NATO War Crimes in Libya

In March 2011, a dinghy packed with 72 black Africans fleeing the NATO bombing of Libya and the poverty and racist persecution they had suffered there ran out of fuel and drifted at sea for two weeks. The boat’s desperate occupants sent out repeated distress calls to nearby NATO ships. The imperialist military commanders left the refugees to die of starvation and thirst.

Only nine survived. When they eventually made it to Europe, their harrowing story was picked up by the London Guardian. They described how, within hours of the first distress signal, a military helicopter dropped off some bottles of water and a few packets of biscuits before disappearing over the horizon. Days later, after half the occupants had already died, the boat drifted so close to a large military vessel that the refugees could see sailors on the deck taking photos of them. Frantically appealing for help, the despairing passengers held aloft bodies of the dead, but the warship simply pulled away.

This March 29, the Council of Europe, which includes representatives of 47 capitalist countries, issued a report on its investigation of the incident, which took place amid the NATO imperialists’ bombing campaign in support of forces arrayed against the regime of Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi. The Council report is a cynical whitewash, blandly concluding that “NATO did not fully take up its responsibilities” to save the refugees’ lives.

Led by the U.S., France and Britain, the NATO war against Libya was a stark illustration of the workings of the imperialist system, in which a handful of advanced capitalist countries terrorize and subjugate the world’s weaker and more backward societies in the pursuit of spheres of exploitation. It was sanctioned by the United Nations—an assemblage of imperialist murderers, their victims and accomplices. Some 1,500 refugees from Libya died last year trying to make it to Europe. Citing the succession of boats loaded with refugees that sank in a small sea packed with NATO warships, we wrote at the time: “This cannot be called anything but mass murder” (“Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya,” WV No. 981, 27 May 2011).

Before the imperialist attack, Libya was being racked by what was a low-intensity civil war between Qaddafi’s bourgeois regime and an imperialist-backed opposition based in the east of the country, heavily overlaid by tribal and regional divisions. In that conflict, the proletariat had no side. However, with the beginning of the NATO bombing on 19 March 2011, the civil war became subordinated to imperialist military intervention. The anti-Qaddafi forces—a collection of former Qaddafi henchmen, monarchists, Islamic fundamentalists, tribal chiefs and others—acted as the ground troops for the imperialists.

From the start of the bombardment, we said that workers around the world should take a stand for the defense of Libya against the imperialist powers, without giving any political support to the Qaddafi regime. We noted that the imperialist intervention, cynically launched in the name of protecting civilians, would slaughter countless men, women and children.

Last month, a UN Commission of Inquiry declared that the “rebels” had engaged in war crimes during the NATO offensive by carrying out such acts as torture of suspected opponents and revenge attacks directed against entire communities. Recurring throughout the litany of atrocities in the UN report are lynchings, beatings and racist abuse directed by the imperialist-backed forces against dark-skinned Libyans and black Africans. Those forces have plumbed new depths in the legacy of racism that was fostered under Qaddafi’s regime, which had subjected black African migrant workers to arbitrary arrest and deportation—and at times outright pogromist attacks—while using them as scapegoats for unemployment and other ills. The rebels, as they seized areas formerly held by the Qaddafi government, carried out their own pogroms against black Africans, whom they labeled as pro-Qaddafi mercenaries.

In one case described in detail by the UN Commission, the Libyan opposition in August 2011 attacked the town of Tawergha southeast of Tripoli and, with the support of NATO bombing, drove out all of its 30,000 residents. These were mainly black descendants of slaves brought by Arab slave-traders to this part of North Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. Much of the town was razed, and the word “slave” was scrawled on the walls of buildings left standing. Refugees from Tawergha were pursued throughout the country, including in refugee camps, and rounded up to be tortured or killed. Scores of Tawerghan men and women told of being forced to crawl on all fours and bark while the rebels called them “dogs” or forced them to acknowledge their tormentors as their slave masters.

The victory of the anti-Qaddafi ground forces was made possible by the campaign of NATO air bombardment—by official count, some 7,700 bombs and missiles were unleashed on the country—that left its own trail of slaughter of civilians. In a single attack on the village of Majer, east of Tripoli, some 34 civilians were slaughtered on 8 August 2011 when NATO warplanes dropped a series of laser-guided, 500-pound bombs on three homes. Contrast that wanton destruction of human life with the imperialists’ painstaking care to avoid the slightest impairment of Libya’s 40 critical oil and gas fields: The only damage to speak of, throughout the entire war, was at an oil field in the east where a transformer got knocked out. The massacre at Majer included a tactic that survivors at several other sites also recounted: NATO bombers would restrike targets minutes after the first attack, thus dropping high-explosive ordnance on doctors and other civilians rushing to aid the wounded. The word for this is terrorism.

Following the capture and gruesome murder of Qaddafi last October, a gloating President Obama proclaimed: “The Libyan people can now celebrate their freedom.” In fact, much of the population has been subjected to an all-sided reign of terror. A provisional government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), oversees the flow of oil, negotiating lucrative contracts with the oil multinationals, and controls the billions in assets of the Qaddafi regime that the imperialists had frozen. Meanwhile, in addition to the NTC’s official army, hundreds of militias and tribal-based groups throughout the country are jostling for power—and a share of the wealth—while gunning down rivals, imprisoning suspected opponents and inflicting hideous tortures on a vast scale.

Reports coming from some Western bourgeois liberal organizations offer a glimpse of the atrocities. A January 26 article by Amnesty International titled “Libya: Deaths of Detainees Amid Widespread Torture” reported on the torture of Libyans and migrant workers from sub-Saharan African countries being carried out in detention centers in Tripoli and other cities by “officially recognized military and security entities as well [as] by a multitude of armed militias operating outside any legal framework.” Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced in January that it was ceasing operations in the city of Misurata after having treated over 100 people with torture-inflicted wounds, since detainees were being brought for medical treatment simply to make them fit for further torture sessions. Since MSF pulled out, local medics have continued treating torture victims. One told of seeing nine prisoners whose genitalia had been cut off (Associated Press, 3 March).

The perpetrators of these acts represent the “free Libya” forces that were hailed in Washington, London, Paris and other imperialist capitals. Echoing the capitalist media in the U.S. and elsewhere, which portrayed the opposition to Qaddafi as the Libyan component of the “Arab Spring,” were reformist leftists, from the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France and the British Socialist Workers Party to the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S. Just two days before the imperialists launched the bombing campaign that the rebel forces had been clamoring for, the ISO posted a 17 March 2011 article on its Web site that enthused over the Libyan “rebellion.”

The ISO subsequently tried to cover its tracks by feigning to discover that, some time after the start of the NATO onslaught, the imperialist-backed rebels unexpectedly became...agents of the imperialists. An article in the ISO’s International Socialist Review (May-June 2011), titled “Libya’s Revolution, U.S. Intervention, and the Left,” declared: “In the short space of a few weeks, it appears that the Libyan opposition...are increasingly putting themselves in a position of providing cover for the Western attempt to roll back the Arab revolution and to maintain the flow of Libyan oil.”

The stark fact is that the ISO & Co. acted as cheerleaders for the Libyan opposition, which never made a secret of their desire for imperialist intervention to back up their drive to oust Qaddafi. Meanwhile, the Workers World Party (WWP) opposed the NATO intervention, but as champions of the nationalist Qaddafi dictatorship, which long disguised its brutal rule as “anti-imperialist.” But the ISO and WWP found unity last spring by joining hands with liberal pacifist groups in building protests against the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations that raised the timeworn reformist appeal for money for jobs and education, not war.

The role of the reformists is to hide the reality that imperialist war crimes are an inevitable part of the same capitalist system that grinds down the working class, black people, immigrants and the poor at home. In opposing imperialist wars and occupations, revolutionary Marxists in the “belly of the beast” fight to forge a workers party that will infuse the proletariat with the understanding of its historic task of overthrowing the capitalist order through socialist revolution.