people occurring in the Mediterranean region since the implementation of the EU's restrictive militarised asylum and migration policy. Schily's new initiative from May 2005 will probably be spearheaded under the name of the "fight against global terrorism". Because the European security doctrine alleges that the same North African networks responsible for organising terrorism are also responsible for the migration of boat people.
In a Europe-wide appeal from 12.10.2004, numerous initiatives and individuals have already demanded the closure of all extraterritorial EU camps and a halt to the building of new camps (see http://no-camps.org/). It is now the time to publicly scrutinise the existing camps and prisons in the Mediterranean region because human rights groups are being denied access to these camps and there are various indications that secret camps are being built nevertheless.
Boat people targeted. Although an more accessible route for a poor Senegalese or Algerian refugee is to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe by wooden boat (pateras), this option takes a lot of determination and daringness, resulting in approximately 10,000 deaths since the creation of the visa regime towards North African states in 1992. It is, however, not the question of compensation payments that is currently debated in Europe, nor is it asked who is responsible for the mass deaths at sea; instead it is the economic "damage" that boat people allegedly cause after successful passage to the EU that is widely debated.
According to official figures, boat people only constitute a very small percentage of the around 500,000 people who cross the EU's southern borders secretly and without documentation year to year. It is the "poor" that have to resort to the risky passage by boat. For those who can afford it or have connections with friends or relatives migration can be an easier task by buying a well forged passport and travelling by plane or crossing the straits with one of the major car ferries’. This way of migration is a costly business and it is argued that "criminal networks" are profiteering in an organised manner. In the case of Eastern Europe, however, most of these "networks" have proven to be police constructs rather than reality, with everything being defined as "criminal" that opposes those legal forms of EU migration politics that fall short of human rights principles.
The border regime that drives migration into "illegality" is based on utilitarian principles and driven by European economic interests. The European labour market relies on undocumented workers. Especially in the Mediterranean region, the EU's border control measures reinforce a marked difference in living standards. With the visa regime, Europe's interior ministers are themselves responsible for refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean secretly and without documentation. Unlike the future plans to lift entry restrictions for Eastern Europeans over a period of time, such plans do not exist for the countries of the South. At the same time, many North African states have concluded readmission agreements with western European countries, with far-reaching consequences, as these states are now obliged to search for and deport migrants in transit. In return, Spain and Italy have merely agreed to allow entry for a minimal quota of legal workers from selected northern African countries. In general, services on behalf of the EU in return for the migration political cooperation of northern African states are lacking, or they take place in the energy sector (investments in North African gas or oil production). The servility of northern African governments with regard to extraterritorial EU refugee camps appears to be reaching its limits.
However, the tenacity of those regimes against EU demands is not led by a principled humanitarian stance in favour of refugees and against camps per se. This is why in future the question will be how much the EU is willing to give politically and financially for the creation of such camps.
The secret nature of extraterritorial camps. For the last two to three years, the biggest deportation camps of the EU have been created on the Canary Islands, in southern Spain and on the southern islands of Italy. They are being controlled by para-military forces and are not accessible to human right’s groups (including UNHCR) or journalists. These camps are the organisational preconditions for mass deportations to the future camps in North Africa. The first mass airlift deportation in Europe's post-war history took place in October 2004: under military command, more than 1000 refugees were deported from southern Italy to Libya, without an examination of their identity or an individual examination of their reasons for flight. This constituted a blatant violation of the Geneva Refugee Convention and the European Convention of Human Rights.
At the same time, Rocco Buttiglione, the designated and later suspended EU commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs (!) assured during his hearing before the European Parliament that he had never proposed "to create concentration camps in north Africa to deport illegals there", and that he was not intending to make such a proposal in the future (Minutes of the Hearings, Handelsblatt, 5.10.2004). Buttiglione was criticised by some members of parliament after he described his vision of camps around Europe as a "good idea" during several interviews (amongst others on the radio station Deutschlandfunk on 27.8.2004). He clarified his ideas of "reception centres" by saying that they should only be created with the consent and cooperation of the sovereign states on the other side of the Mediterranean. He further proposed that they could also serve to separate and select the desired economic migrants to Europe (Die Welt, 31.8.2004; Frankfurter Rundschau, 6.10.2004).
The proposal to create extraterritorial EU camps was received with a storm of protests in Europe. Furthermore, the North African governments have not provided land for future EU reception centres (Schily. FAZ, 23.07.2004). The concept though is being steadily refined in order to realise these camps, even if this is being continually denied in official statements: at their informal meeting in Scheveningen on 30 September to 1 October 2004, the EU's justice and interior ministers agreed in principle that the EU is striving for the creation of "reception camps for asylum seekers" in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritius and Libya, not under supervision of the EU but of the respective countries. On 31 January this year, the EU interior minister’s conference in Luxemburg, however, stated that the idea of extraterritorial camps had been "buried". Because of the boat people in the Mediterranean, it was said, in future the EU would accept some quota refugees from North Africa.
How the camps can nevertheless become reality is exemplified by extraterritorial camps and prisons run by the US in some north African states to enable the use of torture on prisoners (compare Jane Mayer, 'Outsourcing Torture' in: The New Yorker, 14.2.2005): the already existing infrastructure in those countries - the prisons, the airports, the torture institutions and torture personnel - are being used secretly for EU and US interests.
It is unlikely that the creation of the extraterritorial refugee camps will not be advertised with boards informing the passer-by that "The EU is building here!". The concept behind the camps is more one of hired complicity. At the same time, North African states are supposed to be turned into "appropriate first asylum states". The EU is presenting this as a strategy in accord with human rights that appears to be strengthening the protection of refugees outside of Europe. No matter how the European camp visions will be realised in law and practise: for those imprisoned, neither constitutional rights nor recourse to the courts will apply (Schily, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2.8.2004) and the authorities will know how to obscure the financing, the administrative responsibility and accountability.
The fact that chain deportations (migrants are deported from one country to the other until they are back again to the country of origin) stated taking place from Europe in particular to Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Ghana became known already before the Italian mass deportation to Libya last October: refugees who had been deported from south European countries had reported back about military desert camps in North African countries in which they were interned for some time. Some were subsequently driven to and abandoned in border regions in the Sahara. Many migrants, it has been reported, have not survived this ordeal and collapsed or died of thirst.
It is to be feared that once the extraterritorial camps have been institutionalised, the situation of refugees and undocumented migrants within Europe will become even worse. The repression of irregular migration will be increased with far-reaching consequences. Tony Blair's comprehensive plan foresees the deportation of all asylum seekers to outside the EU's borders. Once these capacities exist, they will be used - resulting in a Europe with comprehensive population control measures and only hired or carefully selected migrants and refugees will be granted access.
This is why we demand that delegations of members of national and the EU parliament as well as human rights groups from the EU and from north African states visit the regions where extraterritorial camps are located and visit the externalised prisons financed by the EU along the migration routes as soon as possible, in order to work towards their closure. The agenda includes an inspection of the big deportation camps in southern Spain and southern Italy as well as the desert camps. It is of uttermost importance to create a critical publicity around the EU's strategy to build camps around Europe, which violates international human rights obligations, and to expose the developing complicity in the creation of these camps.
Support the appeal
With this appeal we want to call on the European public, civil society and national and EU members of parliament. Please distribute this appeal (translations available under
http://www.grundrechtekomitee.de/ub_sho ... icleID=151).
Initiatives and organisations can sign this appeal by 20 July 2005 by mailing appell@grundrechtekomitee.de. The names of signatories will be collected on the above named website and all groups will receive a complete list of signatories after 20 July, with which they can inform their local media about the delegations planning to visit the camps.
Public persons who are willing to accompany such a delegation and thereby publicise it should also contact the Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie, stating your address and e-mail.
Helmut Dietrich / Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration
Dirk Vogelskamp / Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie
http://www.nolager.de/blog/node/228
by JackRiddler » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:52 pm
American Dream wrote:Then there's the Wilson/Terpil story:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/c ... son_1.html
Ed Wilson's Revenge
The Biggest CIA Scandal in History Has Its Feet in the Starting Blocks in a Houston Court House
by Michael C. Ruppert
[The following article appeared in the January, 2000 issue of From The Wilderness]
The following is written after examining more than 900 pages of documents, in four volumes, filed since last September, in Houston Federal Court, by attorneys representing former CIA operative Edwin P. Wilson and the United States Department of Justice. As strange as it may seem, FTW assures you that there is a document on file or an on-the-record quote to support everything we now tell you.
On February 2, 1983, the Houston trial of former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, on Federal charges that he had unlawfully sold explosives to Libya, hung at a truly precarious moment.
SNIP!!!
by Jeff » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:25 pm
barracuda wrote:lupercal wrote:There was a time in my life when I thought Gaddafi was evil incarnate but it was mercifully brief...
Between his periferal involvement in Lockerbie and the La Belle bombing, I always sorta figured Gaddafi was probably a CIA asset.
Al-Libi, Torture, and the Case for the War in Iraq
— By Nick Baumann
| Thu May. 14, 2009 9:08 AM PDT
On Monday, I wrote about the "suicide" of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi was the man whose false confession, obtained under torture, of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda provided the Bush administration with its casus belli for war with Iraq. It didn't seem to matter that al-Libi's claim that Bin Laden had sent operatives to be trained in the use of weapons of mass destruction by Hussein's people didn't make any sense. "They were killing me," al-Libi later told the FBI about his torturers. "I had to tell them something." A bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee report would later conclude that al-Libi lied about the link "to avoid torture."
The al-Libi story has been moving forward at a breakneck pace since it first broke in the Arab press over the weekend. Human Rights Watch, whose staffers last spoke to al-Libi on April 27, called for an investigation into his death in a press release issued late Monday afternoon. (When HRW spoke to al-Libi on the 27th, he refused to be interviewed, instead asking, "Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails?")
But the biggest news so far in the al-Libi case comes from former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson. In a post on Steve Clemons' Washington Note, Wilkerson writes:
[W]hat I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002—well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.
Wilkerson is saying that getting the false "information" from al-Libi about an Iraq-Al Qaeda link wasn't an unexpected "bonus" of the torture—it was the goal of the torture. Kevin Drum's caution is very important here: "One way or another, Wilkerson is going to have to tell us how he knows this. It's not enough just to say that he 'learned' it." But if Wilkerson's information is reliable—and he's been reliable in the past—this changes everything about the torture debate. Josh Marshall explains:
The basis of most of the anti-torture push has been the assumption that torture was used for the purpose of eliciting information about future terrorist attacks. Whether it was illegal, wrong-headed, misguided, immoral—whatever—most have been willing to at least give the benefit of the doubt that that was the goal. If the driving force was to gin up new bogus intel about the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link, politically it will put the whole story in a very different light. And rightly so.
There's another connection back to the al-Libi story. Wilkerson doubts al-Libi's death was a suicide at all. He continues:
(Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi....)
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball at Newsweek published a piece on Tuesday casting further doubt on the idea that al-Libi's death was a suicide:
Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and prominent critic of the Kaddafi regime, says there were plenty of reasons to question the report that Libi had committed suicide.... "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya," Al-Ghwell explains. In the past, he adds, there have been a number of cases where political prisoners are reported to have committed suicide. Then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death. "My gut feeling is that something fishy happened here and somebody in Libya panicked," he says. With the prospect that the Obama administration might release more Bush-era documents about the treatment of CIA detainees, officials in the Kaddafi regime had reasons to be concerned that their "complicity" in the U.S. war on terror would be exposed, Al-Ghwell says.
by American Dream » Sat Feb 26, 2011 2:17 pm
by 23 » Sat Feb 26, 2011 3:24 pm
TRIPOLI, Libya — A bold effort by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to prove that he was firmly in control of Libya appeared to backfire Saturday as foreign journalists he invited to the capital discovered blocks of the city in open revolt.
Witnesses described snipers and antiaircraft guns firing at unarmed civilians, and security forces were removing the dead and wounded from streets and hospitals, apparently in an effort to hide the mounting toll.
When government-picked drivers escorted journalists on tours of the city on Saturday morning, the evidence of the extent of the unrest was unmistakable. Workers were still hastily painting over graffiti calling Colonel Qaddafi a “bloodsucker” or demanding his ouster. Just off the tour route were long bread lines where residents said they were afraid to be seen talking to journalists.
And though heavily armed checkpoints dominated some precincts of the city, in other neighborhoods the streets were blocked by makeshift barricades of broken televisions, charred tree trunks and cinder blocks left over from protests and street fights the night before.
“I have seen more than 68 people killed,” said a doctor who gave his name only as Hussein. “But the people who have died, they don’t leave them in the same place. We have seen them taking them in the Qaddafi cars, and nobody knows who there are taking the people who have died.” He added, “Even the ones with just a broken hand or something they are taking away.”
In some ways, the mixed results of Colonel Qaddafi’s publicity stunt — opening the curtains to the world with great fanfare, even though the stage is in near-chaotic disarray — is an apt metaphor for the increasingly untenable situation in the country.
On Friday, before the journalists arrived, his forces put down a demonstration in the capital only after firing on the protesters. There were reports that an armed rebel force was approaching the city on Saturday, but Colonel Qaddafi’s forces are believed to have blocked the way at the city of Surt, a stronghold of his tribe.
He is no longer in full control of the countryside either. Rebels now control about half the populous Mediterranean coast, including the strategic towns of Zawiyah and Misurata, not far from the capital and near important oil facilities.
But Tripoli is home to a third of Libya’s roughly six million people. Colonel Qaddafi and his special militias have unleashed enough firepower here that it may enable them to keep a firm grasp on the city for some time to come, raising vexing questions about just how the standoff might end.
Until Friday night, Colonel Qaddafi’s government had imposed a complete ban on foreign journalists, had shut down most Internet access, had confiscated cellphone chips and camera memory cards from those leaving the border, and had done whatever it could to prevent unauthorized images of the unrest here from leaving the country.
But he reversed himself on Thursday when his son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi said Libya would now welcome the foreign news media and officials began figuring out how to issue visas when many of its embassies abroad had already defected to the rebels.
When foreign journalists arrived Friday night, the airport looked like a refugee camp, with thousands jammed into the halls awaiting flights out of the country. Many customs and security officials wore hospital masks in fear of contracting some disease among the hordes.
In a midnight news conference for journalists assembled in the luxurious Rixos Hotel, where bread and other food was plentiful, the younger Mr. Qaddafi, dressed in a dark zip-up sweater, acknowledged for the first time the extent of the rebellion, confirming reports that rebels had control of Zawiyah and Misurata despite concerted attempts over the last two days to dislodge them.
But, contradicting rebel claims that their victory was at hand, the younger Mr. Qaddafi said the government was negotiating with the protesters and making great progress, an assertion not confirmed by the protesters.
He promised journalists they would find the streets peaceful and support for his father strong. Do not confuse the sound of celebratory fireworks for bursts of gunfire around the streets of Tripoli, he told them.
The next morning, a driver took a group of foreign journalists to an area known as the Friday market, which appeared to have been the site of a riot the night before. The streets were strewn with debris, and piles of shattered glass had been collected in cardboard boxes.
A young man approached the journalists to deliver a passionate plea for unity and accolades to Colonel Qaddafi, then left in a white van full of police officers. Two small boys approached surreptitiously with bullet casings they presented as evidence of force used on protesters the night before.
But at another stop, in the neighborhood of Tajoura, journalists stumbled almost accidentally into a block cordoned off by makeshift barriers where dozens of residents were eager to talk about a week of what they said were peaceful protests crushed by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces with overwhelming, deadly and random force.
A middle-age business owner, who identified himself only as Turkey, said that the demonstrations there had begun last Sunday, when thousands of protesters inspired by the uprising in the east had marched toward the capital’s central Green Square. He said the police had dispersed the crowd with tear gas and then bullets, killing a man named Issa Hatey. He said neighbors had now renamed the area’s central traffic circle Issa Hatey Square in memory of their struggle.
He and several other residents said that over the past week neighbors had been besieged by pickup trucks full of armed men shooting randomly at the crowds, sometimes wounding people who were sitting peacefully in their homes or cars. At other times, several said, the security forces had employed rooftop snipers, antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks and buckshot, and they produced shells and casings that appeared to confirm their reports. Mr. Turkey said that on one day he had seen about 50 to 60 heavily armed men who appeared to be mercenaries from nearby African countries.
The residents also said that they had seen security forces scooping up dead and wounded protesters and removing them from the streets, apparently to hide evidence of the violence. Because they believe security forces are also removing casualties from hospitals, they said, they have tried to hide their friends within the hospital and remove them after initial treatment.
After Friday Prayer, Mr. Turkey and his friends said, a crowd of several thousand had gathered at what they now call Issa Hatey Square to march to Green Square. They raised what he called “the old-new flag,” the former tri-color flag of the Libyan monarchy that rebels have claimed as the flag of a free, post-Qaddafi Libya.
Two carloads of Libyan Army soldiers had joined them, he said, though they never used their weapons. The protesters were determined to remain peaceful, he said, because they knew that if they fought back with weapons Colonel Qaddafi would retaliate with even greater force.
But when they got to a neighborhood called Arada, they met an ambush led by snipers firing down from the roofs. Others had attacked with machine guns and antiaircraft guns. At least 15 people had died, he and others said.
Several said they had been attacked by the personal militia of Colonel Qaddafi’s son Khamis Qaddafi, which is considered the most formidable battalion in the Libyan Army or other Qaddafi forces.
A precise death toll has been impossible to verify. A Libyan envoy said Friday that hundreds had been killed in Tripoli.
Asked why he and his neighbors were rising up now, after living under Colonel Qaddafi for 42 years, Mr. Turkey, 46, shrugged. “No one can tell the time,” he said. After forty years of pressure, “you explode.” Two funerals were taking place nearby for those who died on Friday, and he said they expected another big protest on Sunday.
A pickup truck of Qaddafi critics wheeled by just in time to carry the foreign journalists back to meet their official driver, and the official tour continued.
by Jeff » Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:54 pm
Libye : Le Parti de Gauche sera toujours du côté des révolutions citoyennes
Samedi, 26 Février 2011 21:11
Nous avons pris connaissance avec tristesse et consternation des propos tenus sur Twitter par le président vénézuélien Chavez à propos du régime dictatorial de Kadhafi.
Le Parti de Gauche est au côté des révolutions citoyennes et soutient la lutte du peuple libyen pour sa liberté.
Aucun pouvoir n’est légitime à tirer sur son peuple.Nous applaudissons le “dégage” crié par les peuples tunisien, égyptien et libyen comme nous avons soutenu le « que se vayan todos » sud américain.
Partout nous condamnons les régimes dictatoriaux souvent soutenus par la puissance Etats-unienne et appuyons les révolutions citoyennes qui soulèvent aujourd’hui les peuples arabes et particulièrement libyen confronté à un massacre.
Nous resterons aussi vigilants sur les intentions réelles des pays européens et des Etats-Unis en Libye et dans la région.
by AlicetheKurious » Sun Feb 27, 2011 4:37 am
Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter sets out the UN Security Council's powers to maintain peace. It allows the Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and to take military and nonmilitary action to "restore international peace and security".
Chapter VII also gives the Military Staff Committee responsibility for strategic coordination of forces placed at the disposal of the UN Security Council. It is made up of the chiefs of staff of the five permanent members of the Council. Wikipedia
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