Libya: time for hard choices

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The time has come for hard decisions. With Gaddafi launching a full-scale war on the rebels, we have to ask the question; are we willing to allow a “demented despot” (as was aptly described by French MEP Danny Cohn Bendit) win the war? If the answer is no, we have to quicken the end of the regime and help the rebels win.

For once the west has the opportunity of setting a positive precedent; that national sovereignty does not give anyone a license to kill. And by seeking a mandate from the UN security council, the west seems bent on not repeating the same mistakes comitted in Kosovo and Iraq. 

Remaining neutral in such circumstances reminds me of Sweden’s neutrality during the second world war. Surely nobody expects a rock to give a significant military contribution except perhaps for logistical support. What counts most is our moral stance. Perhaps our Prime Minister was to quick to follow other European countries in writing off the Gaddafi regime but he did the right thing in refusing Libyan overtures and requests to return the two military jets.

The prospect of having to live next to an unredeemable pariah who could periodically swamp southern Europe with migrants, should make us cringe. The quicker he goes the better for all peace-loving people.

Some people who know me as an intransigent critic of US foreign policies might be surprised on why am advocating a no fly zone which could require US and Western armed backing.

I grew up resenting the collusion between western nations and brutal dictatorships in the Third World. In the name of anti-communism the US propped up murderous regimes in Latin America and South East Asia. In the name of regional stability and the war on terror the west also propped up unsavoury regimes in the Arab world.

Libya was the latest addition, with its brutal dictatorship being co-opted not just as a reward for giving up its weapons of mass destruction programme, but also in a bid to secure new markets and perversely police Europe’s southern frontiers from the flow of sub-Saharan migrants. It was our own way of farming out terror, and Malta was a party to this infamy.

But despite my reservations on western motives, I also believe that these governments also respond to public opinion which is influenced by a new positive globalisation of digital solidarity based on the advocacy of human rights.

Yet what irks me most are not the liberal-democratic pretensions of western democracies, but their failure to apply these values in their relations with the rest of the world. In this sense I welcome any move which puts these words in to action.

It is the new cosmopolitanism which seeks the global applications of democratic values and not the old anti imperialism of yesterday which rejects these values in the name of fossilized ideologies which holds the key to the future.

Our response to the epochal moment of rebellion against the despots of North Africa should not be conditioned by the petty thinking of the past. The anti-imperialists of yesterday have no right to interpret our world with their fossilized ideology which not only paints the world in black and white but is guilty of the same racism of the political right wing which considers Arabs and Africans as being tribal, primitive and incapable of a democracy.

Libyans may be rightly suspicious of western nations who consorted with Gaddafi in the past but am sure that most Libyans love their children too and would prefer to have them protected from Gaddafi’s fighter jets.

Some would say that we should les the Arabs sort their mess alone ignoring the west’s historical responsibilities. A no-fly zone in Libya would send the message that no regime can terrorize its own people with impunity. It will represent a major victory for all those who believe in the globalization of human rights. Now that we apply this standard to the Libyan regime, we cannot fail to apply it when the Saudi regime starts to crack. That would be a major test for western diplomacy.

But even that would fail to redress the mistakes of the past if we are unable to think big and launch a new political process of Euro Mediterranean unity based on liberal democracy and an end to neo-colonialism i.e. the racist notion of dealing with Third World elites to keep the borders safe from migrants and commerce going.

Instead we should embark on a very long journey which will probably take decades to accomplish of unifying the two shores of the Mediterranean with the ultimate goal being a new political block-comprehending both Europe and all democratic Mediterranean states, a block where migration is regulated and where political and civil rights, social and environmental protection are slowly but steadily harmonized.

We need a vision similar to that of Altiero Spinelli who back in June 1941, well before the outcome of the war was safely predictable, wrote the Ventotene Manifesto, entitled “Towards a Free and United Europe”, which argued for the establishment of a European federation. 70 years later we have still to accomplish this dream but we have made big steps in that direction.

As regards Libya, the absence of civil society and a rational bureaucracy (a legacy of the criminal regime-something which makes Gaddafi far worse than Ben Ali and Mubarak) will complicate matters but my hunch is that the major force for change in North Africa and even Libya is a profound desire to live without fear and a yearning for the exciting prospects offered by globalization and the new technologies.

It is the same desire which triggers revolt in all Arab states and hopefully in other dictatorial countries worldwide including those countries professing anti imperialism but who fear pluralism and openness like Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, Vietnam, China and Zimbabwe. After all it is not a crime to desire a normal life and no pseudo revolutionary demagogue has a right to deny that to anyone in the name of anti imperialism.