It is being described as carnage, a massacre, street bloodshed, violence against Libyan civilians by their own leader, government and regime. Libyan leader Mommar Al Qaddafi is going after his own people in a desperate bid to stay in power by committing the worst atrocities over the country of 6.4 million.
The popular opposition has started from the east and went on to the west of the country and it seems that there is no way of stopping them.
The bloodiness in Libya is nothing like what is being dubbed as the non-violent, civilized, white revolution Egypt recently went through, where the army refused to fire one single bullet at the demonstrators.
In Libya the situation is more complex and intense, bloody and brutal, displaying a diabolical face to the regime when police and security men pounce on protesters with no compunction.
The spark that lit the revolution became Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, and quickly spread to many of the cities and towns in the eastern side of the country: Bayda, Derna, Tobruk, Misrata, and Sirat. It came within days of the stepping down of Husni Mubarak in Egypt.
The scale of the protests in Libya came as a bit of surprise, as the flare up was quickly ignited from the east hinterland to the west of the country, to the Libyan capital of Tripoli where the Libyan leader has arguably built his power base.
From the start, it was the iron fist approach. The Libyan regime and its security forces and mercenaries decided on a violent protracted approach as soon as the protests started.
The regime, through the instruction of none other than Qaddafi himself, decided on the rapid deterrent approach, to hit hard on protesters by using live fire before it become a mass movement of opposition.
Instead, and as ground witnesses said, the iron fist increased the number of people who joined the protesters, openly demanding the fall of Qaddafi, which was something new in Libya, and no doubt affected by what had been going on in Tunisia and Egypt.
The harsh tactics fuelled the people moving from hundreds, to thousands to hundreds of thousands all calling for the removal of the president extraordinaire, who has been ruling the country since 1969 through a military coup he instigated when he was just 29 years old.
Within days, the situation had turned violent, bloody and chaotic with people protesting in the streets. This was no Egypt, there was none of the civil society institutions that had been built elsewhere. In Libya’s Qaddafi, political parties were illegal; the opposition had been muzzled out and forced to flee abroad.
The protesters, many young in their 20s and 30s, took to the streets, fearless in an atmosphere of state terror.
But it remained unclear from the start as to who was leading and who was causing the violent onslaught, which was at best deadly. Besides the people, three forces were on the ground: the army, the security forces and the African mercenaries.
This was especially unusual situation, for Qaddafi was using an outside force of hired killers directly flown into Libya, and no doubt paid for by oil money, from neighboring countries such as Chad and Niger, both of whom border Libya to the south, to brutalize the demonstrators.
While there is still yet no independent verifications of those killed, some say it could be in the hundreds, others say 250 or more in Benghazi alone, and still some suggest between 200 and 400 in the country overall, and within the span of four to five days. This may show the length at which the regime is prepared to go through to stay in power, in a closed system controlled by the president himself and his sons.
The mercenaries have been brought in especially as independent forces with no relation to the social structure of the country which has been systemized by tribal relations, and which Qaddafi cultured over the years as a source of power relations.
In doing so as well, he undermined the structures of the state because part of his “green book” philosophy was to decentralize the central administration through local “popular committees” whose source of authority was the leader himself in Tripoli.
This may explain why he needed to get the African mercenaries because of the issue of loyalty and allegiance to the central state, which may had been put in peril and undermined because of previous policies instituted by Qaddafi himself who directly controlled the policy-making process that outflanked the government and the central administration.
In an attempt to control the uprising, Qaddafi has clamped down on the foreign media and the Internet, including a shutdown of interactive sites like Facebook and Twitter that have been essential in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.
While the foreign press, most of whom have initially been banned from the country, news on latest developments have been coming in through media such as YouTube providing some pictures of what is going, including the carnage in streets and hospitals.
But regardless, the eastern side of the country was quickly taken by the opposition. CNN’s Ben Wedeman may have been the first to get across the border into Libya simply because the regular security forces have left, or more likely chased out by the opposition forces. No doubt much more international media organizations are in the process of entering country.
This may show, as well, that Qaddafi’s hold has started crumbling because, in building the power structure, Qaddafi disenfranchised many in the public bureaucracy and the army itself.
The latter institutions witnessed, including the elite corps, Al Saaiqa, many defections, including soldiers, military officers and pilots, two of which flew their planes to Malta because they refused to attack civilians on the ground from the air.
Aside from that, Libyan Minister of Justice Mustapha Abd Al Jaleel quit his post because of the “shoot-to-kill” policy that was being practiced.
In addition, news was coming of Libyan ambassadors and diplomats, from India, Maysia, Japan, Sweden to the United States and from the Libyan diplomatic mission in the United Nations as well as the Libyan Ambassador to the Arab League, defecting and washing their hands of the regime. Leaders, from the UN secretary-general to presidents and prime ministers, are expressing their disgust openly against a leader whom they wouldn’t throw a rope to.
Sief Al Din Al Islam, Qaddafi’s eldest son appeared on television to warn that there would be a civil war if protests didn’t stop and he would fight to the last bullet to maintain the integrity of his country. Also Qaddafi was briefly shown in his car to dispel rumors that he left the country and later came on television to state that he will not step down but will go after demonstrators house by house if they don’t stop their protests.
It appears for the time being that the big man is still standing and may just even be sabre-rattling. However, and whatever the case, Libya appears to be the next domino that might fall in what increasingly looks like sweeping the region of the Middle East. International diplomatic pressure is being heightened.
Dr. Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based journalist specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.
