After some 8,000 bombing raids, with estimates of 4 bombs used per attack NATO has already dropped over 30,000 bombs on Libya. That’s almost 200 bombs per day for 6 months, some tens of thousands of tons of high explosives. With an estimated 2 Libyans killed per bomb and without a single NATO casualty the Western regimes have massacred over 60,000 Libyans in the past half year with the rebels themselves having said there have been 50,000 Libyan deaths. One hell of a humanitarian intervention isn’t it?

How the “civil war” in Libya has proceeded can best be described in light of the events of August 21. On that Sunday afternoon a BBC film crew showed a rebel column fleeing the approaches to Zawiya outside of Tripoli. With their tails between their legs, glancing fearfully over their shoulders as they fled wildly back down the road from whence they came, even the BBC presstitute on the scene could not contain his disgust at the sight. Once again the rebels had run into stiff resistance and had shown their true mettle by fleeing the fight.

The next morning a France24 reporter recounted how later that Sunday night she had accompanied these same rebels as they drove almost unopposed through Zawiya into Green Square in the heart of Tripoli, this time passing row upon row of bombed out still burning buildings.

This has been NATO’s war and while the world may not understand this, the Libyan rebels certainly do.

A major problem for NATO and its Libyan Quisling League a.k.a the National Transitional Council (NTC) is that most of rebel military is now under the leadership the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a self described affiliate of Al Queda in the Maghreb (North Africa). The “general” in command of the mainly ethnic Berber rebel fighters that have captured the Libyan capital, known as the Tripoli Military Council, is the head of the LIFG. One of his top commanders is head of the Benghazi based rebel army. With the recent murder of “General” Younnis, former head of the Libyan secret police and once considered the most feared man in the country, the LIFG has now taken over leadership of almost all of the most effective fighting forces of the Libyan rebellion.

Quite an accomplishment and Al Queda in the Maghreb’s sincere thanks must go to the USA and its allies in NATO.

As the former LIFG terrorists turned “freedom fighters” go house to house arresting and executing “Gaddafi supporters” and “African mercenaries” in Tripoli life for the ordinary people of the city has become one of survival. Without water for almost two weeks now, without cooking gas or fuel for their cars and with food in short supply the future for the people of Tripoli remains uncertain.

Some reports in the international media have claimed that the Great Man Made River (GMMR), the irrigation system that supplies northern Libya with almost all its water was bombed by NATO. Other reports claim that “Gaddafi loyalists” still control the southern water wells and have shut off the water supply. If the later is true then even Benghazi’s water supply is in jeopardy. In any case, Tripoli is going to be dependent on imported water for quite some time and how a city of almost 2 million is to survive using water imported via water trucks is a question the western media has stopped talking about.

The “Transitional National Council” now recognized as “the legitimate government of Libya” by NATO governments and their allies is made up of many former high ranking Libyan Government officials and is increasingly caught in a tough spot. With the African Union trying to block the release of Libyan Government funds held in western banks, there is little time to spare if this NTC’s control is to remain in place.

South African President Jacob Zuma has condemned the NTC leaders as embezzlers and demanded they return the tens of millions of dollars the NTC top leaderships is charged with stealing during their days in office in the Libyan government before the AU lifts its opposition to Gaddafi government funds being released to the NTC.

NATO leaders are having to scramble to keep the NTC afloat. Images of pallets stacked 6 feet high with 200 million Libyan Dinars flown in from London show just how touch and go it has become for the NTC’s attempts to maintain its influence. While NATO’s “Friends of LIbya” circus held in Paris promises the release of Libya’s $billions held ransom by the west, implementing these promises is another matter all together. Corruption and incompetence mark the NTC leadership’s past and it will come as no surprise to hear reports of massive embezzlement of these funds in the future.

How much longer the LIFG/Al Queda lead rebel armies will stand by and allow their former bitter enemies in the TNC to remain in power is the $60 billion question. Already the rebel “government” in the port city of Misrata has announced they do not recognize the authority of the TNC and rally’s demanding the removal of the former Libyan government officials in the TNC have been reported taking place on an almost daily basis there.

In the mean time the vast reaches of the southern Libyan desert has not been conquered by NATO and almost all of Libya’s water and much of its oil remains outside of the control of the NTC.

With hundreds of villages and small towns scattered across an immense area Col. Gaddafi and his supporters still have a vast area at their disposal. With Algeria fighting Al Queda in the Maghreb their border on Libya’s western flank remains open and allows opponents of the NATO backed rebels a safe haven. The NTC has already raised the alarm about a nasty long term insurrection based in southern Libya using Algeria as base.

So far the Al Queda lead rebel fighters and the west’s bully boys in the NTC have yet to begin to eat each other, though it seems almost inevitable that internal warfare amongst the rebels will take place. We may yet see NATO warplanes bombing its erstwhile allies in the Libyan rebellion.

The one thing that is clear is that the Libyan Tragedy has just begun and that the capture of most of northern Libya by the NATO backed rebels is just its first phase. 30,000 bombs over Libya killing some 60,000 Libyans marks the beginning rather than the end of this disaster.

Thomas C. Mountain was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987 and is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.

Eritrea is on the threshold of a mining boom that is hoped to boost the mainly agriculture-based economy that has suffered from irregular rainfall.  The United Nations last month voted to punish Eritrea for its alleged support of Islamic insurgents in Somalia. The abundance of minerals, including gold that nearly quadrupled in price during the last 8 years, attracts many international investors disregarding the fact that the associated money may be tainted.

Gold price trend in last 10 years.

Apart from small-scale artisan mining and some minor extraction by Italians during the colonial era, Eritrea’s mining potential is not fully exploited. Bisha is currently Eritrea’s most advanced mining project. Its 27 million tonnes of ore are believed to contain 1 million ounces of gold, close to 800 million pounds of copper and 1 billion pounds of zinc. Production is expected to begin by the end of 2011.

More than a dozen foreign companies are now exploring, or about to begin the exploration plans.  Before sanctions were imposed in December, the Canadian corporation Nevsun Resources Ltd, spent a record $21.7 million on its Bisha project in the third quarter of 2009.

Stanley Rogers, the head of the Bisha project for the Nevsun, implying an apparent lack of need for any social or political accountability of the inter-national corporations, said that the industry was not feeling the heat and that all eyes were on the movement of the price of gold. “For investors, the international price of gold is a more decisive factor than sanctions imposed on a single country. External perceptions of Eritrea are at odds with the internal reality. Internally, this is a stable place to do business. My view on this hasn’t changed,” he concluded.

Any ethical dilemmas? You be your own judge.

Eritrea is accused by the United Nations and others of fueling the chaos in Somalia — where 18,000 people have died in violence since the start of 2007 — by sending funds and arms to rebel groups battling the UN-backed transitional government. Sanctions include an arms embargo, travel bans and asset freezes but they do not target the interests of mining companies operating in Eritrea, where licenses are held by groups from Australia, Canada, China, Libya and the United Kingdom.  But some observers argue there is now an ethical obligation on the part of these companies — some hailing from nations who were vocal supporters of the sanctions — not to put millions of dollars in the pockets of the Eritrean government.

“Absolutely not the case,” said Rogers, “External investment is up to the individual. We’re not forcing people to spend money in Eritrea. We’re not involved in the politics of the nation or internationally … people are still investing.”

International lobbying efforts of Eritrea are substantial and routine. For example, in 2006 Eritrea paid total of $390,000 to BGR LLC. The description of BRG Group LLC, provided by Spin Profiles, a project of SpinWatch is self-explanatory:

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, LLC (BGR) is a Washington, DC-based lobbying company, which was described as “all-Republican” in 2007.^[1] It describes itself as “performance based” and that it can offer “a proactive, creative approach to solving problems and aggressively seeking results”. ^[2]; and as ‘a premier strategic consulting and government affairs firm in the United States and worldwide’^[3].

John Sununu: Bush's Bad Cop

A further check on the Chairman of BGR Group, Mr. Rogers reveals that he has a direct plug to the Republican politicians such as John H. Sununu, the former White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush – a rather close connection to a source of things to be done in the US and abroad. Not by accident, Mr.  Sununu was referred to as Bush’s Bad Cop by Time Magazine.

If there is a question why Eritrea came directly to the US government, instead dealing with the UN that is present in the region, the answer maybe found in this statement quoted from Eritrea: Independence Day call for a year of urgent human rights improvements by Amnesty International:

Such is the level of secrecy and intimidation inside Eritrea, which affects Eritreans in the diaspora too, that few confirmed details are available on new political detainees in the past year. They currently include 10 Eritrean staff of the UN Military Mission to Eritrea and Ethiopia (UNMEE) administering a buffer zone between the two countries, who were detained earlier this month as relations deteriorated further between Eritrea and the UN.

The accomplishments of Mr. Isaias Afewerki, president of Eritrea since 1993, in the area of human rights violations are evident as Eritrea has turned into one of the most totalitarian states in Africa. His early tactic was to ban multiple political parties and  privately owned press, and simply expel foreign journalists who became too critical.

“What is a free press? There is no free press anywhere.”

- Isaias Afewerki

The international journalist watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea’s press freedom as the worse on earth in 2009, behind North Korea and Turkmenistan.  As if the complete suppression of political freedoms in Eritrea weren’t enough, Afewerki has found a remarkably “efficient” way to expand the size and scope of its government: a forceful servitude; he pays people about $50 a month to work as government employees, whether in an office or providing manual labor. Those not inclined to give up their former jobs, even if that actually provided enough money to support their families, were given another option: prison without trial. Afewerki’s scheme ran into snags when young Eritreans started fleeing to Sudan to avoid indentured servitude to their dictator. In turn, Afewerki ingeniously tackled the problem by simply jailing the families of people leaving the country to escape his state-mandated poverty. Finally, we can not omit the state sponsored persecution of religious minorities in Eritrea reported for years.

Eritrea President Isaias Afwerki standing with Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao.

It’s safe to presume that Afewerki will survive the latest round of fighting with Ethiopia, yet another source of problems in the troubled region. Afewerki’s decision to provide money and weapons to anti-Ethiopian militant groups may, however, backfire on him, as some experts expect.

With well orchestrated lobbying efforts of Afewerki any chance he will be resigning soon is unlikely. The latest assassination attempt on Afewerki was conducted in August, 2009. In this failed action, the president was barely able to escape death. The man who tried to kill the president though, a former freedom fighter, 43-year old First Lieutenant Daniel Habte Yihdego, after an exchange of fire with the president’s security, was shot to death.

I predict that President Afwerki’s complete disregard for the East-African wisdom stating that “Peace with justice is everything” and his attempt to apply his own wisdom will fail.

The latest about situation in Eritrea can be found at Asmarino Independent and Eritrea Daily websites.

Written by Mark Bajkowski.
Mark, born in Poland, is a Jack of all trades, master of none, who lives in New York since 1979. Mark has an unusually wide range of interests and is known to relate well to the people half of his age. Since his early childhood, he felt a curious relation to Africa, which unavoidably brings up the controversial subject of multiple-life experiences.

Their stories are numerous, some similar and others flavored by particular struggles in specific sites of discontent. Overall, their attitudes are of stubborn resilience, hope, and survival in environments desperate for their labor but resentful of their presence. With over 100 photographs and videos from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Czech and Britain, the exhibition, organized by NYU’s Africana Studies Department, follows some remarkably resilient immigrants on their uncertain sojourn on makeshift, intermittently powered fishing boats from West Africa, through the rigors of European immigration control, into the interstices of European society. AfrobeatRadio’s Wuyi Jacobs and Leon James talks to Awam Amkpa, Director of NYU’s Africana  Studies and co-curarator of They Wont Budge currently on at MoCADA on WBAI 99.5 FM on October 3, 2009.

This map presents (in French) summary data related to African immigration into countries of EU in 1985~1993 period (source: www.cartographie.ird.fr).

These works of art are created by award winning photographers, photo-journalists, and human rights activists all over Europe including Juan Medina (Spain), Alfredo Muňoz de Oliveira (Portugal), Francesco Cocco, Angelo Aprile, Elisa Cozzarini, Marco Ambrosi, Matteo Danesin, Aldo Sodoma and Stefano Renna (Italy). Also included are selected photos courtesy of agency Fotogramma (Milan) and AGNfoto (Naples).

The title “They Won’t Budge” is derived from Salif Keita’s song “We Won’t Budge” and adopted by Manthia Diawara as the title of his celebrated book. The exhibition is divided into 6 themes: Passages, Work, Defiance, Religion, Spaces, and Portraits. The exhibition also consists of installations of African working migrants and artists, anti-racist campaigns and protest songs that illustrate the advocacies of Africans and Civic organizations in Europe.

Book reading by Manthia Diawara. Elizabeth Nunez scholar and author of “Grace” in conversation with Manthia Diawara University Professor at NYU, on his book “We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World” at the QBR Author Talk: Emerging Writers, Emerging Markets at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on July 15,  2003. The event was sponsored by QBR The Black Book Review and The Asian American Writers Workshop. Originally recorded in film by Melvin Simmons and edited for audio by Wuyi Jacobs.