Samantha Power and the women around Obama (Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton) we are told convinced Obama to back the ouster of Qadhafi in Libya based on the “new international community’s responsibility to protect.” I was never quite sure who exactly was being protected from whom.
Here a writer in The Star from Toronto says he is hopeful that Libya will “emerge as a showpiece of the Arab Spring” (really now, like Egypt was supposed to have been?). In your dreams!
The sheer messiness of the moment renders premature any declarations of mission accomplished. What Canada joined — a new kind of war framed on the emerging ideal of the international community’s “responsibility to protect” — has given rise to a new kind of aftermath.
Libya is altogether different today than Iraq in 2003, or Afghanistan in late 2001. Uglier, in some ways, because of the score-settling…
So who is the target of the score-settling by Arab Islamist militias? Dark-skinned people, that’s who.
Nowhere did the revolution’s ugly aftermath present itself as viscerally as at a Tawerga refugee encampment near Tripoli Airport, where close to 2,000 darker-skinned Libyans are living in fear of continued score-settling. Many acknowledge they fought with Gadhafi forces. But many did not. And unlike lighter-skinned Libyans who allied with the ousted regime, the Tawerga refugees have been subjected to near-blanket reprisals — most recently, at this camp, a night raid in early November involving 60 carloads of fighters from the hornet’s nest of anger that is Misurata, Tawerga’s neighbouring city.
This is one of nine Tawerga camps…
Watch for it! The ‘responsibility to protect’ means we go to war and create a whole new bunch of refugees that need to be resettled in the West!