The US and Nato's killing of Gaddafi.

By Professor Jonathan Moyo

Professor Jonathan Moyo is a political scientist and MP for Tsholotsho North (Zimbabwe)

THE indisputably barbaric killing of Muammar Gaddafi last Thursday by a high-tech US drone controlled by some freaky soldier in Las Vegas aided by a French jet fighter assisted by NATO special forces on the ground has been received in some quarters as a warning to so-called “dictators”.

Warning! What warning? To dictators? Which dictators?

If anything at all, the macabre killing of Gaddafi in wanton violation of international law and daylight trampling of the very same human rights which his inhuman killers claim to champion is a reminder, not a warning, but a reminder that Western imperialism is by definition barbaric even though the idiom of its lingua franca is always packaged and couched in disingenuous and hypocritical terms of Christianity, civilisation, freedom, democracy, good governance, rule of law and all that crap.

Zimbabweans should know better than entertaining the nonsense that Gaddafi’s unlawful killing was justified, allegedly because he was a dictator. The fact of the matter is that democracy and dictatorship are two sides of one and the same coin. There is no single country in the world which has dictatorship without democracy or which has democracy without dictatorship. Not one.

Rioters in inner cities inhabited by blacks and other immigrants in Britain recently took to the streets in a big way with allegations that there was dictatorship in that country and that the unemployed and downtrodden are voiceless and thus not listened to.

Cameron’s government reacted with an unprecedented iron fist to quell the riots and further silence the already silent voice of the rioters. Night judges were summoned to set up night courts to dispense night justice as innocent blacks and other immigrants were given draconian sentences at the instigation of politicians. Many of those cases are now on appeal but the damage has already been done.

Is that not dictatorship? Should Cameron be bombed into hiding in a sewage hole by some US drone supported by a French jet fighter?

How about the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations that are currently taking place across the US? Despite all sorts of efforts to use the so-called global media to present the huge and continuing demonstrations as the work of the lunatic fringe, their mainstream message is clearly that the US is a dictatorship run by Wall Street capitalists.

The same capitalists control poor Barack Obama who has proven that he does not run America by his breathtaking failure to live up to his plagiarised 2008 pre-election rhetoric whose sources are now becoming as apparent as the fact that he is not going to be re-elected and is set to be abused by racists as an example why black people are not yet to be president in the US.

How did British imperialists kill Mbuya Nehanda? Was she a dictator? David Cameron’s ancestors macabrely hanged Mbuya Nehanda in the most barbaric manner of killing a woman as they, along with their African puppets of the time, celebrated every moment of her death in ways that are morally equivalent to what we are witnessing on television, the internet and newspaper editorials as NATO imperialists and their puppets celebrate Gaddafi’s barbaric killing.

And how did the same British imperialists kill King Lobengula whom they called a “native despot” in many of their colonial dispatches which are now there for anyone to read in utter disbelief? They shot him in cold blood and went on to lie as they are wont to do that he crossed River Tshangani and disappeared leaving all his people behind! If that colonial tale is not nonsense to cover up the bloody butchering of African leaders, then nothing is.

The macabre murder of Mbuya Nehanda and King Lobengula precipitated the First Chimurenga whose mission and purpose find expression during the Second Chimurenga. Who among us has forgotten how children and women were slaughtered in untold numbers inside the country and in refugee camps in Zambia and Mozambique by the supposedly Christian and civilised Rhodesians?

Were those victims of macabre killings by British imperialists in refugee camps like Nyadzonia, Nampundwe, Mboroma and Chimoio dictators? When we see images of our fallen victims of napalm bombs, are we supposed to think that we are seeing images of dictators who deserved to be killed?

And how about Patrice Lumumba who was killed in a way worse than that of Gaddafi by the same imperialist forces? Was Lumumba a dictator who deserved to be killed by imperialists in the name of our freedom and democracy? Why do Western imperialists think Africans have short memories? Is it because, as racistly claimed by French President Sarkozy not too long ago, Westerners think Africans have no history?

There’s the case of Kwame Nkrumah. Was he killed in cold blood by the Westerners who last Thursday murdered Muammar Gaddafi because he was a dictator? Is that what Ghanaians today think?

Last week, our region was commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of Samora Machel who was killed by the same imperialists. Was he a dictator who deserved to be killed?

The list of African leaders and African heroes butchered in cold blood by Western imperialists in unbelievably barbaric ways is just too long and too recent to forget. Gaddafi’s case is one out of too many. This is not to say Gaddafi was in every way like these other leaders. He was not, especially if you judge him by the last years of his rule when he acquiesced in the disarming of his country and poured billions of dollars in Western economies in what appeared to be misguided attempts to appease and please his enemies. If that was a strategy, it failed badly yet none of that should take away the fact that Gaddafi supported the African liberation movement.

It is also true that Gaddafi’s vision of a United Africa was good in principle but flawed in detail. The Gaddafi of latter years was clearly not the same as the Gaddafi of former years but that change or difference did not make him lesser of a brother or a comrade. No. He was a brother and comrade to his death at the hands of imperialists using their superior technology and puppets who foolishly and falsely call themselves revolutionaries.

In the circumstances, there’s an inevitable question: For how long shall we let them get away with this trail of atrocities against our leaders while many among us cheer? For how long?

It is too much for Western propagandists to expect the world to accept the hollow proposition that Gaddafi was a dictator and therefore deserved to be bombed by an American drone and French jet which critically wounded him and which thus enabled his easy capture by NATO ground special forces from France and Britain, before being handed over on a silver platter to alleged NTC fighters who safely and conveniently lay waiting by a predetermined sewage drain to finish him off in a choreographed barbaric drama whose stupid narrative of a holed up Gaddafi will be believed only by idiots.

Ask any revolutionary, or check out the biography of real and true revolutionaries in history, you will find that without any exception to a person, the fear of death has never ever been an incentive or paradigm for revolutionary commitment or behaviour.

Revolutionaries know that like taxation, death is certain for everyone whether they are called dictators, democrats, Western or African, NATO or whatever. The story would be different and even heavenly interesting if the so-called democrats were death-proof. Then everyone would want to be called a democrat.

But, alas, everyone is going to die and how that death will happen is ultimately irrelevant because the simple truth is that death is coming. The imperialists who killed Gaddafi are also going to die just like the imperialists who killed Lumumba and Nkrumah are now dead meat. End of the story.

If anybody truly and honestly wants to know why imperialists have throughout history killed our leaders in a willy-nilly fashion, the explanation was candidly given by the French defence minister, Gerard Longuet, whose country is claiming the trophy of Gaddafi’s head delivered last Thursday.

On Friday Longuet was widely quoted by the media as having said that France “will strive to play the role of principal partner in the country (Libya after Gaddafi) where the leaders know they owe us a lot”.

This needs to be repeated in case you have missed the point: The French defence minister asserted that the new NTC leaders in Libya “owe” France “a lot”. Longuet went on to say: “Our (French) involvement was not belated, mediocre or uncertain. And we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

So there you have it. If you thought it was about freedom and democracy in Libya, you are dead wrong. It was about resources. French imperialists think Libyans owe them a lot for using the jet fighter to kill Gaddafi and they are now lining up to demand a lot from Libya. British and American imperialists also feel the same as the French and they believe that Libya owes them a lot for its alleged freedom after the barbaric killing of Gaddafi.

If any African thinks that what is happening in Libya is an African revolution, then they are mad, pure and simple. It is a Western counter-revolution against the African interest.

What makes this bad situation worse is that the United Nations is nowhere to be seen where things matter the most. While the United Nations Commission for Human Rights has, along with Amnesty International, predictably if not perfunctorily called for an investigation into how Gaddafi was actually killed, the world body’s treacherous Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has gone on record celebrating Gaddafi’s extra-judicial killing by claiming that it “… marks an historic transition for Libya”.

With this background, Gaddafi’s killing is not a warning to anybody about any dictator but a reminder that the fact that Western imperialists have killed our leaders with the collaboration of our own sell-outs and puppets before since they butchered King Lobengula and Mbuya Nehanda under the false covers of Christianity and civilisation means they will do it again today under the new but still false covers of human rights, democracy and rule of law.

In this vein, the urgent question before the African community at home and in the Diaspora is very simple: what are we going to do about it? Well, time will tell. But our starting point as Africans has been terrible. It was very wrong and most unfortunate that South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon abused their status as African representatives on the UN Security Council by voting for the treacherous UN Resolution 1973 which was abused by NATO countries to effect regime change in Libya in a barbaric way reminiscent of their brutal colonial legacy.

The excuse used by South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon that they voted for Resolution 1973 to protect civilians has been exposed for the rubbish that it is by the fact that more civilians were killed after the resolution was passed than before.

And to make the whole mess worse, regime change which was specifically prohibited in terms of the resolution has been effected.
While this might be too hard for some fake nationalists to stomach, the inevitable and therefore unavoidable truth is that, with all due but perhaps undeserved respect, South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon quite clearly have Gaddafi’s blood on their hands.

Even more seriously, they have on their hands the blood of an untold number of innocent Libyans indiscriminately killed by NATO bombs since their approval of the treacherous UN Resolution 1973.

These countries failed Africa in Libya. They had an historic opportunity to express and defend the African voice at the United Nations but they squandered that opportunity as they opted for their narrow and wrong national interests at the expense of the continental interest as they sold out in broad daylight in their strange and unfortunate quest to outbid each other in a mindless competition for imperialist attention and approval.

That is very sad for Africa. Gaddafi is dead. And Africa is dying for continental leadership on the international scene and those on offer are sadly not making the grade and the Lumumba and Nkrumah days of the cold-blooded killing of our leaders in the false names of freedom and democracy are back again.

If like me you think this means the Gods must be crazy, then maybe we are right and that means we have a lot of work to do before us.