“We came, we saw, he died”. It was October 20, 2011 and the former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was in Kabul, Afghanistan. In a break between a series of interviews, she commented as above – smiling and quoting Julius Caesar – the news of the death of the Libyan Rais, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
That 20th October of five years ago, the rebels of the “National Transitional Council” catched the Rais, who was fleeing from Sirte. The images of the capture of Gaddafi circulated around the world. The former Libyan dictator is surrounded by the insurgents who have just captured him. He has disoriented eyes and swollen face dripping with blood. These are the last moments of his life. The powerful dictator begs for mercy in front of the rebels around him. He wipes his forehead, showing the bloodied palm of the hand, while on each side they continue to rage mercilessly on his wounded body, also sodomizing him with the bayonet. He will die within hours. The Americans celebrate.
The mystery of the murder of Gaddafi
Five years later, however, there are still many shadows on the death of the Libyan Rais, who previously took power in a military coup in 1969. The questions on the story are many. According to the official version, in fact, would have been Omran Shaban, a young fighter of the Council of Misurata, to inflict the fatal blow to the dictator, after having discovered him in a pipeline, where he was hiding together with the head of the loyalist army and his bodyguards.
According to other witnesses a French secret agent, infiltrated among the guerrillas, would have killed the Rais. Indeed, Paris had every incentive to close as soon as possible the mouth to the former dictator who, in March 2011 – after the French had dropped the first bombs over Benghazi – threatened to reveal embarrassing details about the millions of dollars paid by the colonel to finance the political rise of the former President Sarkozy.
Details of the truth of the story will remain buried with Shaban, who died a year later after being kidnapped and tortured for fifty days in suspect circumstances.
All the wrongs of the West
The only thing sure is that Libya, once considered one of the most developed countries of the MENA region, has become a failed state. Outpost of the Islamic State in the central Mediterranean region, a crossroads of human trafficking from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and ground of clash between three governments, 140 tribes and at least 230 militia. This, in a nutshell, is the tragic outcome of the “February Revolution” of 2011. After the execution of Gaddafi, in fact, wasn’t celebrated the “Liberation Day” announced by the US reporters, rather was inaugurated a new war of all against everyone, so beloved by some Americans.
The admission of Obama
The first admission of guilt about the Western mistakes arrived last March 2016, when the US President Barack Obama, near the end of his second term, in an interview with the weekly magazine “The Atlantic”, called a “disaster” the situation in Libya and a “mistake” his support to the NATO intervention, wanted by the English and French allies. The former French President Sarkozy was the main promoter of the war for geo-strategic reasons. He, basically, stirred up the anti-Gaddafi uprising to gain control of Libyan oil and to prevent the creation by the Rais of a new common currency for trade within the African Union (competitor of the CFA Franc).
The role of Hillary Clinton
Meanwhile, the US State Department, then headed by the Democratic candidate for the American presidency, Hillary Clinton, was anxious to protect the rebels in Benghazi. Clinton did not fail to support the NATO operation and the rebels’ leaders like Mahmoud Jibril. Ignoring that among the rebels there could be also some cultivating sympathies for organized Jihad. As those of Ansar al-Sharia, which on 11 September 2012 broke into the US Consulate in Benghazi, brutally killing the American ambassador Chris Stevens and three other US citizens.
The poisoned fruits of the Libyan chaos
The Libyan chaos resulted in the destabilization of the whole Sahel-Saharan area. The conflict in Mali in 2012 and the strengthening of the jihadist and criminal groups operating in the area, with tons of weapons coming into the hands of terrorists across the nonexisting borders of the Sahara desert, are just some of the consequences of the 2011 “revolution”.
The three Libyan governments
In Libya today there are, de facto, three governments. The national unity government of Fayez al Sarraj, backed by the United Nations, and the former Islamist Executive of Tripoli (“Caliphate of Libya”), backed by Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey, Sudan and Qatar, which are competing for the control of the western part of the country. In the east, instead, in Cyrenaica the Executive of Tobruk still does not recognize the government of Tripoli and the army of General Khalifa Haftar assured to control the so-called “oil crescent”. And still only chaos and desolation are reigning.
Source: Gli occhi della guerra