Don’t give Qaddafi “anti-imperialist” cover

Submitted by martin on 2 March, 2011 - 10:58

On 23 February, soft-left groupings in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria called for their own governments “and international authorities” to intervene in Libya to help the people against Qaddafi.

Meanwhile, from the Cuban and Iranian governments, and from sections of the international left, the US and UN sanctions against the Qaddafi regime, imposed on 25 and 26 February, have triggered an outcry against “imperialist intervention in Libya”.

The record both of the big powers and of the governments in the region mandates an attitude of distrust and refusal of confidence to any intervention. Whatever they do, they will do for their own interests, which are those of continuing profitable business rather than of maximising freedom. They will shape what they do, as far as they can, to help the most conservative forces of post-Qaddafi Libya.

That much must be said against the statement of the North African soft left. Something also needs to be said against the attitude of those on the international left who on this question follow Fidel Castro and Ahmedinejad (and Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez, who has been more cautious than Castro or Ahmedinejad but said on 25 February: “I can’t say that I support, or am in favour, or applaud all the decisions taken by any friend of mine in any part of the world, no, one is at a distance. But we do support the government of Libya”).

The measures so far taken by the United Nations (a freeze on assets and a travel ban for Qaddafi and his close associates, an arms embargo for the regime) and by the USA (a more far-reaching asset freeze on people linked to Qaddafi) cannot be flatly denounced without effectively saying that Qaddafi should be free to import as many guns as he likes to kill his people, and to move out as much loot as he likes. Imposition of a “no-fly” zone against Qaddafi’s airforce is also more likely to be welcomed than feared by the people of Libya. The USA is doing what it is doing not because it hopes its measures will enable it to seize Libya’s oil fields, but because it hopes its measures will overshadow its previous complicity with Qaddafi and place it better to do deals with a post-Qaddafi regime.

In fact, in the actual circumstances, a large military intervention by any government, such as could “seize Libya’s oil” and “impose neo-liberalism on Libya” — or destroy the threat to Libya’s people from Qaddafi’s hard-core military loyalists — is improbable. Any government doing it would face hostility from others fearing that they would be shut out; no government is strongly enough placed to shrug off that hostility.

At least one of the groups signing the 23 February statement — the FFS in Algeria — has suffered much at the hands of its own countries’ army (there was virtual civil war in Algeria in the early 1990s, which the army used as an opportunity to settle scores), and is based in a country which had to fight a long and bloody war to win national independence. It is out of place to lecture them about having illusions in their own country’s army, or in imperialism.

In Britain, the problem runs wider than the “Workers’ Revolutionary Party” — “We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution”. This is the tiny rump of an organisation of the same name which was once the biggest group of the supposedly-Trotskyist left in Britain, but from 1976 turned itself into an apologist for Qaddafi in return for money from him.

Herald

In the 1980s wide sections of the left accepted the paper Labour Herald — produced by a WRP executive editor, on WRP presses, under the titular editorship of Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight — as an authentic paper of the Labour left, despite it enthusing for Qaddafi as lavishly as the WRP’s own press.

Today, for example the Workers’ World Party in the USA, while being cautious enough not to back Qaddafi outright, states that he “has not been an imperialist puppet like Hosni Mubarak. For many years, Gadhafi was allied to countries and movements fighting imperialism. On taking power in 1969 through a military coup, he nationalized Libya’s oil and used much of that money to develop the Libyan economy. Conditions of life improved dramatically for the people. For that, the imperialists were determined to grind Libya down... Many of the people [in Libya] being promoted in the West as leaders of the opposition are long-time agents of imperialism”.

Socialist Appeal, while unequivocally endorsing the revolt against Qaddafi, attributes it to the loss of “progressive features the regime might have had in the past”, which, were, apparently, its opposition to the USA and other big powers.

Libya today shows the hollowness and falsity of the world-view which measures the “progressiveness” of a regime, or movement, by its hostility, demagogic or real, to the USA and other big powers. Decades of Stalinism had shown that already: the leftists who accredited Stalin, or Kim Il Sung, or Pol Pot, as “progressive” because they were in opposition to the USA had lost their bearings. But the lesson still needs to be re-learned.

It is not that Qaddafi was once a “progressive”, when he nationalised oil interests in Libya, or preached war against Israel, or financed groups like the WRP; ceased to be “progressive” in recent years when he did deals with the USA and Britain; and presumably can be made “progressive” again by the USA or the UN taking measures against him.

He was always a reactionary. His supposedly “progressive” measures were all about promoting the wealth and standing of his clique on the backs of Libya’s people and its many migrant workers. They were all tied together with fierce repression of all freedoms in Libya.


23 February statement

At this very moment, our Libyan brothers are suffering the agony of another age. Hundreds of victims have fallen under bullets, heavy arms and war planes.

It is a genuine industry of extermination that has been unleashed. We must stand up to it, as any conscious individual would, and do everything to stop this massacre. Gaddafi is capable of anything: he is setting tribes against one another, activating his militia and using an army of foreign mercenaries. This man has lost all sense of humanity... The political parties which co-sign this statement urgently call on the governments of the Maghreb and international authorities to do everything to halt this revolting massacre which will remain engraved as a disgraceful stain on the collective memory.

Signed by: Parti démocratique progressiste (PDP, Tunisie); Mouvement Ettajdid (Tunisie); Forum démocratique pour le travail et les libertés (Tunisie); Parti du progrès et du socialisme (PPS, Maroc); Union socialiste des forces populaires (USFP, Maroc); Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS, Algérie).

alturl.com/ge8ys.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.