BY MAHMOOD MAMDANI
Iraq and Afghanistan teach us that humanitarian
intervention does not end with the removal of the danger
it purports to target. It only be gins with it. Having removed the
target, the intervention grows and turns into the real problem. This
is why limiting the discussion of the Libyan intervention to its
stated rationale – saving civilian lives – barely scratches the
political surface.
The short life of the Libyan intervention suggests
that we distinguish between justification and execution in writing its
biography. Justification was a process internal to the United Nations
Security Council but execution is not.
In addition to authorising a “no-fly zone” and
tightening sanctions against “the Gaddafi regime and its supporters”,
resolution 1973 called for “all necessary measures to protect
civilians under threat of attack in the country, including Benghazi”.
At the same time, it expressly “excluded a foreign occupation force of
any form” or in “any part of Libyan territory”.
UN conflicts
The UN process is notable for two reasons. First, the
resolution was passed with a vote of 10 in favour and five abstaining.
The abstaining governments – Russia, China, India, Brazil, Germany –
represent the vast majority of humanity.
Even though the African Union had resolved against an
external intervention and called for a political resolution to the
conflict, the two African governments in the Security Council – South
Africa and Nigeria – voted in favour of the resolution. They have
since echoed the sentiments of the governments that abstained, that
they did not have in mind the scale of the intervention that has
actually occurred.
The second thing notable about the UN process is that
though the Security Council is central to the process of
justification, it is peripheral to the process of execution.
The Russian and Chinese representatives complained
that the resolution left vague “how and by whom the measures would be
enforced and what the limits of the engagement would be”.
Having authorised the intervention, the Security
Council left its implementation to any and all; it “authorised member
states, acting nationally or through regional organisations or
arrangements”.
As with every right, this free-for-all was only in
theory; in practice, the right could only be exercised by those who
possessed the means to do so. As the baton passed from the UN Security
Council to the US and NATO, its politics became clearer.
Money trail
When it came to the assets freeze and arms embargo,
the resolution called on the secretary general to create an
eight-member panel of experts to assist the Security Council committee
in monitoring the sanctions.
Libyan assets are mainly in the US and Europe and they
amount to hundreds of billions of dollars: the US treasury froze $30bn
of liquid assets and US banks, $18bn. What is to happen to interest on
these assets? In the absence of any specific arrangement, assets are
turned into booty, an interest-free loan, in this instance, to the US
treasury and US banks.
Like the military intervention, there is nothing
international about the implementing sanctions regime. From its point
of view, the international process is no more than a legitimating
exercise. If the legitimation is international, implementation is
privatised, passing the initiative to the strongest of the member
states. The end result is a self-constituted coalition of the willing.
War furthers many interests. Each war is a laboratory
for testing the next generation of weapons. It is well known that the
Iraq war led to more civilian than military victims. The debate then
was over whether or not these casualties were intended. In Libya, the
debate is over facts. It points to the fact that the US and NATO are
perfecting a new generation of weapons, weapons meant for urban
warfare, weapons designed to minimise collateral damage.
The objective is to destroy physical assets with
minimum cost in human lives. The cost to the people of Libya will be
of another type. The more physical assets are destroyed, the less
sovereign the next government in Libya will be.
Libya’s opposition
The full political cost will become clear in the
period of transition. The anti-Gaddafi coalition comprises four
different political trends: radical Islamists, royalists, tribalists
and secular middle-class activists produced by a western-oriented
educational system.
Of these, only the radical Islamists, especially those
linked organisationally to al-Qaeda, have battle experience. They –
like NATO – have the most to gain in the short term from a process
that is more military than political. This is why the most likely
outcome of a military resolution in Libya will be an Afghanistan-type
civil war. One would think that this would be clear to the powers
waging the current war on Libya because they were the same powers
waging war in Afghanistan. Yet they have so far shown little interest
in a political resolution. Several facts point to this.
The African Union delegation sent to Libya to begin
discussions with Colonel Gaddafi in pursuit of a political resolution
to the conflict was denied permission to fly over Libya – and thus
land in Tripoli – by the NATO powers.
The New York Times reported that Libyan
tanks on the road to Benghazi were bombed from the air, Iraq
war-style, when they were retreating and not when they were advancing.
The two pilots of the US fighter jet F15-E that
crashed near Benghazi were rescued by US forces on the ground, now
admitted to be CIA operatives, a clear violation of resolution 1973,
as it points to an early introduction of ground forces.
The logic of a political resolution was made clear by
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, in a different context:
“We have made clear that security alone cannot resolve the challenges
facing Bahrain. Violence is not the answer, a political process is.”
That Clinton has been deaf to this logic when it comes to Libya is
testimony that so far, the pursuit of interest has defied learning
political lessons of past wars, most importantly Afghanistan.
Marx once wrote that important events in history
occur, as it were, twice – the first time as tragedy, the second time
as farce. He should have added that for its victims, farce is a
tragedy compounded.
(Mahmood Mamdani, a well-known author and academic, is
professor and director of Makerere Institute of Social Research at
Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, and Herbert Lehman Professor of
Government at Columbia University, New York. This article was posted
on the Al Jazeera website on March 31, 2011.)
Courtesy: Al Jazeera; http://english.aljazeera.net