Sarkozy explaining the recipe for the dessert from the desert at the upcoming dinner at the G8 top meeting in France May 2011: a Libyan ‘oil cocktail’ named ‘”Tour de Force de la Tour Eiffel” to be served by Apache waiters with NATO bonfires providing a festive backdrop. He makes it clear why the chosen interventionist taste is ‘Libyan’ and – say – not ‘Algerian’ or ‘Sudanese’, as there are 20 G-force countries wanting their sweet-oil-tooth to be served at a regular basis and one must make sure that there is enough constant supply of the needed ingredient.
Posts Tagged ‘NATO’
G20 2011 dinner: dessert from the desert: a Libyan Oil Cocktail
Posted in Africa, Economics, tagged African oil reserves, G20 2011, G8 2011, interventionist policies, Libyan oil reserves 2011, NATO on May 28, 2011| 2 Comments »
NATO disrupting the course of justice in Libya and International Criminal Court not reacting
Posted in Africa, international justice, tagged International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo (prosecutor International Criminal Court), Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (1942-), NATO on May 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Flying NATO warrant for Gaddafi over Libyan desert.
When a court orders an alleged killer to be arrested and it notices that someone else tries repeatedly to kill ‘their killer’…. it would issue also an arrest warrant for the murderer ‘in spe’ of the indicted. Sounds logical but we see today that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court fails to do so. He did not issue any public statement ordering the chiefs of NATO to stop their attempts at the life of someone who needs to face his judges here on earth.
Below is the concluding statement by the ICC Prosecutor at the press conference on Libya in The Hague on 16 May 2011:
My Office has not requested the intervention of international forces to implement the arrest warrants. Should the Court issue them and the three individuals remain in Libya, Libyan authorities have the primary responsibility to arrest them. Libya is a member of the United Nations and it has the duty to abide by Security Council Resolution 1970.
When the time comes, implementing the arrest warrants will be the most effective way to protect civilians under attack in Libya and elsewhere. As in any other criminal case, the execution of the warrants will have a deterrent impact for other leaders who are thinking of using violence to gain or retain power.
Images that prevent us from thinking: the Afghanistan case
Posted in Is everything propaganda then?, Media history, Visual Language, tagged Afghanistan, atrocities photographed, demonstrations, emblematics, NATO, Taliban, United States Army on September 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »
IMAGES THAT PREVENT US FROM THINKING… is the subject of an article in Le Monde Diplomatique of this month. The article starts with the the portrait of Bibi Aisha, on the cover of the july 29. issue of Time magazine, the Afghan woman with her nose cut off by her father in law because of an affront to his authority, an act supported by a local – supposedly Taliban – official. The display of this horrific picture triggered a fierce debate, because of the emblematic way it was used with the descriptive accompagning text: “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.” One may confront this implicit argument for Western involvement in Afghanistan and its continuation, with images of civilian casualties by NATO and American forces, especially the structural case of ‘collateral damage’ as a result of always imprecise air attacks.
In the words of Serge Halimi of Le Monde Diplomatique: “Will there be more mutilations “if we leave Afghanistan”? Well, “our” presence has not prevented the people of Afghanistan from being mutilated. The Taliban have plenty of pictures of civilians who have lost limbs or been killed by western missiles. Perhaps Time will publish one. Will it make the front cover? And what caption will it carry?”
July 2010 front cover of Time magazine and a elsewhere published photograph of a demonstration in Kabul August 2010: "Afghan protesters hold placards during a demonstration against U.S. forces and NATO in Kabul, Afghanistan Sunday, Aug 1, 2010. More than 400 demonstrators have marched toward the presidential palace in Kabul to protest the alleged killing of 52 civilians by a NATO rocket strike in the south. NATO has disputed the report of civilian deaths."
The photograph of the Kabul demonstration has been published (just one example of its usage) by an American news web site cleveland.com with the header: “Holland bails out on Afghanistan war, adding pressure on Germany, UK to scale back.”
In Holland itself this news item on a demonstration against US Forces and NATO has – as far as I can conclude after 15 minutes of precise web searches – not been published. Which is in line with the general strategy of embedded journalism and evasive reporting on civilian casualties,during the years of military involvement of the Netherlands in Afghanistan. I can not recount any serious attempt of the Dutch press to come up with a civilian body count of the Afghan War. Quiet some money must have been invested in embedded reporting, but serious ‘open source’ research (which is much cheaper to do) of casualties of this war other than “our own” boys and girls have not been undertaken. A case of death by ‘friendly fire’ of Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan may be found back in the national Dutch news lines over weeks, but the fate of the the local population during all kind of disastrous incidents and the needed debate of how casualties are counted at all, just does not exist. It makes me remember the ‘news’ on the Vietnam War before 1975 (the Fall of Saigon) and how it was often implicit that when a town or village was under attack, the victims that fell in such an operation could only be ‘insurgents’, Vietcong or their allies. The same thing seems to happen now, with only another insurgent stamp: Taliban.
This being said does not mean that either the Vietcong or the Taliban were or are to be exempted from any criticism on their deeds. We may better try to be conscious of the underlying process of imposing an emblematic picture of ‘the enemy’, a phenomenon for which the German language has one single word ‘Feindbild’ (Ennemy-Picture). A ‘Feindbild’ is a generalised picture and mostly pre-cooked in written language and later on may get a visual expression. Often the caricaturist lends a helping hand to typify the ‘enemy’ by enlarging what is seen as typical features of the face, the rest of the body and the way of clothing. The racist and non-racist dividing line in the depiction of face and ethnicity is often hard to draw.
the limping messenger 