Nicolas Pelham in the New York Review of Books reports from post-NATO-anointed Libya. The bungling interim government and the incessant ethnic conflict are not bringing the democracy heralded by the war’s advocates:
Yet for Libya’s new governors, the turbulent south—home to Libya’s wells of water and oil—is unnerving. Since Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the NTC chairman, declared an end to the civil war last October, the violence in the south is worse than it was during the struggle to oust Qaddafi. Hundreds have been killed, thousands injured, and, according to UN figures, tens of thousands displaced in ethnic feuding. Without its dictator to keep the lid on, the country, it seems, is boiling over the sides.
…Both sides speak of arming for the battle ahead. Photographs of mutilated cadavers displayed on mobile phones ensure that the scars remain open. The graffiti that raiding Zwarans left on Riqdaleen’s walls threatened to turn the town into a “second Tuwagha,” the site inhabited by pro-Qaddafi black Libyans that militiamen from Misrata, further east, ethnically cleansed in the fall. “We don’t see a new Libya,” the Riqdaleen town councilor told me. “We’re starting to regret. The Berbers want us out.”
The issues in Libya have spread throughout the region. The displaced have fled to neighboring countries in all directions. At the same time, arms flows coming out of Libya (some 20 million guns are estimated to be circulating in Libya,” Pelham reports) are getting into the hands of unsavory groups. A UN report released in February assessing ”the Libyan crisis” said the impact of the NATO-backed rebel victory over Gadhafi “reverberated across the world” in “such neighboring countries as Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania, the Niger and Tunisia,” which, “bore the brunt of the challenges that emerged as a result of the crisis.” The bulk of the Sahel region “had to contend with the influx of hundreds of thousands of traumatized and impoverished returnees as well as the inflow of unspecified and unquantifiable numbers of arms and ammunition from the Libyan arsenal.”
Pelham writes: “Libya’s turmoil is acquiring continental significance.”
Aside from that, no official in Washington has dared answer for the serious violation of human rights, including torture and extra-judicial killings, that NATO’s proxies have committed.
