The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are born to be slaves. They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab, and it does not matter whether that black is a Christian, or a fellow Muslim.

Arab culture is intensely racist. 

And Arabs continue to keep slaves.

A common word for a black African is the word for a slave: ‘Abd. 

Nesrine Malik wrote in a 2008 article at the Guardian titled A paler shade of black:

The word ‘abd, although strictly meaning “slave” or “servant”, became synonymous with negritude.

The whole article needs to be read.

This is from Gatestone, by Ruthie Blum, published August 19, 2018:

On August 7, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania arrested Biram Dah Abeid, the founding head of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), a human rights organization dedicated to eradicating slavery in the west African nation. Abeid described the police waking him in his home in the capital city of Nouakchott, and taking him into custody without charges.

Abeid and those petitioning for his release have good reason to suspect that his arrest – one of many over the past few years – is related not only to his persistent anti-slavery activism and critique of Islamic texts, but to the fact that he is running for a seat in parliament in the legislative elections slated for September 1.

Abeid, a member of the Haratin, Mauritania’s largest minority group, established the IRA in 2008, the year in which Mauritania’s first democratically elected president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, was ousted in a coup led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who has been in power ever since. Abeid has been described as a “thorn in the side” of Aziz, particularly when he challenged Aziz in the 2014 presidential election, and came in a “distant second”.

Abeid, … has long been a crusader against slavery. The practice was formally abolished in Mauritania in 1981, criminalized only in 2007, but is still practiced with virtual impunity there to this day. …

A 2015 piece in Front Page Magazine, by Stephen Brown, which chastised America’s Black Lives Matter movement for ignoring the genuine plight of blacks in Africa, described the race-based nature of Mauritania’s rigid caste system:

Mauritania’s slaves are all black Africans and their owners are Arabs or Berbers, called “whites”, who constitute about 20 percent of the population. Both slaves and masters are Muslim. The “whites”, like Mauritania’s president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, make up almost all of Mauritania’s political, business and military elite class that controls the country. And therein lies the problem. It is very difficult to get the elite class that makes the laws to take any meaningful action against slavery when many of them are reported to own slaves themselves.

 But this inaction is also based on a pronounced, anti-black racism that African-American writer Samuel Cotton noticed when he travelled to Mauritania in the 1990s to explore the slavery issue. 

The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are born to be slaves,” wrote Samuel Cotton in his book Silent Terror: A Contemporary Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery. “They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab, and it does not matter whether that black is a Christian, or a fellow Muslim.”

What have US labor institutions had to say about Mauritania’s continuing slave ownership?

The state’s ongoing racism and widespread practice of slavery sparked the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to demand in August 2017 that Mauritania be removed from the eligibility list of countries benefiting from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), legislation enacted by Congress in 2000 that “significantly enhances market access to the US for qualifying Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries”.

To qualify and remain eligible for AGOA benefits, each African country “must be working to improve its rule of law, human rights, and respect for core labor standards”. Yet, Mauritania was nevertheless deemed eligible for AGOA benefits as soon as the law was passed. In 2006, its eligibility was removed. Stunningly, in spite of its appalling human rights record, Mauritania’s eligibility for AGOA benefits was restored in 2009.

In September 2017, a month after the AFL-CIO requested to testify before the US Trade Representative to defend its petition, an anti-slavery delegation from the US, which had intended to meet with Mauritanian government officials, was denied entry into the country when it landed at the Nouakchott airport. According to a report in the North Africa Post, this was part of Mauritania’s “blackout on the practice of slavery in the country by denying access to international civil rights organizations”.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) nevertheless continues to provide Mauritania with huge sums of money to support its “economic reform” efforts. At the end of January, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde met in Morocco with Mauritanian officials and issued the following statement:

I had a constructive meeting with Governor Abdel Aziz Ould Dahi and Minister Ould Djay, during which we discussed Mauritania’s recent economic developments and prospects. I welcomed the launch of the Mauritanian authorities’ economic reform program supported by the IMF’s $163.9 million Extended Credit Facility (ECF). I reiterated that the IMF stands ready to continue to support Mauritania in its reform efforts. I also highlighted that Mauritania should take advantage of the current favorable external environment to accelerate reforms and transition to stronger growth, which is needed to improve people’s living standards in a sustainable manner.

To state that Mauritania is engaged in the kind of “reform” that is “needed to improve people’s living standards” is both false and unconscionable. Not only are Mauritania’s minorities so impoverished that being enslaved is often their only perceived alternative to starving, but its deceitful government is responsible for perpetuating the situation.

Thus, according to CJA News Africa, six members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Lagarde asking that the IMF cease providing loans to Mauritania. …  No response has been reported.

This brings us to the issue of Washington’s leverage. Mauritania is considered an American ally. According to a recent State Department fact sheet:

The United States engages with Mauritania on a wide array of issues, including counterterrorism, food security, trade promotion, and efforts to strengthen human rights and the rule of law. The Departments of State, Defense, USAID and Justice are represented at the U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott… Assistance other than humanitarian assistance to Mauritania was suspended after the 2008 coup. Following certification of the 2009 election by foreign observers, bilateral assistance restrictions were lifted. …

Mauritania gets aid from the US.

This can only mean that American tax-payers are subsidizing slavery. And persistent racial discrimination.

Institutions like the IMF, led by globalists like Christine Lagarde, will go on favoring the Third World and pouring funds plundered from the First World into the coffers of its tyrants, and at the same time go on calling themselves human rights protectors and anti-racists, without really giving a damn for the fact of black slavery under Arab rule.

But what will the Trump administration do? Insist on the release of Biram Dah Abeid? Stop giving dollars to the Mauritanian government? Condemn Mauritanian slave ownership in all international forums, including the IMF?

See these posts of ours on the subject of Arab racism and enslavement:

Nothing wrong with … er … um … slavery and rape, February 13, 2017 here.

Tens of millions of slaves, November 17, 2014 here.

The child slaves of Arabs, December 30, 2011 here.

The black slaves of Arabs and Durban III, September 2, 2011 here.

Some sane Europeans are making slight efforts to resist the Muslim onslaught which threatens, all too plausibly, to overwhelm the continent and destroy its civilization.

It’s good to see resistance, but unless it expands rapidly into a vast movement, it is too little, too late.

Stephen Brown, writing at Front Page, tells the story of a small effort, made by one university in Germany, to try and assert the European value of tolerance over the continual exploitation of it by intolerant Muslims.

While Western civilization often caves in nowadays to demonstrations of Islamic supremacy one small, appeasing step at a time, a European academic institution firmly stood its ground recently and upheld Western values against one such Islamist test probe.

The Technical University of Dortmund (TUD) in Germany, finally had enough of Muslim students bullying others, especially women, after the former had taken over for a prayer room an area the university had set aside as a quiet space for all students. Located in the physics building, TUD recently closed the facility. …

The university had originally intended the room to be a “religion and world-view neutral” space to accommodate students of different faiths attending TUD from around the world. …

But instead of relieving stress, the TUD’s well-intentioned idea was rather to cause a lot of it.

University officials may have been unfamiliar with the doctrine of Islamic supremacy, which claims the superiority of Islam over all other religions, when they made the decision to open such a facility. Along with the equality-of-faiths-be-damned attitude, inherent in Islamic supremacism is also a condemnation of a fundamental, underlying value of Western civilization, that of tolerance.

In America, Omar Ahad, a co-founder of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), probably summed up best the Islamic supremacist doctrine. When making a speech in California, he stated: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

But if the TUD administration was familiar with the Islamic supremacy doctrine, one must then ask why it would even proceed with this experiment in the first place without safeguards in place? There would obviously be problems with fundamentalist Muslim students possessing supremacist notions. They would definitely not miss an opportunity like this to demonstrate their belief in their religion’s superiority and launch a test of strength. …

It wasn’t long before they did so, storing their prayer rugs there and violating the university’s usage rules for the space. Probably hoping to avoid confrontation, the administration naively reacted to the Muslim students’ aggressive actions by placing a couch and a bookshelf in the room [to signal “this is no prayer room”]. …

But in dealing with Islamic supremacists, such feeble measures are doomed to failure. In fact, it was possibly because of the university’s weak, initial reaction to their power probe that, according to the newspaper Die Welt, the supremacists just got “obviously more radical”.

Visitors complained that Muslim students blocked off more than half the room and had used a large picture hanging on the wall to do so. This, apparently, was done to segregate the sexes. The noise from the Muslim students’ praying also kept the “Quiet Room” from being quiet. Besides prayer rugs, Korans were also stored there with one left out in the open. Besides the Koran, “flyers in Arabic and instructional pamphlets in German” were displayed. …

But it was the Muslim students’ actions towards women that appears to have been the final straw in the university’s decision to close the facility. … Women were instructed to wear headscarves … [and] told they could not wear perfume in the room. And female visitors were “repeatedly intercepted” at the door by male Muslims who told them they could only use the room’s smaller part.

“The room was also divided by curtains into a bright area for men and a dark one for women,” Die Welt reported, the smaller, darker area perhaps unwittingly symbolising the Islamist attitude towards women. …

What was happening was a violation of the law regarding the equal treatment of men and women. …

The expected Muslim student reaction to the university’s decision was not long in coming. More than four hundred signed a petition, demanding the room’s re-opening, protesting its “rigorous and unarranged” closing, indicating they should have been consulted first. They also regarded “these forms of disrespect as discrimination”.  Which should surprise no one. When Islamists fail to get their way, accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism are almost sure to follow.

But to its credit, TUD’s administration did not wring its hands in anxiety over the charge of discrimination, and then cave in to the petition’s demand, as other Western universities would have done. Instead, its office of the chancellor shot back with a “detailed” letter of its own, telling the Muslim students the room was closed because they were breaking the rules in their use of it. Moreover, in Germany they would have to abide by German law regarding equality.

“We gladly take up your notes regarding the meaning of integration and allow ourselves to add that this includes a knowledge and acceptance of the valid laws in the Federal Republic of Germany, to which we are all bound,” the letter read. The missive also quoted for the Muslim students’ benefit Article 3 of the German Constitution that stipulates equality, especially “equal rights for men and women”. These rights, the administration made clear, “are a sacrosanct, core area in it”.

So far, no answer has been received to the university’s response. …

As for the Islamic supremacists, the room’s closing represents only a partial failure. While they could not appropriate the room for their own purposes, the supremacists could still be viewed, in some respects, as victorious. By causing the room’s closure, they still determined its use, or non-use, in this case. If it couldn’t be a Muslim prayer room under Muslim control and rules, then the supremacists are probably satisfied with the fact that they have prevented any other faith from using and enjoying it. In this respect, their dominance behaviour was successfully established.

Which is really what Islamic supremacy is all about.

European governments “may have been unfamiliar with the doctrine of Islamic supremacy”, its absolute intolerance, when they started the process – now accelerating – of importing millions of Muslims into Europe.

But what sort of excuse is that?

Why did they not inform themselves? Find out what it would mean to do such a thing? What the consequences would be?

And if they did know, then what was their aim?

What is the mysterious cause of Europe’s determining to destroy itself?

Guilt and shame? Europe has much to feel guilty and ashamed about. But not nearly as much as the Second and Third Worlds have –  without it bothering them in the least.

Boredom? There’s a fat treatise to be written about that possibility.

Blind stupidity? Not to be ruled out.

Getting tired of power? Tired of greatness?

Nations can surely grow tired of power and greatness just as individuals can.

Whatever the cause or causes, Europe is slowly committing suigenocide. (To coin a legitimately constructed word.)

Digging its own grave. Where quietness and equality are forever to be found. 

It’s an undertaking without precedent in history.

Will the United Nations pause in its continual condemnation of Israel for daring to exist, and say a word or two against the enslavement of children by Arabs?

We all know the answer to that question.

Will the US State Department censure the practice?

We know the answer to that one too.

This is by Stephen Brown from Front Page:

It is perhaps the most pernicious of evils. The words “child slavery” would cause most people nowadays to recoil in horror, but in the oil-rich countries of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, it apparently still doesn’t.

There are … many … parents among Pakistan’s large, poverty-stricken population willing to sell their male offspring into the Persian Gulf. Boys as young as three are bought from poor parents, and sometimes simply kidnapped from the street, principally in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and sent as slaves to these oil-rich states for one purpose only: to win camel races for their new Arab masters. The boys are expected to do this after being trained as riders under very brutal conditions for what is a very popular sport in that region. …

The unfortunate boys kept on an “ousbah,” an isolated camel farm, are caught up in a nightmare of hellish proportions. After experiencing the trauma of suddenly being separated from their families, they are made to work 18-hour days. A camel jockey-in-training is also starved, beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Serious injury, even death, is a fate that also awaits many of the child riders, some as young as five, when training or racing over distances between four and 10 kilometres atop of 800-900 pound animals that can run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Even if the rider does not fall, damaged genitals is one of the serious wounds the slave boys often suffer. …

Along with the boys, young girls from South Asia and other impoverished countries are also trafficked to the Arabian Peninsula but for sexual exploitation. …Traffickers have also sometimes been taught at Third World airports leaving for the Arabian Peninsula with their human cargo. In 2007, one was caught in Karachi with both a boy and a young, pregnant woman. He was headed for Oman where he planned to sell the boy as a camel jockey and the girl as a sex slave. Her unborn baby was also destined to become a camel jockey or a sex slave, according to Pakistani police, who claim pregnant women are being trafficked for the purpose of producing future slaves. …

Unfortunately for its innocent victims, both present and future, the eradication of slavery on the Arabian Peninsula will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. It is an ingrained, centuries-old institution. … Under sharia law, which governs Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Muslims are legally allowed to own slaves. … Another reason for this inhuman sense of entitlement is that the prophet Muhammad was also a slave owner, setting the example for the fundamentalists. …

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to abolishing slavery in places like the Arabian Peninsula and Mauritania is the mindset. In these countries, enslaving non-Arab human beings, including children, is simply viewed as the natural order of things. …

Victims of child slavery also cannot look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for help. It contains despots and tyrants whose human rights records are just as bad as Mauritania’s and Saudi Arabia’s, as well as Islamic countries that bribe them and may be practising slavery themselves.

There is a UN agency that ostensibly exists to prevent the exploitation of human beings: the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The ILO does nothing to save little boys and young girls from Arab enslavement.

Arabs are never to be offended by any UN interference in their affairs. Islam is never to be offended by any criticism whatsoever.

That being its policy  – unofficial but fully implemented – the UN is not only the protector of slave owners and traffickers, it is collaborating with them. By permitting slavery, it encourages it.  

The UN must be destroyed.

Is the war of the Western powers against the petty despot of Libya over?

Has the petty despot won?

According to this report at (not always reliable) DebkaFile, it is and he has:

Bar the shouting, the war in Libya virtually ended Thursday morning, July 14, when US President Barack Obama called Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to hand Moscow the lead role in negotiations with Muammar Qaddafi for ending the conflict – provided only that the Libyan ruler steps down in favor of a transitional administration.

The US president thus accepted the Russian-Libyan formula for ending the war over the heads of the NATO chiefs who rejected it when they met Russian leaders at the Black Sea resort of Sochi last week. …

By the time Obama had decided to call Medvedev, individual governments which had spearheaded the anti-Qaddafi campaign were quietly melting away. …

From Saturday, July 9 … NATO discontinued its air strikes against Libyan pro-government targets in Tripoli and other places. The halt though unannounced was nonetheless an admission that 15,000 flight missions and 6,000 bombardments of Qaddafi targets had failed to achieve their object: Col. Qaddafi, without deploying a single fighter jet, firing an anti-air missile or activating terrorist cells in Europe, had waited for NATO to run out of steam and was still in power.

In an overview of the war to British air force commanders Wednesday, July 13, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox remarked that while no one knows when it will end, British ground corps, naval and air forces do not have the means to continue the war. … [He] added that British and European military industries lack the capacity for supporting a war effort that goes beyond a few weeks.

Italy, a key player in NATO’s military effort, last week secretly withdrew its Air Force Garibaldi-551 planes from the campaign – dealing the operation another grave setback. And in the last 10 days, France has also scaled back the military assets it had invested in the fighting after despairing of the anti-Qaddafi rebels based in Benghazi ever making headway against Qaddafi’s forces. First, Paris tried to transfer its backing from Benghazi to the secessionist Berber tribes fighting Qaddafi in Western Libya. On June 30, President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered weapons to be parachuted to the tribal fighters in western Libya, contrary to UN and NATO decisions. But the Berbers preferred to use the French guns for plundering towns and villages instead of fighting government forces.

On Monday, July 11, after that experience, Defense Secretary Gerard Longuet said it was time for talks to begin between Qaddafi and the rebels. Paris, he said, had asked the two sides to begin negotiations.

This was backhanded confirmation of the claim Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam made to the French media that his father was engaged in contacts for ending the war through emissaries who met with President Sarkozy.

While Minister Longuet said the Libyan ruler cannot stay in power, he refrained from demanding his ouster by force or his expulsion from the country. This formula therefore came close to Qaddafi’s terms for ending the war. …

It also knocks over the international war crimes tribunal’s demand to extradite Qaddafi and his sons as war criminals.

Instead of sitting in the dock of the world court, they will now take their seats at the negotiating table for a deal one of whose objects will be to rescue NATO from the humiliation of defeat at war.

In an article at Front Page, Stephen Brown confirms that NATO is stopping the air strikes and seeking to negotiate an end to the war :

In a major shift in its position on the war in Libya, France has announced it wants the rebels to begin direct negotiations with representatives of Muammar Gaddafi. NATO has been trying for more than three months to depose the Libyan leader in an air campaign, led by France, which has cost tens of millions of dollars and caused fractures in the alliance.

In a strong indication of mounting frustration over NATO’s lack of success from the air and the rebels’ slow progress on the ground, France’s defence minister, Gerard Longuet, said last Sunday on French television that NATO had “stopped the hand that was striking” against the insurgents and “now was the time to sit down at the negotiating table.

“We have asked them to speak to each other,” said Longuet, whose government was the most ardent supporter of military action three months ago and was the first to launch air strikes.

But the biggest surprise in Longuet’s television appearance came when he said the bombs would stop falling as soon as negotiations begin, indicating NATO will cease all military operations. Which means that Gaddafi, against all expectations, will survive. Forcing Gaddafi to leave had always been a main goal of the military campaign Great Britain and France have been spearheading.

“We will stop the bombing as soon as the Libyans start talking to one another and the military on both sides go back to their bases,” said Longuet. “They can talk to each other because we’ve shown there is no solution through force.”

Which is another way of saying, ‘We’ve lost, he’s won”.

Up until now, the rebels have refused to negotiate with the Libyan government until Gaddafi stepped down. France says it still wants Gaddafi out but obviously now believes NATO’s bombing campaign will not achieve this goal and is too expensive to maintain, so a diplomatic solution is now necessary. …

Gaddafi, Longuet said … could “remain in Libya ‘in another room of the palace, with another title’.”

France’s two main NATO allies, Great Britain and America, were both quick to respond to Longuet’s announcement, indicating their displeasure as well as a possible breach opening up in the alliance.

But this Washington Post report paints a somewhat different picture, of the rebels preparing for the aftermath of their victory, and the US already recognizing their leaders as the legitimate “governing authority” of Libya – though conceding that Gaddafi is still in power:

The United States granted Libyan rebel leaders full diplomatic recognition as the governing authority of Libya on Friday, a move that could give the cash-strapped rebels access to more than $30 billion in frozen assets that once belonged to Moammar Gaddafi. …

The U.S. announcement was accompanied by an agreement among all of the countries taking part in a meeting of 30 Western and Arab nations to similarly recognize the rebel council after five months of fighting that has failed to oust Gaddafi. …

A meeting at which, it seems, Hillary Clinton was thoroughly taken in by the rebels (no surprise):

The rebels’ Transitional National Council “has offered important assurances today, including the promise to pursue a process of democratic reform that is inclusive both geographically and politically,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an explanation of the decision to other foreign ministers. …

For weeks, U.S. officials have stopped short of official diplomatic recognition because of concerns about whether a post-Gaddafi government set up by rebel leaders would be truly inclusive politically and geographically.

The United States and other foreign powers have worried that the oil-rich country could become embroiled in tribal conflicts or ethnic tensions once Gaddafi is no longer in power.

The United States changed its position after hearing a presentation in Turkey by Mahmoud Jibril, the transitional council’s foreign affairs representative, who described the rebels’ plans for governing a post-Gaddafi Libya.

According to Libyan council members, the plan includes having the rebels, now based in the eastern city of Benghazi, reach out …

to other regions of Libya not currently represented on the council. Together, they would form an interim government to rule in Gaddafi’s place and then guide the country through democratic reforms and, ultimately, the election of a new government.

It’s getting ever worse, the mess that Obama and some European leaders have made with their interference in Libya “to protect civilians”.

The “civilians” include al-Qaeda operatives and murderous mobs which use the upheaval of war to hunt down and kill “aliens” in their country whose ethnicity they don’t like.

And now Omar al-Bashir, the mass-murderer tyrant of Sudan, has been let in to help the most powerful military alliance in the world with their failing campaign against the tin-pot dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) says it is protecting civilians in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, an International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted fugitive, it has allowed another ICC-wanted criminal to send his army into the country.

In an under-reported event, Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the ICC for genocide in Darfur, recently sent troops across the Libyan-Sudanese border into southern Libya to occupy Kufra, a town located in an important oil-producing area. Only last May in his own country, Bashir, who could teach Gaddafi lessons on killing civilians, had used the same army to ethnically cleanse 60,000 Dinka tribesmen with tanks from Abyei, while his air force is currently bombing Nuba civilians indiscriminately in their mountain villages in possible preparation for a new genocide. Indicating that a deal with the devil may have been made prior to the Sudanese army’s cross-border move, NATO, which controls Libyan airspace, did not oppose the occupation.

“Our surveillance shows that they are not moving the oil, so it is not about money in the short term,” one Western official was quoted as saying.

What the Sudanese intervention most likely is about, however, is oil. More specifically, it is about getting it flowing again, a NATO priority. British officials are reported to “have worked closely” with the rebels in Benghazi to this end.

The role of the Sudanese troops in achieving this goal, it seems, is to provide the oil-producing area around Kufra with protection from Gaddafi’s forces. The Libyan leader’s fighters have been attacking oil facilities around Kufra and elsewhere to prevent the rebels from selling the oil and using the proceeds to prosecute the war against him. Without money, the rebels say they are “incapable of battling Gaddafi.” …

The Sudanese army moved into Kufra only days after the last attack by Gaddafi forces on the area’s oil fields on June 12. Prior to the Sudanese arrival, there had been a lot fighting around the town. What Sudan’s government expects to receive for its help in Kufra is unclear. But one can rest assured that Bashir is not helping out for nothing.

If NATO acquiesced or assisted in hiring the army of a war criminal and mass murderer like Bashir for use against a similarly indicted criminal, as appears likely, it throws a hypocritical shadow over the military alliance’s oft stated mission statement of protecting Libyan civilians. Enlisting Bashir proves protecting civilians from a brutal dictator was never NATO’s priority; rather it proves, as has long been suspected, the war is primarily about oil.

In our opinion, oil is a very good reason for going to war. Oil is the lifeblood of our commerce, essential to our civilization. We regret that the US did not take possession of the major Middle East oil-fields long ago – in 1973 at the latest.

It’s a much more respectable reason than “protecting civilians”, even if that were a genuine reason, and not the hypocritical pretext that it is.

What does it say about our culture that a sentimental lie is thought necessary to justify a war that is actually being fought for the vital interest of at least some of the NATO powers (chiefly France)?

One African columnist, Obi Nwakanma, has most likely discerned the true reason for NATO’s involvement in the Libyan civil war. Britain and France, Nwakanma maintains, feared being shut out of the Libyan oil fields in favour of China and India. Libya contains the largest oil reserves in Africa.

“It is no longer a secret that behind this NATO alliance war on Libya, and far beyond the ‘do-good’ face it …wears…as its reason for bombing Libya to smithereens is the quest to control the oil fields of Libya, guarantee Western access to energy sources in the face of growing concern over the rise of China and India and their…emerging gluttony for oil…,” Nwakanma writes.

It would be just like the sadistic Gaddafi to turn around and make oil exploration deals with China and India after Britain and France had suffered humiliation at his hands in expectation of getting such agreements. But NATO is running out of options in bringing a quick end to the bloody mess the Libyan war has become. The rebels are no closer to deposing Gaddafi than they were last February when the rebellion began. Facing a stalemate in eastern Libya, they have also not advanced from Misrata in western Libya despite having the advantage of NATO air support. As an indication of their weakness, and perhaps of their desperation, the rebels’ ruling council in Benghazi has now offered to allow Gaddafi to stay in Libya, if he would only step down. This offer was promptly rejected.

A possible sign of NATO’s desperation occurred when it was revealed last week France had air-dropped arms to anti-Gaddafi Berber rebels in Libya’s western mountains, defying the UN resolution banning the supplying of weapons to either side. The French defended their actions, saying the weapons, “rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, machine guns and, above all, anti-tank missiles,” were to protect the rebels against Gaddafi’s troops. Frustratingly for NATO, the French weapons have not helped so far. The French-armed Berber rebel force, now positioned 50 miles south of Tripoli, first offensive failed. Fighting on flat plains is not the same as mountain warfare.

Failing is bad enough, but making common cause with a blood-soaked savage like al-Bashir is worse. If they weren’t pretending not to be fighting for oil, the Western powers could send an army in and take it. It’s the sentimental pretense that has landed them in a disgusting alliance with al-Bashir.

And to what further depravities and slaughter is it all leading?

Even if NATO does prevail, one must question what kind of democracy does it expect to appear in Libya after Gaddafi’s downfall? The rebel forces are not very united, except in their desire to get rid of Gaddafi, and some have even been accused of war crimes, especially against black Africans. Made up largely of tribes, the opposition forces may eventually start to fight each other over power and control of oil revenues after Gaddafi’s demise, setting the stage for a never-ending, multi-phase civil war like happened in Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. If this is the case, NATO may inadvertently have created more candidates for the ICC, against which it will again eventually have to act “to protect Libyan civilians.”