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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Away with Dictators, Bahrain, Colonel Gaddafi, February 2011, Hugo Chavez, Hugo Chavez’s tent, Iran, Libya, Middle East, Mubarak, Nick Griffin, revolt | 2Comments »
Was away at the weekend and didn’t follow the news at all, so events in Libya have caught me on the back foot.
Nevertheless, here’s a bit of a round up from those in the know, all very subjective and incomplete:
Nick Griffin and Colonel Gaddafi, weird, but then they did share the same pet hate at one time in life, if you think about it.
Terry Glavin on that Libyan Slave Revolt.
Salon has a primer on Libya, with this revealing photo of Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi holding hands:
Comrade Dave looks at the Libya crackdown: the trajectory of Brother Gaddafi.
From December 2010, Hugo Chavez and the gift from Muammar Gaddafi.
From the Don’t vote BNP channel on YouTube, more on Nick Griffin and the Libyan connection:
Over at the Guardian, WikiLeaks cables: A guide to Gaddafi’s ‘famously fractious’ family.This is the bottom line:
“Like all the Gaddafi children and favourites is supposed to have income streams from the national oil company and oil services subsidiaries.”
This is superb, Mapping Violence Against Pro-Democracy Protests in Libya, a Google map of the on-going events in Libya.
Marko Attila Hoare reminds us of how money talks in academia, Saif al-Islam Muammar al-Gaddafi and the London School of Economics.
Kellie Strøm takes a wider perspective, Revolution Overload.
CNN has a breaking news feed from Libya.
Finally, thanks to Graham Lloyd, here’s “The Harder They Come” by Jimmy Cliff.
Update 1: At the Scotsman, Gaddafi orders air force to bomb his own people.
Update 2: Apparently, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received a gong from a Gadaffi front organisation in 2010 and he’s been asked to give it back, not that he will!
Update 3: In the Surreal, but True category, there is a prize which you won’t believe, the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights!
It is administered by a Swiss based NGO and front organisation, Nord-Sud 21 (coincidentally, their web site is down), recipients of the prize include: Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the well-known Holocaust denier, Roger Garaudy.
Update 4: The BBC live feed is here.
Update 5: Colonel Gaddafi has been on TV.
Update 6: Tribal support for the dictatorship is failing, the Irish Times explains the issues:
“During his 42-year rule, Muammar Gadafy, born into a Bedouin family from the Sirt area, has relied on tribal bonds and cultivated tribal allegiances to keep him in power. Since these connections remain strong in the military and the police, the fate of his regime could depend on whether the tribes remain loyal or join the protesters.
The auguries are not propitious for Col Gadafy. On Sunday, the “Thunderbolt” army unit defected to the protesters in Benghazi, which was proclaimed “90 per cent liberated”, while nearby Bayda was said to be declared an “Islamic caliphate” by anti-regime fundamentalists influential in this region. An opposition spokesman claimed that “all [local] tribes” were supporting the revolt.
The leader of the al-Zuwayya tribe, Faraj al-Zuway, threatened to cut oil exports to the West unless the regime halts its “oppression of the protesters”. The tribe dwells south of Benghazi, the epicentre of the rebellion which began a week ago.
The Awlad Ali tribe, based on the Libyan-Egyptian border, is said to be facilitating the transit to Benghazi of medical supplies gathered by opposition activists living in Egypt.
To make matters worse for the regime, Akram al-Warfalli, a senior figure in the Warfallah tribe, one of the country’s largest, stated, “We tell the brother [Gadafy], well, he’s no longer a brother, we tell him leave the country.” This tribe is located south of Tripoli, the capital, which experienced its first large-scale anti-regime demonstrations only on Sunday.”
Update 7: Robert Fisk has harsh words for Muammar Gaddafi:
“So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.”
Update 8: Those words contrast with Fisk’s sketch of Gadaffi in 2000 which paints a sometimes whimsical and insubstantial picture:
“It was ever thus. This is the man, after all, who supervises his own military parades – which mark the anniversary of his coup d’etat against King Idris on September 1 1969 – by ordering, over his mobile phone, new squads of soldiers and missiles to appear in the streets. This is the man who told the Algerian regime that it had squandered the million and a half martyrs who died in the war against France because it didn’t continue across North Africa to “liberate” Jerusalem; who idolised Nicolae Ceausescu but warned Romanians against another “dictator” once Ceausescu had been shot.
Gaddafi’s Green Book, a distinctly odd collection of immensely boring essays, has been published in dozens of languages. The book urges the world to adopt his alternative to both capitalism and communism – a system of government run by people’s “committees” and people’s “bureaus” – which, so he claimed, inspired Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union. Given Russia’s subsequent economic collapse, it’s not a boast that we’ve heard recently. But the stories – alas, all true – go on and on.”
