Below is an account dealing with the silent and accepted harvesting of people, their citizenship and social effort to finance and run a significant Hedge Fund based in London.
This is a time in history where transparency is unravelling all the Smoke and Mirrors relate to unprecedented wealth accumulation.
THE ROVING EYE 'Brother' Gaddafi, you're going down
By Pepe Escobar
You know the fat lady is about to sing when a dictator unleashes hell from above over his own unarmed, civilian compatriots, and bombs parts of his capital city. That's a bridge too far even by the unspeakable standards of Western-backed dictators in the Arab world.
You know the (ghastly) show may be over when Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, one of the most popular Sunni authorities in the world, not least because of his weekly show on al-Jazeera, issues a fatwa - "I am issuing a fatwa now to kill [Muammar] Gaddafi. To any soldier, to any man who can pull the trigger and kill this man to do so" - and then prays live, on al-Jazeera, for the end of the
Libyan dictator ("O Lord save the Libyans from this pharaoh." When he finishes, the al-Jazeera anchor says "Amen").
You know the bells are ringing when your "Abu Omar Brigade", responsible for your protection, is still on a rampage; but your ambassadors around the world defect en masse; your own deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Omar al-Dabashi, says your government is carrying out genocide; your fighter pilots refuse to bomb your cities; your military officers, in a statement, ask all members of the army to head to Tripoli and depose you; a coalition of Islamic leaders tells all Muslims it is their duty to rebel against you because of your "bloody crimes against humanity"; and to top it off, people are calling for a "million man march" following the Egyptian model.
And what about the Maltese Falcons? In a day of volcanic activity, it's hard to beat the spectacular defection of two colonels of the Libyan Air Force, who flew their Mirages to Malta. They had refused to bomb protesters in Benghazi, telling Maltese authorities they had come so close to carrying out their mission that they could see the crowds on the ground. They also passed "classified" information about what the Libyan military has been up to.
And all this in just one day - Monday.
It was not enough to deploy "black African" mercenaries in a shoot-to-kill rampage in Benghazi. Already on Sunday, Sheikh Faraj al-Zuway, leader of the crucial al-Zuwayya tribe in eastern Libya, had threatened to cut oil exports to the West within 24 hours unless what he called the "oppression of protesters" in Benghazi was stopped.
Akram Al-Warfalli, a leader of the al-Warfalla tribe, one of Libya's biggest, in the south of Tripoli, had told al-Jazeera Gaddafi is "no longer a brother, we tell you to leave the country". The 500,000-strong Berber, Tuaregs from the southern desert, are also against him. When you have four of your key tribes - the spine of your system - marching on Tripoli to get rid of you, you better watch out.
History may eventually register how Gaddafi's appalling 41-year rule in Libya (he was already in power when "Tricky Dicky" Richard Nixon was the United States president) virtually collapsed in only 24 hours. There will be blood - a lot of blood; but "brother" is about to go down.
'Rivers of blood will run through Libya'
The beginning of the end was classic Arab dictator stuff; Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, looking like an upscale bouncer in suit and tie, went on Libyan state TV on Sunday night instead of his father to deliver a threatening/repellent/pathetic speech that only infuriated the Libyan masses even more, after six days of protests in the historic Cyrenaica region.
After threatening to "eradicate the pockets of sedition" (echoes of Iran's leadership eradicating protests last week) Gaddafi's "modernizing" son said Libyans risked igniting a civil war in which Libya's oil wealth "will be burned".
In 2009, Said received a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE) with a thesis titled "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions: From 'Soft Power' to Collective Decision-Making". Last year he delivered a lecture about it at the LSE (listen to it here.)
Isn't wonderful that the ghastliest dictators in the world may send their offspring to the best schools in the world where they can appease the West's false consciousness while back at home they openly threaten their own people and go for sniper fire, automatic weapons and heavy artillery against their unarmed compatriots?
It's doubtful the LSE taught Saif how to ignite a flash civil war with just a rant. But that's what he accomplished.
Libyan writer Faouzi Abdelhamid - comparing the name Saif al-Islam ("sword of Islam") with Saif al-I'dam ("sword of execution") came out all guns blazing, calling the whole Gaddafi clan criminals and thieves; "You don't even have the right of living among us as ordinary citizens, because you're guilty of high treason".
By the time Saif was delivering his threats, the eastern city of Benghazi had already fallen to the protesters. Tripoli was next, on Monday. With the regime blocking all phone lines, all day Monday occasional, frantic tweets relayed all sorts of terrifying rumors and facts - inevitably clouded by the ominous sound of live ammunition. Helicopters raining bullets down on people in the streets below. Fighter jets launching strikes. Snipers firing from building tops.
Schools, government offices and most stores in Tripoli were closed, with armed "Revolutionary Committees", ie regime thugs, patrolling the streets hunting for protesters in Tripoli's old city. According to Salem Gnan, a London-based spokesman for the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, 80 people may have died when protesters surrounded Gaddafi's residence and were shot at from inside the compound.
As the People's Hall - where the parliament meets when it is in session in Tripoli - was set on fire and all cities south of Tripoli were progressively being "liberated", al-Jazeera managed to trace the source of jamming of its Arabsat satellite frequency to a Libyan intelligence building south of the capital.
Ahmed Elgazir, a human-rights researcher with the Libyan News Center (LNC) in Geneva, later told al-Jazeera he got a call for help from a woman witnessing a massacre in progress on a satellite phone. Eyewitnesses reported to Agence France-Presse another "massacre" in the Fashloum and Tajoura districts of Tripoli. By late Monday night, the (unconfirmed) death toll in Tripoli alone had reached at least 250.
Among Libyans, virtually all information all around the country was and remains word of mouth. But tweets that reached al-Jazeera or the BBC also emphasized a profound disgust with the deafening silence of the "international community" ("Are we only worth mentioning when it has to do with oil and terrorism?")
Round up the oily condemnations
Said "international community" indeed started noticing when the Libyan Quryna newspaper reported protests had broken out in the northern city of Ras Lanuf, whose oil refinery processes 220,000 barrels a day.
Yes, apart from Gaddafi's antics, Libya registers in the West because it exports 1.7 million barrels of oil a day. Its gross domestic product is US$77 billion - number 62 in world rankings; that theoretically implies a per capita income of over $12,000 a year, more, for instance, than BRIC member Brazil. But profound inequality is the norm; roughly 35% of Libyans live below the poverty line, and unemployment is running at an unbearable 30%. The oil wealth stays in Tripolitania. Eastern Libya - Cyrenaica - where the anti-Gaddafi revolution started, is dirt poor.
In the high-stakes front, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) - also owner of a London-based hedge fund - has invested more than $70 billion around the world. It's a major shareholder, for instance, in the Financial Times, Fiat and one of Italy's top soccer clubs, Juventus. LIA invests - and plans to invest - billions in Britain.
Cue to the European Union (EU) foreign ministers issuing the usual, bland, bureaucratic condemnation. At least Italian Prime Minister, "bunga bunga" idol and close Gaddafi pal Silvio Berlusconi, who had said earlier he didn't want to "disturb" his friend, had to qualify the massacre of civilians as "unacceptable" and profess he was "alarmed". To see Berlusconi literally kissing Gaddafi's hands, go here No less than 32% of Libya's oil exports go to Italy.
Then there's another classic - Washington's deafening silence. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the standard bland condemnation. Libyan-American scientist and activist Naeem Gheriany told the Institute for Public Accuracy the Barack Obama administration "says it's 'concerned' about the situation - there's no real condemnation in spite of the dire situation. People are being massacred in the hundreds, Gaddafi is reportedly using anti-aircraft guns to shoot people. In a few days, more people in Libya have apparently been killed than in weeks in Iran, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and even Egypt (which has a much larger population) ... Even the oil cannot justify this silence."
Not to mention that Washington and Gaddafi have been the best "war on terror" pals. Captured al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi - the object of a Central Intelligence Agency "rendition" to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Omar "Sheikh al-Torture" Suleiman, who duly tortured him into confessing to a non-existent Saddam-al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction connection that then-secretary of state Colin Powell used as "intelligence" at his United Nations speech in February 2003 - was later tracked in Libya by Human Rights Watch just to end up his life as an alleged "suicide".
Milan villa or The Hague?
Libyan opposition writer Ashour Shamis has remarked, "For Gaddafi it's kill or be killed". The family told Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, "We will all die on Libyan soil." That means Gaddafi and a row of hated offspring.
Son Khamis - the commander of an elite special forces unit, trained in Russia - is the mastermind of the repression in Benghazi. Son Saadi is, or was there too, alongside the head of military intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi.
Son Muatassim is Gaddafi's national security adviser and, until now, possible successor. In 2009, he tried to set up his own special forces unit to erode Khamis's power.
Son Saif, the "modernizer" with an LSE diploma, cuts no mustard with the regime's old guard and the dreaded "Revolutionary Committees".
Son Saadi is basically a thug fond of raising hell across nightclubs in Europe. Same applies to son Hannibal.
It all looks and sounds like a cheap blood-splattered gangster movie. What to make of Gaddafi's bizarre 20-second appearance on state TV early this Tuesday ("I'm in Tripoli, not in Venezuela"), clutching an umbrella, sitting inside a cream-colored microvan and sporting a winter hat with ear flaps, with no clue of what is going on? (After all he was supporting his pals, Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and to Mubarak, until the very end). He defined TV channels - such as al-Jazeera - as "dogs" (in the 1980s he had already used hit squads to murder exiled "stray dogs" who challenged his revolution).
Still, Gaddafi should not be underestimated. He controls all the hardware - defense, security, foreign affairs. Plus all those "black African" mercenaries/exterminators paid in gold. Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh said Yemen was not Egypt or Tunisia. Gaddafi said Libya was not Egypt or Tunisia. Mubarak said Egypt was not Tunisia.
They were all wrong; the entire Arab world now is Tunisia. The Libyan masses hate "their" leader. Even fellow Arab dictators - with the exception of the House of Saud - hate him. He has few expat options. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez would be crazy to offer him asylum and forever destroy his "champion of the poor" credibility.
Well, there's always Berlusconi. Nice villa near Milan, great pasta, and he can pitch his Bedouin tent in the luxurious gardens. And if Berlusconi is sent to jail in his "Rubygate"-related trial in April, Gaddafi may even move up to the main residence. But, after you bombed your own citizens from the air, and hired mercenaries to shoot them, there is only one choice destination: the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
PHOTO ESSAY Rangers to the rescue in Myanmar
By Tony Cliff
KAREN STATE, Myanmar - Saw Maw Nam spreads his dental instruments over a plastic sheet on the spongy ground of a vast but untended durian plantation cleared from Myanmar's northern Karen State jungle. With the help of a camper headlamp, he vigorously pulls at a tooth from a puzzled woman.
"Here most of the people get their teeth rotten by the betel nuts they constantly chew," smiles the 38-year-old Karen, himself a regular chewer. Besides Saw Maw Nam, who also goes by the nickname of "Superman", a group of women with their young children and a few elders from a nearby village sit on a tarpaulin.
Some have lived here since birth, others have come more
recently, forced to leave homes which were burnt down by government soldiers. Settled amid the small crowd, young medics take blood samples from screaming babies and test the breathing of their mothers with a stethoscope.
Photos by Tony Cliff
"Malaria is a big killer here," says Saw Hser Doh, a 25-year-old Karen medic. "Many people suffer from dysentery, anemia and other diseases which can be easily treated."
A female assistant will then distribute medicine and dutifully write down the details in a log book. Moving around this little theatre, Sai Khur Harn, a 28-year old Shan, is filming with a compact video camera. Later he will record the testimony of two villagers, detailing how they were forced to work as porters on trails infested with landmines by the government army - they all say "SPDC", the acronym for "State Peace and Development Council", the ruling military junta's official name since 1997.
Pictures and reports of atrocities perpetrated by soldiers against civilians will be processed on portable computers and sent with satellite equipment to a mailing list across the globe, including to international human rights activists and a handful of United States congressmen.
A short distance from the medical makeshift facilities, squatting near a fire with their guns within reach, other young men wash cuts of red meat for lunch. They are Naw Naw La Pang, a 30-year old Kachin, and Kya Bon, a 36-year old Lahu, both security volunteers.
They are all members of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) relief team who reached the plantation the day after a tough walk through remote mountainous jungle. They were accompanied by some 20 porters carrying medical supplies, blankets, cloth and other emergency items.
The FBR were founded in 1997 by a then 37-year-old former American Special Forces officer who had grown up in Thailand and a handful of young Karen from a refugee camp. They were horrified by the displacement, disease and death of a brutal and large scale offensive along the Thai-Myanmar border launched by the government army against Karen insurgents.
"Refugees arriving on the border were more or less accommodated in camps in Thailand but we realized that there were huge needs in the jungle and the mountain where scores of displaced people were hiding in terror, nobody was helping them", says a FBR founder, who for security reasons asked not to be quoted by his real name but rather by pseudonym Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, or "the father of the white monkey" in the Karen language.
It took a few years before the FBR established itself as a humanitarian force to reckon with and become the only organization of its kind not directly affiliated with an ethnic resistance movement to actually work deep inside Myanmar's vast ethnic territory.
In many ways, the FBR have reactivated in Myanmar what pioneering international non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as the French Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Aide Medicale Internationale (AMI) were doing in the 1980s in war-torn countries like Afghanistan before switching to more cautious strategies.
Then, humanitarian groups frequently worked without governments' authorization to send medical relief teams in war zones, often by passing through clandestine border crossings. Today, with the vast network of humanitarian organizations all over the world, the FBR are one of the few that have maintained this risky, life-saving approach.
Most FBR missions take place in Myanmar's so-called "black zones", a term used by the junta to describe ethnic territories with intense underground activities. They are also where soldiers have a free license to kill suspected guerrillas as well as civilians. The ongoing offensive in ethnic territories is not new but rather the continuation of a massive counter-insurgency strategy launched in the 1960s under a policy known as the "Four Cuts".
The objective then was to push the insurgents from central Myanmar to more remote mountainous areas and cut their links to food, money, intelligence and recruits with the local and mostly sympathetic population. That move also had an economic motive: the exploitation of these lands vast and rich natural resources. The policy has over the years amounted to an endless and efficient ethnic cleansing campaign which is still ongoing.
The "black zones" in particular have become a setting for daily tragedies. Government soldiers, driven by a system that insures total impunity, have engaged in a myriad of abuses: murder, rape, torture, destruction, looting, forced labor, child conscription. FBR and other organizations estimate that there are currently over one million internally displaced people in Myanmar's ethnic areas. Some are forced to flee fighting and abuses for a few days, others for months or even years.
FBR volunteers are young people selected by ethnic leaders for their motivation and aptitude. They are generally trained from a one to two month period in secret camps set up in ethnic territory. They learn the basic techniques of medical emergency, psychological counseling, media reporting, map reading, landmine removal and physical training before signing up for at least four years with the organization. A new "Ranger" has to make the fundamental commitment "to be with people under attack and to stand with them if they cannot flee".
After a year of practice, volunteer medics are invited to attend an advanced training program where they are taught more sophisticated techniques, including amputation. Western medical professionals often travel from overseas to volunteer and run training sessions.
The most regular is with no doubt Shannon Allison, a 49-year-old American dentist. Every year or so, this former Special Forces officer and friend of Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa leaves his dental practice in Mandeville, Louisiana, his wife and their four children for the journey to the Thai-Myanmar border.
Carrying his equipment, including a specially designed portable drill that works on solar energy, he often disappears for a month in the Myanmar jungle with a FBR team. Wherever the expedition stops, Allison, a gentle and always laughing giant, pulls and fills rotten teeth but most importantly imparts his dental expertise to young volunteers such as Superman.
The FBR currently have 55 teams with a total of about 300 volunteers from 11 different ethnic groups, half of them Karen. Each team operates for spells or one to two months, and sometimes as long as four months, in conflict affected ethnic territories. The teams' security is usually provided by the local ethnic resistance movements that operate in those areas. For instance, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) in the East and the Arakan Liberation Army (ALA) in the West organize the crossing of strategic and heavily mined military roads in their territories. The priority of FBR teams, who must move constantly to eschew entrenched SPDC positions and camps, is to avoid at all cost any encounter with soldiers.
They can be painstaking maneuvers when, as it often happens at the start of a FBR expedition, a column of 150 people including a hundred unarmed porters has to be moved. Since 1997, however, only a few FBR members have been killed or captured by government soldiers. Others have perished from malaria or other diseases.
The bulk of the FBR budget - about US$1 million in 2010 - comes from private donors, mostly American and European Christian networks, but also some European governments have discreetly provided the organization with equipment. Increasingly complicated administration and logistics managed outside of Myanmar are generally taken care of by Western volunteers, mostly from the US.
The FBR also contributed, thanks to a large private donation from a couple of American citizens, to set up an early warning system in 150 Karen villages. These village headmen were trained and provided with communication equipment and solar panels. Any move by the Myanmar army in a given location can be quickly dispatched to the nearest KNLA rebel position who will send guerrillas to help villagers to flee and hide in the forest before the soldiers arrive.
Because the FBR's core founders are Christian, it is often erroneously believed that it's a religious organization. "That's not exact," says Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa, himself a devout Christian. "Even if Christians like myself are motivated by the love God gives to the people, we have amongst our volunteers non-believers as well as people from Buddhist and animist background".
Members of the team often gather children and women in a so-called "Good Life Club" program specifically designed for them. Under the direction of Daniel Dan Phone, a 33-year old Karen, the children will sing, dance and play for a couple of hours before receiving a pack containing toilet items, toys and baby outfits.
For Dan Phone, this kind of jungle recreation afternoon represents a dramatic turn from a previous life. Indeed a few years ago he was making a living as a pianist playing Chopin and Bach in the lobby of Rangoon Sedona and Traders luxury hotels ... "I thought I was useless there and I decided to join the Karen resistance where I had some relatives and friends, and more recently I volunteered with the FBR".
Currently FBR teams are at work in Mon, Karen, Karenni, Shan, Arakan and Chin States. In almost 14 years of existence, according to their own statistics, FBR teams have treated over 360,000 patients and helped over 750,000 people. Although difficult to measure, another upshot of FBR's work appears to be deterrence, judging by the decline in the number of villages raided and pillaged by government troops in recent years.
"The KNLA told us that many times they intercepted messages by the SPDC telling their troops to be careful as human rights groups were in the area filming," says Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa. "We were told sometimes they mentioned FBR, other times they just said human rights groups."
FBR teams also try to get as much information as they can about the Myanmar army officers and soldiers responsible for atrocities. Names, ranks, locations and other details have been reported, but so far it has been impossible to confirm whether this kind of exposure has directly changed their actions.
The FBR's existence has been recognized at the very top of the SPDC's hierarchy. During a state visit to India in 2010, General Than Shwe, the junta's leader, reportedly asked Indian authorities to crack down on Tha-U-Wa-A-Pa and his volunteers because they "are trying to destabilize the peaceful border with millions of dollars from the American government". That's almost an official acknowledgement.
Tony Cliff, a pseudonym, is a Bangkok-based freelance photojournalist. Since 1999 he has accompanied FBR teams in Karen, Karenni and Shan States for periods of two to five weeks. He may be reached at tonycliff7@gmail.com.
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