April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

$16,000 payoff each. After Gaddafi zigzagged to a pro-Western stance in
2004 by demobilising weapons of mass destruction in exchange for closure
on the PanAm airline bombing and subsequent sanctions, some millions of
the family’s ill-gotten wealth were showered on the academic crowd most
favoured by Blair.
Blair’s “Third Way” political advisor, former London School of Economics
director Lord Anthony Giddens, visited the Libyan dictator in 2007,
pronouncing: “As one-party states go, Libya is not especially repressive.
Gaddafi seems genuinely popular… Will real progress be possible only when
Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite. If he is sincere in
wanting change, as I think he is, he could play a role in muting conflict
that might otherwise arise as modernisation takes hold.”
To help “mute conflict”, as Giddens might have it, British weaponry is
mainly being deployed against Libyans in the capital Tripoli, for Gaddafi’s
army seems to have defected nearly everywhere else. Muammar’s second
oldest son (and most likely successor) Saif al-Gaddafi – who has vowed to
“fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” – was awarded a doctoral
degree from the LSE and his foundation then gave £1.5 million to its
Centre for Global Governance.
The centre’s money-blinded director, Professor David Held, remarked at
the time: “It is a generous donation from an NGO committed to the
promotion of civil society and the development of democracy.”
But to clear-sighted LSE students, that funding “was not obtained through
legitimate enterprise but rather through 42 years of shameless exploitation
and brutal oppression of the Libyan people”, as one put it, and so a sit-in
ensued last week to demand that Held transfer the funding back to assist
Gaddafi’s victims.
So far Held has only agreed to halt the North African reform research
underway with the Gaddafi money, not return it, and last week his lame
excuses for the murderous Saif sickened former admirers (myself
included).
In the same spirit, several African civil society organisations and
Archibishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu insisted on February 25 that the
African Union (AU) act against Gaddafi, on grounds that “Article 3 of the
Constitutive Act of the AU lists the promotion of peace, security and
stability on the continent as one of its key objectives. Despite this, the AU
and African governments have been slow to react.”
South African arms to Gaddafi
Sorry, don’t expect peace promotion from the African National Congress
government in South Africa. Late 2010, the chair of South Africa’s National
Conventional Arms Control Committee, justice minister Jeff Radebe,
approved the sale of 100 South African sniper rifles and more than 50,000
rounds of ammunition to Gaddafi. Any references to human rights in the
committee’s deliberations are already considered a joke, but Radebe may
now have some serious bloodstains on his reputation.
The civil society/Tutu statement continued: “The three African countries
that sit on the UN Security Council – South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon – as
representatives of the continent have a special responsibility to ensure
that the people of Libya are protected from grave human rights violations
constituting crimes against humanity.”
But all three also have substantial popular uprisings underway internally.