Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

It was in the days of 1969 when Col. Gaddafi seized power in a bloodless military coup , He was a very charismatic fellow, a leading political philosopher, developing something called ‘the third universal theory, outline in his Green Book, and the enforcer of democracy to some extent. He established what he called ‘ Al-Jamahiriyya’ which in English denotes ‘ Rule By the Masses’.
Muammar was an eager disciple of president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. his primary objective was to attack the unfair economic legacy of foreign dominion , in which he started with OIL…During his last days He said “ I did all I could to give my people houses, hospital, schools, and when they were hungry I give them food, I even turn Benghazi in to a farm land from the desert, I did all I could to help you understand the concept of real democracy where people committee run our country, but still some selfish one told Americans and other visitors that they needed democracy, and freedom, never realizing that it was a cut throat system…but they were enchanted with those words, never realizing that there was no free medicine, no free hospital, no free housing, no free education, and no free food except when people had to beg, or go to long lines to get soup,…today they want to kill me and take away our freedoms and ways of life and replace it with American style thievery “capitalism.”… I must take my make my stand , and if Allah wishes .i shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farm land ,with food and health and even allow us to help our African brothers Arab brothers, and sisters to work here with us ,I do not wish to die, but if comes to that to save this land, my people, all the thousand who are all my children then, so be it…” The following statements are extracts from one of the last speeches delivered by Col. Muammar Gaddafi the then leader of Libya.
I wrote this little because, I was deeply baffled and mentally frenzied/agitated when I heard of the tragic death of this African Hero, I stand to be corrected however.(emphatically, Col Muammar was a Hero for me and many of my likes out there, like Jean-Paul Pougala, who previously wrote on similar topic, and who ideas had served as a root this note. www.rightsmonitoring.com).

Retrospective analysis of Gaddafi’s African, and the Western relations .
I do share the view that most of us do not know what does the acronym RASCOM represents? For the sake of our discourse, RASCOM is Regional African Satellite Communication Organization, it origins is traced from 1992 , and was established by 45 Africans Nations, so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs on the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations.
According to reports, the World Bank, IMF, the USA, and Europe made a promise for 14 years and never realized it. Gaddafi put an end to these fruitless requests to the western ‘sponsors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan leader put US$300 million on the table, the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.
China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010.(http://www.rightsmonitoring.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/04/africa).
This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere US$300 million changed the life of an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of US$500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential manner.
Why the west supports regional unity , instead of United Africa?
To destabilize and destroy the African union which was gradually bending dangerously (for the West) towards a United States of Africa under the guiding hand of Col. Gaddafi, the European Union first tried, unsuccessfully, to create the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM). North Africa somehow had to be cut off from the rest of Africa, using the old tired racist clichés of the 18th and 19th centuries ,which claimed that Africans of Arab origin were more evolved and civilized than the rest of the continent. This idea failed because Gaddafi refused to buy into it. He soon understood what game was being played when
only a handful of African countries were invited to join the Mediterranean grouping without informing the African Union but inviting all 27 members of the European Union.
What African leaders fail to understand is what Col Gaddafi understood, “that as long as the European Union continues to finance the African Union, the status quo will remain, because no real independence will be in Africa”. This is why the European Union has encouraged and financed regional groupings in Africa.
Was Gaddafi Really A Pan African ?
To a greater extend I can say yes, for most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. For five long years, no plane could touch down in Libya because of the embargo. One needed to take a plane to the Tunisian city of Jerba and continue by road for five hours to reach Ben Gardane, cross the border and continue on a desert road for three hours before reaching Tripoli. The other solution was to go through Malta, and take a night ferry on ill-maintained boats to the Libyan coast. A hellish journey for a whole people, simply to punish one man…

Are the west really , democratic then Gaddafi’s Libya?

The answer to this question may varies from one person to another person, but let us look at the issue from a diversified perspective. Flashing back to March 19th 2003, this was the day that President George Bush began bombing Iraq under the pretext of bringing democracy. Again on the 19th Of March 2011, exactly eight years later to the day, it was the French president’s turn to rain down bombs over Libya, once again claiming it was to bring democracy. Nobel peace prize-winner and US President Obama says unleashing cruise missiles from submarines is to drive out the dictator and introduce democracy.
The question that anyone with even minimum intelligence cannot help asking is the following: Are countries like France, England, the USA, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Poland who defend their right to bomb Libya on the strength of their self-proclaimed democratic status really democratic?
To answer this again, I would like to say NO, basing on the logic propounded by Jean-Paul Pougala, a renowned Cameroonian-Italian Academic and investigative journalist, who wrote ”… for the plain and simple reason that democracy doesn’t exist.” He continues by saying, that, Rousseau sets out the following four conditions for a country to be labeled a democratic and according to these Gaddafi’s Libya is far more democratic than the USA, France and the others claiming to export democracy:

1. The State: The bigger a country, the less democratic it can be. According to Rousseau, the state has to be extremely small so that people can come together and know each other. Before asking people to vote, one must ensure that everybody knows everyone else, otherwise voting will be an act without
any democratic basis.

The Libyan state is based on a system of tribal allegiances, which by definition, group people together in small entities. The democratic spirit is much more present in a tribe, a village than in a big country, simply because people know each other, share a common life rhythm which involves a kind of self-regulation or even self-censorship in that the reactions and counter reactions of other members impacts on the group.

From this perspective, it would appear that Libya fits Rousseau’s conditions better than the USA, France and Great Britain, all highly urbanized societies where most neighbors don’t even say hello to each other and therefore don’t know each other even if they have lived side by side for twenty years.

2. Simplicity in customs and behavioral patterns are also essential if one is to avoid spending the bulk of the time debating legal and judicial procedures in order to deal with the multitude of conflicts of interest inevitable in a large and complex society. Western countries define
themselves as civilized nations with a more complex social structure whereas Libya is described as a primitive country with a simple set of customs. This aspect too indicates that Libya responds better to Rousseau’s democratic criteria than all those trying to give lessons in democracy.
3. Equality in status and wealth: A look at the Forbes 2010 list shows who the richest people in each of the countries currently bombing Libya are and the difference between them and those who earn the lowest salaries in those nations; a similar exercise on Libya will reveal that in terms of wealth distribution, Libya has much more to teach than those fighting it now, and not the contrary. So here too, using Rousseau’s criteria, Libya is more democratic than the nations arrogantly pretending to bring democracy. In the USA, 5 per cent of the population owns 60 per cent of the national wealth, making it the most unequal and unbalanced society in the world.

4. No luxuries: according to Rousseau there can’t be any luxury if there is to be democracy. Luxury, he says, makes wealth a necessity which then becomes a virtue in itself, it, and not the welfare of the people becomes the goal to be reached at all cost, ‘Luxury corrupts both the rich and the poor , the first , which is the rich , through possession and the latter through envy; it makes the
nation soft and prey to vanity; it distances people from the State and enslaves them, making them a slave to opinion.’

Is there more luxury in France than in Libya? The reports on employees committing suicide because of stressful working conditions even in public or semi-public companies, all in the name of maximizing profit for a minority and keeping them in luxury, happen in the West, not in Libya.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if the Libyans revolted. What is bad is to imposed on a group of people your style of life, which give less credence to their ways of life (culture). And Rousseau concludes: ‘Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium’ – translation “If gods were people, they would govern themselves democratically. Such a perfect government is not applicable to human beings.” So to claim that the killing of Col. Gaddafi is for the good of Libya is a hoax/trick, Jean-Paul Pougala, concluded.
What was symbolic, in 2009 when Col. Gaddafi took out pages from the UN Charter ?
At the 2009 General Assembly, Col. Gaddafi delivered a very long speech, and at certain time scrammed/get out pages from the UN charter, for me this was very symbolic, for Africans and the world at large. He simply stressed the profound unequal relationship with in the United Nation, “ how can it be called United Nation when only five countries can decide the fate/destiny of the entire world?” The Col. Tried to make us African understand the need for reform in the United Nation Agenda. Can you remember for how long Nigeria and South Africa had been lingering for seats in the UN? Maybe an alternative for a change could be the use the Chinese method . That is all 50 African nations should quit the United Nations and only return if their longstanding demand is finally met, a seat for the entire African federation or nothing. This non violent method is the best weapon of justice available to the poor and weak Africa. Africa could simply quit the United Nations because this organization, by its very structure and hierarchy, is at the greater service of the most powerful and lesser service to the weak.
Today’s events are evocative/memory of what happened with China in the past. The international community chose Taiwan to be the sole representative of the Chinese people instead of Mao’s China. It took 26 years when on October 1971, for the UN to pass resolution 2758 which all Africans should read to put an end to human folly. China was admitted and on its terms it refused to be a member if it didn’t have a veto right. When the demand was met and the resolution tabled, it still took a year for the Chinese foreign minister to respond in writing to the UN Secretary General on 29 September 1972, a letter which didn’t say yes or thank you, but spelt out guarantees required for China’s dignity to be respected. This is the type of vision that Col. Muammar Gaddafi saw, and spoke of, and was gradually engulfing Africa with this cliché/message, this was also a reason for the west to erode him. Col. Muammar Gaddafi was a human, for erring/making mistake is of our natures, We categorically accept the fact that he could have done so many extreme things which are inevitable especially being a leader for an African and an Arab nation, but nevertheless let us all grade him as an African Hero, a man who opened our eyes and minds publicly for the understanding of western policies against our continent, May his soul rest in peace and light perpetual shines upon it, May Allah/God prepare for him a better resting place in order to recompense his services he render to us all…
Warning to the Arab League and the African Union, “ Know that Saif-Al Islam, the Son of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, is an asset/benefit, not only to Africa but also to the Arab World, we ask that you intervene for an asylum for him, or ensure a peaceful trial which should not be sectarian/bias in nature.