Bani Walid, a cynical distraction from the US and NATO’s terrorist atrocities in and plunder of Libya.

By Stanley Collymore

Throughout most of 2011 those of us living in the west couldn’t open up a newspaper, switch our television sets on, or turn on our radios without repeatedly and inescapably having barefacedly thrust into our faces graphically written, supposedly localized visual images or audio accounts of purportedly firsthand reports shamelessly portrayed in the most bellicose and condemnatory manner possible and emphatically referenced by these self-same self-righteous and, as would subsequently prove to be the case, disreputable organizations of what they unquestioningly claimed were innumerable atrocities systematically carried out as well as scrupulously planned by the then ruler of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, against those among Libya’s population that were implacably opposed to his ruthless and uncompromising dictatorship. An alleged humanitarian situation it was repeatedly said that was of the utmost importance and urgency to prevent further bloodshed and the needless loss of life on the part of these hapless and innocent victims which these media organizations and the mouthpieces of their respective western regimes pleadingly brayed about.

Rapidly, eagerly and unsurprisingly so jumping on board this concerted, fabricated and totally dishonest bandwagon, while not in the least interested in checking out the so-called facts which they happily presented to the public to see whether or not there was any truth to these outrageous claims, were Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross and the ICC, that to put it mildly has a particularly, deeply ingrained and troubling colour problem itself, insomuch that it can only see and register the colour black, a situation that pertains exclusively to Africans or those who’re closely and positively linked to them; that’s why without exception all of those arraigned, prosecuted and sentenced to lengthy terms of incarceration or even death by the ICC are black or African, and with not a solitary white face, regardless of how many or how heinous the crimes of the Caucasian perpetrators are, ever seen in the dock of any court run by the ICC.

But then that is the nature and precise remit of the ICC, and why it was explicitly set up by white western countries with lingering colonialist and imperialist aspirations to give a much needed fig-leaf and pseudo-legal legitimacy to the serial crimes that they routinely and callously implement against the global south, while using as well to simultaneously get rid of all legitimate leaders of that region that in their eyes have the nerve to openly challenge their hegemony there, or attempt to stop the natural resources plunder of global south.

Colonel Gaddafi was one such leader who sought to resist these white, Caucasian plunderers and their local stooges, and consequently he had to be got rid of. So dishonestly employing the office of the United Nations Security Council the key beneficiaries of this fraud, principally the United States and its white European satrapies, generously encouraged and supported by their corporate backers, paymasters and effective controllers, and with their well-established, operational mafia outfit the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation, aka NATO, unhesitatingly available to provide the muscle required, having strong-armed the UNSC in the face of supine cowardice and a total betrayal on the part of Russia and China and why they have vetoes in the UNSC at all, the United States, UK and France inevitably got their way in that chamber, and with it UN Resolution 1973 against the government of Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.

Meant only to be a humanitarian gesture and solely designed to stop what the west said were Gaddafi’s murderous intentions against his people Resolution 1973 was misused from the very start, as was always the purpose of the western bloc within the UNSC, with NATO using it as a pretext to do what the west had planned all along, which was to effect radical regime change in Libya; physically get rid of Colonel Gaddafi; set up a pro-western, puppet regime in place of his government; brutally reinforce the west’s hegemony in North Africa and, of course, take instant and physical control of Libya’s enormous natural resources on behalf of their multinational and warmongering corporate sponsors.

It was a determined enterprise that the west enthusiastically embarked on, forcefully succeeded in accomplishing while ironically creating in the process at the very least ten times more deaths among Libyans, the overwhelming majority of them women, children and the elderly, than had ever occurred during Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, or even their own grossly exaggerated figures of deaths which they said he was responsible for suggested, let alone amounted t. Then for good measure and to resurrect latent animosities that were rife among the several tribal factions and ethnic groups inside Libya and goad them into becoming suspicious of and take to fighting each other once more, these outside colonialist and imperialist entities that had brutally assailed the sovereign sanctity and independent integrity of Libya, illegitimately and immorally carrying this out in a manner that they would determinedly have resisted with all means at their disposal had others attempted let alone done the same to them, cynically and heartlessly brought into to play the old colonial artifice of divide and rule.

Which worked marvellously well for these western powers, having Arabs pitted against black Libyan citizens, in Africa of all places. Black Libyans that were slandered and viciously denigrated as Colonel Gaddafi’s mercenaries when the western countries intentionally engaged in this reprehensible and self-serving vilification knew perfectly well from the very beginning what the truth concerning these black Libyans was; and that what they were purposely, scandalously and quite dishonestly disseminating to the world were simply barefaced lies.

That though didn’t matter to these western scoundrels even when the numerous lynching of black Libyans by these completely barbaric, Arab interlopers to Africa, nihilistic terrorists and sadistic death squads liberally ferried into Libya by the west to do their bidding belatedly began to reach the world’s attention. The total ethnic cleansing of the black community of Tawergha being one such unfortunate casualty; now the town of Bani Walid, the last stronghold of genuine patriotic though peaceful opposition to this western rape and pillage of their country, is in the murderous sights of the west and the puppet regime it has arbitrarily and arrogantly installed in Libya which even so doesn’t effectively control Tripoli far less the rest of Libya.

That however is of little or no genuine concern to the state sponsored, western mass murders in the capitals of the two North American countries wholly located on that continent, those of the EU, other NATO states or the Danegeld paying, Sykes-Picot Arab Bantustans of the Middle East and particularly in the Persian Gulf for whom chaos is a positive thing as long as their own people, especially in the case of the western countries involved, don’t get killed. For as long as the locals in Libya are either of their own free will busily killing each other or forced to do so at the behest of the west, that effectively means that those who’re now both actively and callously engaged in the comprehensive plunder of Libya can continue doing so apace.

And while the slight and somewhat inconvenient hiccup of the assassination of the United States’ ambassador to Libya and three of his countrymen by the same terrorists that the US gratuitously and premeditatedly took to Libya to create the chaos it is now dishonestly complaining about has caused some minor concern to these indisputably irredeemable, international and state sponsored war criminals, it’s nevertheless an entirely contrived concern that’s self-interestedly engendered through the enormous personal and even collective embarrassment occasioned on the part of US and other western leaders that the US ambassador’s murder has evoked for them and others that intentionally caused this murderous propensity for havoc within Libya in the first place. After all they’re politically obligated to publicly denounce the US envoy’s death; but against the repulsive backdrop of Hillary Clinton’s unconcealed and gloating triumphalism over the United States and its satrapies’ savage and criminal assassination of Colonel Gaddafi, these shameless international mass murderers know full well that they’re walking of thin ice.

Not least because the killers of the US ambassador are their own Frankenstein created monsters. And while they can’t very well own up to that publicly, nor for a multitude of demonstrably apparent reasons denounce these savages of theirs, who they’re routinely in cahoots with and regularly but deniably employ to carry out their dirty work, too forcefully; having openly and lyingly acclaimed these nihilistic terrorist killers as freedom fighters and the fervent advocates of democracy and human rights, it’s now nigh impossible for the ostensibly moronic leaders of the United States and its European satrapies to launch a similar Colonel Gaddafi style regime change against the same murderous bunch of odious savages whom they fulsomely praised to the rafters and just as exultantly but dishonestly told the world would fittingly and responsibly herald a new dawn of peace, essential prosperity, enduring stability and sustained human rights for Libya and its purportedly western-liberated citizens.

Reality though is very much different as these western states knew, hoped for, planned, expected and even insisted on before they actually began their premeditated enterprise of toppling Colonel Gaddafi’s government. But the terrorist killing of the US’s ambassador to Libya that couldn’t be overlooked either by the politicians or the west’s media has itself opened up a can of worms for the west. Chaos in Libya is still one of the west’s principal agendas in that country as it always was, for the unmistakably simple and quite brutal reason that the west doesn’t give a toss about the Libyan people, since the three key objectives of Libya’s regime change from the perspective of the west were always the total elimination of Colonel Gaddafi and his government, the seizure and privatization of Libya’s natural resources, the armed and economic reassertion of the west’s hegemony in North Africa, and the unimpeded utilization of Libya as a natural springboard and US model to militarily topple other governments in the region like Syria’s and Iran’s as well as independent and anti-imperialist organizations like Hezbollah that resolutely refuse to bend the knee to white, western colonialism and imperialism.

The US and its Caucasian satrapies have largely achieved most of their objectives in Libya but at a frightful cost. For not only in the global south but increasingly at home they’re now faced with the highly embarrassing and very inconvenient truth that the al-Qaida killers, terrorists and death squads they calculatedly and arrogantly employed to oust Colonel Gaddafi’s government as well as assassinate the man himself, despite their heralded but hollow talk about fighting international terrorism which has long been borne out to be a deliberate lie on their part as is observed through their constant use of NATO as their bully boy while cynically conscripting elements of al-Qaida as and when they require their services, are themselves the world’s foremost terrorists. However the major headache for the west of this vile duplicity they’re practising is that like Frankenstein they can create their terrorist monsters at will but as Frankenstein forlornly found out to his cost they too are in the same boat, as they simply aren’t able to effectively control these monsters all the time let alone what they might independently choose to do.

As such the Colonel Gaddafi style assassination of the US’s envoy to Libya falls squarely into this particular category of activities and well beyond the scope of even the world’s key instigator of terrorism, namely the United States of America. And it accounts too for why, with the insane march to topple the regime in Syria against the backdrop of Libya’s ongoing chaos which is far worst than anything that ever occurred under Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, the incredible hypocrites and utterly mindboggling purveyors of these rather despicable double standards that the rest of the world is repeatedly forced to observe and endure, those that call themselves Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the ICC and the International Red Cross are so sickeningly and reprehensively silent on what is appallingly going on in Libya generally and the besieged town of Bani Walid in particular this time round. In the identical fashion that one can’t get a squeak out of the UN mission that is in Libya.

Prior to the ouster of Colonel Gaddafi’s government the UN and most particularly so its official High Commissioner for so-called human rights, Navanethem Pillay had a palpable contagion of what in Britain we call verbal diarrhoea; in other words this loathsome Tamil scumbag with South African citizenship that she should unceremoniously be summarily stripped of as she has no rightful place anywhere on the continent of Africa either now or at anytime in the future, just couldn’t stop herself from talking about what she deceitfully claimed were horrendous human rights atrocities being carried out in Libya and how very urgent and desperate the need was for international, interpret that to mean NATO, intervention in that country to combat and put a permanent stop to these evil transgressions.

This by the way from an organization that wasn’t on the spot in Libya, had moreover time after time deliberately refused to go there and observe for itself the facts on the ground, and consequently and complicitly chose instead to rely heavily for it reports, those that it didn’t wilfully fabricate that is, from second-hand and biased sources with their own anti-Gaddafi agenda compounded with whatever racist, colonialist and imperialistic axes they personally had to grind against this Libyan leader and his government.

Now the same UN is physically in Libya but rather conveniently and inexplicably refuses to see what is actually going on around it, and when asked about this can’t give any logical reasons for its taciturn behaviour; and furthermore becomes extremely aggressive when it’s rightly pressed on the matter as to why this is the case, or crucially important why it hasn’t gone to Bani Walid to accurately monitor conditions there as well as report on and do something positive about the commonly known mass slaughtering of the people there that’s daily occurring in that besieged community. Double standards or what? For it seems obvious to me that why this isn’t happening is because to do so would evidently be a highly embarrassing and inconvenient truth for the UN to acknowledge after its barefaced connivance in what has happened in Libya, and additionally would be an insult it thinks to its puppet master the US that needs this murderous distraction in Bani Walid to cynically divert the world’s gaze from what the United States, its white European satrapies and their Arab stooges are deliberately doing not only to the people of Libya but also those of the global south generally.

Acts carried out on the behalf of the purported Master Race that feels it has an omnipotent right to inflict these heinous evils and other wrongdoings on those it regards as inferior to itself and whose wealth or natural resources it similarly has a right to take by whatever means it regards as appropriate; no matter how many millions of these people have their lives and future unwarrantedly blighted or must die in the process to appease this insatiable western, Caucasian and corporate greed.

That’s why Bani Walid must be sacrificed and in the process of this happening totally ignored by the so-called international community. And the public awareness of most Americans in regards to politics, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, is such that if one were to mention Jordan to them they would instinctively think that person was referring to the basketball player.

France loots Africa, liquidates dissidents

By Finian Cunningham

Redolent of a bygone era, France has re-emerged as a strident neo-colonialist power. It is also leading the current foreign covert war of aggression against its former colonial possession, Syria. Along with the US and Britain, it is also targeting the people of Iran with criminal sanctions based on trite, unfounded suspicions. And France has shown that any African leader who questions its monetary enslavement in the 21st Century will be summarily hauled in front of an international show-trial on trumped-up charges to face life imprisonment.

This weekend African leaders from the continent’s Francophone countries are gathering for a summit in Kinshasa, capital of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Topping the guest list is France’s President Francois Hollande. Speaking earlier this week ahead of the conference, Hollande sounded like a colonial master from centuries past. He warned that he would be conveying a tough message on democracy, human rights and corruption to his African guests. Of equal concern, said Hollande, is the spread of terrorism in the Sahel region among the former French colonies of Mali and Niger.

The irony is that the French leader is the least competent to lecture on these matters. For decades, his country has sucked the natural wealth out of Africa like a giant parasite, causing poverty, disease and underdevelopment, which in turn have fuelled despair, conflict and violence. And the parasitic arrangement continues to this very day.

For decades, France has contributed directly to the violence and instability that has wracked so much of Africa. Coups, counter-coups, assassinations, destabilization and abductions - perhaps no other country among the colonial powers has afflicted the Earth’s largest continent with so much grief and ruination.

Following the Second World War, France ushered in a new era of modern slavery for the African countries that it had acquired as possessions during the earlier colonial Scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th Century. Financially and militarily devastated by WWII, France knew that it could no longer subjugate Africans solely by force of arms. So, a new means of domination was devised: monetary control. The plan was signed into action by post-war French leader Charles De Gaulle in December 1945.

Through a French-imposed Colonial Pact, the “colonies francaises Afrique” were given a new currency, known as the CFA Franc. In all, 14 countries were obliged to adopt the single currency. They included Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Senegal in French West Africa, and Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon in French Central Africa. The pact has persisted more than five decades after France granted formal independence to its African colonies in the early 1960s.

The level of power usurped from these countries by France through monetary control is astounding. All members of the CFA Franc are mandated to deposit up to 85 per cent of their country’s foreign exchange earnings in the French national treasury. France in turn has the right to invest this money in the Paris Bourse as it sees fit and it has the prerogative not to disclose to the African governments how much these investments earn. Not only that but the French treasury is able to lend the money back to the African nations with interest charged to them for the privilege of borrowing their own money. Moreover, the loans are capped at a limit of 20 per cent of the countries’ current public revenues.

The irony is breathtaking. The same monetary mechanism that Nazi Germany deployed to subjugate occupied France was, and continues to be, used by the liberated French on their African territories. Furthermore, France determines the exchange rate for the CFA Franc. Unilateral devaluations have ensured the flow of cheap African exports to France while impoverishing African workers.

An integral part of the Colonial Pact was the right of free passage to French military in the signatory countries. Even though these African states were supposedly independent, France was able to maintain military stations and dispatch troops whenever it felt the need.

And the need was felt when the French government deemed that a party or persons within its African sphere of influence was challenging its hegemony. One of the earliest victims of French dominance was Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio. He was assassinated in 1963. A gifted economist who objected to the blatant exploitation of his people under the monetary arrangement, Olympio was eventually terminated by France and replaced by reliable stooges.

Another victim was Thomas Sankara, the leader of Burkino Faso, who was deposed and murdered in 1987 because he dared challenge French interference in his country’s internal affairs. He was affectionately known to his supporters as “Africa’s Che Guevara”. The week before he was assassinated, Sankara said, “You can kill a revolutionary and an individual, but you cannot kill an idea.”

The French specialized in covert operations using mercenaries and special agents who would infiltrate target countries and recruit “rebels” to unleash terror campaigns against the people; the model currently being deployed in Syria. One of their notorious clients was former French soldier-turned-mercenary Robert Denard. From the 1960s, Denard and his dogs of war engaged in coups, counter-coups and assassinations in Angola, Benin, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Mali, Mozambique and even the British former colonies Nigeria and Rhodesia; now Zimbabwe. In the Comoros Islands, off East Africa, Denard was involved in four coups between 1975-1995 and is suspected to have had a hand in the assassination of three of its presidents.

All the while, the French government was afforded plausible deniability in the criminal sabotage carried out by “pirates of the republic”. But there is little doubt, from the disclosed involvement of French Special Forces in these operations and from subsequent legal protections afforded to renegades, that French leaders, including Georges Pompidou, Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterrand, knew full well and indeed most probably sanctioned them.

The French neo-colonial system of enslavement and exploitation across Africa persisted because the Francophile African leaders were allowed to amass personal fortunes and assets by France. That was their pay-off. Ruthless dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic enjoyed private Air France Concorde flights to dine out in Paris and acquire palatial chateaux while their people starved under reigns of terror. Bokassa also had the penchant for staving in the heads of children and eating the flesh of his victims - all good qualifications for terrorizing his country in the service of France.

Millions of Africans died from deprivation as their countries’ natural resources were extracted to enrich the French-backed dictators and French national treasury. The DRC, whose capital hosts the summit this weekend attended by France’s Francois Hollande, is still recovering from decades of war, hunger and disease that claimed up to six million lives - horrors that France played a major role in inciting from the 1960s onwards, when the independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.

As political commentator Christof Lehmann notes: “It is a scandal that under the French monetary system so much of Africa remains poor and starving instead of benefiting from the vast natural wealth of the continent and the productivity of its people. Through monetary dominance exerted by Paris, Africa is propping up the economy of France and in turn the economy of Europe.”

Lehmann also points out that history shows that any African political leader who tried to break the Francafrique system of exploitation was invariably liquidated by France through coup d’etat or assassination.

The most recent case is that of Laurent Gbagbo, who until last year was the president of Cote d’Ivoire. Since independence in 1960, the West African country has been a leading exporter of cocoa and coffee. Corrupt elites, French export companies and the French treasury earned billions of dollars from the country’s fertile soil and labourers. But after decades of lucrative earnings, the majority of the people still live in poverty, forced to toil as wage slaves on the country’s plantations.

Gbabgo, a history professor and active trade unionist, could see that his country would never develop and prosper unless it broke from the monetary shackles that France had imposed. The French government knew that he was planning to take Cote d’Ivoire out of the CFA Franc system. In recent years, Gbagbo and some other African leaders, including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, were trying to set up a gold-based Pan-African dinar. The Cote d’Ivoire is the hub of the West African francafrique economies. The French could see the writing on the wall for their monetary enslavement of Africa if the Gbagbo succeeded in extricating his country. Other countries would soon follow suite.

Says Christof Lehmann: “Laurent Gbagbo was one of the few African leaders who dared to challenge the oppressive status quo. He wanted to use the wealth of the African nations for the social well-being and development of Africa rather than enriching French and European capitalists.”

In late 2010, the Cote d’Ivoire Constitutional Council - the country’s supreme body - ruled that Gbagbo won a disputed presidential election. But French troops stationed in the country moved immediately to arrest him, killing many of his supporters in the process. They then installed the French-backed former IMF director, Alassane Quattara, as president. Gbagbo is currently in custody in The Hague awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face allegations of crimes against humanity. His arrest, detention and prosecution are viewed by many as “victor’s justice” - political persecution to silence an inconvenient opponent.

International lawyer Christopher Black comments, “The arrest and detention of President Gbagbo does not conform to any standards of due process. He was arrested during a coup d’etat conducted by French forces allied with the rebels of Quattara, who was then installed in power to serve the interests of France, Britain and the US. The question of selective prosecution also arises. Why was Gbabgo charged when Quattara’s forces are alleged to have committed terrible crimes in the northern region they controlled and during the election and the coup? The French forces shot down civilians when the latter tried to come to the aid of President Gbagbo, yet no French leader is before the ICC.

Christopher Black adds: “Gbagbo’s arrest is a brutal example of how the ICC is used to justify the overthrow of governments that resist the diktats of the colonialist powers such as France, Britain and the US.”

Redolent of a bygone era, France has re-emerged as a strident neo-colonialist power. It took a lead role in prosecuting NATO’s criminal war on Libya last year, culminating in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. It is also leading the current foreign covert war of aggression against its former colonial possession, Syria. Along with the US and Britain, it is also targeting the people of Iran with criminal sanctions based on trite, unfounded suspicions. And France has openly shown that any African leader that questions its monetary enslavement in the 21st Century will be summarily hauled in front of an international show-trial on trumped-up charges to face life imprisonment.

But history never repeats itself exactly. Unlike earlier colonial times, this time around the mass of working people in France are finding that they too - like the masses of Africa - are being treated like abject slaves by the monetary diktats of the French (and European) elite. Bonuses and bailouts for the rich; austerity and exploitation for the masses; no questions tolerated.  This weekend in Kinshasa, Francois Hollande’s sanctimonious, elitist lecturing on democracy, rights and corruption will have as much significance for workers in France and Europe as it does in Africa.

Biography of the article’s author

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Many of his recent articles appear on the renowned Canadian-based news website Global research. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He specialises in Middle East and East Africa issues and has also given several American radio interviews as well as TV interviews on Press TV and Russia Today. Previously based in Bahrain and originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland Finian Cunningham  witnessed the political upheavals in the Persian Gulf kingdom during 2011 as well as the subsequent Saudi-led brutal crackdown against pro-democracy protests. He was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted many human rights violations by the Western-backed regime.