African mercenaries in Libya nervously await their fate
Mercenaries captured in Libya are facing an uncertain future, writes Nick Meo in Al-Bayda.
Image 2 of 2Mohammed, a boy of about 16 from Chad, said he was offered a free flight to Tripoli but found a gun thrust into his hand on the plane Photo: JULIAN SIMMONDSForeign fighters captured by local Libyans and kept prisoner at a school near Al Bayda in eastern Libya. Photo: JULIAN SIMMONDS
Crowded into an empty classroom which was stinking of unwashed bodies and reeking of fear, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's defeated mercenary killers awaited their fate.
A week earlier the men – Libyan loyalists of the dictator and black African recruits – had been landed at airports throughout eastern Libya and sent out into the streets to shoot protesters in a murderous rampage. They killed dozens before they were overwhelmed by anti-Gaddafi militias.
The survivors were exhausted, filthy, far from home, and fearful of execution, even though they had been assured of good treatment. Fifty of them lay on mattresses on the floor in one classroom alone, with nearly 100 more in the same school building which was being used as a temporary prison. Most looked dazed. Some were virtually children.
"A man at the bus station in Sabha offered me a job and said I would get a free flight to Tripoli," said Mohammed, a boy of about 16 who said he had arrived looking for work in the southern Libyan town only two weeks ago from Chad, where he had earned a living as a shepherd.
Instead of Tripoli, he was flown to an airport near the scruffy seaside town of Al-Bayda and had a gun thrust into his hands on the plane.
Gaddafi's commanders told the ragbag army they had rounded up that rebels had taken over the eastern towns. The colonel would reward them if they killed protesters. If they refused, they would be shot themselves. The result was bloody mayhem.
About fifty people were killed in Al-Bayda city and twenty more in a village near the airport. Dozens of anti-Gaddafi militia were killed or wounded during a terrific firefight at the airport where 3000 local men gathered to attack mercenary reinforcements as they disembarked from a plane.
Hundreds more were killed in battles in Benghazi and almost every other town in eastern Libya.
Wrecked tanks and burnt-out police stations were testimony to the ferocity of the uprising and the battles when the mercenary counter-attack arrived, for miles along the coast road and in all the major towns west of the Egyptian border.
The departure lounge floor at Labrak airport was littered with smashed glass and cartridge cases, with blood smears across the white tiled floor from battle casualties. Giant rocks had been dragged across the runway to stop any more attempts to land mercenaries and a few jumpy-looking militia men were still around in case they tried again.
In halting Arabic, Mohammed, the young Chadian, tried to explain how he had ended up on the wrong side in somebody else's revolution.
Mohammed drifted into Libya looking for casual work, like many sub-Saharan Africans, perhaps with the hope of eventually finding people smugglers who would take him across the Mediterranean to Europe.
"I wanted a better life, not war and destruction," he said. He insisted that he had been treated well since his surrender, with regular meals, and said he hoped he would be allowed to return home soon.
"I didn't really know what was going on. They told me to do these things and I was really scared when the shooting started."
From his mumbled, incoherent account it was clear that he didn't really understand himself how it had happened.
He was a boy with a quiet, pleasing manner and dreamy eyes, who spoke slowly and tried to be helpful. He looked ridiculous, wearing a windcheater indoors with the hood up. He must have wanted nothing more than to get back to life with his goats in Chad. What horrors he had witnessed during his brief career as a militia thug could only be guessed at. The violence was horrific.
The Sunday Telegraph was shown video footage shot on mobile phone cameras of a young protester being shot in the head by a secret policeman during a demonstration, slumping lifeless to the ground with blood pouring from his head. Another showed a captured mercenary lynched from a street lamp after he had surrendered. A third film showed a black African hanging on a meathook, with angry young men crowding round to stare at his corpse.
The man most responsible for Mohammed's ordeal – excepting Colonel Gaddafi himself – was being held in an adjoining classroom, with the rest of the Libyan prisoners.
"I am sorry for what happened," said Othman Fadil Othman, a Gaddafi loyalist from the southern town of Sabha, just across the Chad border.
He was a small cog in a cruel machine of repression, although possibly a willing one. It was Mr Othman who had approached Mohammed at the bus station in Sabha as he rounded up recruits. Now Mr Othman was desperately trying to excuse himself.
"Gaddafi betrayed us all. We were told we were being sent east to stage demonstrations in favour of Colonel Gaddafi. I didn't know there was going to be an attack on the protesters."
It seemed more likely that Mr Othman was trying to save his skin than tell the truth. A beefy, confident man of 30, with three wives and several children back home – he told us with a smirk – he spent a career as a party organiser in Gaddafi's bizarre Soviet-style dictatorship, telling people what to do.
He worked for the youth wing headed by the dictator's son Saeef. Mr Othman still couldn't quite bring himself to condemn the colonel. It was painfully obvious that he was hopelessly unsuited for Gaddafi's attempt to terrorise his own people into submission.
Like nearly all the captives Mr Othman had no military training. Unleashing thugs and mercenaries like him had backfired disastrously.
Instead of being cowed, Libyans were appalled that their dictator was murdering his own people with foreign killers, and the could see that instead of a formidable security operation, Gaddafi's ragbag army ran away as soon as protesters fired back. Horrified and growing in courage at the same time, Libyans all over the east rallied to the protesters' cause.
Beaten and captive, Mr Othman was doing his best to do what political organisers everywhere try to do in a tight corner – talk their way out of trouble. He oozed unconvincing gratitude for his captors. "I thought they would shoot me when we were captured," he said. "But they have treated us so kindly."
The chances are he will be reunited fairly soon with his three wives.
"Some of them are completely innocent people who were duped, some of them were sent here by Gaddafi to make Libyans kill each other," said Abdullah Al-Mortdy, a lawyer who has become one of the captors of the mercenaries.
"Some of them who organised the attack will have to face a trial, but they will not be executed. We are a merciful people and they will be treated leniently," he said.
"Most of them are victims of Gaddafi's system. Gaddafi wants us to shoot them – that's one reason why he sent them here. He calculates that if we do that, their families will vow revenge and come here to fight us. He has controlled Libya for 42 years by dividing people against each other. But this is over now. We are united against him."
To demonstrate how merciful the revolution was, Mr Al-Mortdy ordered that one of the men who was beyond doubt a committed killer be brought out of his classroom-prison to answer questions
Amir Hamada, 25 and from Tripoli, was a sniper with the supposedly elite Khamis Brigade, named after one of Gaddafi's sons. Their fighters were the most highly-trained and best-armed force in Libya.
But instead of crushing the rebellion, in Al-Bayda they wreaked havoc on a suburb, breaking into homes and killing people, before the anti-Gaddafi militia caught up with them and quickly put them to flight. Many are probably still in hiding in the fields around the city, having stripped off their uniforms.
Mr Hamada gave himself up after he was surrounded, and was doubly lucky to survive capture; not only did he belong to the most hated unit in Gaddafi's forces, but he was a sniper who had almost certainly shot down unarmed protesters.
He shifted uncomfortably during a brief interview in the school corridor – it was judged too dangerous to go into the room where he was being held with other Khamis Brigade men.
"Gaddafi is a coward," he mumbled unconvincingly after being prompted, looking down at the floor. "I had to obey orders. You have to in the army."
Mr Al-Mortdy said even he would probably be freed fairly soon. "These young men are brainwashed into loyalty to Gaddafi. As soon as the dictator is dead or flees abroad his spell over them will be broken. They won't be a danger to the new Libya once Gaddafi is gone."
But they asked The Sunday Telegraph not to disclose exactly where the prisoners were being held, for fear they would be lynched by angry townspeople. The militiamen armed with machine-guns were there to protect the prisoners, rather than stop them escaping. One look inside the classroom-prisons showed that there was no fight left in the captured mercenaries.
Elsewhere there was other evidence of captives being treated with kindness. In Al-Bayda's main hospital a young man of about 18 was recovering after suffering a terrible head injury in the battle at the airport. He was in a coma and no one knew his name.
In the next ward was Wail Abdul Salam, 25, brought in from the same battle with a bullet wound to the stomach which had caused appalling internal injuries. He was a policeman who had joined the protesters.
Dr Suleiman Rafadi, who spent years in London at Guys Hospital before returning home, was delighted that he had saved the lives of both men. "They are both Libyans, and in their different ways both victims of Gaddafi," he said, beaming hugely.
He admitted that the terrible injuries he had seen had left him shaken and angry. "The world must understand that we are being attacked by this criminal ruler," he said. "Why is he doing this to his own people?"
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Libya: Gadhafi has History of Using Mercenaries
Retired army Lt. Col. Robert Brown is editor and publisher of Soldier of Fortune Magazine. It reports on what it calls “news and adventure.” The magazine’s editorial policy is stated as pro-military, pro-strong U.S. defense, pro-police and pro-veteran.There have been numerous reports that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is using mercenaries to try to quell the unrest in his country. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s employed outside fighters.
Brown says Mr. Gadhafi has a history of using mercenaries.
“You’ve had Gadhafi employing mercenaries way back in the late 70s, when he had Americans, when he had employed two notorious individuals – Frank Terpil and Ed Wilson - who served as advisors to him. And they had brought in a number under false pretenses, I do believe, Americans that had been discharged, or some which were actually on active duty taking leave working for him. It became quite a scandal back then. So, it’s not something unusual,” he says.
Both Terpil and Wilson were former CIA agents accused of many crimes, including illegal arms dealing.
Not all mercenaries alike
Brown says mercenaries are easy to be found in Africa.
“Africa is a very open ground, if you will, for recruiting. You had a lot of your South African soldiers, after the apartheid government fell, serving in Executive Outcomes, which actually did a very good job in suppressing the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in Sierra Leone. You had a lot of Chadians I think that are now with Gadhafi’s forces,” he says.
Brown says mercenaries can be motivated by any number of things to fight, including adventure and especially money. But he says not all mercenaries are alike.
“Well, it’s hard to say what their level of training is,” he says, “whether they’re just thugs that can go around and beat people as an irregular force or whether they’ve been trained. This I don’t think anybody knows. And certainly their effectiveness is going to be predicated on what type of training they have and what their capabilities are. Certainly, it doesn’t take a great deal of training to go around and beat civilians or shoot civilians.”
He says they do know that if they are caught by the opposition that their lives are at stake. And if reports from Libya are true, suspected mercenaries have not been treated kindly.
He says there can be a big difference between those called mercenaries and those called contractors, like those we’ve seen in Iraq working on behalf of the U.S.
Brown says, “People that Gadhafi has certainly don’t have the training or the capabilities as the people who’ve been hired as contractors. Because whether you approve or disapprove of contractors, it’s been my experience that these people for the most part are very well trained, or they wouldn’t be hired.”
Robert Brown has been the editor of Soldier of Fortune Magazine since its founding 35 years ago.
>via: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/decapua-africa-mercenaries-25feb11...
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African viewpoint: Colonel's continent?
In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, filmmaker and columnist Farai Sevenzo ponders Libya's relationship with the rest of Africa.
To lose one dictator as the year began may have been fortuitous, to lose two and a possible third in the space of three months seems miraculous.
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He had no qualms about pitching his tent in our capitals”
The desert winds of change blowing across North Africa are howling a firestorm in the direction of the conundrum that is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and Africans are reeling from the speed of it all.
In the theatre of these revolutions, the man currently occupying centre stage has more reason than others to take up the interests of Africans, and so the death throes of his 42-year-old regime are reverberating across an entire continent.
The colonel's theatrical character seems to have walked out of the pages of macabre fiction, and as the years passed, the character came closer to a caricature of the absolute dictator than to the memory of the 27-year-old captain who took Libya kicking and screaming into the second half of the 20th Century, then remained stuck there well into the 21st.
Tunisia's former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali loved and exploited his Parisian connections and kept his distance from Africans; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was caught in the net of the Middle East and its conflicts - and was in any case paranoid about black Africa ever since gunmen fired on his motorcade in Ethiopia's Addis Ababa.
The colonel, though, embraced us.
African portfolio
Libya's wealth has allowed Col Gaddafi to foster close ties with African leaders
He had no qualms about pitching his tent in our capitals and could drive his motorcade across several African borders to attend a conference or just to dazzle us with oil money as an array of designer shaded curvaceous bodyguards attended to his needs.
A brief examination of the colonel's African connections reveals a deep-rooted intent to forge ties with the rest of Africa.
Having come to power in that decade of former UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's "winds of change" speech, there was not a liberation movement that had not received his backing.
From Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa to Namibia's freedom fighters, plus every rebel without a cause like Sierra Leone's Foday Sankoh to Liberia's Charles Taylor, Uganda's late Idi Amin and even that country's present leader Yoweri Museveni - they have all supped at his revolutionary table or taken his money and weapons.
Only the other year Mr Gaddafi was the chairman of the African Union, and has almost single-handedly funded its existence for decades.
As head of this largely mute and ineffective brotherhood of presidents, the colonel pushed for a United Africa over which he would preside.
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Turkish workerWe had 70-80 people from Chad working for our company - they were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: 'You are providing troops for Gaddafi'”
His money had of course spent a long time constructing such a possibility.
Libyan investments in Africa through its huge reserves of oil are legion and the soaring price for this black gold enabled the Libya Africa Portfolio for Investments (LAP) to set up a "sovereign wealth fund" in 2006.
And then there is Oil Libya Holding company, the Libyan Arab Company for African Investments, Afriqiyah Airlines and a host of other portfolios.
Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe, Uganda, is 100% owned by the Libyan sovereign wealth fund, the Novotel Umubano in Kigali is 60% owned by the Libyans; there is real estate in Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, South Africa; brand new mosques in East and West Africa have been built with the colonel's cash.
Did the Africans accept him as a new Kwame Nkrumah, the founding father of Africa's independence movement, or did his money know no ideology?
It is no wonder then, that the colonel's dilemma is making headlines all over the continent.
Questions have been tabled in the Zimbabwean parliament as to whether Zimbabwean forces are involved in propping up Mr Gaddafi's last stand, even as 46 people are languishing in a Harare jail for watching videos of the Egyptian uprising.
Venomous hatredRumours are everywhere of a recruitment drive for mercenaries in Nigeria and Ghana.
And now, as things fall apart, the colonel is defiantly holding on with many reports suggesting that Africans, black Africans, are the crutches on which his depleted army is now hobbling.
Thousands of foreigners are trying to flee the chaos in Libya
In the past week, the phrase "African mercenaries" has been repeated by Libyan citizens and rolling news, eyewitnesses to the violence in Tripoli have spat the word "African" with venomous hatred.
Part of the Libyan story now is the scramble to escape of Turks, Germans, Indians, Englishmen, Italians, Malaysians and a host of other nationalities that include black men commonly known as Africans.
In the violence of the last fortnight, the colonel's African connections have only served to rekindle a deep-rooted racism between Arabs and black Africans.
As mercenaries, reputedly from Chad and Mali fight for him, a million African refugees and thousands of African migrant workers stand the risk of being murdered for their tenuous link to him.
One Turkish construction worker told the BBC: "We had 70-80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: 'You are providing troops for Gaddafi.' The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves."
Libya's new forces for change have simply picked up where the colonel left off his bloodletting.
And as the world moves to freeze Libya's assets, they must unpick the intricate web of the colonel's investments and decide what is his and what is Libya's - although in 42 years of absolute power it has never been easy to tell the difference.
Belated noises are now coming from the African Union, condemning the use of violence.
Even that anonymous community made from that meaningless phrase - the international community - now deny ever arming him, and claim there is no evidence that their teargas has been used against protesters, as if teargas floats in the colours of a national flag so we can all know where it was made as we choke.
The forces of change must now hope that Mr Gaddafi's fighting friends evaporate, and he can live out his last days in a tent pitched on a hotel lawn once owned by Libya, or Gaddafi plc; or face the music.
There is no love lost between Africans and Arabs and it definitely does not start with events in Libya; it just provides the best opportunity to clear the Arab country of the despised hue and physiognomy that the African represents. If we Africans are not highly exploitable, we can never be exploited!
Black Africans today have forgotten the first survival lesson taught by our grandparents "Do not eat anything offered to you by strangers on the roadside -- Do not tell reveal your real or family names -- Do not go into their houses even if they offer to slaughter a fat cow. Stay within your family compound and be satsfied with your mother's cooking." What is happening in Libya today is the ancient curse of the leopard -- rather sad that so many innocent people must get caught in this judgment.
Look folks, Gaddafi current plight is a classic case of chicken coming home to roost. For more than a decade this demon has exported violence in poor African countries. He is the main purveyor of voilence on the continent and his bloodletting extends from Central Africa (Chad) to the West (Liberia). He did not hesitate to lend hand to those who sought to destabilize a peaceful and functioning government. Little did he know that one day his dirty deeds will catch up with him. His time is up and he must heed the will of the Libyan people and leave.
I come from Sierra Leone now a US citizen. The reason why I left my country in 1998 was because of the war. I bore the blunt of that war and allegedly financed by Ghadafi. I want him gone.and tried for terrorism and crimes against humanity.
Although the name Gaddafi is a known name in Africa, but its a name that evokes diverse opinions within the African continent. To this day Africans find it hard to reconcile what he claim to stand for with his actions over the years. The idea of playing and parading himself as the eagle and leader of a revolution that is very unpopular among Africans would have found a better meaning, if he had sincerely tried to build his country beyond himself. At this moment that he is under the flood-light, we can't but see him better and understand what he is made of, just as many Africans now feel a sense of shame to have had him as the AU chairman not long ago. If Kwame Nkrumah left a legacy, what can we say that Gaddafi built over the ages that are not crumbling even now that he is still alive.
When I was growing up I first read a comic book of his revolution at the age of ten. Since then as dictators came and went.Colonel Gadaffi has made an impression on me as a Man who truely loves Africa! Infact Libyans could complain that he spent their wealth on other africans! but if those Africans he helped put in power built schools and mosques and many forms of development just to show that Africans can for themselves. if those africans would abandon him to be swallowed by Western Impellialism and their lies and just let him go as a dictator in the name of the so called democracy...if they could do that...they should receive the the names and fate that the western press gives our beloved leader. If there is any one person who was half as generous as he is let them step forward.
This man has been accused of many things and listening to the West who just recently were happy to accept his generous hospitality, you will think that he is worst than Hitler. The racism and contemptuous attitudes of Arabs towards black African has made a natural sceptic of any overtures from them to forge a closer link with black Africa but Gaddafi was an exception. Yes, he may have been implicated in destabilising some African governments but his contribution to freedom courses throughout the continent and beyond and his investment should not be overlooked. When the West ignored the young military junta in The Gambia following the coup in 1994, he embraced them and supported them with cash and one of the biggest hotels in Banjul belongs to Libya but I now learnt that his former friend Yaya Jammeh is calling for him to go. How time changes?
Sure Gaddafi contributed many unwise, ill advice adventures in the African continent including the destruction of Somali nation. And the Libya people are now taking the same road, using same violent as Gaddafi killing innocent African people in Libya. In my small hometown in northern Somalia there are confirm reports that three Somali refuge from this area were shot dead in Tripoli.
Prinston has said it all.Western imperialism is at work here.I think we should support Ghadaffi because when we saw protesters in Tunisia and Egypt they were not carrying weapons but these CIA and MI6 and whatever else Propped agents are carrying weapons how can we tell who kills who in Libya. Ghaddafi is a sitting Leader so he has the right to stop the destabilization of his government.Will the American or any of these hypocritical governments allow it's citizen to protest like that without trying overtly or covertly to control the stages? in fact any government will try to control the stage and work for it's and the people's interest?
The lunatic muamur gaddafi,who has been in power for 42 year,yet his quest for power make him to be killing his own people like fowls.It' very unfortunate and regretable that he is using black poor african to carry out this mass killing with europeans weopons. Illitracy and lack of moral convictions has made this mad man to order airstrikes against peaceful protesters.It is not a suprise that it took italian prime minister long before he condem his ally use of heavy bombardment aginst women and children protesters,just because of oil.
To many an African, black African, who has had to endure the brunt of Gaddafi's numerous escapades characterized pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric and sponsored violence, the sooner he exits the better. for Libya, Africa/the region and world at large. But even as the desired hastened departure of Gaddafi assumes the dominant thinking of his many victims and 'ideological' (that is, if he ever had any ideology) nemesis/critics, the potential reply of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, including the post Hussein Irag, should never be relegated with a whiff to the unconscious, even subconscious. How naive to believe, even wish, that four unbroken decades of consolidated megalomania and active promotion of international terrorism, the latter with the real prospect of Gaddafi having to account for his egregious crimes, will he exit the comfort and protection offered by him being at Libya's helm without a flexing of the muscle. Any surprise he and his sons have hollered to 'fight to the death,' and 'in rivers of blood!' Without a doubt, it is the expected fallout form all this for Libya, Africa/the region and world security, and how it can be managed, that must now actively exercise world thinking. This should be contemplated against the backcloth of the reported plethora of weapons of violence at Gaddafi's disposal, even as he continues to be cornered by his long oppressed masses. Gaddafi's potential to deliberately proliferate such lethal weapons of violenc, as is already evident in Libya, and the implications for Libya, the region and the world should not be taken with a wait-and-see attitude. Ignoring that will sooner rather than later be at our collective peril. Hope not! That said, for now it seems the chickens have come home to roost for Moamar Gaddafi.
It is so sad to hear mute responses from alot of African Governments. Not that they have not formed up there opinions but its largely because alot of these Governemnts have long dismissed him as jocker. Angola for example ruled by another dictator sitting on an oil economy Mr. Jose Eduardo dos Santos has never paid attention to who Gaddafi is. And this factor and attitude reflects in the Angola people as well. Angolan people are busy rebuilding their country. Angola was the only country which infact slowed Gaddadfi's program of wanting to declare the African Union as one nation at the time Gaddafi had wanted. The Angolan President is also heavily involved in Ivory Coast and yet the International community does not seem to know as to how handle Mr. Santos. Oil money I guese!1What is sad however is the fact that while Libya is experiencing all these changes, Angola is sinking deeper and no one would ever attempt to stand up to Jose Eduardo dos Santos.The only good thing is the fact that Gaddafi is going down, and as to whether the remaining dictators ( Santos, Biye and Museveni) have anything to learn will be a wait and see situation. Ultimately they should all go!!!!
Gadhafi claims he has no official post, just a leader or patron of the revolution. Then when the noose began to tighten around his neck he said he was like the Queen of the United Kingdom; he had no real power. So I said how amazing and ironic is that this guy overthrew a monarchy only to install himself as a secular monarch, actually in the process of preparing his son, Saif-Islam, to take over him, the Syrian way. It is high pass noon since he should have been gone long ago. This guy has had a hand in many destabilizing events on the continent, including Sierra Leone, Liberia, The Gambia, Chad, Burkina Faso and even my country Ghana where he sponsored the 1981 coup of JJ Rawlings. The murderous Rawlings regime stayed for 19years before he and his party were kicked out by the people. Suddenly Gadhafi's time is up, and he has nowhere to run to but to stay, fight and die. He will get his death wish, in the next few days. But then he is not alone, there are a lot of Gadhafis on the African continent who came by coups and metamorphosed into undeclared life-presidents. This is the reason for the muted response coming from the African continent, as no leader has been bold enough to call on Gadhafi to step down. Probably they are praying incessantly that he survives and prevails over the forces aligned against him. Fear is that the wind of change that is currently sweeping across North Africa might turn southerly very soon to blow them away. The signs are written on the wall. The Africans have lost their fear of dictators. When Gadhafi made his coup in 1969, Barack Obama was only six years and in Grade 1. That is how long ago. Game over.
In Africa even a ten year-old has ever heard about this man whose name is synonymous with violence.I agree with the colleagues who have correctly stated that the man destabilished the whole continent by interfering in internal affairs of countries.Like Napoleon Bonaparte he has an insatiable appetite for power and glory.It is the search for these that has consumed all his energies in pushing for an impractical 'United States of Africa' with no one but himself as the omnipotent leader and his fellow lunatic- Mugabe as his deputy. Ugandans were surprised when this demon once came to Kampala and advised Museveni not to leave power for as he put it 'Revolutionaries do not retire' and Museveni has taken up this advice since ! He even had the guts to promote Museveni's son to a military rank of his choice, forgetting that Uganda is not Libya where he is a god. I really dont see him surviving for another week. It is time to leave Libya or commit suicide. Other African dictators who have glued themselves in presidency should better watch out because popular protests cannot be stopped by the barrels of bombs.
This demon only turned his sights south toward black Africa after his Arab brothers refused to back him up when Reagan bombed him in 1986. The results were catastrophic with his export of wars and its resultant carnage to our people. I watched with disgust his feeble attempts to correct his sins by giving handouts of his iol money to our governments in Sierra Leone in an effort to make ammends. I was praying that our leaders tell him to keep his blood stained largese and "Go to hell" inspite of our poverty. The guy is comical and I hope he is toppled to face justice for all his crimes.
What amazes me most is the fact that Gaddafi still believes that killing largely unarmed Libyan citizens is good for 'Libya'. I am inclined to believe that it has always been about himself and not Libya or Africa that drives his policies. What kind of a man is he that, instead of accepting that there is more to life than Gaddafi, would rather burn the whole country to spite those that dare challenge his supposed invincibility? He is certainly raising the stacks and I hope that he is also prepared to fall spectaculary and hard enough for the sake of our history. Does anyone remember a GREAT AND SEEMINGLY INVINCIBLE man who was later pulled by his whiskers from a foul-smelling rat hole? The right thing for Gaddafi and his family to do is to stop the killings, gather whatever loot they have hoarded and say their goodbys to Libya. We all know that he is only a human being who has been addicted to power and pampering so much that he now believes that losing those would be the same as being dead. I feel for the fellow innocent black Africans who have found themselves in a hostile Arab community that had never accepted the fact that they also are Africans. The fact that they can prove that they are peaceful economic migrants will not save them as they are a race that had always been dispised by the Arabs. Unlike the fortunate nationalities that are being whisked to safety by the rich governments and countries, the black Africans have to find their own ways of escaping. On the way, they should be praying that they do not come across any groups of Arabs.
Arab slave trade on the African continent left a lot of wounds in the minds of those aware of this dark history, from the kidnapping of African Women and Children, to the Genocide of Africans by Oman Arab slave traders, Arab states have been shy in apologising about their continent's role in brutalising Africa.The case of Sudan where an Arab led Government has continued to practice enslavement of Black Africans is a constant reminder in the minds of Black Activists that we need to challenge and hold accountable the Arab states role in Africa colonisation and enslavement on their own continent.
It serves Quadafi right. He is reaping what he's sown. In Ghana we believe in an old saying, "just prior to the goat"s death, it struggles". This is the end of Quadafi. He is done, gone, finished. This is the man who supported Jerry Rawlings of Ghana to topple a legitimate regime in Ghana in 1981. He used Libyan money to finance such useless actions throughout the African continent. Just like his son said, plans A, B and C are to live and die in Libya. This is absolutely true but I promise them, they have a few weeks to live if these plans work out for them.
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