Category Archives: Democracy

Juan Cole on Ghaddafi’s brutal counter-attack:

The strafing and bombardment in Tripoli of civilian demonstrators by Muammar Qaddafi’s fighter jets on Monday powerfully recalled the tactics of some decades ago of Benito Mussolini, who spoke of imposing a ‘Roman Peace’ on Libya.

In 1930, under Mussolini’s governor of Libya, Rodolfo Graziani, some 80,000 Libyans were removed to concentration camps, where 55% of the inmates perished. In 1933-1940, Italo Balbo championed aerial warfare as the best means to deal with uppity colonial populations. Between 1912 and 1943, half of all Libyans were killed, starved or chased from the country by the Italian colonial regime.

American pundits speak glibly of “Islamofascism,” thus deeply insulting Muslims by tying their religion to a Western political movement. What they do not know is that Libyan Muslims suffered mightily at the hands of the real fascists. The movement of Omar Mukhtar, the school teacher who turned anti-colonialist revolutionary, was repressed by Italian fascism.

This weekend saw a massacre of civilians in Benghazi ordered by Ghaddafi followed by Junior’s televised threat to Libyans of more to come, the LSE have issued a statement on its funding arrangements with Ghaddafi:

The School has had a number of links with Libya in recent years. In view of the highly distressing news from Libya over the weekend of 19-20 February, the School has reconsidered those links as a matter of urgency.

LSE Enterprise has delivered executive education programmes to Libyan officials, principally from the Economic Development Board, and managers. That programme has been completed, and no further courses are in preparation. We have also received scholarship funding in respect of advice given to the Libyan Investment Authority in London. No further receipts are anticipated.

It’s all kicking off in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen.

The Guardian is live-blogging events with their correspondents in each of the three countries.

Also covering the uprisings Issandr Al-Amrani who writes this on The Arabist blog:

My gut feeling is that the most important protests now taking place in North Africa are those in Libya. I say this with no disrespect to those in Algeria, where the regime certainly deserves to be brought down, or my own native Morocco, where the palace and Makhzen need a wake-up call that the status quo (and indeed, the regression of the last few years) is not acceptable.

Lots of hearsay, rumours and maybes.

Aljazeera condenses the mixed messages:

Hassam Badrawi, the secretary general of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), told the BBC and Channel 4 News on that he expected Mubarak to hand over his powers to Omar Suleiman, the vice-president.

“I think the right thing to do now is to take the action that would satisfy … protesters,” Badrawi told BBC television in a live interview.

Ahmed Shafiq, the country’s prime minister, also told the BBC that the president may step down on Thursday evening, and that the situation would be “clarified soon”. He told the Reuters news agency, however, that Mubarak remained in control, and that “everything is still in the hands of the president”.

However, Anas el-Fekky, Egypt’s information minister, denied all reports of Mubarak resigning.