Last night, the drunken conversation turned around how Muammar Qaddafi was killed, instead of being captured alive, and then, how his body was dragged through the streets. The judgement how shameful this was must have come from the media somewhere.
May I just remark to those Western journalists, and heads of states etc. condemning what happened, that maybe you live 25 or 35 years, or however old you are under a dictatorship like Qadaffi's, live under constant fear, have maybe one or two of your extended family members "disappeared" during this time, and then come back and tell Lybians how to act?
I am basing this consideration on an experience when in Iraqi Kurdistan. My local guide for the day took me up an extremely steep, increasingly tighter growing hairpin road scaling a mountain that faced the famous village Amediyah. Up there, we shuffled around in the rubble of what had once been a luxurious castle, made by Saddam Hussain. I could imagine vividly how the tyrant's castle had been hovering threateningly over the fairy tale landscape to the other side.
"But why did you destroy the structure?", I asked, rather naively, "You could have 'squatted' it, made something else out of it." The man answered: "Yes, but you don't understand. After so many decades living under constant fear, when we were finally rid of Saddam, we could not help but take to our sledgehammers and clobber away at the thing. It felt liberating, it was cathartic."
Of course, Muammar Qaddafi should have been taken to court, tried according to the rules of international law, his crimes should have been exposed so as to avoid repetition. But then let's remember what happened to Saddam. Yes, he was taken to court, but instead of sitting through his entire trial like a good man should, the proceedings were aborted, he was executed as quickly as possible. This happened out of Western fears that their nations' parts in selling him the chemical weaponry he used in his genocidal attacks would come to the light.
And executed he was in an abominable manner, on an Islamic holy day, on which such things are forbidden by religious as well as Iraqi law. Even Iraqi non-Muslims felt offended. Could there have been any guarantee that things would have turned out better in the case of Qaddafi?
The West criticizes the act of killing Qaddafi, but how about what happened to Osama Bin Laden? A military operation in a foreign country on a private house, killing a man, then dumping his body in the sea? How about this man gets a trial, like he should?
I mean, at least Qaddafi got killed by Lybians. As I blogged before many citizens of the country where OBL resided at the time of his death, did not believe he was a criminal (or that he even existed, for one). "Conspiracy theories", Westerners may scoff. But who is to judge? How about an impartial international tribunal? This chance has been foregone.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
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