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

a meeting with him at the US embassy:
“Jibril welcomed American companies, universities and hospitals to
participate in this endeavour [of restructuring the economy]... According
to Jibril, there are 11,000 development projects in Libya... The NEDB’s
role in these projects is to ‘pave the way’ for private sector development,
and to create a strategic partnership between private companies and the
government.” (Full cable: 09TRIPOLI386)
Omar Mokhtar El-Hariri has been made Minister of Military Affairs. He was
involved in the initial 1969 coup against the monarchy that brought
Gaddafi to power. However, he was also involved in a plot to overthrow
Gaddafi in 1975, a clear attempt to stop Gaddaf’s programme of
nationalisations. After the coup failed, he was arrested, served 15 years in
prison until 1990 when he was placed under house arrest. When the revolt
erupted he sided with the rebels in the east.
As we can see, the lawyers and community activists, youth and so on, who
were part of the initial Interim Council seem to have been pushed to one
side. Of the four ministers so far announced we have two from the Gaddafi
camp, two from the reactionary part of the opposition, but all of them
stooges of imperialism. Some of them hark back to the early days of the
Gaddafi regime, when it was an openly bourgeois military dictatorship.
None of these can even be classed as “genuine democrats”. These are all
people whom the US “know and trust”. All these people are direct agents
of imperialism and are against the revolution.
It is precisely this change within the opposition, with its direct appeals to
imperialist powers, that has strengthened Gaddafi. We have seen reports
of people saying that they are against Gaddafi the tyrant, but if foreign
powers bomb Libya they will stop fighting against him and join him in the
fight against the imperialist aggressor. A recent report in The Independent
explains that, “The conduct of those who should be allies nearer home is
also causing problems for the rebels. At some towns and villages, residents
turned against them and fought alongside loyalist troops.”
Imperialism manoeuvres behind scenes to defend its own interests
It is clear that imperialism has been manoeuvring behind the scenes to
place trusted stooges in positions of command in the areas that have been
liberated from Gaddafi’s forces. In all this the initial revolution has been
snuffed out. We are no longer dealing here with a revolution to overthrow
Gaddafi. It has become a pure imperialist aggression to remove one
reactionary regime and replace it with a more pliant one.
If the government in the east should successfully come to power in the
whole country it will not produce the regime that the masses wanted. It is
sufficient to look at the Karzai regime in Afghanistan or the Maliki regime
in Iraq to see what kind of regime we could expect to see in Libya. Any
regime that comes to power on the back of imperialist bayonets cannot be
a regime that solves the burning social and economic problems of the
working masses. It cannot even guarantee genuine “bourgeois democracy”.
It would be a regime in which the different factions and groupings,
including the various tribal leaders, would vie for power and influence. It
would be a corrupt regime, no better than that of Gaddafi’s.
The idea has been raised by some that this is a “war for oil”. Oil is a factor
in the situation, but to limit one’s analysis to this would be simplistic to
say the least, as imperialism already had access to Libyan oil, as the many
lucrative contracts granted by the Gaddafi regime to foreign multinational
oil corporations testify.