Theres a video of Dr Alia Brahimi of the London School of Economics greeting Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as Brother Leader at the school three months ago,and presenting him with an LSE cap a tradition,she says,that started when the cap was handed to Nelson Mandela.
It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I cant think how. If only the LSE were an isolated case. Im glad the United States and Europe have gotten behind the Bahrain-to-Benghazi awakening. But Ive not heard enough self-criticism.
Hearings should be held in the US Congress and throughout Western legislatures on these questions: How did we back,use and encourage the brutality of Arab dictators over so many years? To what degree did that cynical encouragement of despots foster the very jihadist rage Western societies sought to curb?
The West has long known what the likes of Gaddafi and Egypts Hosni Mubarak did. Hisham Matar,the acclaimed Libyan novelist,has a new novel out called Anatomy of a Disappearance. His father,Jaballa,disappeared in 1990,abducted from his Cairo apartment by Egyptian security agents who handed him over to Libya.
For more than a decade there has been no trace of this former diplomat,last seen in Tripolis notorious Abu Salim prison. His crime was belief in democracy and freedom. He has vanished leaving a fine novelist aching for closure,demanding if his father is dead to know how,where and when it happened.
There you have the Cairo-Tripoli axis. They were useful,Mubarak and Gaddafi,for intelligence and renditions and a cold Israeli peace in the case of the Egyptian; for oil and gas in the case of the Libyan. They were also killers. No law governs their captives fate. They vanish and then they are tossed into mass graves. Gaddafi massacred over 1,000 political prisoners at Abu Salim in June 1996. Was Jaballa Matar among them?
The entire Western world has been complicit in the pain of Hisham Matar,whose first novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The West has embraced every Arab dictator now being toppled by the people they starved of rights and life itself. Matar told The New Yorker this was an appropriate moment for Americans to reflect on how they have for three decades allowed their elected officials to support a dictatorship as ruthless as Mubaraks. To ask,for example,what are the reasons that have motivated the current vice president of the United States to say,as recently as January 27,that Mubarak is no dictator.
I think Joseph Biden might answer that question.
There are many reasons I oppose a Western military intervention in Libya: the bitter experience of Iraq; the importance of these Arab liberation movements being homegrown; the ease of going in and difficulty of getting out; the accusations of Western pursuit of oil that will poison the terrain; the fact that two Western wars in Muslim countries are enough.
But the deepest reason is the moral bankruptcy of the West with respect to the Arab world. Arabs have no need of US or European soldiers as they seek the freedom that America and the European Union were content to deny them. Gaddafi can be undermined without Western military intervention. He cannot prevail: Some officer will eventually make that plain.
Timothy Garton Ash,in his book Facts are Subversive,quotes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who wrote: Do not feel safe. The poet remembers./ You may kill him another will be born./Deeds and words shall be recorded.
Yes,the poet remembers,and Gaddafis deeds his crimes will be recorded. One day we will know what befell Jaballa Matar and the numberless dead. Lets put names to the dead,dates to the crimes,and details to our complicity. I know the world is unjust: Nobody made a big fuss about Dr Brahimis words three months ago. All the more reason to be severe in assessing lessons learned. ROGER COHEN
