the limping messenger

…while the list of Libyan war criminals by  the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno-Ocampo keeps dwindling and until now only three suspects are mentioned by name: Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and Gaddafi’s brother in law Abdullah Senussi. The deserted former head of the Libyan Secret Service and last Minister of Foreign Affairs Moussa Koussa (also spelled in the Western press as Musa Kusa), part of the regime till a few weeks ago, when he crossed the border of Tunis and was welcomed as a valuable informer for NATO in Great Britain, seems not to be on the list of the International Criminal Court. We now have a whole score of pro-active regime members who are defecting by telephone. This tactics seem to be much more effective than throwing big bombs from speedy airplanes onto buildings that are either empty or inhabited by people who were are the wrong place at the wrong moment. What to think about the British Chief of the Defence Staff General David Richards who called last Sunday for “widening targets in Libya”  as NATO tries all it can to keep Gaddafi from being caught alive and being brought for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. All of this is also a show of force to help topple the tank based Assad family from power in Syria, in the near future. Political leaders must by now have received the message of the international legal community, that only in China it is allowed to use tanks against demonstrators. Both politics and justice in Africa and the Middle East seem to be in the hands of  NATO generals, they take the initiative while parliaments have lost all control over this theatre of war. Happily the International Criminal Court in The Hague – that has no own police force to arrest indicted war criminals – still has a telephone line, to prove things can be done differently. Or, one musty believe that the members of Gaddafi’s claque and clique needed some bombs to rain next to their front doors before they would call The Hague, as if the downfall of the Gaddafi reign had not been imminent for many months already, without NATO airplanes. Why diplomatic forms of subversion have failed to be used to oust the regime of Gaddafi? Who does the body count in Libya irrespective on which side death occurs? Who are those Libyan army soldiers that are legitimate targets now?  I read the army consists of 25.000 volunteers and 25.000 conscripts and that their equipment is rather outdated. So what chance they have against the ultra up to date NATO forces? NATO does not have smart bombs that can decide who to kill and who not, bombs that can distinguish between a conscript, a volunteer, a Gaddafi guard or an insurgent. Too many unanswered questions. I have always had a suspicion when ‘civilians’ are protected and soldiers are open for lawful slaughter. We need to widen our vision on such conflicts and develop new tactics for more peaceful methods of transition of power.

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