Libyan Armchair Arab · @ArmchairArab
25th Oct 2011 from Twitlonger
Well perhaps you'd be interested in the view of an actual Libyan who lived in Gaddafi's nightmarish 1984-style world. A Libyan who's relatives were wrongly imprisoned for 20 years, and who wasn't able to reach his family members in the battered city of Misrata for months, always wondering if they were alive or dead. A Libyan who watched video after video of innocent Libyans murdered by Gaddafi's thugs, simple for calling for change after 42 years of brutal dicatorship.
One thing to point out is that Libyans aren't naive, we know all governments operate based on interests. Our next challenge will be to make sure the interets of the nations that help us, match our interests and it's a challenge we'll happily take on, now our 42 year nightmare has ended. Many Libyans were actually opposed to any NATO/UN intervention to start off with, but when we saw that Gaddafi was hellbent on actually wipping cities like Benghazi/Misrata off the map (and there is documented evidence that show he sent these exact orders to his forces) that we realised we needed help.
We would have gladly taken protection form our Arab or African brothers, but the latter especially were too busy kissing Gaddafi's ass. So when a 4km long convoy of heavy weapons, armour, tanks, artillery is headed to destroy your city, and massacre 10s of thousands, you sort of don't get too particular about where help comes from. NATO intervened and the facts on the ground are that they saved lives.
Why did NATO intervene? Well there are a few key reasons, they saw the people were going to keep going and figured they'd ensure their interests by getting in good with the new people running Libya. There was also a public outcry about allowing this kinda massacre to happen so close to europe. From a practical perspective, action in Libya doesn't bare the risk of regional conflagration, not nearly as much as Syria, so that helped. Is it because they love Libyans or arabs or muslims? No, we never thought that. Oh and as for oil, well Gaddafi was the richest man on the planet, he didn't create Microsoft, or the iPhone. He stole our oil, that's how he made money. So we've had OUR oil stolen for about 42 years by Gaddafi and his cronies.
Now let's fast forward to Gaddafi's death. Well the funny thing about that is many people are crying out in the name of due process. But with the same breath, they are trying and judging our brave fighters with cold-blooded murder, without any evidence what so ever. All the videos related to Gaddafi's end, and I've seen them all a few times at least, show Gaddafi being captured with a serious wound to the forehead. There's no video evidence what so ever of any of the fighters shooting him or stabbing him. Certainly they are shouting aggressively, in fact in one video one of the fighters clearly says 'we want him alive, we want him alive'. The assumption that a 69 year old man, would in no way die from a serious, heavily bleeding headwound, on a 3 hour trip to a hospital is pretty far fetched. As for the cause of this headwound, we just don't know that yet. If you really care about due process and innocence before being proved guilty, don't by a hypocrite and condemn our fighters before you have evidence or clear proof.
Finally I'd like to close by the observation that when bin laden was killed, in a brutal way, obviously executed and dumped in the sea, people in the US celebrated. To be fair people also complained, and asked about the fairness of killing bin laden in this way, but no where near the extent of what we're hearing now about Gaddafi. Also, the other point is that when this 'celebration of death' happened in the US, people didn't question the validity of the US democracy, or culture.
The Libyan people have paid a very heavy price for their freedom, those in Syria and Yemen especially know that our arab dictatorships don't bow out easily. One thing I can assure as a Libyan is that we are determined to never, ever let a dictator like gaddafi rule us, we want to build a modern, democratic state, with real freedoms. But we're starting form scratch, and we only announced our liberation this weekend. We won't turn into sweden over night.