Libya

Qaddafi, looter and despot, dies

Muammar Qaddafi, who was killed by Libyan rebels on Thursday 20 October after 42 years ruling the country as a despot, had more than $200 billion stashed in bank accounts, investments, and property around the world, or about $30,000 for every child, woman, and man in Libya. That is the latest estimate, from the Los Angeles Times (21 October). The death of Qaddafi, in Sirte, led the National Transitional Council to declare final victory in the war which has raged in Libya since protests began there on 15 February, inspired by the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. On 22 October, the general...

The lies the left tells itself

By Sacha Ismail Helping out at a student freshers' fair recently, I ran into a member of another socialist group. (For the purposes of this article, I'm not going to reveal which one, since I think the arguments she made could have been made by members of most of the groups in Britain.) We argued briefly about Libya. The person in question seems, from what I know of her, very intelligent - so it was a good test of how political demagogy rots your brain. This is not an attempt at satire; I'll try to report what she said and I said as accurately as possible. "So you still think it was a bad...

Middle East: the workers emerge

By Clive Bradley Until the beginning of 2011, North Africa and the Middle East had been dominated by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships for decades. Popular opposition, too, had been muted. The so-called “Arab Spring” — now Autumn — reveals that profound social and political changes had been taking place “beneath the surface”. Common to most of the uprisings has been on the one hand, growing resentment — especially among youth — of the repressive regimes, and on the other frustration at general social inequality and in particular the closing down of opportunities for, eg, university...

Libya: the new struggle after victory

NATO intervention in Libya has now largely come to an end. The general laziness of NATO in prosecuting its campaign had frustrated a National Transitional Council (NTC) which had clamoured for support in terminating the Qaddafi regime. But at a decisive point it prevented the taking back of Benghazi and Misrata in a terrifically brutal fashion. This halting of genocide led to a greater amount of leverage for the rag-tag rebel militias and ultimately to the fall of Qaddafi. The rebellion would not have survived without that intervention. For those on the left who shrugged their shoulders at...

Libya: the tyrant is toppled

A year ago the Middle East and North Africa seemed a “stable” region: that is, most of the regimes had been in power for decades; and there had been very little in the way of mass popular opposition movements also for decades. There were mass strikes in Egypt and Tunisia in the 1970s; there was the Iranian revolution at the end of the ‘70s. But since then most opposition movements had been, or had been presumed to be, “radical” Islamist in character. It had become a platitude of Western punditry that Arabs — perhaps Muslims in general — lived under authoritarian regimes because they liked them...

The Libyan revolution: issues for Marxists

By Sacha Ismail 1. Support for the rebels against Qaddafi The AWL supported the Libyan rebels against Qaddafi because they represent a popular revolt against a totalitarian dictatorship. That this revolt is dominated by a heterogeneous mix of bourgeois tendencies, many of them quite reactionary, is not decisive from the point of view of winning democratic space in Libyan society, and above all space for a Libyan workers’ movement to develop. As Trotsky put it in 1932 (‘What next?’), explaining the difference between the decaying Weimar Republic and the Nazi revolt against it: “The German...

"The main solidarity Libyans need is ideas"

Lucinda Lavelle from the British Libyan Solidarity Campaign spoke to Sacha Ismail and Chris Marks. There are a lot of Libyan exiles in the UK; Manchester is the biggest centre, with more than 10,000 people. But in general activists have tended to write and do things individually, in isolation from one another, with no attempt to build collective campaigns. The reason is that no one trusted anyone; and there was an element of sense to this, because the community was infiltrated by Qaddafi’s agents. Before the start of the movement in North Africa this year, there were two issues that really...

The Socialist Party leadership: practised liars, but scared to debate

By Sacha Ismail The Socialist Party has now published a third article attacking the AWL over Libya. The first two were by SP general secretary Peter Taaffe (see here ) - the second not just about Libya but a lengthy diatribe against various aspects of our tendency's history and politics. The third is by Robert Bechert on the website of the CWI, the international tendency of which the SP is part (see here - note, by the way, that the SP attacks on us never link to our articles or even quote them at length). Bechert writes: "The idea that there was ‘no alternative’ to NATO was already disproved...

Atrocities by the Libyan rebels? Some consistency, please!

Socialists who, like the AWL, have backed the Libyan rebels against Muammar Qaddafi’s dictatorship should not ignore or downplay reports of atrocities by victorious rebel fighters in Tripoli and elsewhere. Already, those on the left who are determined to prove that there is no difference between the two sides – or even that the rebels are worse than the old regime – are citing such atrocities to back up their arguments. But that does not mean that none of the claims are true. The fact that there have been cold-blooded reprisals against those claimed to be Qaddafi officials and fighters is...

Arab spring frees the Berbers

One consequence of the uprisings across North Africa is the new freedoms won by the Berber peoples. Authoritarian Arab regimes had suppressed Berber history and language, claiming they threatened ‘national unity’. Islamists supported Arabic-only laws. There are perhaps over 20 million Berbers, mainly in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Mali and Niger. They share a common history and mainly speak variations of the Tamazight language. In Libya Qaddafi believed Berber culture was “colonialism’s poison” and banned their language. Many of the rebel fighters in the West of Libya are Berbers from their...

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