Is Gaddafi : (1) a friend or a (2) foe of the pan-Afrikan world? (3) Is he just opportunistic? Or is he (4) a complicated amalgam of all of these? This essay argues for # 1 but I am leaning more towards #4. GI
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Muammar Gaddafi during happier times throwing up deuces |
Libya, Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective
by Gerald A. Perreira
Thousands of Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, Filipinos, Turks, Germans, English, Italians, Malaysians, Koreans and a host of other nationalities are lining up at the borders and the airport to leave Libya. It begs the question: What were they doing in Libya in the first place? Unemployment figures, according to the Western media and Al Jazeera, are at 30%. If this is so, then why all these foreign workers?
For those of us who have lived and worked in Libya, there are many complexities to the current situation that have been completely overlooked by the Western media and 'Westoxicated' analysts, who have nothing other than a Eurocentric perspective to draw on. Let us be clear - there is no possibility of understanding what is happening in Libya within a Eurocentric framework. Westerners are incapable of understanding a system unless the system emanates from or is attached in some way to the West. Libya's system and the battle now taking place on its soil, stands completely outside of the Western imagination.
News coverage by the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera has been oversimplified and misleading. An array of anti-Qaddafi spokespersons, most living outside Libya, have been paraded in front of us – each one clearly a counter-revolutionary and less credible than the last. Despite the clear and irrefutable evidence from the beginning of these protests that Muammar Qaddafi had considerable support both inside Libya and internationally, not one pro-Qaddafi voice has been allowed to air. The media and their selected commentators have done their best to manufacture an opinion that Libya is essentially the same as Egypt and Tunisia and that Qaddafi is just another tyrant amassing large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts. But no matter how hard they try, they cannot make Qaddafi into a Mubarak or Libya into Egypt.
“Libya's system and the battle now taking place on its soil, stands completely outside of the Western imagination.”
The first question is: Is the revolt taking place in Libya fuelled by a concern over economic issues such as poverty and unemployment as the media would have us believe? Let us examine the facts.
Under the revolutionary leadership of Muammar Qaddafi, Libya has attained the highest standard of living in Africa. In 2007, in an article which appeared in the African Executive Magazine, Norah Owaraga noted that Libya, “unlike other oil producing countries such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, utilized the revenue from its oil to develop its country. The standard of living of the people of Libya is one of the highest in Africa, falling in the category of countries with a GNP per capita of between USD 2,200 and 6,000.”
tags: libya, black africa, arab africa, cultural imperialism
See also:
- Obama and Egyptian Liberation by Kevin Alexander Gray
- HOW THE BRITISH STOLE ZIMBABWE
- From American Military to Afrikan Consciousness: The Story of Askia Muhammad
- The Invention of "Illegal" Humans: a Recipe for Imperialism in Haiti
- Maxine Waters's chilling account of the US overthrow Haiti's President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide (dap @ stephanie)
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