Libya: House of cards collapsing
April 26, 2013, 8:48 pmNo sooner had crude bombs rocked Boston than France received a rude shock. On Tuesday, a car bomb went off near the French embassy in Tripoli. No one has claimed responsibility for the dastardly blast but the message those behind it have sent is loud and clear: Libya is not safe for westerners.
The western governments instrumental in ousting Gaddafi may have thought they would be able to call the shots in that oil rich African nation. In fact, when British Prime Minister David Cameron and the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Tripoli immediately after its capture by the anti-Gaddafi forces, they were given a rousing welcome. But, their house of cards is collapsing with Libya sliding towards anarchy.
The puppet regime in Tripoli has proved to be too weak to tackle the problem of lawlessness vis-à-vis the powerful militias who ousted, captured and executed Gaddafi. In place of one eccentric dictator and his cabal, the Libyans now have thousands of bloodthirsty monsters indulging in robbery, torture, killings and rape, to contend with. They are apparently in the same predicament as those Sri Lankans who secured the support of the Dutch to get rid of the Portuguese, a blunder which has been likened to swapping ginger for chillies.
When US Ambassador Chris Stevens and four others were butchered last November in a mob attack on their diplomatic mission, Benghazi was declared unsafe for westerners, who were asked to evacuate that city, where the anti-Gaddafi rebellion started. Now it is patently clear that no part of Libya is safe for them. This is the price the West has had to pay for its ill-conceived strategy to further its geopolitical and economic interests by backing the Arab Spring which religious fanatics used as a Trojan horse not only in Libya but also in other countries where regime changes have been effected through uprisings, like Tunisia and Egypt. Terrorists in the garb of rebels who received arms, ammunition and funds from the West and consolidated their power in Libya through their bloody uprising against Gaddafi are now all out to get rid of the foreign powers with a hidden agenda. This is a worrisome proposition not only for Libya in the grip of terrorists but also the entire world as terrorism like a contagion transcends geographical boundaries. Afghanistan is a case in point.
French President Francois Hollande has called upon the Libyan authorities to ‘shed the fullest light’ on the bomb blast, ‘so that the perpetrators are identified and brought to justice.’ This is a tall order for the beleaguered Libyan leaders fearing for their own safety. Bringing terrorists to justice is a task that not even the US-led forces have been able to achieve in their war on terror. In Afghanistan, Taliban and al-Qaeda responsible for crimes against the West are far from tamed even after a decade of fighting and have demonstrated their ability to strike at will by killing a young US diplomat and several others in a recent attack.
Prime Minister Ali Zidan is in an unenviable position. His attempts to recruit the militias into the Libyan army which he is trying to raise from scratch have failed and in what could be described as a strange turn of events he has sought help from the US, the UK, France etc to fight the former rebels they used to eliminate Gaddafi. It is rather unlikely that the ex-fighters enjoying unbridled freedom at present will ever want to join the army and lead regimented lives.
It looks as if Libya had gone the same way as Afghanistan. The choice the Western governments have in that country seems to be between pulling out their diplomatic missions and inducting troops to protect them at the risk of being drawn into another imbroglio.
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