The West and Others~~Western Civilization, Global Continuity & The 'Third' World~~
Photo; the Turf... a little bit of Heaven, Abraka, Delta State, Nigeria
Strauss-Kahn's Alleged Sex Attack Victim Is African Woman From Guinea
"Until he stepped out of the shower naked in his swanky hotel suite on Saturday and reportedly tried to rape the Guinean immigrant, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was the Socialist Party's early favorite for next year’s French presidential race. That ambition is now in tatters, as is his international power base at the IMF."~Sahara Reporters
The alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been identified as an African immigrant from Guinea, a country once colonized by the French.
New York Police said the woman, 32, had already identified the suspect from a lineup that included five other men.
The alleged sexual attack at the Times Square Sofitel, by a man with a formidable opportunity to be the next French president on the platform of the Socialist Party, is shifting focus to the sexual abuse of African women dating back to the colonial days.
But it also, ironically, underscores years of failed economic policies championed by the IMF on the African continent, the very reason that increasing numbers of Africans have become vulnerable second class citizens in Western capitals, often exploited as sex slaves, maids and nannies by powerful capitalist oligarchs.
Whereas most African families live on one dollar per day, Mr. Kahn was soaking in luxury at a lavish $3,000 per night hotel suite. That amount alone, without even one French cigar, croissant or a tot of cognac added to the bill, equals the daily sustenance of 3,000 African families in Guinea today.
This is at a time that the IMF is continuing to force African governments to cut programs for the poor through Structural Adjustment Programs and other controversial economic policies such as the devaluation of national currencies.
Meanwhile, Mr. Strauss-Khan is assembling an all-star defence team to be led by Benjamin Brafman, famously remembered as Michael Jackson's pre-eminent lawyer. He appeared in a New York court today, but his lawyers said he would plead not guilty to charges of a criminal sexual act...
Also, in Paris, a female writer is reportedly considering a formal complaint against Mr. Strauss-Khan for a similar assault upon her in 2002.
Until he stepped out of the shower naked in his swanky hotel suite on Saturday and reportedly tried to rape the Guinean immigrant, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was the Socialist Party's early favorite for next year’s French presidential race. That ambition is now in tatters, as is his international power base at the IMF.
A New York judge has denied the IMF chief bail, the judge ordered on Monday that Mr. Strauss-Kahn be held in a New York jail without bail until the next adjourned court date.
Radiation Experiment on Black people left hole in their heads
In this unbelievable video, an elderly man tells a story about unknown radiation experiments that started when he was five-years old. As a result, he has a hole in his head to this day. In a Smith Leonard Production, the story is going to be told about what happened to these people and why most of us never knew anything about it.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves."~William Pitt in the House of Commons, November 18, 1783
When the news first broke that alleged Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden had been caught, killed and then thrown overboard at sea, the mainstream media were quick to call the procedure a traditional Muslim burial, or more subtly “a burial at sea in accordance with traditional muslim rites”. However the simplicity of this account has backfired and added to the suspicion that his burial was some kind of cover-up or complete psyop. The history of Bin Laden is hardly clear-cut as we’ll soon find out.
At a glance you may come to the conclusion that sea burials themselves are some kind of tradition in Islam. Indeed a look on Wikipedia for Islamic Funerals lists Burial at Sea as an option.
But if we take a closer look at the detail, a burial at sea could be nothing further from tradition:
“This is, however, a tradition, specific to each culture, and not found in the Quran. However, even in cases of drowning, all effort must be made to perform a burial in the ground.”
In other words sea burials are a last resort for those who have died at sea, not something Muslims might choose in ordinary circumstances.
Islamic scholars and experts soon made the facts clear.
“Dumping the body into the sea is not part of any Islamic ritual,” said Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a physician of internal medicine. “Koranic scripture says God created him and he must return to the earth.”
The addition of this entry in to Wikipedia seems out of context and irrelevant to the main topic of Islamic funerals. The Christian Burial page features no section on sea burials [2], so why add it to the Islamic page?
If we check the edit history of the page in question, we find that the entry was only added after the news that Bin Laden had been executed. At the bottom of this screenshot you can see that it says May 3rd.
Click to Enlarge:
[Update: Somebody with some sense has now removed the sea burial section from the page]
One conclusion we could draw from this is that somebody at the time wanted it to seem like Burial at sea was an Islamic tradition in order to mask the fact that dumping Osama’s body (the evidence) in to the sea is extremely illogical. How is anybody ever going to properly verify his death without a body? With something as important as the death of the world’s most notorious terrorist it shouldn’t be left to the word of the US government alone. Not when there is far more evidence that he died years ago and that the establishment have continually lied about and manipulated the image of Bin Laden, and covered up the fact that he was a CIA ally for a number of years.
Osama Bin Dead For Ages
The Pakistan Observer reported that Bin Laden died of untreated lung complications and was buried in an unmarked grave in Tora Bora on December 15, 2001. This was picked up by the American media.
Also on December 26, the Egyptian newspaper AlWafd – Daily carried a short obituary by a prominent official of the Afghan Taliban, who was allegedly present at the funeral, stating Bin Laden had been buried on or about December 13. This was reported in British news.
You only have to look at one of his videotapes at the time to see that he was on his last legs. He appears pale and sick:
An expert reporting to CNN noted:
"You can look [at pictures from a December 2001 video] and notice that he has what some doctors refer to as sort of a frosting over of his features — his sort of grayness of beard, his paleness of skin, very gaunt sort of features. A lot of times people associate this with chronic illness. Doctors can certainly look at that and determine some clinical features.
But even more than that, it’s sometimes possible to differentiate the specific type of disease or illness that he may be suffering from. The sort of frosting of the appearance is something that people a lot of times associate with chronic kidney failure, renal failure, certainly someone who is requiring dialysis would have that."
According to Pakistani President Musharraf in the above CNN article, Bin Laden required two dialysis machines. He concluded: “I think now, frankly, he is dead.”
Osama Bin CGIed
The image of Bin Laden is a carefully crafted hoax. Before his most recent death, the west would use him as a propaganda tool to support their various agendas. They claimed he was wherever they wanted him to be.
It was only about a year ago that we were told he was living in Iran under the protection of President Ahmadinejad. As we reported at the time in the article (Bin Laden In Iran? Get Real), this was ridiculous because Bin Laden and the Iranian majority worship completely opposing versions of Islam. This was just another piece of propaganda to demonize Iran, along with their thoroughly debunked Nuclear Threat.
Since the months surrounding 9/11 every tape released alleging to be Bin Laden has been marred in controversy. Many were just audio tapes; easily faked, others appeared to be carefully edited video re-cuts.
After the 2007 tape was released it was quickly analyzed by experts. CNETnews reported:
In analyzing the video, Neal Krawetz of Hactor Factor, an expert on digital image forensics, said in his latest blogs that the video contained many visual and audio splices, and that all of the modifications were of very low quality.
As documented in the WideShut documentary 7/7 The Big Picture – the tape heralded as Bin Laden’s confession to orchestrating the 9/11 attacks was re-translated by German experts and found to be fake, in that the US claimed he said things that he clearly didn’t.
Professor Gernot Rotter, scholar of Islamic and Arabic Studies explains: “Regardless of the question if bin Laden personally was actively involved in the organization of the attacks or not: This tape is of such poor quality that many passages are unintelligible. And those that are intelligible have often been taken out of context, so that you can’t use that as evidence…The American translators who listened to the tape and transcribed it obviously added things that they wanted to hear in many places. Things that can’t be heard – never mind how often you listen to it.”
The available evidence suggests Bin Laden died shortly after the 9/11 attacks and ever since then fake videos and stories have been leaked to the media by elements of the international intelligence community to justify the western agenda in the Middle-East.
Osama Bin Played
It’s not entirely clear how much the real Bin Laden knew about the New World Order agenda. What we do know is that he was the CIA’s ally for a number of years. A likely scenario is that they simply used him as a tool and then threw him under the bus when they were done.
Bin Laden first came on to the scene in 1979 when Obama’s Columbia University mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski (then National Security Adviser under President Jimmy Carter) developed a strategy to defeat the Soviet war machine.
They would entice them in to a conflict in Afghanistan while backing the Muslim opposition.
As revealed by Brzezinski himself to Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998:
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
Code named Operation Cyclone, the CIA funded, armed and helped train hundreds of thousands of militant Muslims (known then as freedom fighters or the Mujahideen) to fight the Soviets; it was here that Bin Laden began working with the CIA to nurture this Muslim army.
On whether he regretted creating this fundamentalist force, Brzezinski responded:
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
Three years later the Twin Towers were attacked and the US mounted an invasion in to Afghanistan, claiming it was those stirred-up Muslims who were to blame.
Bin Laden became enemy number 1 and any mention of America’s own involvement in creating what would later be labeled Al Qaeda was swept under the carpet.
The anomalies surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the evidence that suggests elements within the US government/intelligence community helped carry them out are far too numerous to investigate for this article, but what is worth mentioning is former FBI Translator turned Whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, who testified that the US were still working with Bin Laden up until the day of 9/11 itself.
At the same time aid had been given to the Taliban up until at least 1996 with talks about a gas Pipe-Line in 1998.
It was soon revealed after 9/11 that an invasion of Afghanistan was pre-planned before the attacks.
This all suggests that Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the Taliban were built up on one hand, just to be taken down by the other. If Bin Laden did die in 2001 it made the whole operation easier because they could fabricate his bogeyman status and use it to further demonize other countries the west wished to invade and pillage.
They’ve wheeled out his death now for a number of reasons, it helps Obama get reelected, it distracts the average citizen from important issues like the economy and the illegal operations in Libya and it gives the pretext for further attacks on Pakistan, who will be blamed for harboring Bin Laden. The overall goal in all of this is full spectrum dominance of the Middle-East.
Conclusion
One mainstream headline claimed Bin Laden’s sea burial fuels conspiracy theories, but what’s really fueling these quote “conspiracy theories” is a decade of deception and outright lies. If we had a transparent trustworthy government that didn’t fund and train Muslim extremists, work with Bin Laden himself, fake videos and invade innocent countries, a burial at sea could possibly slide. But we don’t, so his burial at sea is highly suspicious for the reasons already outlined.
Perhaps what’s even more suspicious is that he was murdered to begin with. If you had the world’s leading terrorist in your clutches, somebody that was allegedly still signing off on attacks and would obviously have a treasure trove of information….would you kill him? Or would you maybe ask him a few questions first?
The first official story (of course like all of these dubious events it’s already changed a billion times), Bin Laden was resisting so he had to be neutralized. But as the Guardian is reporting:
The US has backed away from its initial account of the killing of Osama bin Laden, which claimed that the al-Qaida leader was carrying a weapon and fired at US troops before he was shot dead.
On Monday, John Brennan, a counter-terrorism adviser to Barack Obama, said Bin Laden was “engaged in a firefight” with his assailants and he did not know if he “got off any rounds”. Other US officials briefed that he was firing at members of the US navy’s elite Seal Team Six.
However, subsequent briefings by US officials suggest that, when confronted at the high-security complex in Abbottabad, Bin Laden did not have a weapon and did not fire at his assailants.
Nobody knows what’s going on for 100% fact, that’s just the nature of secretive government actions, but judging from the available evidence it’s much more likely that Bin Laden has been dead for years, thus they would have to report that he’d been shot and his burial at sea is a way to dispose of the evidence, or account for the lack of a body.
What we have is a complex web of lies with more lies being added on top. The majority of the public are running around like headless chickens, wrapped up in the superficial patriotism of it all; making it even harder to expose the truth. Off the back of this the Obama administration can justify numerous abhorrent actions, and we’re already being told to expect a retaliatory attack from Bin Laden’s so called loyal followers.
The future doesn’t look too bright, but the saga continues.
It was Gaddafi’s Libya that offered all of Africa its first revolution in modern times – connecting the entire continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching. And thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low cost connection was made available across the continent, including in rural areas.
It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country.
An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of US$400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a US$500 million annual lease. Which banker wouldn’t finance such a project? But the problem remained – how can slaves, seeking to free themselves from their master’s exploitation ask the master’s help to achieve that freedom? Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the USA, Europe only made vague promises for 14 years. Gaddafi put an end to these futile pleas to the western ‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put US$300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.
China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010. The first totally indigenous-built satellite and manufactured on African soil, in Algeria, is set for 2020. This satellite is aimed at competing with the best in the world, but at ten times less the cost, a real challenge.
This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere US$300 million changed the life of an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of US$500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential manner, thereby helping maintain an occult system in order to plunder the continent.
AFRICAN MONETARY FUND, AFRICAN CENTRAL BANK, AFRICAN INVESTMENT BANK
The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation – the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.
The African Monetary Fund is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only US$25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatization like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies. No surprise then that on 16-17December 2010, the Africans unanimously rejected attempts by Western countries to join the African Monetary Fund, saying it was open only to African nations.
It is increasingly obvious that after Libya, the western coalition will go after Algeria, because apart from its huge energy resources, the country has cash reserves of around €150 billion. This is what lures the countries that are bombing Libya and they all have one thing in common – they are practically bankrupt. The USA alone, has a staggering debt of $US14,000 billion, France, Great Britain and Italy each have a US$2,000 billion public deficit compared to less than US$400 billion in public debt for 46 African countries combined.
Inciting spurious wars in Africa in the hope that this will revitalize their economies which are sinking ever more into the doldrums will ultimately hasten the western decline which actually began in 1884 during the notorious Berlin Conference. As the American economist Adam Smith predicted in 1865 when he publicly backed Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery, ‘the economy of any country which relies on the slavery of blacks is destined to descend into hell the day those countries awaken’.
REGIONAL UNITY AS AN OBSTACLE TO THE CREATION OF A UNITED STATES OF AFRICA
Without the driving force behind the African Federation, the UPM failed even before it began, still-born with Sarkozy as president and Mubarak as vice president. The French foreign minister, Alain Juppe is now attempting to re-launch the idea, banking no doubt on the fall of Gaddafi. What African leaders fail to understand is that as long as the European Union continues to finance the African Union, the status quo will remain, because no real independence. This is why the European Union has encouraged and financed regional groupings in Africa.
It is obvious that the West African Economic Community (ECOWAS), which has an embassy in Brussels and depends for the bulk of its funding on the European Union, is a vociferous opponent to the African federation. That’s why Lincoln fought in the US war of secession because the moment a group of countries come together in a regional political organisation, it weakens the main group. That is what Europe wanted and the Africans have never understood the game plan, creating a plethora of regional groupings, COMESA, UDEAC, SADC, and the Great Maghreb which never saw the light of day thanks to Gaddafi who understood what was happening.
GADDAFI, THE AFRICAN WHO CLEANSED THE CONTINENT FROM THE HUMILIATION OF APARTHEID
For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. For five long years, no plane could touch down in Libya because of the embargo. One needed to take a plane to the Tunisian city of Jerba and continue by road for five hours to reach Ben Gardane, cross the border and continue on a desert road for three hours before reaching Tripoli. The other solution was to go through Malta, and take a night ferry on ill-maintained boats to the Libyan coast. A hellish journey for a whole people, simply to punish one man.
Ghaddafi and assasinated adopted daughter
Mandela didn’t mince his words when the former US president Bill Clinton said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one – ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do’. He added – ‘Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi, they are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.’
Indeed, the West still considered the South African racists to be their brothers who needed to be protected. That’s why the members of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, were considered to be dangerous terrorists. It was only on 2 July 2008, that the US Congress finally voted a law to remove the name of Nelson Mandela and his ANC comrades from their black list, not because they realized how stupid that list was but because they wanted to mark Mandela’s 90th birthday. If the West was truly sorry for its past support for Mandela’s enemies and really sincere when they name streets and places after him, how can they continue to wage war against someone who helped Mandela and his people to be victorious, Gaddafi?
ARE THOSE WHO WANT TO EXPORT DEMOCRACY THEMSELVES DEMOCRATS?
And what if Gaddafi’s Libya were more democratic than the USA, France, Britain and other countries waging war to export democracy to Libya? On 19 March 2003, President George Bush began bombing Iraq under the pretext of bringing democracy. On 19 March 2011, exactly eight years later to the day, it was the French president’s turn to rain down bombs over Libya, once again claiming it was to bring democracy. Nobel peace prize-winner and US President Obama says unleashing cruise missiles from submarines is to oust the dictator and introduce democracy.
The question that anyone with even minimum intelligence cannot help asking is the following: Are countries like France, England, the USA, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Poland who defend their right to bomb Libya on the strength of their self proclaimed democratic status really democratic? If yes, are they more democratic than Gaddafi’s Libya? The answer in fact is a resounding NO, for the plain and simple reason that democracy doesn’t exist. This isn’t a personal opinion, but a quote from someone whose native town Geneva, hosts the bulk of UN institutions. The quote is from Jean Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712 and who writes in chapter four of the third book of the famous ‘Social Contract’ that ‘there never was a true democracy and there never will be.’
Rousseau sets out the following four conditions for a country to be labelled a democracy and according to these Gaddafi’s Libya is far more democratic than the USA, France and the others claiming to export democracy:
1. The State: The bigger a country, the less democratic it can be. According to Rousseau, the state has to be extremely small so that people can come together and know each other. Before asking people to vote, one must ensure that everybody knows everyone else, otherwise voting will be an act without any democratic basis, a simulacrum of democracy to elect a dictator.
The Libyan state is based on a system of tribal allegiances, which by definition group people together in small entities. The democratic spirit is much more present in a tribe, a village than in a big country, simply because people know each other, share a common life rhythm which involves a kind of self-regulation or even self-censorship in that the reactions and counter reactions of other members impacts on the group.
From this perspective, it would appear that Libya fits Rousseau’s conditions better than the USA, France and Great Britain, all highly urbanized societies where most neighbours don’t even say hello to each other and therefore don’t know each other even if they have lived side by side for twenty years. These countries leapfrogged leaped into the next stage – ‘the vote’ – which has been cleverly sanctified to obfuscate the fact that voting on the future of the country is useless if the voter doesn’t know the other citizens. This has been pushed to ridiculous limits with voting rights being given to people living abroad. Communicating with and amongst each other is a precondition for any democratic debate before an election.
2. Simplicity in customs and behavioral patterns are also essential if one is to avoid spending the bulk of the time debating legal and judicial procedures in order to deal with the multitude of conflicts of interest inevitable in a large and complex society. Western countries define themselves as civilized nations with a more complex social structure whereas Libya is described as a primitive country with a simple set of customs. This aspect too indicates that Libya responds better to Rousseau’s democratic criteria than all those trying to give lessons in democracy. Conflicts in complex societies are most often won by those with more power, which is why the rich manage to avoid prison because they can afford to hire top lawyers and instead arrange for state repression to be directed against someone one who stole a banana in a supermarket rather than a financial criminal who ruined a bank. In the city of New York for example where 75 per cent of the population is white, 80 per cent of management posts are occupied by whites who make up only 20 per cent of incarcerated people.
3. Equality in status and wealth: A look at the Forbes 2010 list shows who the richest people in each of the countries currently bombing Libya are and the difference between them and those who earn the lowest salaries in those nations; a similar exercise on Libya will reveal that in terms of wealth distribution, Libya has much more to teach than those fighting it now, and not the contrary. So here too, using Rousseau’s criteria, Libya is more democratic than the nations pompously pretending to bring democracy. In the USA, 5 per cent of the population owns 60 per cent of the national wealth, making it the most unequal and unbalanced society in the world.
4. No luxuries: according to Rousseau there can’t be any luxury if there is to be democracy. Luxury, he says, makes wealth a necessity which then becomes a virtue in itself, it, and not the welfare of the people becomes the goal to be reached at all cost, ‘Luxury corrupts both the rich and the poor, the one through possession and the other through envy; it makes the nation soft and prey to vanity; it distances people from the State and enslaves them, making them a slave to opinion.’
Is there more luxury in France than in Libya? The reports on employees committing suicide because of stressful working conditions even in public or semi-public companies, all in the name of maximizing profit for a minority and keeping them in luxury, happen in the West, not in Libya.
The American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in 1956 that American democracy was a ‘dictatorship of the elite’. According to Mills, the USA is not a democracy because it is money that talks during elections and not the people. The results of each election are the expression of the voice of money and not the voice of the people. After Bush senior and Bush junior, they are already talking about a younger Bush for the 2012 Republican primaries. Moreover, as Max Weber pointed out, since political power is dependent on the bureaucracy, the US has 43 million bureaucrats and military personnel who effectively rule the country but without being elected and are not accountable to the people for their actions. One person (a rich one) is elected, but the real power lies with the caste of the wealthy who then get nominated to be ambassadors, generals, etc.
How many people in these self-proclaimed democracies know that Peru’s constitution prohibits an outgoing president from seeking a second consecutive mandate? How many know that in Guatemala, not only can an outgoing president not seek re-election to the same post, no one from that person’s family can aspire to the top job either? Or that Rwanda is the only country in the world that has 56 per cent female parliamentarians? How many people know that in the 2007 CIA index, four of the world’s best-governed countries are African? That the top prize goes to Equatorial Guinea whose public debt represents only 1.14 per cent of GDP?
Rousseau maintains that civil wars, revolts and rebellions are the ingredients of the beginning of democracy. Because democracy is not an end, but a permanent process of the reaffirmation of the natural rights of human beings which in countries all over the world (without exception) are trampled upon by a handful of men and women who have hijacked the power of the people to perpetuate their supremacy. There are here and there groups of people who have usurped the term ‘democracy’ – instead of it being an ideal towards which one strives it has become a label to be appropriated or a slogan which is used by people who can shout louder than others. If a country is calm, like France or the USA, that is to say without any rebellions, it only means, from Rousseau’s perspective, that the dictatorial system is sufficiently repressive to pre-empt any revolt.
It wouldn’t be a bad thing if the Libyans revolted. What is bad is to affirm that people stoically accept a system that represses them all over the world without reacting. And Rousseau concludes: ‘Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium – translation – If gods were people, they would govern themselves democratically. Such a perfect government is not applicable to human beings.’ To claim that one is killing Libyans for their own good is a hoax.
WHAT LESSONS FOR AFRICA?
After 500 years of a profoundly unequal relationship with the West, it is clear that we don’t have the same criteria of what is good and bad. We have deeply divergent interests. How can one not deplore the ‘yes’ votes from three sub-Saharan countries (Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon) for resolution 1973 that inaugurated the latest form of colonization, baptized ‘the protection of peoples’, which legitimizes the racist theories that have informed Europeans since the 18th century and according to which North Africa has nothing to do with sub-Saharan Africa, that North Africa is more evolved, cultivated and civilized than the rest of Africa?
It is as if Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Algeria were not part of Africa, Even the United Nations seems to ignore the role of the African Union in the affairs of member states. The aim is to isolate sub Saharan African countries to better isolate and control them. Indeed, Algeria (US$16 billion) and Libya (US$10 billion ) together contribute 62 per cent of the US$42 billion which constitute the capital of the African Monetary Fund (AMF). The biggest and most populous country in sub Saharan Africa, Nigeria, followed by South Africa are far behind with only 3 billion dollars each.
It is disconcerting to say the least that for the first time in the history of the United Nations, war has been declared against a people without having explored the slightest possibility of a peaceful solution to the crisis. Does Africa really belong anymore to this organisation? Nigeria and South Africa are prepared to vote ‘Yes’ to everything the West asks because they naively believe the vague promises of a permanent seat at the Security Council with similar veto rights. They both forget that France has no power to offer anything. If it did, Mitterand would have long done the needful for Helmut Kohl’s Germany.
A reform of the United Nations is not on the agenda. The only way to make a point is to use the Chinese method – all 50 African nations should quit the United Nations and only return if their longstanding demand is finally met, a seat for the entire African federation or nothing. This non-violent method is the only weapon of justice available to the poor and weak that we are. We should simply quit the United Nations because this organisation, by its very structure and hierarchy, is at the service of the most powerful.
We should leave the United Nations to register our rejection of a worldview based on the annihilation of those who are weaker. They are free to continue as before but at least we will not be party to it and say we agree when we were never asked for our opinion. And even when we expressed our point of view, like we did on Saturday 19 March in Nouakchott, when we opposed the military action, our opinion was simply ignored and the bombs started falling on the African people.
Today’s events are reminiscent of what happened with China in the past. Today, one recognizes the Ouattara government, the rebel government in Libya, like one did at the end of the Second World War with China. The so-called international community chose Taiwan to be the sole representative of the Chinese people instead of Mao’s China. It took 26 years when on 25 October 1971, for the UN to pass resolution 2758 which all Africans should read to put an end to human folly. China was admitted and on its terms – it refused to be a member if it didn’t have a veto right. When the demand was met and the resolution tabled, it still took a year for the Chinese foreign minister to respond in writing to the UN Secretary General on 29 September 1972, a letter which didn’t say yes or thank you but spelt out guarantees required for China’s dignity to be respected.
What does Africa hope to achieve from the United Nations without playing hard ball? We saw how in Cote d’Ivoire a UN bureaucrat considers himself to be above the constitution of the country. We entered this organisation by agreeing to be slaves and to believe that we will be invited to dine at the same table and eat from plates we ourselves washed is not just credulous, it is stupid.
When the African Union endorsed Ouattara’s victory and glossed over contrary reports from its own electoral observers simply to please our former masters, how can we expect to be respected? When South African president Zuma declares that Ouattara hasn’t won the elections and then says the exact opposite during a trip to Paris, one is entitled to question the credibility of these leaders who claim to represent and speak on behalf of a billion Africans.
Africa’s strength and real freedom will only come if it can take properly thought out actions and assume the consequences. Dignity and respect come with a price tag. Are we prepared to pay it? Otherwise, our place is in the kitchen and in the toilets in order to make others comfortable.
