Gaddafi’s “United States of Africa”
Muammar Gaddafi the Arab nationalist “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” of Libya has threatened to abandon his political connections to Africa in favor of an orientation to the Arab world and Europe if his call for a “United States of Africa” continues to be ignored. His threat, which would see the estimated $5bn Libya has “invested” in black Africa withdrawn, comes in the run up to an African Union “summit” in Ethiopia, which as a Christian nation serves as a regional bulwark against Islam. “The (meeting) will be decisive. It will either put an end to stalling and time wasting on the unification of Africa or prove there is a conspiracy which vetoes African unity,” Gaddafi declared. While Gaddafi identified allies in Francophone Africa, he was not hopeful for progress from other states.
Gaddafi has invested decades in his dream, which would see Africa united as a rival of the US and European Union. He spent countless amounts of cash supplying various “liberation movements” in black Africa, from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which overthrew the white government of Rhodesia and installed Robert Mugabe, to the African National Congress of South Africa. He also fought a long proxy war http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2252 dreams, and made his peace with Europe.Neoconservatives, especially in America, remain fearful of Gaddafi and his influence in the Third World. This fear may be behind the claim, made through the mouth of an Iraqi occupation government official, that Gaddafi’s son and heir presumptive, Saif al Islam (“Sword of Islam”) al Gaddafi, had something to do with a recent attack in Mosul that levelled fifty buildings and killed at least 38 people. This would put Saif in beed with al Qaeda, which sounds similar to claims about al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; despite his blood curdling name, Saif and the Libyan regime are, llike Saddam was, secularists with nothing in common with Islamists like al Qaeda. In fact, former British MI5 agent David Shayler claimed that UK intelligence used Libyan Islamists in a failed assassination of Saif’s father. Saif has been touted in the European press as a modernizer who sports fashionable Western clothes and intervened to have Bulgarian medic accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV freed.
Gaddafi’s dream of a “united Africa” is not as quixotic as it seems, and rests on a long historical relationship between the Arab world and the blacks south of the Sahara. Since time immemorial the Arabs have used black Africa as a vast pool of slave labor. The Arabic word “abd” is used to mean both “black” and “slave,” and even today, in such places as Darfur, blacks are preyed on by Arab speaking nomads. But the Arab attitude towards blacks is occasionally paternalistic; his offer of $1bn to the Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan was blocked by the US government.
According to Arab tradition, a person’s lineage is calculated through the male line, and so many parts of Africa have black ethnic groups who look down on other blacks and serve as reservoirs of sympathy for the Arab world. Additionally, Islam is the fastest growing religion in Africa, another reserve of Arab support.
Gaddafi has long had expansionist designs elswhere, from Malta to the Phillipines. Like his idol, Egypt’s Gamel Nasser, Gaddafi dreams of a united “Arab Nation,” with himself as caliph, and on a recent visit to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2635 went to sites connected with the long Islamic occupation of Spain, in the company of native Spaniards who have converted to Islam. Gaddafi has boasted that Europe’s insane immigration policies will eventually fulfill the Muslim dream of an Islamic Europe.
Gaddafi’s vision for Africa may be fuelled by quiet support from his new European allies. While the West keeps Africa alive thanks to food and other aid, direct political interference has been muted since the end of the colonial era. Into this vacuum Red China has moved. One third of Chinese oil needs come from sources in Africa, and they have invested heavily there, especially in pipelines and other infrastructure.
Gaddafi may be making his demands in the knowledge that he would be serving as a proxy for Europe, partly as a check against China. The Europeans have already enlisted his support in another key area, stemming the flow of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3041 from Africa. Italy and Libya have agreed to set up joint coastal patrols to interdict alien traffic in the Mediterranean, and the Libyans maintain large refugee camps where they detain those they catch. An airlift system has been organized, which repatriates the immigrants. Illegal aliens, many of whom have settled in Libya, bring the same problems they do wherever they settle. A Libyan diplomat in Nigeria was quoted as saying that “some [illegals who can’t get a job, get involved in drug peddling, prostitution and armed robbery, which our society does not like.” From Tripoli to Tuscon the problem is the same.
Gaddafi is not known for clear thinking across the board. In his “Madman of the Middle East” phase Gaddafi enlisted the services of a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2838 in Chicago to launch guerilla war inside America, while the various terrorist attacks, like the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, the 1984 shooting of London policewoman Yvonne Fletcher, and the 1986 La Belle discotheque blast in Berlin were monumental blunders. But his intended audience in those operations was in the Third World. His latest pronouncements may be intended for European eyes and ears, and Gaddafi is one to watch.