Chavez (and "Workers' Revolutionary Party") back Qaddafi

Venezuela's Chavez administration has put itself on the line as almost the last people in the world to back the tottering Qaddafi dictatorship in Libya.

Al Jazeera reports: Venezuela's top diplomat on Thursday echoed Fidel Castro's accusation that Washington is fomenting unrest in Libya to justify an invasion to seize North African nation's oil reserves.

Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister said: "They are creating conditions to justify an invasion of Libya".

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has... tweeted: "Gaddafi is facing a civil war. Long live Libya. Long live the independence of Libya".

According to other reports, Qaddafi has named a football stadium in Libya after Chavez; Chavez has received a "Qaddafi human rights prize"; Chavez has recently said that he plans to work for a while from a tent which Qaddafi gave him.

Chavez has not even gone quiet when Qaddafi is on the back foot and can hope to retain power only by extreme violence against his own risen people.

A group called the "Workers' Revolutionary Party" in Britain has also backed Qaddafi.

"We urge the working class of the world to oppose the imperialist intervention into Libya that is being made, and the greater, possibly military intervention to come into the affairs of the Libyan people.

"We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution, and to develop it.

"This can only be done by the defeat of the current rebellion and a major national discussion about the introduction of workers control and management of the Libyan economy and society, as well as the introduction of the political organs for exercising that political control and management..."

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/6150.

This "WRP" is the rump of a rump - the fragment led by Sheila Torrance which came out of the 1985 break-up of the old "Workers' Revolutionary Party", once a sizeable though politically erratic and internally very undemocratic left-wing group, which since the mid-70s had become a sect operating on finance provided by Libya and other reactionary regimes.

This rump of a rump, though tiny, still produces a daily paper. How is that financed? Draw your own conclusions from their comments on the dictator's last stand.