Month: April 2011

Xan Rice reports for the Guardian from besieged Misrata.

The resistance from the rebels – from all the people in Misrata – seems remarkable given their limited armoury and experience. That they have managed to keep Gaddafi’s forces to one side of the city seems a miracle, or at least a masterclass in guerrilla warfare.

At least a thousand have been killed in Misrata, 3000 are injured, and 300,000 huddle in a small section of the city away from the frontlines. Qaddafi’s forces are using sniper fire, heavy artillery and, Israel-style, illegal cluster bombs.

But there is some good news. This film shows the people of Misrata celebrating the recapture of a bank and insurance building. This film shows the people of revolutionary Nalut receiving news of the elimination of a Qaddafi commander. For those who tell us that Libya is split east-west, Nalut is in western Libya. According to the UN, 11,000 have fled Qaddafi’s attacks on Nalut for Tunisia in recent days. This film is from the western mountains. A revolutionary fighter announces the capture of ‘Libyan mercenaries’ – so-called because the regime bought them – and his plan to have them tried in Zawiya and Sabrata, the cities in which they committed their crimes, once freedom comes. Meanwhile, revolutionaries today captured the Wazin border crossing, forcing Qaddafi forces to surrender to Tunisian troops.

This was published at Ceasefire Magazine.

The anti-imperialist left, in the West at least, is painfully divided over the NATO-led intervention in Libya. On the one hand, such commentators as Paul Woodward, Gilbert Achcar, Phil Weiss, and me, believe the intervention is the least worst option, that there was no better alternative. On the other hand, John Pilger, Mahmoud Mamdani and many others, are wary of a new Iraq and oppose Western intervention on blanket principle.

Both positions are legitimate. Although I disagree in this case, I’m very pleased that the general gut response – if we must work by gut responses – is against intervention. But unfortunately a number of lesser figures, emotional oppositionists of the sort who qualmlessly rearrange reality to fit their personal agendas, have wilfully ignored facts on the Libyan ground, and even stooped so low as to slander the revolutionary Libyan people.

Some say NATO is interfering in a civil war, that Libya is split between east and west, that Tripoli stands firm with Qaddafi. These people fail to understand the overwhelming unpopularity of Qaddafi’s capricious regime. In the first days of the revolution, the regime lost control of most areas in the west as well as the east, including suburbs of Tripoli. Protestors marching on Green Square (or Martyrs Square) were driven back by machine gun and artillery fire. Qaddafi is currently keeping the capital quiet by mass arrests, rooftop snipers, and roving jeeps of weapon-wielding thugs.

Some people describe the free Libyans are mere ‘so-called’ rebels. If they were real freedom-fighters, these people argue, they’d be able to take over the country without foreign help. Their acceptance of intervention proves them to be CIA stooges, agents of imperialism, traitors.

Continue reading “Blankets, Dazzlement, Slander”