Salaam Gadhafi Salaam

Styling himself in various occasions as “a brother leader,” “guide of the revolution,” and “king of kings,” the flamboyant Colonel Muammar Gadhafi who took power in Libya since 1969 died Friday after he was gunned down by rebel forces identified with the National Transition Council (NTC) that has decreed an end to his autocratic rule.

Accounts streaming out of western media strum native instincts of revenge with narratives of how the leader was found holed-up in a rain drainage hole, captured and dragged by the hair by one of NTC’s vehicles.  We recall the early accounts of the attack on Osama Bin Laden, and the subsequent attempts of the White House to straighten “facts” that got out of hand; we must be wary of unverified stories.  Attempts are even now made to compare Saddam Hussein’s ignominious capture to that of Gadhafi! 

Hoping that one can finally separate fact from fiction is, of course, a futile exercise.  More so as we all suffer from the linguistic notion that we can have one word for every item of reality, along with the discovery that images influences behavior, and image-creation has become the growth industry of the times.

We might be better served in our understanding of events if set Gadhafi’s rule and demise within a broader context. 

As a geo-social reality, we treat Africa as if it was one unit, forgetting that Africa south of Sahara is quite different from the lands north of it along the Mediterranean Sea. My social grid combines North Africa and the Middle East (NAME) as a separate geo-social continent, which is not far from the area’s self designation of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). 

Until a decade ago, we were schooled with the Mercator projection of the globe where north of the Equator is disproportionately blown up at the expense of the lands south of it, making Africa and South America look smaller than the lands in the northern hemisphere. 

To appreciate how huge Africa is, combine the United States, China, India, Europe, and Russia together and we would still have enough space to plunk the Marianas into the picture.  Libya is the fourth largest country in Africa, created by Italy out of Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica in the early 1900s when Europe started colonial expansion for natural resource.  Eighteen years after Italy granted Libyan political independence in 1951, Gadhafi led a coup d’etat that created a socialist state. Rich with oil, producing as much as Saudi Arabia, Libya tried to ascend into the nuclear warhead club of nations, but was dubbed instead as a rogue state in the eyes of the West.  It swore off its atomic weapons program after the fall of Iraq to NATO forces. 

In another instance of the instigating power of digital social networking, Libya joins Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria in what is now referred to as Arab Spring, of popular uprisings against unaccountable autocratic rule.  Libya’s unrivaled universal education and social medicine in the region notwithstanding, popular uprising combined with the labyrinthine petroleum politics, set into motion what eventually deposed the colorful thorn on the side of the West, once the darling supporter of rebel causes.

Even if the current events in Libya are best understood in the context of a huge continent with known and still unknown oil reserves, the Marianas is not immediately affected.  Our fuel supply that keeps CUC running our aircons falls in the proven good graces of Mobil/Shell that has this previous Iberian colony by the cajones.

That is not, however, the case of China that has tried to assure its future fossil fuel requirements on African resources, given the paucity of its own.  (CONOCO Phillips just sealed a BP-like Gulf-of-Mexico spill on Bohai Sea.) The war on Afghanistan is a quarrel over the Aral regions’ oil reserves going south to Pakistan for the West, rather than to China.  China’s attempts to explore and access resources in its borders (Kazakhstan to the west, Mongolia and Siberia to the north, Japan and Yellow Seas/East and South China Seas on the east) are continually frustrated by nations who prominently control the financial operations of the oil companies that Italian Enrico Mattei dubbed as the “seven sisters” controlling Middle East oil extractions.  

So, today’s demise of Gadhafi in the hands of ‘freedom fighters’ suffers in the hands of journalistic service of the bastions of corporate greed that manages to corral the frenzy of the masses to control of resources.  But as has been true of all movements in the past, revolutionary change does not follow a neat menu, and neither the gas masks in Athens, Greece, nor the hygiene-challenged park near Wall St. will ever make the stench of coercive change palatable.  Ironically, one who followed the dictum that power emanates from the barrel of a gun, has become his own victim, has plunged his own country into a situation where every household has now, at least, a barrel of its own! 

To its credit, members of the NTC promised a quiet Islamic burial for Muammar Gadhafi.  We might yet find a spring flower in the harried global soul!